I recently mentioned Natasha Pettigrew, the Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate here in Maryland. In fact, I was planning on voting for her. (No worries about "throwing away your vote" on a third party candidate here; for good or for ill, Democrat Barbra Mikulski has the race all but sewn up.)

According to the Washington Post, Natasha Pettigrew was struck by a car early Sunday morning while she was biking, training for a triathlon. She died Monday night.

Shockingly, the driver of the SUV that killed Pettigrew didn't realize it for perhaps as long as an hour:

State police said the driver apparently thought she had hit a deer or another animal and realized what had happened only when she arrived home and found Pettigrew's bicycle trapped under her car. Pettigrew was not dragged by the vehicle but suffered severe injuries, police said.

The driver, who police identified as Christy R. Littleford, 41, called Prince George's County police sometime before 6:30 a.m. on Sunday to report the crash. County police then relayed the information to state police, who were on the scene.

"She had driven to her home and called from her home," said Greg Shipley, a Maryland State Police spokesman. "The initial indication was that she thought she may have hit a deer or an animal in the roadway. . . . When she arrived home and saw the bicycle, she assumed it was something else."

That, folks, is how careless drivers can be.

Brian Bittner, Maryland Green Party co-chairman, expressed the loss felt by those who worked with her in the party, saying that Pettigrew had "incredible potential as a future leader for this party and this state...We all looked forward to working with Natasha for years to come."

A few months ago, I went to see Brad Warner speak at the Baltimore Zen Center. My good friend Mike Gurklis had been recommending Warner's work to me for a few years; I ended up quoting him twice in Why Buddha Touched the Earth, and had I finally got around to reading his book Hardcore Zen, so I thought it would be worthwhile to see him in person.

And it was. But more than that, I found that my old friend and former English teacher Alan Reese was a member of the BZC sangha. Also, when Brad was late (due to car trouble), the resident teacher, JB "MuSsang" Jaeger, gave a little talk -- and he started off talking about Ikkyu.

If you've been to my "Zen in the Art of Love" workshop, or read any of the drafts of my book, you know that Ikkyu Sojun is my favorite Zen lunatic. It's not just his "Red Thread" concept of Zen with it's explict acceptance and appreciation of sexuality, but the very human person who comes through in his poetry. Like "I like my anger / my grouchy furious love" -- right up my alley.

So between Alan's presence and JB's invocation of one of my favorite spiritual dudes, I thought, "Hmm. This group is worth revisiting."

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem about an interesting person you have met (or can imagine meeting)

I do enjoy my life. I get to meet such interesting people.

The guy wearing bunny ears and a bikini top who turned out to be a nuclear disarmament expert
The Zen teacher who works as a bouncer
The Broadway stage manager who became a nurse
The English teacher who had a side job as a Mark Twain impersonator
The punk rock drummer turned monk turned elementary school principal
The 60-something karate master who married a woman thirty years younger and became the father of twins
The M-to-F transgendered multiple-personalitied poet
The political activist who used to be a crazy homeless guy who used to be a brilliant computer programmer who used run an internet company in the Brazilian jungle
The bartender who used to be a cop on a SWAT team, and has fostered a whole bunch of kids

Walk down the street any afternoon
and you would pass any of them by
never know their stories

every person you pass --
every every every one --
a story
unlike any other story

is it strange to say that each person is as precious as a book?

Being of an anarchic -- or Zenarchic -- disposition, I really hate to call the cops. I'd rather, to the extent possible, have people talk out their problems as a community of equals, rather than throwing "authority", with its dangers into the mix.

But when I see two young idiots racing their go-karts on the rainy street, presenting a hazard to navigation and raising the potential for traffic accidents, my choices are 1) let it go, and if an accident is caused, ah well; 2) try to chase them down on foot and, if I catch them, give them a stern talking-to; 3) try to chase them down on foot and, if I catch them, take more direct action, like pulling a wire out of their noisy little engines, or 4) call it in to the BCPD, knowing that not much is likely to come of it but at least I've done what I could.

Please, folks: don't behave in such a stupid manner that I have to make decisions like this. Thanks.

I previously mentioned Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes, who argued that efforts by Denver's mayor -- and now Democractic nominee for governor -- John Hickenlooper to make that city more bike-friendly were "converting Denver into a United Nations community, " "part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty, " and "contradictory to our own Constitution."

