Monday Newsbreak: 11/3

--The Gainesville Sun reported Sunday that about 47.5 % of registered voters in Alachua County (where Gainesville is) have already voted, either by absentee ballot or early voting. I’ve voted early once in the past, and would have this time as well, just for the opportunity to vote together with my wife (we have conflicting schedules on Tuesday). But things just didn’t work out, so we’ll each find a time to vote on Election Day. Unlike in other parts of the country, I have never experienced any appreciable lines or snags with voting. I suspect that the problem in some of the concentrated urban areas is that they don’t have enough precincts set up. In some areas, there needs to be a precinct every couple of blocks or so because of the high population density.

--Fox has canceled animator Mike Judge’s long-running cartoon series King of the Hill. After liking his relatively shorter-lived and controversial Beavis and Butt-Head series, I was pretty disappointed in King of the Hill. The main problem I had was relating in a sympathetic way to any of its characters. In a way, they were unintentionally more pathetic than Beavis and Butt-Head’s title characters were deliberately made to be. But who knows, maybe twenty years from now I’ll be channel-surfing and come across an old Hill episode and it will hit me: masterpiece! Well, maybe not.

--I’m looking at my sample ballot and the election guide in today’s local newspaper. And I see some obscure races (Alachua County Soil and Water Conservation District, for example) on the sample ballot that are completely ignored in the paper. Now how am I supposed to know anything about these candidates to make an informed choice? And if your answer to me is for me to search the Web for information, then my rejoinder would be, “Why then even bother having a newspaper in the first place?”

--The “thrill” activity of zip-line riding came to my attention for the first time in an article in Sundays Gainesville Sun. Apparently, a rider can zip down a line traveling through a forest at speeds near 50 mph, whizzing by trees in a manner that must resemble the forest chase scene in 1983’s Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. Well, you know what I want to do now!

--The University of Florida Gators paid back their football rival, the Georgia Bulldogs, Saturday for last year’s defeat by routing them 49-10. Of course, the way this game is, they could turn around and lose to them again next year. Still, the win gives Florida a clear shot at the Southeastern Conference championship and a possible shot for a national championship game (if the other teams ranked ahead of them find a way to lose during the next few weeks). The Gators this year have a complete team, with both the offense, defense, and special teams playing important roles in their victories.