Now it turns out that a bunch of heavy-duty researchers agree with me. But that doesn’t stop guys like this:

“Children are solicited every day online,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”

That’s Richard Blumenthal, the CT Attorney General and one of the biggest hysteria-mongers around this stuff. Ha.

What’s interesting is that they do find kids bullying each other a lot online. That kind of matches my unscientific impression, I guess.

For some parts of the day we stood around the statutory 100 feet from the polling place, handing out slate cards and waving our signs. Every couple of hours we checked the list of people who had voted, and then called and reminded the people who hadn’t. Late in the afternoon we knocked on the doors of some of the last holdouts. We didn’t have to physically drag anyone to the polling place, but it would be fair to say our phone calls and door-knocking may have accounted for up to ten votes that might not have been cast if we hadn’t been on the case. That felt pretty good.

Our candidate didn’t win — not a big surprise, for an underdog effort against two other candidates with better funding and name recognition. But I got everything else out of it that I wanted. Mainly a chance for Laura and Lilly to see what it’s like when a diverse bunch of progressive, big-hearted people get together to do something good against the odds. Lots of young people from the neighborhood got mobilized. The campaign office was crammed every evening with latino and African-American kids using their own cell phones to call voter lists. We went on a couple of noisy bike parades to get attention, and just for fun. We met some great people, like Sasha, David, Huli, and of course Eric, and we got to know some out-of-way corners of our city by walking campaign literature door to door. I’d say we’re ready to do it again.

My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.

She has been putting in a lot of time at this the last couple of months, and it shows. Her dialogue gets better every time I look at it. She has as good an ear for speech as for melody, maybe better. She seems pretty excited about going to writer’s camp for three weeks this summer. My only worry is that she might come out of it a threat to my job. Losing work to India is the least of my concerns. Running into better writers: that’s a real problem.

I guess the biggest difference between Laura’s literary activity and mine at that age is the instant feedback she gets from the Web. The sites she frequents are all about reviews and rankings and there’s a constant flow of chatter among the writers. When I was learning to write, it seemed like a more solitary pursuit. It took a long time to get better. With the commentary Laura gets — sometimes in pretty sharp terms — she knows exactly what to fix right away, and she does.