Yesterday was Election Tuesday! Like the good citizen that I am, I left the office early to get my vote on – and it was an unmitigated disaster.

I consider myself a reasonably well-informed person, someone who follows major issues but doesn’t know, for example, the candidates in Chicago’s 44th ward. Such a gap in my own knowledge doesn’t bother me so much as, say, not knowing how to register to vote.

I assumed – incorrectly – that I could, you know, just show up at the place where I cast my last ballot and that would be my contribution to American government. Apparently this is not the case.

‘Do you have your card?’ the largish man with the hacking cough asked.

I start to pull out my Illinois driver’s license and he stops me.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I need your voter card.’

I don’t have a voter card, so this confuses me. ‘But I voted here last time,’ I volunteer, thinking this will solve the problem.

‘You’re not in the book,’ he says, as if this ‘book’ is like St. Peter’s Book of the Heavenly Eligible, the list from which the souls of the worthy are allowed past the pearly gates. Except this ‘book’ is The Three-Ring Binder of Voter Rolls, Administered by Hacking-Cough Guy. ‘Try the other precinct (cough) down the street (cough) closer to your address.’

This is why I’m lucky I live in Chicago; the next precinct was four blocks away.

However, once I got there, the same story unfolded. I wasn’t in The Book, I didn’t have a voter card, I couldn’t cast a ballot.

At this point, I had spent 45 more minutes than I intended on the electoral process. I did what any self-respecting, civic-minded person would do: I gave up and went home.

Here’s my problem with the situation: When you were in grade-school or even high-school civics, did you hear anything other than ‘remember to vote’? The preliminary processes necessary to ensure voter registration weren’t even mentioned. This complaint is in the same vein as the ‘I’ll never need algebra in real life’ or ‘when are we going to use literary criticism in business?’ complaints, but with a more real-world application.

Sure, vote and all that, but would it have been too much for someone to tell me what needed to be done to get that ballot cast? Apparently you have to pre-register for each election, but I don’t recall that information ever being passed on to me. It’s all a conspiracy to keep me from voting … even though I didn’t know who I was going to vote for once I was in the balloting box.

Footnote, celebrity-watch style. Apparently I’m a professional colleague of a Real Live Celebrity. My friend Jessica, who hold an analogous position to me at an organization in Memphis – if you want to get technical, fine, she’s on the same level as my boss – was on Fox News yesterday as an election analyst. While I didn’t see her performance (and she calls the whole thing ‘a blur’), it’s nice to know that I could conceivably get a plug for my site on a nationally syndicated news show. Right Jess? Right?

In any case, read what the young Miss GOP has to say here.

Liking Google is like handing your car keys to a valet: You know bad things can happen – a la the joyriding garage staff in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – but the convenience is just too good to pass up.

But my entire life has become Google-ized. My main e-mail account ends in ‘gmail.com.’ I perform 40-50 Google searches per day, on average. All of my work documents and files are indexed with the Big G’s desktop-indexing software. Suddenly, that valet has constant access to my car and can go joyriding whenever he wants. The only thing keeping me around is the convenience of being able to do pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to do and more – at the cost of one large repository of my personal data and search history, an information repository that could be used either for good or for evil.

So it’s safe to say that while I’ve adapted to My Google Life, there are some lingering doubts about what becoming a Google Zombie can do to your sensitive personal data. However, with one simple article in today’s Wall Street Journal, my feelings turned from guardedly wary to enthusiastically giddy when I read that it will allow businesses to purchase print ads through its online portal.

That’s right: You’re buying print ads through what is one of the largest and most diversified digital holding companies.

The company’s current AdWords strategy has worked wonders, breaking the idea that advertising must be big, bold and overbearing in order to grab eyeballs. You’re familiar with the campaign, even if you don’t know you are. Any Google search results in a right-hand column on the results page with sponsored ads for products and services related to your search. Suddenly, Google discovered, customers don’t like being beaten over the head with popups and flashy colors, but they do like being lightly nudged in a direction they’re already heading.

Because the AdWords campaign is so successful, Google is now moving to a different field – the one of print advertising. Readership in print newspapers has been in decline for years – with some even going so far as to decry the inevitable fall of the mighty printed word – so the fact that an industry leader is willing to a) form a more standard way of ad purchase for clients, b) provide a much-needed infusion of advertising dollars to the newspaper industry and c) establish itself as a partner, not as a competitor, to the online versions of those newspapers – even while still promoting its own products, Google News and Google Finance.

This is, in a word, big.

And there are some things online news sources can’t provide. There’s just something oddly grin-inducing about seeing Jonathan Davis, the lead singer of Korn, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He was being interviewed about the how absolutely mind-blowing Guitar Hero is – and here he is, a rockstar, talking about how much fun it is to play a video game where you get to play a rockstar – and it’s prominently displayed on the face of the nation’s financial paper of record.

I know it’s a horrible argument, but I have to make it: Print can’t die, because print is really cool. Especially when it talks about Guitar Hero. Bring it on, Google. This just might save newspapers.

Childhood naturally leaves its mental sacred cows, those vestiges of bygone days that, no matter how cheesy, chintzy or stupid, can never be anything less than what you would describe to your friends as ‘seriously, just the best thing ever.’

One of those things for me is The Price is Right. And that’s why I take Bob Barker’s retirement a little personally.

The show represented the American Dream. I’m not talking about the white-picket-fence-and-2.3-kids Dream, I’m talking rags-to-riches-and-support-the-troops American Dream, Horatio Alger-style.

Take the Dice Game, for example. The contestant can win a car – a freaking car! – by rolling dice. Or in Plinko, the player can take home $50,000 by dropping discs down a chute. Or Punch a Bunch, where small prizes are earned in a primal version of Deal or No Deal. These aren’t games of knowledge or skill, so the next Ken Jennings won’t have any sort of Jeopardy!-style advantage. The only precursor to winning is a working knowledge of capitalism and the prices of current promotional items.

Like I said, this is the American Dream in action. We all buy crap – it’s our duty as good citizens – and we have to entertain ourselves, so The Price is Right is the intersection of both.

Oh Bob Barker, I’m sorry you’re retiring, but maybe it’s a good thing that we won’t have to reanimate your skeleton every weekday morning to say ‘you’re the next contestant! Come on down!’ and ‘remember to spay and neuter your pets!’