It's Monday again, and we did a lot of work in studio which I won't bore you with (foundation details and suchlike joys.)

Election fever is definitely hotting up here. Lou's (now open again after their holiday, which I discovered was to a church convention) is the centre of canvassing, not so much for a particular party, but for voter registration. All the students apart from me have been made to register here over the past few weeks, and now we're all being reminded to actually cast our votes. Lou's is a black-owned business with a very (unusually) mixed crowd of customers, and it's always interesting to hear the conversation there. Alabama will certainly go Republican again, but the Black Belt apparently goes Democrat. It's amazing how strongly this shows up on the maps. - a red belt running through the centre of the state. All of which means that the lunch-time scene in Lou's is buzzing with talk, definitely tending towards the radical and with a strong vein of protest, whether towards the hotly disputed recent mayoral election (apparently lots of dead people voted with absentee ballots), statewide or national politics. Mustang Oil is the opposite - displaying a photocopied sheet the other day spreading scaremongering rumours about John Kerry. I pocketed it (the only copy) in the hope that I could at least prevent other less questioning readers from taking its contents seriously - probably a vain hope.