Seriously, reading through all the ballot initiatives is one, big-huge time suck. While we were waiting in line at a store over the weekend, we heard one guy behind us talking to a friend via cell discussing how hard they were working just to get through it all. From what I could make out, the guy on the phone had an absentee ballot and had spent all afternoon working on it. The guy behind us said that he took all of the stuff he was supposed to read through and spent over two and half-hours at a coffee shop reading through it. And he still wasn't done. All of which makes us wonder if the relatively low-rate of people voting has something to do with the fact that in order to do a good job in voting, the conscientious voter has to, like, study. And who wants to do that?

So with that in mind, we take a look at this elections ballot initiatives, both for California and for San Francisco. That's a total of three books and just about four hundred pages (two hundred for each). To put things in perspective, that's way over a hundred and fifty pages more than The Great Gatsby (clocking in at 240), maybe the greatest work of 20th Century American literature. It's also about one hundred and fifty pages more than Tom Sawyer, probably the greatest work of American Literature. We had enough trouble studying for them in school, how are we going to be able to study up for some election? Talk about beating on, boats against the current.

Today and tomorrow, we'll start off with the California State ballot initiatives. On Thursday and Friday, we'll be focusing on the San Francisco ballot initiatives.

And away we go......