A quick story

I got an e-mail from a friend lamenting the fact that NASA had made a big production about conducting a poll to come up with a name for a room in the International Space Station. The name that came out on top of the poll, Colbert, was a write-in by followers of Steven Colbert and was an obvious joke. But there were a number of other names that should have been used. Instead, they went with the name that came in eighth - Tranquility. Why even go through the exercise if they weren't going to take the top name the poll came up with that wasn't tainted? It's one thing to throw out the name that won by ballot stuffing but it's another to just pick the name you wanted all along.

It reminded me of an incident in my own life. Our school district built a new junior high school that opened as I was going into the eighth grade. We, along with the seventh graders and the ninth graders, were the first students in the school and one of the things that needed to be done was to pick a school mascot. They wanted to teach us a lesson about Democracy so they ran this elaborate election where mascots were nominated by different groups and ballots printed. They had advocates campaign for each of the entries. We had studied the Whiskey Rebellion in history class (which happened in our area of the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania) and one group came up with the idea of using the Rebel as the school mascot. To the teachers' credit, they let Rebels be on the ballot with the other nominees but Rebels ended up winning. Then the uproar began and the principal decided that Rebels was inappropriate. So, they had another election with "proper" mascots on the ballot. In the end, the Finley Junior High mascot was the Knight. Like they didn't go out on the town and mix alcohol and wenches once in a while!

The picture on the left is from http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/fall96/images/perils.jpg