I may be the last person on the Internet to come across this photo, but it cracked me up today. Yes, I have a very dry sense of humor. Judging from the weather outside, Gary’s stone would be quite wet if he had placed it in Middle Tennessee sometime yesterday. Here’s hoping Gary’s stone dries out by tomorrow.

OK, I’ll admit it: These Lost action figures look like fun. My inner five year-old just got giddy. Yes, that’s the Hatch in the second photo.

Changing the name of Dickerson Road, if you ask me, is putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. I would like to see this much-maligned strip of crime, debauchery and violence improved, but renaming the street isn’t going to do that. It will just take awhile before “Skyline Boulevard” becomes synonymous with prostitution, drug dealing and other crimes. You can’t cure the flu by renaming it bronchitis.

In the book The Tipping Point (a great read, by the way), Malcolm Gladwell discusses the “broken window effect” and crime on the New York City subways in the 80s. NYC reduced crime on the subways by enforcing the law, especially instances of people hopping turnstiles, vandalizing property and robbing passengers. The result is that NYC subways are now much safer to use than they were 20 years ago.

How does this apply to Dickerson Road? There are a ton of broken windows, absolutely. Rather than applying a band-aid, though, let’s figure out a way to deal with the roots of the problem, not its symptoms. Let’s eliminate the incentives to commit crime and to abandon this street first, and then rename it when the environment is improving. Otherwise, in 20 years, someone will be asking to rename Skyline Boulevard.

Slate’s Jack Slater is on to something, I think: Don’t read the paper this morning, at least the election coverage.

“Save yourself some pain and cash and don’t buy the Tuesday newspaper. If you subscribe, do yourself a favor—tear out the first half of the A section and discard it. If you can purge your paper of its editorial section without looking at it, do so, and go directly to the sports section, which unlike the style, metro, and business sections, will make no attempt to talk politics.”

I should have followed this advice for the past two months. I care about my home state, my country and the world at large, but have I learned much of anything constructive about political candidates since summer? Not really. What have I learned? Mark Foley has issues, both Bob and Harold are conservative and want you to think the other is not, a non-issue (gay marriage, when state law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman) is commanding attention that would be better focused elsewhere and political parties will do just about anything to keep or acquire power.

I’ve already early voted, for what it’s worth, but I would still like to trade the past several weeks of attack ads and lofty rhetoric for honest, constructive discussion. Here’s hoping that, despite the nonsense, we’re generally becoming more informed and reasonable as a nation and, hopefully, willing to work together. I doubt anything in today’s paper or on the air will confirm this hope, but I can still dream.