I’m not going to comment on Joe the Plumber’s Q&A session except to say that I disagree with his politics, and many of the beliefs he holds. I had the opportunity to meet him, and take a photo with him, and he was a very kind individual. He had a lot of nice things to say about DC, and even a few kind words for the President (not related to his policies).

I also have a signed promotional poster that will be going up on my cubicle wall tomorrow, much, I’m sure, to the chagrin of most of my coworkers.

UPDATE: I saw this interview being conducted by WaPo. I got to spend my night putting all those chairs and banners away. Rock star, that’s me.

During a break in these papers I’m pushing, and these people I’m trying to call, I went to check my site meter and almost choked on my gum. This blows away the previous record for most hits in a day by, well, by about 500. So far.

UPDATE:

For those curious, the hits are coming from CNN via my trackback to the article I linked to here. Here’s what my sitemeter looked like at 10p:

This article is awesome.

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets.”

He made the prediction based on the number of “super-Earths” — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said.

“But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

It reminds me of a line in the movie Contact, where our main-character-as-a-child asks her father, played by David Morse, if he believes there is life on other planets. He looks up at the night sky, and says “It’d be an awful waste of space if there isn’t.”

I’m staying late at the Office today — the company kicked up some bucks, reserved a few tables at a nearby pool hall. The alcohol will come out of our own wallets, but that’s okay: the boss-peeples sprung for food.

I’m going to need the alcohol, because when I leave the pool hall, I’m headed straight to the Bookstore: Joe the Plumber’s doing a signing, and we’re either going to be slam-pack busy, or completely deserted.

I have a question I want to ask Joe the Plumber (not that I will, gotta be professional and all): “How do you feel your life would be different if President Obama hadn’t spoken to you that day in October?”

I’m just happy for the hours. And I have a coworker at the Office who is going to have a fit of liberal proportions when he comes in Thursday morning and finds a Joe the Plumber appearance poster taped up to his cubicle.

Oh yeah – Snay’s workin’ drunk tonight. (I hope I’m not on registers…)