It’s not as if, in this age, anyone was left by Wednesday morning not knowing who had won the election, so it was really just a pissing contest between the country’s newspapers to see who could use the largest point size. I think the Minneapolis StarTribune won.
The leaves in my neighborhood have been surprisingly tenacious this year, some not even turning until last week, much less falling off the trees, but the combination of wind and rain over the last 24 hours has finally begun to win the battle. The backyard is a big wet mess of nasty right now. Maybe it’ll snow before it dries up and I can just pretend the leaves don’t exist, instead of having to rake them. (Oh, who am I kidding… I just need to find a way to ensure that I’m not the one doing the raking.)
Update, the next morning: It’s snowing.
I talked on election night about how the electoral college is skewed* towards the less populous states, and I’ve also been talking about how the red state/blue state map doesn’t accurately reflect the will of the people, both because of the winner-takes-all nature of the state-by-state distribution of the electoral votes, and also because most of the population of the country lives in concentrated areas.
Well there’s a great site that takes this a step further and actually proves it with some fancy-pants technology that can distort the map so that area corresponds to population. Here, then, is the site’s ultimate modified red-and-blue map, giving a better sense of just how “blue” or “red” or “purple” the country really is, overall…
*You may notice discrepancies between my numbers and the New York Times. I certainly defer to the “newspaper of record” on this. They are using the number of eligible voters in each state; I was using the total state population. Different numbers, and not in a trivial way, but the point, and the relative state-to-state variations, remain the same.
I don’t know how widespread this is, whether it has anything to do with the election or is just a continuation of the downward trend we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, or whether it’s only just not getting much attention because of the election, but uh…
I saw gas for $1.999 today.
It was at the Moto Mart on Hiawatha in Minneapolis, for what it’s worth. I tried to take a picture of it with my iPhone but… well… it was dark… and raining… and I was driving. Needless to say it didn’t turn out the greatest. But since I went to the trouble of taking the picture, I’ll post it anyway.
I’m pretty sure the smudge in the upper left is the Moto Mart price sign.
It’s easy to make too much of the coincidence here, but it’s still pretty cool, I think, especially since I was just mentioning RFK earlier today.
Although these days we avoid the antiquated (but, at the time, courteous) term “Negro,” Bobby Kennedy couldn’t have been more spot-on in this quote from May 1968 about what America witnessed — no, made happen — last night:
A Negro could be president in 40 years. There’s no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.