Fun videos and gewgaws from assorted other blogs in my reader:
~ Bio-Bak, one of the more insane (and fun) personal sites I’ve seen in many years–it reminds me of Superbad (which I kind of miss)
~ This guy sings “Thriller” in 64 a capella parts… it’s quite a montage
~ And then there’s this guy, who custom built a drum kit to play Guitar Hero 3, then beat the hardest setting. hoo wee!
Category: Observed (Page 9 of 24)
Washington Post: 5 Myths About an Election of Mythic Proportions. “Exit polling suggests that there was no statistically significant increase in voting among [black or young voters],” and other debunking. Worth remembering that Obama’s victory, as noted here previously, is far from the national mandate given to, say, Ronald Reagan.
Related: I watched and enjoyed Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview last night. Barack is an intellectual man who is not afraid of the truth; he and Michelle are balanced, quick to smile, and down-to-earth. (Although there was some bemused discussion in my home as to how extensively the “mom in chief” runs the Obama family, and what that suggests about the president-elect.)
Junglier
Puttiers
Ecotage
Miauled
Plastron
Nuncles
Sordine
Vendeuse
Ectozoa
Cresylic
Kurbashes
Elaterin
Linguica
Entamebae
While America celebrates Barack Obama’s victory–particularly for what it represents–Americans would be wise to remember that his win, while strong, was far from a landslide.
The media in 2008 like to speak of mandates and sea changes, but in fact, Obama’s victory is far less decisive than some other recent elections, and McCain’s showing was not half bad.
Via Wikipedia, I compiled a list of victory margins by electoral votes for all the presidential elections since the electoral college expanded to 538 votes in the 1960s. Obama’s win is mid-pack:
Year Elected Won Lost 1984 Reagan 525 13 1972 Nixon 520 17 1980 Reagan 489 49 1964 Johnson 486 52 1988 George H. W. Bush 426 111 1996 Clinton 379 159 1992 Clinton 370 168 > 2008 Obama 349 163 < 1968 Richard Nixon 301 191 1976 Carter 297 240 2004 George W. Bush 286 251 2000 George W. Bush 271 266
(Note: two states are still being decided; this post will be updated when the final votes are tallied and declared.)
Obama’s victory in terms of the popular vote tells a better story but also comes with a caveat. First, a tip of the cap: his 64,908,616 votes as of this writing are the greatest number of votes ever recorded by a presidential candidate. That is a figure to celebrate.
However, John McCain received more than 57 million votes of his own. Obama’s margin of victory by popular vote is 6.3% (which is to say, if the U.S. had a straight democratic vote instead of an electoral college, he’d have won, 53 to 47 percent).
This is a sound victory. But it still leaves 9 out of every 20 people in the other camp. Four elections in the 538-electorate era have had a greater vote margin between winner and loser. Richard Nixon beat George McGovern by 18 million votes out of 77 million; Obama beat McCain by 7.5 million out of 120 million. Yesterday’s win was solid but not overwhelming.
Still, this is an academic exercise–Obama earned a far stronger win than either of George W. Bush’s campaigns, and his victory forever alters the political landscape in terms of campaigns, backgrounds and style.
As much as anything I am astounded by the emotional reaction Obama supporters, including me, are having to the election result.
Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets, celebrating, as though our nation has won its independence. People are elated! Full of pride, hope and excitement, invigorated in a way this country has not been in years, if not decades.
Today marks a seismic shift in how America views itself, and how the world views America. We can elect a minority candidate to lead our nation. We can back and accept an intellectual who does not hide his intelligence or pander to the ignorant (to which I refer Clinton as well as Bush). We crave pragmatism, we crave leadership, we crave class. We are ready to grow beyond the baby-boomer ideals and standards that have defined us for decades. We are not afraid of change.
The United States is no longer a country defined by narrowmindedness or simplicity. Our president-elect is wordly, clever, and cool. The nation is excited to follow his lead. Remarkable.
Tonight I am, for the first time in a long while, proud to be an American.
Emily Magazine: The kind of crazy you get from too much choice.
