The Really Wild and Exciting Adventures of the Peacenik Vogon, Part Two
Created | Updated Jun 28, 2005
-Last time on "Really Wild Adventures":-
I introduced myself as Pythia the Peacenik Vogon, a pug-ugly anti-war freak with boredom and agression issues. Having crashed into a two-headed loser's salvage ship, I proceeded to blow up Earth's moon and demolish a door that had committed the unforgivable crime of annoying me. Meanwhile, the loser and his semi-cousin, a Guide Researcher and World-Class Freeloader, decided to land on the planet so they could buy toupees. It only gets weirder from there...
I lay back to stare upward at the stars. Inwardly, I gave them the foulest cussing-out ever mulled over but not emitted aloud. If only I had just followed orders and demolished a few of them, I never would have had reason to run across any of the twits I now had the non-pleasure of being stuck with.
Ford Prefect (a.k.a. the freeloader) seemed almost less overjoyed than I was. "Zaphod, you idiot!" he exploded. "So much for your infallible 'kickin'-it' instinct!"
The loser and his cojoined twins, Zig and Zag, gave a quadruple sigh that is impossible to describe for anyone who has never heard it. Aside from being four sighs from two beings, it was also a Betelgeusian Gas Emission, a common signal of uttermost exasperation in the less articulate corners of the Galaxy. (The emission's source is not restricted to the mouth, so this signal has been abandoned in civilizations wherein adjectives of suffecient connotation have been invented.)
Zaphod -previously identified as "the loser"- rolled all four of his eyes, buying time to scrape up an excuse. "Look, Ford, I checked all the topo maps and picked out what looked like an ideal landing spot: no hills, no trees, no buildings-"
"That's because you can't bloody erect a bloody building or grow a bloody tree on the surface of a bloody lake!" Ford screamed as he jumped to his feet, making our inflatable life raft sway and dip dangerously.
There had been no time to launch an escape pod; Zaphod's piece-of-junk ship had gone under the water so fast, it reminded me of watching the last twenty minutes of "Titanic" on fast-forward. So instead we jumped out of the loading door for Cargo Bay Two and treaded water until Zaphod nearly passed out trying to blow up a rubber raft he had yoinked from a cargo crate on the way out. Then I took the boat away from him and blew it up with two lungfuls. Vogons have unbelievable lung capacities, hence their proportionate bellowing power. Ford was the only one reluctant to get in the boat. He looked disgustedly at the inflation nozzle, muttering something dark about my slimy mouth and his doubts concerning where it had been over the past few centuries.
CLICK! FLASH!
The unmistakable herald of paparazzi greeted us from somewhere on the shore of imported, way too grainy sand. Our heads all immediately snapped in that direction (except mine, which actually sort of lolled over because the boat shifted slightly). Standing on a cement surface which I learned to call a "sidewalk", next to an awkward, fragile plyboard structure which I learned to call "shoddy American workmanship"* was an adolescent, stoutish figure which I learned to call Alice.
She was peering at us from behind an extremely primitive box-like device which I assume was her camera. Timidly, she peeked over it with wide, jittery eyes, gaping in typical Earthling fashion. Her gaze was not unlike that of a rabbit who sees a car coming and is smart enough to want out of the road but realizes the vehicle is coming too fast, rendering any attempt to hop away probably riskier than just hunkering down in hopes that the car will swerve at the last second.
(Ever notice how prone humans are to gaping at things? I heard about one family that traveled for days on end just to stare at a giant crack in the middle of nowhere.)**
Alice immediately dropped the camera (but not so immediately that it didn't land on her duffel bag) and threw her arms up in a universal gesture of desire to conduct a survey on the effectiveness of anti-perspirant brands. "Greetings!" she shouted. Then the arms dropped a bit. "Do you come in peace?" she inquired weakly.
Ford and Zaphod looked at each other, as did Zig and Zag. I looked back to the stars and resumed cussing them, this time muttering under my breath. Had we arrived on so backwater a planet that they still bothered with that question? On other planets, folks are advanced enough to realize if the visitors come in peace, they will do it quietly and sometimes bearing gifts. If the visitors do not come in peace, they will do it with many noisy demands and usually while obliterating a sizable percentage of local creatures.
"Uh, yeah, sure, in peace," Ford shrugged. "Do you?"
