Monday, 03/22/04
I learned today that Bush isn't on the ballot yet in Illinois. Here's some background from last November, and here's a more recent update. What is it with Illinois and candidates named JFK?
I was also struck by Illinois's electoral clumping. Newly minted Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama won what looks like 14 counties out of 102, but still beat the runner-up by almost 30 points -- and by 5.5 points, he beat all of his Democratic competitors combined. Due to higher than normal Democratic interest in the race, he also got more votes than all of the Republican primary contenders combined. He's gonna make a great senator.
Washington, of course, exhibits a similar urban clumpiness. Maria Cantwell won her Senate race here in 2000 by carrying only four counties out of 39, a sad average of 39.2% of the vote in each county, while Slade Gorton won an average of 58%. But since she beat him by a nearly identically reversed percentage in King Country (which contains Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond, plus a couple more), worth a margin of 153,000 votes, she still squeaked by with 2228 votes to spare statewide. Eastern Washington sucks.
Enough fun, back to the book.
03:56PM «Tuesday, 03/16/04
It's been a year since the first release of Amputator, my wee Movable Type plugin for replacing ampersands with HTML entity references. A callow youth had written a similar plugin for Blosxom; I fixed some bugs and added MT support. He accepted the bug fixes but refused the MT support, which led to to Amputator's release.
That young man has since retired or been hit by a bus, and his Blosxom plugin is no longer available. Max Barry wrote with an adaptation of Amputator for Blosxom, which I reconciled with the MT version, leading to more or less the same plugin originally rejected by the young man. Thus, Amputator 1.1. The only new development is the additional support for Blosxom.
One person last October did mention to me that Amputator was running roughshod over ampersands in snippets of Javascript not intended for consumption by a web browser. This is solvable, but I have yet to make the undertaking. If you use ampersands in Javascript inside MT or Blosxom entries and you'd like to see this fixed, please let me know. 06:08PM «
Robert Pastorelli died last week. Apparently drug-related. He was one of those actors, like Christopher Walken, who improves a movie just by showing up. 05:34PM «
Wednesday, 03/10/04
"I was like, 'Ha ha, he hit a car!'" Garcia said. "And then I found out it was mine and it wasn't so funny." 01:00PM «
Tuesday, 03/09/04
For months, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has been working on a chart depicting the laugh-out-loud divergence between annual Bush administration employment forecasts and the real employment number.
Most recently, the forecast has been designed to push total employment back up above where it was when Bush took office, so as to avoid the unpleasant headline, "Bush Predicts First Four-Year Job Loss Since Hoover." Obviously, with so little time on the clock and so many jobs lost since 2001, the most recent forecast had to be absurdly high, but the slope of that line only rises a little faster than the previous two. They've been lying for a long time.
That chart just got called up to the big leagues. Excellent. 10:32AM «
Tuesday, 03/02/04
I don't mention often enough that my favorite federal agency is the CDC. This week's Mortality and Morbidity report contains the early results of a revenue study of El Paso bars and restaurants after a smoking ban was introduced. They found that the effect of the ban on revenue was: not statistically significant! God bless my federal government, though a little regime change at the top wouldn't hurt. State and/or King County government, take the hint.
KEXP gave me free tickets to see a pretty good Montreal pop band tonight, and I'm going to pass, because it's just not worth it to stand around in the goddamn Crocodile breathing hipster fumes. Not even for no money. 02:56PM «
The Smoking Gun has posted copies of a couple of dozen letters sent to the FCC after the Super Bowl. Some highlights: "The horse thing was really bad. I can't even remember what they were advertising." "It starts out with one boob at the half-time show and in a few years half the population is walking around naked." "Maybe next years Super Bowl can include Dr. Ruth and a discussion on group sex and Madonna humping a football." "We wonder why we are becoming a nation of Garbage. Remember the introduction of computers. 'Garbage in - Garbage out.'" "If you want the opinion of a professional body piercer..." "I think the FCC should more likely investigate nepotism in its ranks" "The girl didn't show us teat" "What are your objectives? Give equal time to the right tit?" "If it is such a family show, then ban alcohol commercials." 09:18AM «
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