AUSTIN, Texas -- Hard to know what to do about the Middle East, although indicting Ariel Sharon for treason might be useful. And listening to presidential debates just makes one want to sigh. Al Gore: There are 1.4 million children in Texas without health insurance. George W. Bush: "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hard-hearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."

Sigh.

So let's consider some interesting stuff about the stock market. Stock options in high-tech companies, you may have heard tell, have created tons of new millionaires and are a splendid means of motivating employees. They also have this nice side benefit: They can cut a company's federal income tax to zero.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that Cisco Systems, Siebel Systems Inc. and America Online paid no federal income taxes in their latest fiscal year, the entire tax bill having been wiped out by tax benefits from issuing options to employees. The pattern is consistent across the high-tech spectrum, with Microsoft Inc., among others, getting a huge tax reduction. Cisco wiped out what would have been a $1.68 billion federal tax bill.

One of the great paradoxes of modern journalism is that unusual and extraordinary events seem to be the most newsworthy -- but in the long run, key realities of our lives are shaped by what's usual and ordinary.

The news coverage filling our screens is routinely the product of haste, with little exploration beyond the surface. Generally, the sizzle of the moment prevails -- which is understandable, since novelties tend to be more captivating than chronic situations. But over time, barraged with accounts of the atypical, our society can easily lose sight of what matters most.

"When a dog bites a man, that's not news, because it happens so often," journalist John Bogart commented many decades ago. "But if a man bites a dog, that is news." This assumption is apt to sound like common sense. It's certainly common -- but is it really sensible? After all, we have much more reason to be concerned about dogs biting people than the other way around.

If something happens all the time, it's unlikely to be "news" -- but it ultimately may be far more significant than the latest sensation.

AUSTIN, Texas -- For those in favor of having this argument like grown-ups, some history may be helpful.

The punch-card voting system has been a consistent election problem for the last 30 years. About 37 percent of Americans still vote on the rickety little plastic tables, punching holes in cards. (Those present at the dawn of the computer era will recall the old "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate" cards, but you'll have to explain them to your children.)

The cards are then run through machines that are notoriously error-prone -- and, as writer Ronnie Dugger has been pointing out for years, also highly susceptible to manipulation.

None of this is new information, nor has it appeared only after this close election. Dugger wrote a long article for the Nov. 7, 1988, issue of The New Yorker about the potential for fraud and the many proofs of error by this early, proto-computer voting system. The 1988 article contained, among other information, a detailed description of how to rig a Votomatic counting machine.

Exactly this time a year ago, a truly prescient person monitoring bus, car and plane traffic into the city of Seattle could have predicted that Al Gore's presidential bid faced serious trouble on its left. The mostly young people pouring up Interstate 5 from Oregon and California and other states were the green street warriors who had managed by Nov. 30 to paralyze downtown Seattle and shut down the opening ceremonies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. And these same young people made up the core organizers of Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy, which denied Al Gore the crucial margin in Florida and New Hampshire.

As the WTO delegates abandoned Seattle in defeat at the end of that tumultuous week last December, many on the left hailed the coming of age of a new coalition. Among its supposed components: the militant greens in the form of Earth First!, Rainforest Action and Direct Action Network; more mainstream green groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth; Ralph Nader's citizen's trade campaign; labor's legions mustered in Seattle under the banners of the AFL-CIO.

Five fine specimens of Meleagris gallopavo (wild turkey to you) wandered onto my property here in Humboldt county, northern California, a few days ago. I assume they forgot to check the California Fish and Game calendar which permits a two week window for wild turkey hunters before Thanksgiving. Out came my 12-gauge, and I loosed off a shot, which at some 100 feet did no discernible damage, and after a brief bout of what-the-hell-was-that, the turkeys continued to forage. A fusillade of two more shots finally brought down a 14-pounder. I hung him for four days, plucked him, and by Thanksgiving's end, he'll be history. This was all easier than sporting manuals suggest, where hunters take enormous trouble to decoy the turkeys with fake gobbles.

Wild turkeys haven't been seen in California since the Cenozoic era, but in recent years, two ranchers in my valley imported a few, and now they've begun to appear in our neighborhood in substantial numbers. I've heard reports of flocks of up to a 100 wild turkeys 15 miles up the Mattole river around Honeydew, an impressive quantity, though still far short of the 1,000 birds counted in one day by two hunters in New England in 1630.