Chad Jam

A local website called Crawley News has undergone a name and address change and now calls itself Crawley Informer. The change was discussed in this post which mentioned a local newspaper in the Midlands called the Alfreton Chad.

That name really tickled me, and I thought it would be a great name for a band, but while I was looking around for a vaguely amusing picture to illustrate this I came across this page which is all about chads - as made famous by the US elections in 2000. All our favourite familiar terms are there, like hanging chads and pregnant chads, but there was one phrase new to me which I thought would make an even better name for a band than Alfreton Chad: chad jam.

It really is worth looking at the section titled The Risk Of Chad Jam. The voting machines are designed to cope with chad jams, but there is a support brace in it which can cause a problem for only for certain positions on the voting card. As it happens, those positions were occupied by Al Gore and Pat Buchanan in the 2000 Florida election! Anyway, any site which can have a photo caption of "Pregnant chad resulting from punching into a firmly packed chad jam." has got to be worth looking at for that alone. Sheer poetry!

Unfortunately Chad Jam will be forever assumed to be ripping off Pearl Jam, so they will never be taken seriously.