Voting is closed! Click here for the final results!
Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! It’s time for the Most Influential Living Unitarian Iron Cage Death Match of Death!!™ (Two deaths, because it’s just that deadly.)
Last week we separated the merely Unitarian from the super Unitarian. (Burn, Unitarian chaff! Burn, I say!) And so now we shall choose one Unitarian to rule them all!
So vote already! You can only vote once, so choose wisely. And you can’t change your mind once you hit submit, so none of that Unitarian hemming and hawing. Voting is open until Thurs, Dec 14 at noon.
Voting is closed! Click here for the final results!
[NOTE: Pete Seeger had been added due to is accepting write-in votes. (No one else, sorry.) If you’d like to see him added to the formal poll, leave a comment, and I’ll add him in when there’s a critical mass. So save your vote until then if you’re a Seeger fan.]
[NOTE: Originally, there were to be five candidates. However, two tied for fifth place, and, I’m sorry, but no one but sissy little French schoolgirls tie for fifth. So stick that in your Unitarian pipe and smoke it. ]
Maybe we should throw Pete Seeger in the cage too.
Nope. Too late. The cage is already locked.
I wish I’d thought of that, though. He would have made a great addition.
I talked to the DH about this and he said his vote would be for Matt Groening. I’m torn between him and Tim Berners Lee. My difficulty with Groening is that although he is influential through his shows, it is not a direct relationship between him and his fans. How do you know when he is speaking his own opinions and when he is just throwing something out there? And if he wanted to say something really “out there,” would his network allow him to? On the other hand, I don’t know how much real power Berners Lee has, either. He could just be a figurehead that people now ignore.
So I haven’t voted yet.
The DH and I agree that if Oprah was a UU, she would win, hands down.
Yeah, Oprah would be a shoo-in, and not a bad one either.
I was afraid that Martha Stewart was a shoo-in when she was a nominee, before we ruled her out. (Phew.)
My gut leans toward Groening and Olbermann, but the numbers point me to Berners-Lee.
Jeff, on second thought, if there were a goodly number of write-in votes here in the comments, I’d add Seeger in and extend the vote a day to make up for it. That was a pretty big oversight.
So, if you’d like to vote for Seeger, save your vote for now, and drop a comment here to let me know.
I’m going with Olbermann for now, but I want it to be known that zombie William Howard Taft could take all four with one hand tied behind his back.
Wouldn’t you know it, I just voted for Berners-Lee moments before you said that. Sorry I didn’t think to offer Seeger back when you were taking names, it’s kinda busy around my place right now and I didn’t check to see who was in the running.
Maybe we need a second bout between Pete Seeger and zombie Taft. My money’s on Seeger, he always made it explicitly clear that his commitment to non-violence did not extend to the undead, and he wields a mean double-edged banjo.
Jeff: Doh! (Not to push votes in any particular direction.)
Don’t make Undead Taft angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry!
Pete Seeger, for sure. Put him on the list.
Need three more Seeger write-ins and I’ll add him in.
It might just be me, but it seems like we still don’t have a consensus (there’s that word again) on what we mean by influential in this case. For instance, in the context of a death match, my money is on Olbermann. He’s the youngest, and looks to be in the best physical condition. (Yes, there’s Zombie Taft to consider, but I think that Seeger would take him out with his double-edged banjo, but then be too tired to stay in the fight.) If he’d been on the list, I’d vote for Asashoryu Akinori, the only active yokozuna (the highest rank of sumo wrestler.) Unfortunately, he’s not UU. ;)
So anyway, what kind of influence are we talking about? Who has the greatest potential to advance the seven principles? Who has the most name recognition?
What?!! No nominations for Joani Blank?!! She is famous for the following things:
** co-founder of the “Good Vibrations” chain of sex toy stores – a worker-owned, sexuality-positive, feminist business
** sexuality and public health educator
** author and/or editor of 14 books (according to the listing on Amazon.com)
Here’s a brief description of Joani from the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Modest? Shy? Joani Blank? This is the explosive spirit who began selling sexual aids to women in March, 1977 – not exactly the halcyon days of the vibrator. She mirthfully introduced thousands of women to sex-toy joy – expanding the business from a closet-size enterprise –
then turned around and sold the company to the workers. In senior citizenry, Blank is as gung-ho about sexual freedom as ever. When she’s not running around filming people in sexual thralldom (indeed, that is one of her upcoming projects), she’s rhapsodizing about one of her other great loves: co-housing, electric cars, singing, the Unitarian Church, the artist Jan Saudek and her toy poodle, Bapu- ji.
‘She’s crazy,’ said Leigh Davidson, longtime managing editor of Down There Press, the Good Vibrations book publishing house that Blank founded in 1975. ‘Who else in the 1970s would decide to sell vibrators? But I think all visionaries are crazy; that has to be part of their
definition.'”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/0
2/14/WB212311.DTL
And Joani is a member of First UU Oakland (where she sings in the choir).
I like seeing a techie in there with Tim Berners-Lee, but I hear way to many complaints about how Microsoft ignores the W3C and sets it’s own standards. I think the competing corporations really have the power. The standards groups are nice and do worthwhile work, but I don’t see it as a very influential group.
Yes the Internet has had a huge impact on society. But so did the invention of nuclear weapons. Who has more influence with those weapons – the inventors or the people with the launch codes?
Sorry Tim, I just don’t think you are a good choice.
I think the “sorry Al” was gratuitous and unnecessary. He never did say he invented the internet, that’s the right wing spin doctors who claimed that, and he was definitely instrumental in making it happen.
If you vote again in a year or two, things could change. Any predictions? Olbermann has potential.
Now you need only two more votes to write Pete Seeger in. My vote is for him.
If Al can joke about it, so can I. And so can you.
Pete Seeger definitely. For living UU values his whole life, speaking truth to power over and over and never giving up, for writing and singing songs that have inspired millions.
( I voted for Tim before I caught on to the write thing and don’t seem to be able to undo the vote.Sorry!)
I just added Seeger. (I added myself as the fifth write-in.)
If you wanted to vote for Seeger but already voted for someone else, you can cast a new vote by going to this page from a computer with a different internet connection. (The poll software logs IP addresses to prevent vote flooding.)
Tim Berners-Lee. How could anyone have more influence over more lives.
Olbermann all the way!
I hear people all the time say that Matt Groening is a UU but where? And don’t say Springfield either. I went with Pete Seeger because he’s actually out changing things and talks about being a UU.
I found it here with some references.
Maybe this is a generational thing but I barely know who Pete Seeger is, and even less of what he is doing. I don’t have cable so I had no idea who Olbermann was until a few months ago when I kept seeing his name come up on UU blogs. Even still, I thought he was a sports reporter from ESPN. (Still don’t know why I thought that). Now I do know about the good vibrations company and think it’s pretty cool that Joani Blank is a UU. Maybe she is responsible for more births (or preventing more births) than anyone else mentioned so far!
Went ahead and voted for Olbermann, to bring his total up to a product of two primes. So nobody screw it up, okay? ;) (Well, two more votes would bring it up to a prime, and two more would at least get a musical reference… Got a ways to go after that before any other mathematically interesting numbers.)
And for the record, I’m choosing to go with the following definition of influence: “an emanation of occult power held to derive from stars.” No, wait, that’s not it. “Power exerted over the minds or behavior of others.” Which, of these contenders, Olbermann seems to be the one whose, erm, star is in ascendence. That, and like I said before, he can probably kick their butts in a throwdown.