Not a Number Cards and Gifts in Wallingford is your straight ticket to political swag -- and a few laughs

If you've already picked your presidential candidate and his name rhymes with "faux llama," you're bound to feel comfortable at Kara Ceriello and Jon deLeeuw's quirky Wallingford gift shop, Not a Number Cards and Gifts. If you're rooting for the other guy -- well, maybe you can still have a chuckle or two.

That's what Ceriello, whose official job title is "Head Cheese," hopes to inspire during this tense political season. "My favorite thing is when people come in here and laugh," she says. "We are here to make fun of everyone."

Not a Number, which opened about four years ago in Queen Anne and moved a year later to its current location, always carries political items -- its wall of bumper stickers is a perennial draw -- but the inventory expands during election season.

Many of the timelier things, including Obama- and McCain-themed pins, T-shirts, ashtrays and clocks, are locally made. Ceriello says that she and deLeeuw, her husband, whose job title is "Number 6" (like the shop's name, a reference to the British cult TV series "The Prisoner"), don't really have to solicit election-related stuff -- Seattle-area artists generally find them.

Ceriello and deLeeuw's lefty tendencies are evident, as pro-Obama and anti-McCain/Palin doodads comprise the vast majority of the election merchandise, but they don't identify as Democrats, and the occasional item (like a pin that says "Hey Dems! Grow a set!!") gives the Donkey Party its lumps.

Yet books like 72 Things That Are Younger Than John McCain (Israel! penicillin! the minimum wage!) and a pin that says "I can see Russia from my house" (a jab at Sarah Palin's infamous description of her foreign-policy credentials) seem closer to the couple's heart. The store also carries more neutral political things, like T-shirts and stickers, designed in-house, that feature peace signs made up of flags from around the world, as well as items that refer to the current economic crisis.

Ceriello says she gets Republican customers every so often. "We just want people to have an opinion," she says, even if that opinion differs from hers and her husband's. She got a call once from someone looking for a Palin poster. The Head Cheese told the caller that the shop has plenty of stuff mocking Palin. She was met with silence, and then a question: "Why would I want to mock her?"

Appropriately enough, Not a Number will host an Election Night party; it'll start around 6 p.m. According to Ceriello, Nerf guns and "See Through the B.S" glasses will abound.

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