Tomorrow in the U.S. is Election Day. Among other things I tried to show in my book DRAWING THE LINE, was how external conditions like national politics could effect your career, regardless of how talented you are. Artists like Michelangelo,Leonardo Benjamin West, Jacques Louis David, Daumier, Siqueros and many more at one point in their careers were involved in politics.

Even if you don't care about abortion, gay marriage or who your governor is, it's what politicians really plan to do next year that should worry about.

Baby Boomers should know that Washington insiders have dropped hints that they want to go after Social Security again next year. Students should be aware that as the US military gets stretched thinner and thinner to cover world crises, the call for a Draft may again come up. The cost of going to school has risen alarmingly as has health costs. All should be concerned that the House of Representatives and the Governors office have tried several times to reclassify overtime as being after forty hours, instead of the Eight Hour Day. So an employer could work you ten hour days for days without any additional compensation.

John Adams once said: "One Useless Man in a Disgrace; Two Useless Men are a Law Firm; Many Useless Men are a Congress."

So tomorrow is your best chance for two years to show them what you think. It only takes a few minutes.

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Birthdays: Sophocles 495BC, Joanna La Loca (the Mad- 1479), John Phillip Sousa the March King, Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormons, Ignacz Paderewski, Charles Dow of Dow Jones, Adolphus Sax inventor of the Saxophone, James Naismith the inventor of Basketball, film director Mike Nichols, Edsel Ford, Terrytoons animator and strike leader Eddie Rehberg, Sally Field is 61,John Olsen of the comedy duo Olsen & Johnson, Harold Ross the founder of the New Yorker magazine, Maria Shriver is 52, Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Romjin

1566-Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe got his nose cut off in a duel. Thereafter he wore a gold cup over the scar held in place by a string.

1812- On this day during Napoleons Retreat from Moscow, it first began to snow.

1869- Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first college football game.

1916- The elderly cowboy showman Buffalo Bill made his next to last public appearance in El Paso Texas. El Paso had been as wild and bloody a frontier town as Deadwood or Tombstone, but now it was a quiet modern city. Telephone and electricity wires crisscrossed overhead and streetcars clattered down the streets where gunfighters once shot it out. Buffalo Bills parade seemed to make plain to all the final passing of the Old West to the New. The wild cheers brought tears running down the old scout's long white mustache. It was a fitting final bow. He died of prostate cancer within a few weeks.

1966- A great flood hits the City of Venice. An international effort is mounted to save her priceless artifacts. Venice never suffered floods until the end of the nineteenth century when a deep channel was dug in the Venetian lagoon to accommodate modern heavy shipping to the new harbor of La Spezia. This imbalance messed up the natural flood cycle from the Adriatic. Added to that the whole darn city is resting on thousands of wooden pilings pounded into a sand bar when Attila the Hun was still running around. Venice is still sinking a few inches each century.

1975- First appearance of the band the Sex Pistols.