The truth [about living in New York City] is that we try to make it hard for ourselves by creating a lot of tasks and rules and very, very specific needs. The arcane evidence fills the shelves at every big Korean deli in Manhattan and every bodega in gentrified Brooklyn: we need almond butter and organic tempeh and unbleached cotton tampons. We might even need specific brands of these things. We need 24-hour access. We need to never be more than two blocks from an ATM. We need taxis and car services that know how to take us anywhere. We need free wifi and bottled unsweetened iced tea and perfectly decent sushi that costs less than $10. We need fresh lemongrass and thai basil and epazote and coconut milk and three different kinds of artisanal ginger beer and cane-juice-sweetened dark chocolate. We need $40 moisturizer from Kiehl’s and perfect $10 bras from Target and Japanese bubble tea and two eggs and cheese on a toasted whole wheat bagel prepared in under a minute.
An absolute truism of Manhattan residents is that we define our existence by our cravings. We sacrifice significant comforts of space and money in exchange for convenience and specificity.
I can write a paragraph just like Emily’s. My family lives in an utterly charming apartment, filled with light and two minutes from the subway, that also happens to consume an extraordinary percentage of our take-home pay and has no closet in the baby’s bedroom. We have several boxes of Mighty Leaf tea (15 packets, $9) alongside the Lipton (48 bags, $4) in our cabinet. We bring our Chinese and Japanese food uptown from the Village because we haven’t found restaurants on the Upper West Side that meet our tastes. I have over the years switched drycleaners no fewer than 11 times. My wife craves nice shoes like Sigerson Morrisons, of which she a pair, and also Sigerson Morrisons from Target, of which she also has a pair. Our stroller retails for nine hundred dollars and barely fits in the trunk of our car. That we even have a car is considered a luxury; that we share and street-park the car is considered cheap.
Yet this lifestyle is by choice, and it’s one we are pleased to have made. We are in Riverside Park nearly every day with our son and our dog. We do have a 24-hour specialty grocer around the corner, and six places with baked goods within a five-minute walk, and we take full advantage. I ride my bicycle to work twice a week alongside the Hudson River. Our home is full of century-old detail that can only be found in an urban dwelling. We see award-winning theater on a whim, shop in fascinating locally owned stores, eat at world-class restaurants and walk home.
In some ways it is a peculiar living, but it is also a spectacular one. We made a conscious decision to stay in Manhattan, at least in the near term. And I, for one, don’t regret it in the least.
Scene: two tall, thin women, one blonde, one brunette. The blonde is carrying lunch.
Brunette: “You go there?”
Blonde: “I like their egg whites. They’re really good.”
“Really? What do you order?”
“I get the egg whites, some brown rice, and a little bit of fat-free cheese.”
“That sounds like it doesn’t taste like anything!”
“Well, you can put, like, ketchup on it.”
Right, even when he’s wrong on the Ai blog.
“I can check, it’s no problem, if you don’t want this I will see.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling extremely guilty. “Please let the chef know it’s my mistake and not yours. I’ll eat the lasagna if I have to, since I guess I ordered it.”
“Oh, you ordered it,” my wife said.
Seth Godin posted a provocative piece (is that redundant? Seth’s goal is to be nothing but provocative) Saturday entited Random travel thoughts. In it he challenges the conventional wisdom about a lot of the headaches of airline travel.
As a fellow business traveler I have seen and contemplated many of Seth’s observations. Pragmatist that I am, I thought I’d expand and rebut a few of his points. On the whole, I agree with his thesis (“we can do better”) but not his overall view.
Why does a banana cost twenty cents at the supermarket and $1.61 at SFO? Are hungry people supposed to subsidize non-hungry travelers?
This is simple economics at work, not airline policy. My $4.06 frappuccino at any other Manhattan Starbucks cost me $5 at the Javits Center last week. A bottle of water that costs 20 cents in bulk and $1.25 at the corner store is $4.50 at Yankee Stadium (this year… next season, at the new park, it’ll be $9). Captive audiences demand premium payments.
Why doesn’t the airport have sleeping benches?
Sleeping benches encourage loitering. Apparently some airports, like the new American terminal at DFW, bring out springy hammock-like cots when people get stuck at the airport overnight.
After seven years, why is random yelling still the way that TSA screeners communicate their superstitious rules to people in line?
Security in general is a joke to all but the dangerous. Why did the security guards at Yankee Stadium make my brother throw away a perfectly good, safe Bluefly shopping bag and put his things in a clear plastic bag instead? Ridiculous. Unless you’re the guy with the gunpowder.
Why does the FAA require the airlines to explain to every passenger how to buckle their seatbelt?
I’m guessing someone sued. I wonder how Seth feels about snarky flight attendants who poke fun at their own requirements, or the Virgin America safety film that assumes you’re yawning and disinterested, and assumes the same vibe.