Life in the glittering metropolis I call home.

Sunday was not Bridgeport’s day.

Sunday was not a fantastic day for Bridgeport.

My paper’s headline this morning? “Counted Out.” The CT Post/Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition-sponsored vote recount turned up batches of uncounted ballots, and a one-in-four chance that if you cast a photocopied ballot on Nov. 2, your vote was miscounted.

Great. I’ve blogged about the botched election (we didn’t have enough ballots on Election Day) and the recount, but this finding is at least worth a post. That’s more than 1,000 misread ballots. I think my favorite part of the CT  Post’s article was Registrar of Voter Sandi Ayala’s comment when she was asked to respond to the findings. She told The Post that during the original tally, her workers were tired and working under stressful circumstances, “with cameras in their faces and microphones on top of the table where they’re trying to do a tally.” I agree with Ayala – her workers were under a lot of stress. But who let the press into the room where the tally was being done and why?

To top off the day, Seth MacFarlane mocked Bridgeport and Bridgeporters on Family Guy tonight. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be quite so stung – I’d be perversely proud that my city was on television – but today I’m smarting over the election fiasco. The coup de grace? A built-in preemptive strike against the letter I was about to start writing. Blah. The mockery is below, until Family Guy makes whoever posted it take it off YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozepC0AI9Sg]

Seth MacFarlane, you are to Bridgeporters as Mel Brooks is to the villagers in the beginning scenes of Men in Tights. That’s all I have to say this evening.

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Obama is in town.

It is a strange thing to look out your back window and see hundreds of people. It’s a very strange thing to take out the compost and hear crowd

The line was like this for a good hour.

noises. You’d think I’d be used to it. I live in Bridgeport’s South End. Once a year thousands of hippies and deadheads camp out for the weekend at the end of my street. I once got stuck in a traffic jam almost completely made up of VW buses that were trying to get onto the camp grounds. And the Puerto Rican Day Parade completely fills up our neighborhood each July. But this is different. President Barack Obama is speaking at a rally that’s taking place up the block at the Harbor Yard arena, so we have lines of people who are hoping to get into the free event, very large red helicopters flying low over the house, roadblocks and all sorts of other exciting things happening.

We went out and checked out the line earlier, and it was cool – as it always is – to see lots and lots of people on a block can otherwise be pretty desolate.

Still, seeing strangers out my window, helicopters rattling my home and suspicions about just how tight security gets when the President comes to town has me feeling a mite paranoid.

Which is cool, because, as I said in my last post, that’s what we’re celebrating this weekend: Fear.

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