I’m really not as obsessed about the election results as I probably sound. It’s just that it’s a topic so ripe for pontification that I just can’t resist. So please forgive yet another electoral rumination…

When the whole concept of a “chad” (which, by the way, received the “red under-squiggle of shame” as I typed it into Word) was dumped into our collective memory databanks, I thought briefly, “Hmm… “The Hanging Chads.” Wouldn’t that be a cool name for a band?

A few days later, a fellow musician from Southern CA (check out The Over-Reactors) sent out his periodical e-mailing which said, “Wouldn’t that be a cool name for a band?”

I did just a little snooping at Network Solutions to see… Sure enough, you’ve already missed out on the opportunity to reserve www.thehangingchads.com, www.thepregnantchads.com or just about any derivative of these top-level domain names. I could only find two that had actually been put to use yet – a conservative pol has reserved www.thepregnantchad.com and www.thehangingchad.com and is starting to fill them with commentary.

No doubt it’s not the first time a concept has hit the scene and brought many individuals to the same conclusion spontaneously. It’s called zeitgeist. So don’t go suing anyone saying that they stole your idea. The courts are too busy already.

One last word about that squiggle – even though Word didn’t recognize chad as a word (nor did my very dusty Webster’s Unabridged 3rd Edition), Bill Gates slyly put it into his Bookshelf 2000 dictionary. Isn’t that interesting that an earlier product did not have the word, but a more recent one – one that was still before the election – in fact did. Coincidence? Perhaps. Conspiracy? We may never know…