That’s 349 for Obama (the funky question mark)….

Points to the media for impressive graphics showing an impressive win at the top of the ticket, and some close races downticket. The above table is from the New York TImes, and the headline/blurb that I stuck on top of it is from the Washington Post, and was up early this morning. Our country is facing economic nastiness, to say the least. The Pres is our leader, yes, but then there’s Congress. And there’s only so much $$ in the budget (which has also shrunk with the lastest “turmoil”), and it can only go so far.

I couldn’t resist a couple of calculations…. States with 10% difference between the total vote counts for the two candidates controlled 383 electoral votes, meaning most state contests were not that close. They went either for one candidate or the other—STATEwide; locally is another story. Also, the states Obama won had an average of 12.1 electoral votes, while the ones McCain won had an average of only 7.5 votes, and only four of his had 10 or more votes. Note that these states had total-vote differences of less than 5%: Ohio, Florida, Montana, Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri; they controlled 87 electoral votes.

For more wonderful spatial graphics, visit maps and tables on the webpages of CNN, New York Times, or the Washington Post.

Glyph from stone set in wall of closed patio next to the tower, Palenque, Chiapas.

I love it when archaeologists get creative in inserting the past into the present.

David Stuart, a well-known Maya epigrapher, has composed “Obama” in glyphs (it’s “o-ba-ma-a”*), and you can buy t-shirts, cloth bags, or ball caps imprinted with it….

* Oh, you’re asking about the duplicate “a”? That’s explained here. Those crazy Mayas!

Sometimes what’s ordinary in your home landscape sounds rather odd to those passing through*…. I’m not singling out West Virginia here; after all, my home state has both a Hell (with a Baptist church I once watched a wedding party emerge from) and a Paradise (I once ate a fish sandwich there)….

* A quick google-check shows I’m not the only person to note the Big Ugly name…. Here’s a map of one stretch of the river used in Lenore McComas Coberly’s novel, Sarah’s Girls: A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek (2007)….

Sorry, I have no Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf pictures….

Pomfret went to a combination tantalus and electric refrigerator and procured necessities. Fox, glancing around, saw a Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf perched on a cabinet in a corner, and a large deep peach bloom on a table against the wall.

Tecumseh Fox is a lesser-known detective created by Rex Stout, and portrayed in three novels published in 1939–41. This is from the final volume, The Broken Vase. I know it’s a minor concern, but what the heck’s a tantalus?

Answer: lockable stand for liquor decanters, in which they remain visible (same root as tantalize).

And: Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf. This refers to a particular shade of deep oxblood red, produced in Chinese ceramic glazes by additions of copper oxide. The term melds the Chinese and French terms.

Later, Fox is told that this precious vessel is “a Hsuan Te.” This apparently means that it dates to the Ming dynasty, ca. 1426–1435. BTW, the “peach bloom” is another contemporaneous decoration style (I gather).

Bow down to the power of the internet…and consider whether your domicile needs a tantalus….

After our late morning shopping expedition (miscellaneous hardware supplies), we took the long way back from Curtis, thereby circumnavigating* the lake. We stopped to photograph a field of near-harvest-ready sunflowers, and a pair of Sandhill cranes rose up from the far side of the field and flew over the sunflowers and our heads, vocalizing all the way! Exciting! [But mediocre photos.]

Our last photo stop was at the boat ramp/public access on a lovely curve of the Manistique River, where I greatly enjoyed capturing vegetative reflections in the relatively quiet river-surface.

Diary note: cleaned ashes out of wood stove (five trays) and outhouse bucket is now reloaded.

Late afternoon addendum: RIP Aunt NTM.

* Circumnavigate in the dictionary refers to travel aboard (a sailing) ship. Circumambulate means to circle something on foot. I don’t know of a word for traveling around something in a land vehicle.

Bot Garden conservatory, some years ago.

Although Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) is a slim volume (as the phrase goes), I have not yet finished it. Already, I have encountered some lovely imagery.