"Yeah," said the girl, curiously. "Say, ehm, do you guys want me to... oh, I don't know, take you to my leader or something?"
-Oh, zark,- I thought.
Ford and Zaphod looked at each other again, trying to hold back snickers. "Why would we want that?" Zaphod asked, gagging on his suppressed laughter.
"Because, you're aliens," Alice matter-of-factly replied.
Ford squinted in mock bewilderment. "And, er, what leads you to that conclusion?"
The girl took a deep breath. "First, I saw your ship plummeting out of the sky in a magnificent tail of fire and devastation," she began. "I got some great hi-speed shots of it, if you care to see them later. Second, that guy [Zaphod] has two heads, she [me] is green, and you smell like absinthe and peyote."
"This is California," Ford objected. "Since when have any of those things been unusual here?"
"Look, Magellan," the girl retorted, "you're off your target by one hundred and ninety-two miles, in which case you were headed for San Francisco. Or maybe by some three hundred and fifty miles, meaning you wanted L.A. Or maybe you meant to go about eight hours southwest."
"What's eight hours southwest?"
"Culver City."***
Ford shut his eyes painfully. "Zaphod, tell me you didn't land us in the Sierras."
"Okay." He crossed his fingers. "I didn't land us in the Sierras."
Ford made as if to jump overboard and end his misery right there, but changed his mind when he saw how happy the idea made me feel.
"Zaphod," Ford grumbled, "let me put it this way. This area is the reason why California was a LIGHT blue state!" ****
The girl stood by, waiting patiently for her new acquaintences to cease hollering arguments, which were too numerous and stupid for me to repeat here. As Zaphod and Ford kept at it, she got wearied of that and shot some more pictures instead, grinning like a maniac. "My dad is going to have a heart attack," she giggled.
"Why?" asked Zag. "He doesn't believe in aliens?"
"That too," she chortled. "I meant, it's past my curfew." She set the camera down, jiggling too much from her glee to record a proper image.
Meanwhile, the drift of the lake carried us towards the beach, and the water beneath us gradually became shallower. Whether Alice had forgotten her fear because we were behaving in so ordinary a manner or because she had convinced herself that our campany was a band of lost tourists, I still don't know. All I know is she had no reservations about hiking up her ill-fitting skirt and wading out to tow us ashore. Continuing to bicker, Zaphod and Ford ignored her until she jerked the raft to ground it, accidentally toppling them backwards into the water. Zig and Zag laughed unabashedly at their elders' soggy misfortune as the ijits splashed about, swimming for their lives.
"What's so blinking hilarious?" Zaphod demanded between mouthfuls of water. "If you think I'm going to keep up this Esther Williams impersonation forever, think again."
Ford poked Zaphod, trying to get his attention.
"Ford, not now! Can't you see I'm busy drowning?"
Ford groaned. "Sure. Knock yourself out." He calmly sat down to watch and wait.
Alice giggled into her hand and waited for the two-headed man to realize the water was only about three inches deep. After paddling madly for a few more seconds, he figured it out by paddling straight into the beach and filling up both his mouths with sand.
The girl grinned, offering him a hand. "Gentlemen," she said, "welcome to Twain Harte Village."
******************(more asterisks!)
Her apartment was not too far a walk for me and the twins, but it was far too far for the shivering Zaphod and Ford. I made up my mind on the way that I would return to the lake first chance I got; it smelled evil and was full of foul plant matter, my ideal of a swimming hole. I began humming a verse of "Groop, Groop, Groop Away in the Sunny Muck".
-Splishy splash, crunchy crash-
How I love my swimmin' hole!
Strips the oil from my skin,
Makes me feel real foul within,
Won't swim nowhere else again!
Love my mucky swimmin' hole!-
Zaphod glared at me like he wanted to eat my guts, and Alice stared at me like I was a reject for the Space Oddity tour. I sang louder, until a nearby dog began howling.
Upon reaching Alice's place, she switched on a CD player, fetched the guys some towels, and used the toilet before realizing I had raided her refrigerator. For the first and last time, I was grateful for Alice's ignorance; otherwise, she might have known our arrival was not first contact and consequently that there was no call for her to be so accomodating. "Never mind," she sighed. "I need to go on a diet anyway."
"It seems sort of late for no one to be home but you," Ford noticed. "Your parents gone on business or something?"