Maes, in this year where insanity has become a popular fashion accessory for victors in Republican primaries, won the GOP gubernatorial nomination. Apparently the fatal blow to his opponent, former Representative Scott McInnis, was self-inflicted -- McInnis admitted to plagiarizing a paper on water issues, one that he was paid $300,000 to write.

But now, not only the Republican establishment but the Tea Party leadership is backing away from Maes. Seems that not only is he a UN conspiracy theory nut, but he lied about working undercover for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and about how he left a small-town Kansas police department, and has incurred record fines for paying himself more than $40,000 from his campaign fund.

I recently mentioned nutcase Christine O'Donnell, a candidate for the GOP nomination for the Delaware Senate race whom the "Tea Party Express" has backed to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars. O'Donnell grabbed my attention because she's opposed to masturbation on the basis that the Bible says "lusting in your heart" is the same as committing adultery, and called the fact that we have a sexually unhealthy society "wonderful," saying "It's called modesty."

The Delaware GOP tried hard to shoot her down and get more-or-less sane Rep. Mike Castle, a former two-term governor, as the nominee; they went so far as to put out robocalls featuring O'Donnell's campaign manager from her 2008 campaign, accusing O'Donnell of "living on campaign donations — using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt." The GOP dug up records showing that the IRS had once placed a lien against her and that her house had been on the brink of foreclosure; it's also been revealed that she -- falsely -- claimed to have carried two of the state's counties in a race against Biden six years ago.

Showing just how deranged the GOP is this year, Republican voters chose Christine O'Donnell as the nominee for the U.S. Senate seat for Delaware, with 53 percent of the vote. I expect that Democrats all across the country are smiling that someone the state's GOP chairman said "couldn't be elected dog catcher" is now the candidate they'll have to beat, rather than the experienced and well-liked Castle.

What can you do when your product gets a bad reputation? Rename it! That's the plan the Corn Refiners Association has for high fructose corn syrup, a substance linked with high blood pressure, insulin resistance, and high blood cholesterol levels. They want to rename the stuff "corn sugar".

(It's unclear how different the effects of fructose are from sucrose -- it may just be that fructose is cheap so we eat more sugar in general now -- and exercise, as usual, mitigates the effects.)

While a lot of Marylanders will be heading to the polls tomorrow to select the Democratic (not "Democrat", if you can't get the grammar right you disqualify yourself from being taken seriously) and Republican candidates for the upcoming general elections, there are some other alternatives.

The Maryland Green Party is running Maria Allwine and Ken Eidel for Governor/Lt. Gov and Natasha Pettigrew for the Senate. They've also got candidates for Anne Arundel County Executive, and for the Montgomery County Council and the Washington County Commission.

The Libertarians (who generally don't understand the meaning of the word, having stolen it from socialist anarchists, but I'll cut them some slack) have Susan Gaztañaga and Doug McNeil for Governor/Lt. Gov, and candidates for most of the Congressional seats and several down-ticket races.

There's also a Maryland chapter of the nutjob Constitution Party (link deliberately omitted), who believe that the U.S. was founded "on the Gospel of Jesus Christ" and wants to "restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations" -- showing that, like a lot of folks on the far right making a lot of noise about the Constitution these days, they have failed to read and understand it. Sort of like the barbarians in that Star Trek episode whose "holy words" were "E pleb neesta"; it took Captain Kirk to come along and teach them about "We the People" and the Preamble to the Constitution.

As I write this, www.elections.state.md.us, the website for the Maryland election board, is down. Maryland's primary elections are tomorrow. I'm not a member of any party, so I don't get to play; still, I must wonder -- incompetence, or deliberate denial-of-service attack?

New research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine uses data from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals' Follow-up Study to compare the overall mortality effects -- i.e., how likely something is to help you to your death -- of two different sort of low-carb diets: those based on animal products, and those based on plant foods.

Unsurprisingly, overall low-carb diets were associated with an increase in overall mortality. But what's interesting is that when they broke it down by plant-based versus animal-based diets, people consuming animal-based low-carb diets had higher mortality overall and also from cardiovascular disease and cancer, while vegetable-based low-carb diets were actually associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality.