John's Journal

Ten places in the United States where polling stations were set up for the Iranian presidential election:

1. Comfort Inn Buckhead North (Atlanta, Ga.)
2. Doubletree Hotel Denver Tech (Greenwood Village, Colo.)
3. Days Inn Penn State (State College, Pa.)
4. Islamic Education Center (Potomac, Md.)
5. Hilton Garden Inn Champaign/Urbana (Champaign, Ill.)
6. Ayres Hotel and Suites Ontario Convention Center (Ontario, Calif.)
7. Hyatt Regency Irvine (Irvine, Calif.)
8. Best Western Midway Hotel Brookfield (Brookfield, Wis.)
9. Biltmore Hotel Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, Okla.)
10. Courtyard Boston Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.)

A few years ago when I was visiting Yosemite National Park, I stopped to get gas at Crane Flat, and was interested to see that if you had a credit card, you could fill your tank there at any time of day, whether the attached shop was open or not. A few months later, I was driving home from the city after midnight looking for an open gas station, and it occurred to me how ridiculous it was that it was easier to buy gas at 1 AM in the middle of a forest on top of a mountain than it was on Lee Highway in Arlington. That's a little how I feel after learning there were 304 locations around the world, including 41 here in the United States, where Iranian citizens could cast a ballot in today's presidential election. By contrast, in 2008 the United States provided precisely zero polling places for their citizens overseas. Granted, that has a lot to do with our system of delegating the responsibility to run elections to the States, but who said that was a good system?

I was just reading "A Man Young and Old" by William Butler Yeats, and when I read the following:

Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.

I was, of course, immediately reminded of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Fool For Love," and I realized for the first time that William's unrequited love for Cecily was much like Yeats's love for Maud. Oh, sure, Yeats was a better poet, and he eventually consummated his relationship with Maud, and I don't think he ever became a vampire, but otherwise the resemblance is uncanny.