"Why?" Alice was suspicious of the boozer, alien or not, right away.
"Just wondering how fast I need to come up with an excuse for four strangers being in your house," he answered dryly.
She considered this, wondering whether silence or denial or just plain truth would be safest to go with in satisfying his inquiry. Finally she decided on truth. "My dad and stepmum are out for their anniversary tonight," she told him. "Don't worry about when they'll be home; I could bring the entire population of Albania into this house and they wouldn't notice."
Zig and Zag nodded knowingly. According to their explaination, they had done the same thing a few years back, except their guests were the population of an asteroid completely inhabited by ballpoint pens. One of the pens, drunk as a Pyronian Ultra-Skunk, fell out of a chair and spilled ink on the floor. The warranty on the stain-proof carpet had unfortunately expired, so Zig and Zag had needed to keep a rug in their room from then on.
A stupid little box on the table began beeping. I nearly smashed it with my fist, until Alice rescued it from me. She pulled open a hinged flap on the box and began talking into it. "Hi?" she said to the box. She stood quietly for a moment, during which time I was strongly tempted to hum the "Jeopardy" theme. Then she turned pale and closed the box without a word.
"Hey, who was that?" Ford pried. I so wished he would stop asking questions. In fact, I wished he would stop speaking.
"My stepmum," she said hoarsely. "It seems my dad is in a coma."
Ford finally shut up, but then his breathing began to tick me off.
"Coma?" Zig and Zag parroted.
"Yes. My parents went to a rock concert next door to the restaurant they were visiting." She dropped her head bitterly. "The idiots. Everybody knows rock music can be a health hazard for those over the age of thiry-five. Apparently, Dad tried to catch a shirt from the T-shirt launcher, tripped backward over a moonwalk boot and hit his head on a ghetto blaster. The doctors say he'll be a vegatable for the rest of his life."
She looked vacantly out the window. "Laid low by rock and roll. It's not unheard of, but..." Suddenly she sprang into action. "Take me with you!" she begged. "Wherever you come from, no matter how the atmosphere and lavatory facilities are composed! I want to go there!"
"Huh?" It was the first word I had said since the dog episode. Yet, it was an effective communication, expressing the sum total of my thought processes for the time. Why waste words when you haven't got something worth saying?
"Listen, my stepmum is no witch, but she isn't the type you want to spend a lot of time with alone," she explained. "Think about it. This is a woman who actually enjoyed 'Kill Bill', and THEN watched the sequel."
"Freeow!" This was all of us in unison- except Alice, obviously.
"Uh-huh," she nodded. "So, how do we fix your spaceship?"
She had us there. We gaped at one another for about five solid minutes.
"Sayyyy..." Ford suddenly had a stroke of sorta smartness. "Once I went to Oregon on holiday, and I ran into this guy at a hippy fair. He said he had a spaceship repair shop in New Mexico, but at the time I didn't think much of it."
"Why not?"
"Because he was wearing a pink jumpsuit, riding a unicycle, and wearing a banana on his head."
The girl stared at Ford oddly. "You've been to Earth before?"
He'd treed himself on that. I waited to see how what junkola he'd spew to excuse himself by. "Eh, briefly," he muttered.
I groaned. -Real imaginative, Ford.-
The girl, however, let the matter slide. "Hmm. Maybe we should look this guy up."
"You're kidding," I growled.
"Well, it seems we've all got time to kill," Zaphod snapped, still picking algae out of his hair.
"And that is WHOSE fault?" Ford pointed out.
"I doubt Banana Man has a phone number or a website," Alice interrupted, grabbing the spotlight and running with it. "So who's up for a little road trip?"
"Are you SERIOUS?!?!" Ford turned on her. "Drive from here all the way to Roswell? Wherever the bleep that is."
Alice cocked an eyebrow. "A space saucer repair shop in Roswell, New Mexico, owned by a guy who drives hundreds of miles to hippy festivals and likes to sport produce as a fashion statement." She mulled it over. "Sounds like an adventure to me. Who here knows how to drive an RV?"
Even then, I knew I was going to regret the whole episode, but hey, I was bored. As usual.
To Be Continued...
* A beach house.
** The Grand Canyon.
*** Only Californians would get this reference. Culver City is home to three movie studios, including Universal and Warner Brothers.