I am particularly taken, at this moment, with the phrase “self-dramatizing rhetoric” (p. 58). McEwan uses it to describe the tenor of activist meetings in Britain in the late 1950s, pairing it with “mournful rectitude” to describe the span of interaction modes. Still, I’m taken with the first characterization, and can say that I find distasteful the overwhelming trend toward self-dramatizing rhetoric that pervade many discussions regarding issues surrounding our upcoming presidential election.

An AIG ad that’s less than two weeks old….

Eee-yah.

I have little confidence in fiscal decision-making at the top of our elected national management team*. If I ran my household finances the way the gov’t has run our national checkbook lately, well, I’m afraid I’d be living under a bridge and eating at a soup kitchen….

* And Barton Gellman’s new book reveals The Angler to be even more terrifying than we had previously thought (shot a friend in the face—we knew that; lied to the Pres and worked against him behind his back—like I say, terrifying…).

Yeah, this is a regular 4-way corner, but there is a roundabout not far away.

Aha. Traffic circles have stop lights controlling entering traffic. Roundabouts do not.**

I have heard multiple times that both save petrol and are safer; however, I was sure annoyed to discover the fancy ones in the neighborhood above are too narrow for delivery trucks and other long vehicles to negotiate without bumping over the curb and crushing the herbage.

* Word invented for this headline….

** Clarification from Time mag, discussing the trend toward adding roundabouts to our roadways.

This is Carol’s picture from several weeks back; The Botanist reports eating perhaps this very melon earlier this week….

You may have heard that the term “maverick” originated with the practice of a Texas rancher named Samuel Maverick, who wouldn’t brand his cattle, saying that it hurt them too much. This meant he exercised dibs on any unbranded cattle in his area. So, now we use maverick for unbranded range cattle, and for someone who’s independent-minded and refuses to conform to group mores.

What you may not have heard is that his grandson, Maury Maverick, originated the term “gobbledygook” to refer to nonsense language or deliberately obscure wording.

I heard about Maury from The Botanist, who heard Maury speak in the late 1930s, when he was a US House member from Texas; I got the etymological detail from, where else, Wikipedia….

Let’s start with new vocabulary: zanco. That’s Spanish for stilt. Guess why I learned that today? Yes, another Hispanic master craftsman did his magic to help return our house to complete housedom.

I understand that a new kind of sheet-rocker-stilts use technology developed for people with missing feet and legs, those springy, curved appendages. Seems to me they’d be much easier on the knees and hips.

Other vocabulary…that piece of equipment that’s lying on the bucket? It’s a violin in English and banjo in Spanish. It has a spool of tape that runs through a bath of the sheet-rock mud (formally: joint or drywall compound), much like a tape dispenser with a pistol grip. I understand there’s a similar instrument with a longer handle so that the business end is farther away from the workman (for really high ceilings, I assume), and that’s called a bazooka (in both Spanish and English).

If you feel like some serious reading, let me point you toward an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic analyzing the performances* of the candidates in the primary debates.

John McCain is not a good debater, not even by comparison with George W. Bush. Having been in Washington for decades, he knows many issues in detail. Having been in Washington for decades, he often overexplains those details, as Bob Dole did against Bill Clinton in 1996. The exception is the whole field of economics, where through most of the Republican debates, he skated by with allusions to the advisers he would consult.

Worse, he will look and sound old and weak next to Obama. …

McCain also runs the risk of being the first Republican since Dole to go into the debates trailing in the national polls. This would allow Obama to do what George W. Bush did four years ago: nurse a lead and simply try to avoid mistakes. He’s had more practice with debates than McCain, and more recently.

In these circumstances, McCain’s tactics against Obama are obvious. He will ask for as many debates as he can, starting with informal town halls before either he or Obama is officially nominated. The informal setting shows him off to his best advantage, with the affable bantering that has long made him a favorite with the press. Whoever is behind wants more debates.

There’s lots more—fascinating—and on many other candidates. In not too long, we shall see if Fallows got it right.

* Give me points for not making any reference to the potential for stilted delivery here.