Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I ony have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpor...
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I was excited to hear the national spelling bee was to be on "regular TV" a couple of days ago. I was very much in agreement with the news hour, in regards to "That it is great to see kids get this kind of recognition for mental achievement not just achievement in athletics". I remember writing a great paper regarding the "revenge of the nerds take II". Just like when Bill Gates and all the other non-bureaucratic engineers started to get real attention from their achievements we will see information savvy folks do the same. Forgive them they know not what they do. Ask the folks who are working the Google enterprise.

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