**** In the last presidential election, the color code for state majorities was blue if the vote went Democratic, red if it went Republican. California voted blue by a small margin.
I introduced myself as Pythia the Peacenik Vogon, a pug-ugly anti-war freak with boredom and agression issues. Having crashed into a two-headed loser's salvage ship, I proceeded to blow up Earth's moon and demolish a door that had committed the unforgivable crime of annoying me. Meanwhile, the loser and his semi-cousin, a Guide Researcher and World-Class Freeloader, decided to land on the planet so they could buy toupees. It only gets weirder from there...
I lay back to stare upward at the stars. Inwardly, I gave them the foulest cussing-out ever mulled over but not emitted aloud. If only I had just followed orders and demolished a few of them, I never would have had reason to run across any of the twits I now had the non-pleasure of being stuck with.
Ford Prefect (a.k.a. the freeloader) seemed almost less overjoyed than I was. "Zaphod, you idiot!" he exploded. "So much for your infallible 'kickin'-it' instinct!"
The loser and his cojoined twins, Zig and Zag, gave a quadruple sigh that is impossible to describe for anyone who has never heard it. Aside from being four sighs from two beings, it was also a Betelgeusian Gas Emission, a common signal of uttermost exasperation in the less articulate corners of the Galaxy. (The emission's source is not restricted to the mouth, so this signal has been abandoned in civilizations wherein adjectives of suffecient connotation have been invented.)
Zaphod -previously identified as "the loser"- rolled all four of his eyes, buying time to scrape up an excuse. "Look, Ford, I checked all the topo maps and picked out what looked like an ideal landing spot: no hills, no trees, no buildings-"
"That's because you can't bloody erect a bloody building or grow a bloody tree on the surface of a bloody lake!" Ford screamed as he jumped to his feet, making our inflatable life raft sway and dip dangerously.
There had been no time to launch an escape pod; Zaphod's piece-of-junk ship had gone under the water so fast, it reminded me of watching the last twenty minutes of "Titanic" on fast-forward. So instead we jumped out of the loading door for Cargo Bay Two and treaded water until Zaphod nearly passed out trying to blow up a rubber raft he had yoinked from a cargo crate on the way out. Then I took the boat away from him and blew it up with two lungfuls. Vogons have unbelievable lung capacities, hence their proportionate bellowing power. Ford was the only one reluctant to get in the boat. He looked disgustedly at the inflation nozzle, muttering something dark about my slimy mouth and his doubts concerning where it had been over the past few centuries.
CLICK! FLASH!
The unmistakable herald of paparazzi greeted us from somewhere on the shore of imported, way too grainy sand. Our heads all immediately snapped in that direction (except mine, which actually sort of lolled over because the boat shifted slightly). Standing on a cement surface which I learned to call a "sidewalk", next to an awkward, fragile plyboard structure which I learned to call "shoddy American workmanship"* was an adolescent, stoutish figure which I learned to call Alice.
She was peering at us from behind an extremely primitive box-like device which I assume was her camera. Timidly, she peeked over it with wide, jittery eyes, gaping in typical Earthling fashion. Her gaze was not unlike that of a rabbit who sees a car coming and is smart enough to want out of the road but realizes the vehicle is coming too fast, rendering any attempt to hop away probably riskier than just hunkering down in hopes that the car will swerve at the last second.
(Ever notice how prone humans are to gaping at things? I heard about one family that traveled for days on end just to stare at a giant crack in the middle of nowhere.)**
Alice immediately dropped the camera (but not so immediately that it didn't land on her duffel bag) and threw her arms up in a universal gesture of desire to conduct a survey on the effectiveness of anti-perspirant brands. "Greetings!" she shouted. Then the arms dropped a bit. "Do you come in peace?" she inquired weakly.
Ford and Zaphod looked at each other, as did Zig and Zag. I looked back to the stars and resumed cussing them, this time muttering under my breath. Had we arrived on so backwater a planet that they still bothered with that question? On other planets, folks are advanced enough to realize if the visitors come in peace, they will do it quietly and sometimes bearing gifts. If the visitors do not come in peace, they will do it with many noisy demands and usually while obliterating a sizable percentage of local creatures.
"Uh, yeah, sure, in peace," Ford shrugged. "Do you?"
"Yeah," said the girl, curiously. "Say, ehm, do you guys want me to... oh, I don't know, take you to my leader or something?"
