First snowfall…
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Late afternoon, we saw a small flurry of big wet flakes. The Prius’s first snow!
Musings
Flooding? Drought?
Saturday, 12 January 2008
Hey, this is Florida. Well, the Maumee in flood in Florida. Confused? This is Florida, OHIO! From Thursday, when we took the back way from Lima (OHIO, again, and pronounced like lima bean not Lima Peru) to Jackson (Michigan).
Geographic context: simultaneous flooding in east central Midwest and drought in east central South (approximately).
One-foot tango…
Friday, 11 January 2008
A Blaschka glass flower from the Harvard collection….
A busy day of sorting through a mild bureaucracy brought on a crop of stress that needed treatment. As an antidote, we went to A2 to dine with friends.
Contraband?
Thursday, 10 January 2008
We saw at least five semis pulled over by cops on our way north on I-75 (spanning Tennessee to Ohio—not clustered), and I wondered if there were reports of contraband.
Today’s vocabulary: contraband
Mac’s dictionary says origin late 16th century: from Spanish contrabanda, from Italian contrabando, from contra- ‘against’ + bando ‘proclamation, ban.’
Patchiness
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
I don’t understand why people are voting for Congeniality over Policy and Progress. Let’s hope the Presidency has not become a Personality Contest.
Committed
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
This year’s tree’s last night all gussied up….
Commit. That’s an interesting word. It can be that feeling dedication angle (adjective), or range across perpetuate, pledge and entrust/consign (as a verb).
Tonight I stayed up late to see what came down in New Hampshire, and got to thinking about committed and its cousins overcommitted and uncommitted.
But it’s too late for me to compose more than this….
Citizenship missions?
Monday, 7 January 2008
From the Chihuly exhibit at the ATL Bot Garden several years ago…glass, fragile, get it?
I have to agree with George McGovern (here, in the Washington Post) that Bush and Cheney (say Chee-nee not Chay-nee) have repeatedly lied to the American people. Whom they claim to protect. Whose best interests they say they have at heart.
From what I’ve read, it sure sounds like Bush and his staff “have transgressed national and international law” (is going beyond the bounds of the same as broken? seems like it; but maybe not to lawyers…).
Sure sounds impeachable. And more….
So why is most of the national media ignoring all this in a furor about elections in several states (not Wyoming, did you notice that?) that won’t turn out enough delegates to make any diffence at the conventions? Yes, momentum is a real thing, but the media portrays such a biased picture of these votes….
Have we, the American people, so lost track of what we expect of our elected officials (stewardship of the public good while maintaining the public trust) that we permit Bush to stay in the White House without a formal finger raised against him, and evaluate the next set of candidates for the office of President based not on their policies (mostly) and quality of their advisors and the people they make their immediate subordinates?
Today’s vocabulary: pluvious
(adjective) characterized by heavy rainfall; rainy
Scrivener! Hallelujah!
Sunday, 6 January 2008
The cold’s slacked off. I swear I took this before I saw RMJ’s gorgeous pictures….
Today the gods and saints and dustmotes smiled upon me and, some lyrical writing by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes pointed me to the fine text-generation program Scrivener. [Download it here for a 30-day free trial. Sorry you poor PC people, this is a Mac-only program….]
For years I’ve sought to escape the tyranny of Word, just like Heffernan. JCB got me to try Pages, but two things sent me back to The Evil Microsoft Product:
- 1) I love being able to type in something simple like “sp” and have the autocorrect function do the heavy lifting of making those two simple letters into a Big Word I type perhaps too often: “sociopolitical” (and a long list of other examples—“nv” becomes Nochixtlán Valley complete with accent, and “bofm” becomes Basin of Mexico—it’s particularly useful for place names!), and
- 2) Endnote. I use this program to keep track of references and store all my notes; it easily links to PDFs, too. From special entries you make in the [Word] text, it makes a bibliography that needs highly irritating but relatively minor editing (it is annoying, but still better than other software I’ve tried) to standardize into the proper format.
Then JCB figured out some way to make Pages do the autocorrect thing and I had to rethink (again) my Endnote addiction. But I still found myself in its grip.
Now in one simple sunny Sunday I’m a Scrivener convert. It’s superior for generating text while keeping assorted supporting materials in my visual field—if I want them! After the text is generated (late this spring, I hope; keep your fingers crossed!) I anticipate returning to Word to flex Endnote’s power, and then using Word or using Pages for the final layout, but I think Scrivener helps significantly with generating the kind of document I’m working on. I love Scrivener’s interactive outline & superoutline functions, which the program calls Outliner and Corkboard. In short, the program effectively uses the power of Cocoa to display multiple editable views simultaneously.
For now, I’m going to use Scrivener on this chapter that’s been confounding me, inserting Endnote-renderable asides when necessary, and utilizing the creative support of my New Friend to avoid the straight jacket effects of the other W.
BTW…
…wasn’t that a supremely special moment last night when all the Presidential candidates were on the stage together at Saint Anselm College between the two debates, mixing and chatting (picture or NYT story); I even saw a few hugs!
Look! Look!
Saturday, 5 January 2008
One hunter’s trick is to get above the line of sight of ground critters. So, crane your neck and see what you find in the air. This winter-abandoned nest is about 5 meters up.
I-oh-way
Friday, 4 January 2008
It seems that the Obama people correctly analyzed the situation: they sought people who would:
- A) show up to caucus, and
- B) stand firm for their guy.
So, according to data published by the NYTimes (county-by-county outcome here, and entrance poll profiles here), Obama’s team turned out their backers, and those backers weren’t swayed by others. Ergo, Obama came out of the caucus system with the top score statewide.
Sr. GBH the other day…by JCB.
Seems like too many other candidates have not exploited the whole system: gotta stuff those caucus rooms with your people. Doesn’t matter so much how total people many across Iowa are for you, but how many show up for the caucus and are for you.
The Huckabee situation seems like it wasn’t his organization that turned out people so much, but people who held beliefs that motivated them to turn out. Plus so many other Republican candidates didn’t have many highly motivated backers (think McCain, Giuliani). The profile of Romney backers is informative: They supported him “with reservations” and they felt it important that they thought he’d win nationally. That’s a version of lukewarm and situational. It’s not so much about him, but about the situation. Such folks don’t feel as compelled to turn out.
What all that wonderful NYTimes data don’t show is what candidate were people willing to move to, if they couldn’t stay with their original? And its flip side: who was so entrenched they could move people to their candidate? Pundits are saying that on the Democratic side, fewer caucus-goers were willing to move to Clinton as a second choice, so that Obama and Edwards overwhelmingly benefitted in that situation….
My analysis (not meaning to compete with Russert or Brooks): those candidates whose voters were overwhelmingly of one gender or another are not likely to be viable nationally. This means Obama, Edwards, Romney, and McCain have the most “legs.” Those who are overweighted in one gender: Clinton (more women), Thompson (more men; yes!), Paul (more men).
Back to the first point, however: what it comes down to is whether your backers turn out heavily—since voting is not compulsive in the USA, and so few eligible voters do that ever-so-important civic duty. Even in presidential elections….