Famille Du Pentium

OK quick round-up:

• Guliani: Out.  He sez, vote for McCain
• Edwards: Out.  He’s not saying who to vote for.

The latter leaves an interesting milestone in American history today:  One major party has virtually guaranteed that a white male will not be nominated to run for President.

This could get interesting.  A McCain / Obama or a McCain / Clinton fight after the primaries.  I look forward to it.

I’ll sum it up quick.

• Hope you didn’t back Guliani.  He lost big in Florida, and will apparently drop out Wednesday and throw his support behind the winner, John McCain.
• Speaking of McCain, who would have thunk it?  The Republicans now have a clear front-runner, and he’s older than Ronald Reagan was when he ran for President.  Is it too late to change my support?  Just kidding!
• On the Dem side, Clinton won but nobody got any delegates because of their little political tiff.  Now I remember why I wasn’t a Democrat.  So Obama still leads, good for him, I guess it’s up to Super Tuesday.

Man, I hate being right.

Fred Thompson has officially dropped out of the nominating race for the Republican party today.

Guess we’ll just have to be happy with Law and Order re-runs :).

The impact of the John McCain win in New Hampshire and now South Carolina makes the race for the Republican nomination even more interesting.  Offset by Romney’s win in Nevada, it still leaves the current leaderboard effectively a three-way tie.  Granted, Romney has nearly 30% more delegates than his nearest competitor, all still have far less than 100 each and need 1191 delegates in order to lock.  Thus when you see Romney has 59 to Huckabee’s 39 or McCain’s paltry 36, even that 59 pales in comparison to the 1191 that Romney needs in order to win it.  So, as they say, the race is wide open and it looks like Super Tuesday (and maybe Illinois???) have a chance to decide it.

Here’s the leaderboard as of now:

Mitt Romney 59

Mike Huckabee 39

John McCain 36

Fred Thompson 5

Ron Paul 4

Duncan Hunter 2

Rudy Guliani 1

The remaining candidates have zero delegates.

Well the Republicans were hoping for a little clarity, perhaps a front-runner to emerge from Michigan.  I guess that was too much to ask.  Mitt Romney, who has done poorly in other states so far, picked up Michigan’s Republican primary delegates.

On the Democrat front, Hillary Clinton ran unopposed in Michigan and due to the Michigan Democratic Party moving their primary forward without the national party’s approval, no delegates will be awarded in the Michigan democratic race.

Thanks, Michigan.  Jerks. 

So I published a comment that my brother posted (4 days ago, tells you how often I check for new comments… sorry!) and MT rebuilt my blog as per normal.  Usually when it does this, it sort of re-jiggers the current front page posts so that they fit nicely within the borders of the webpage, while also dumping older posts.  This time, when it rebuilt, it left my webpage totally blank.  Weird.  So this is a post to jump-start it again.

Oh yea, the comment from Kelly – apparently he and I bought the EXACT SAME PLASMA TV this winter.  Once again, weird. 

No Disney World New Year’s, or watching Navy Pier fireworks from a suite at the Swisshotel.  This year, we’re going to plant ourselves firmly in front of the new 42" Plasma and watch it all in living color in our family room.

We’ve got a nice Ice Wine to ring in the new year, and a half dozen cheeses and meats to snack on until the ball drops.  Then, we’ll probably just go to bed and sleep late on Tuesday.

We here at FAMILLE.ORG hope that you and your family have a safe, happy, and profitable new year. 

Michael Klein was the father killed in the terrible small plane crash in the Panamanian jungle earlier this week.  Mr. Klein founded a company called eGroups many years ago, which was later purchased by Yahoo and renamed Yahoo Groups.  Yahoo Groups (and before its purchase, eGroups) hosts the family humor e-mail address, "famille-humor" (I won’t put the full address in, to save everyone some spam).

The definitive ballad singer / songwriter of the 1970’s and ’80’s, Dan Folgelberg, died today.  His emotional songs "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" were chart-toppers that had everyone singing in their cars whenever they played on the radio.  Leader of the Band was actually about his own father, who actually was a bandleader. 

Folgelberg died of prostrate cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2004, at the age of 56. 

As promised, today I spent some time doing an activity with the kids… we made Hanukkah cookies.  These were basically store-bought cookies so no presumptuous "made from scratch" here… just a good time mixing, baking, frosting, and painting them.  Pictures are HERE.  Give an hour or so from now (5:30 PM CST) for the upload to complete.

Speaking of pictures, you can review all of the Hanukkah 2007 pictures HERE.

So as the sun is setting now, Hanukkah 2007 has come to an end, and we now will have to muddle through another Chicago winter and look forward to Pesach, when the snow melts and we start to come out of hibernation.