-Oh, zark,- I thought.
Ford and Zaphod looked at each other again, trying to hold back snickers. "Why would we want that?" Zaphod asked, gagging on his suppressed laughter.
"Because, you're aliens," Alice matter-of-factly replied.
Ford squinted in mock bewilderment. "And, er, what leads you to that conclusion?"
The girl took a deep breath. "First, I saw your ship plummeting out of the sky in a magnificent tail of fire and devastation," she began. "I got some great hi-speed shots of it, if you care to see them later. Second, that guy [Zaphod] has two heads, she [me] is green, and you smell like absinthe and peyote."
"This is California," Ford objected. "Since when have any of those things been unusual here?"
"Look, Magellan," the girl retorted, "you're off your target by one hundred and ninety-two miles, in which case you were headed for San Francisco. Or maybe by some three hundred and fifty miles, meaning you wanted L.A. Or maybe you meant to go about eight hours southwest."
"What's eight hours southwest?"
"Culver City."***
Ford shut his eyes painfully. "Zaphod, tell me you didn't land us in the Sierras."
"Okay." He crossed his fingers. "I didn't land us in the Sierras."
Ford made as if to jump overboard and end his misery right there, but changed his mind when he saw how happy the idea made me feel.
"Zaphod," Ford grumbled, "let me put it this way. This area is the reason why California was a LIGHT blue state!" ****
The girl stood by, waiting patiently for her new acquaintences to cease hollering arguments, which were too numerous and stupid for me to repeat here. As Zaphod and Ford kept at it, she got wearied of that and shot some more pictures instead, grinning like a maniac. "My dad is going to have a heart attack," she giggled.
"Why?" asked Zag. "He doesn't believe in aliens?"
"That too," she chortled. "I meant, it's past my curfew." She set the camera down, jiggling too much from her glee to record a proper image.
Meanwhile, the drift of the lake carried us towards the beach, and the water beneath us gradually became shallower. Whether Alice had forgotten her fear because we were behaving in so ordinary a manner or because she had convinced herself that our campany was a band of lost tourists, I still don't know. All I know is she had no reservations about hiking up her ill-fitting skirt and wading out to tow us ashore. Continuing to bicker, Zaphod and Ford ignored her until she jerked the raft to ground it, accidentally toppling them backwards into the water. Zig and Zag laughed unabashedly at their elders' soggy misfortune as the ijits splashed about, swimming for their lives.
"What's so blinking hilarious?" Zaphod demanded between mouthfuls of water. "If you think I'm going to keep up this Esther Williams impersonation forever, think again."
Ford poked Zaphod, trying to get his attention.
"Ford, not now! Can't you see I'm busy drowning?"
Ford groaned. "Sure. Knock yourself out." He calmly sat down to watch and wait.
Alice giggled into her hand and waited for the two-headed man to realize the water was only about three inches deep. After paddling madly for a few more seconds, he figured it out by paddling straight into the beach and filling up both his mouths with sand.
The girl grinned, offering him a hand. "Gentlemen," she said, "welcome to Twain Harte Village."
******************(more asterisks!)
Her apartment was not too far a walk for me and the twins, but it was far too far for the shivering Zaphod and Ford. I made up my mind on the way that I would return to the lake first chance I got; it smelled evil and was full of foul plant matter, my ideal of a swimming hole. I began humming a verse of "Groop, Groop, Groop Away in the Sunny Muck".
-Splishy splash, crunchy crash-
How I love my swimmin' hole!
Strips the oil from my skin,
Makes me feel real foul within,
Won't swim nowhere else again!
Love my mucky swimmin' hole!-
Zaphod glared at me like he wanted to eat my guts, and Alice stared at me like I was a reject for the Space Oddity tour. I sang louder, until a nearby dog began howling.
Upon reaching Alice's place, she switched on a CD player, fetched the guys some towels, and used the toilet before realizing I had raided her refrigerator. For the first and last time, I was grateful for Alice's ignorance; otherwise, she might have known our arrival was not first contact and consequently that there was no call for her to be so accomodating. "Never mind," she sighed. "I need to go on a diet anyway."
"It seems sort of late for no one to be home but you," Ford noticed. "Your parents gone on business or something?"
"Why?" Alice was suspicious of the boozer, alien or not, right away.
"Just wondering how fast I need to come up with an excuse for four strangers being in your house," he answered dryly.
She considered this, wondering whether silence or denial or just plain truth would be safest to go with in satisfying his inquiry. Finally she decided on truth. "My dad and stepmum are out for their anniversary tonight," she told him. "Don't worry about when they'll be home; I could bring the entire population of Albania into this house and they wouldn't notice."
Zig and Zag nodded knowingly. According to their explaination, they had done the same thing a few years back, except their guests were the population of an asteroid completely inhabited by ballpoint pens. One of the pens, drunk as a Pyronian Ultra-Skunk, fell out of a chair and spilled ink on the floor. The warranty on the stain-proof carpet had unfortunately expired, so Zig and Zag had needed to keep a rug in their room from then on.
A stupid little box on the table began beeping. I nearly smashed it with my fist, until Alice rescued it from me. She pulled open a hinged flap on the box and began talking into it. "Hi?" she said to the box. She stood quietly for a moment, during which time I was strongly tempted to hum the "Jeopardy" theme. Then she turned pale and closed the box without a word.
"Hey, who was that?" Ford pried. I so wished he would stop asking questions. In fact, I wished he would stop speaking.
"My stepmum," she said hoarsely. "It seems my dad is in a coma."
Ford finally shut up, but then his breathing began to tick me off.
"Coma?" Zig and Zag parroted.
"Yes. My parents went to a rock concert next door to the restaurant they were visiting." She dropped her head bitterly. "The idiots. Everybody knows rock music can be a health hazard for those over the age of thiry-five. Apparently, Dad tried to catch a shirt from the T-shirt launcher, tripped backward over a moonwalk boot and hit his head on a ghetto blaster. The doctors say he'll be a vegatable for the rest of his life."
She looked vacantly out the window. "Laid low by rock and roll. It's not unheard of, but..." Suddenly she sprang into action. "Take me with you!" she begged. "Wherever you come from, no matter how the atmosphere and lavatory facilities are composed! I want to go there!"
"Huh?" It was the first word I had said since the dog episode. Yet, it was an effective communication, expressing the sum total of my thought processes for the time. Why waste words when you haven't got something worth saying?
"Listen, my stepmum is no witch, but she isn't the type you want to spend a lot of time with alone," she explained. "Think about it. This is a woman who actually enjoyed 'Kill Bill', and THEN watched the sequel."
"Freeow!" This was all of us in unison- except Alice, obviously.
"Uh-huh," she nodded. "So, how do we fix your spaceship?"
She had us there. We gaped at one another for about five solid minutes.
"Sayyyy..." Ford suddenly had a stroke of sorta smartness. "Once I went to Oregon on holiday, and I ran into this guy at a hippy fair. He said he had a spaceship repair shop in New Mexico, but at the time I didn't think much of it."
"Why not?"
"Because he was wearing a pink jumpsuit, riding a unicycle, and wearing a banana on his head."
The girl stared at Ford oddly. "You've been to Earth before?"
He'd treed himself on that. I waited to see how what junkola he'd spew to excuse himself by. "Eh, briefly," he muttered.
I groaned. -Real imaginative, Ford.-
The girl, however, let the matter slide. "Hmm. Maybe we should look this guy up."
"You're kidding," I growled.
"Well, it seems we've all got time to kill," Zaphod snapped, still picking algae out of his hair.
"And that is WHOSE fault?" Ford pointed out.
"I doubt Banana Man has a phone number or a website," Alice interrupted, grabbing the spotlight and running with it. "So who's up for a little road trip?"
"Are you SERIOUS?!?!" Ford turned on her. "Drive from here all the way to Roswell? Wherever the bleep that is."
Alice cocked an eyebrow. "A space saucer repair shop in Roswell, New Mexico, owned by a guy who drives hundreds of miles to hippy festivals and likes to sport produce as a fashion statement." She mulled it over. "Sounds like an adventure to me. Who here knows how to drive an RV?"
Even then, I knew I was going to regret the whole episode, but hey, I was bored. As usual.
To Be Continued...
* A beach house.
** The Grand Canyon.
*** Only Californians would get this reference. Culver City is home to three movie studios, including Universal and Warner Brothers.
**** In the last presidential election, the color code for state majorities was blue if the vote went Democratic, red if it went Republican. California voted blue by a small margin.
