Exit Poetry (Updated)

Jon Sanders at the John Locke Foundation is a practitioner of the minimalist poetry commemorating the departure of political figures, dubbed the "bye-ku". He unleashed it mercilessly on my [former] candidate yesterday:

Fred Thompson's campaign,

Like the Law & Order theme,

Simply went "Clunk, clunk."

Fellow Locker Room denizen Paul Chesser's reply was even worse:

Sunken, hollow eyes
Vacant much like his campaign
Will he blame Jeri?

I expressed my dilemma this morning:

Since Bill Buckley said

"Vote rightwardmost viable"

and Fred's not it -- whom?

To which Paul agreed:

Mitt flips; McCain, ugh;
Big tax Huck; Rudy pro-choice
None of the above

The root of the problem seems to me:

"Conservatism",

for voters, has Gaussian

popularity

UPDATE: The Boston Phoenix (HT: Real Clear Politics) raised an interesting historical point: This may not be over yet. My link from the Locker Room:

Brokered convention

May resurrect the morbid

Fred-shade of Harding!

And as I'm reading A Team of Rivals, I might add that Lincoln was nominated under similar circumstances in 1860.

Music to Fix Washers By

I'm on the floor repairing the washing machine and find my mood is captured pretty well by Karl Orff.

The MIDI sequence has a certain metallic percussion that reminds me of sheet metal.

UPDATE: Problem found -- change music to Handel.

UPDATE: Wow. The "large object filter" in front of the drain pump (three stores to find the tool) had a mass like a racquetball in it, something like an owl pellet with unknown objects inside. Further examination yielded a wire nut (my fault), an unidentified part of an Ertl toy, a 4-inch LEGO, and at the center of it all, a worn-out Scotchbrite pad ... all richly coated with blue-gray lint.

Well, that helped. No wonder it wouldn't drain.

The Mandarin Candidate

Election officials in districts with a high Chinese population are debating how to render candidates' names into Mandarin and Cantonese characters. The problem is that while Arab and Israeli names can be transliterated directly, to "spell" a Western name in Chinese requires someone to pick characters for words that sound like the Western syllables.

This page is an example of how it works. Barack Obama's name ends with the Mandarin word for "horse" -- ma. Easy, see?

But the characters retain their own meaning, too, which can result in the Asian equivalent of punning names in English -- like the rancher Bob Warr and the family counselor Marion Haste (HT: Car Talk).

According to this story, Mitt Romney may be known as "Sticky Rice", while Fred! becomes "Virtue Soup".

I like that. Thompson could have been like the local candidate whose name was rendered "Imbecile". Make mine "Virtue Soup", please.

Sounds like Baghdad

Headline this morning: Bush tours flattened town

They did? Wow.

The newspaper style books do that kind of thing. They meant "[President] Bush tours [the tornado-] flattened town" but it comes across like some sort of Administration-sponsored vandalism

More On The Radio

I was listening to public radio somewhere on the Nebraska-Colorado state line last month -- I think it was just past Peetz -- and heard two absolutely stunning sentences. The announcers on "All Things Considered" need to remember the listener can't see the punctuation, and if they're not going to vocalize the periods and commas like Victor Borge, they have to make it clear some other way.

At the station break, we heard:

"Next, NASA weighs the Theory of Relativity and your letters."

No kidding? Oh, on Thursday they read their email.

And so introducing one of the letters (one which NASA, incidentally, neglected to weigh), they referred to an earlier story

"... our story about a man suffering from Alzheimer's and his wife ..."

If anything, she was probably suffering from him.

Honestly, guys.

Time to change stations

This morning I heard a few minutes of an unknown syndicated talk program (this was very early this morning). Apparently the guest was a supposed clairvoyant of some sort, and the caller was a woman who claimed she had had all kinds of dreams about herself come true.

The medium interrupted and actually said, "Well, some people say you can't be psychic about yourself, but I think that's just an old wives' tale."

Actually, ma'am, the "tale" goes much further than that.

Spring is icumen in

Wow, I love spring, when everything turns green -- the grass, the trees, the sidewalk, the car, the dog ...

If there is a downside to living in North Carolina, or at least this part of it, I think this would have to be it. We've got corruption and occasional flakiness in state government, but we had that in Louisiana and California. Hot and humid summers, Louisiana again, and Florida. High taxes, California again. But pollen, oh, we got pollen.

The first year I worked in Johnston County, the pollen nearly killed me. I think my co-workers knew me as the new engineer who was slowly choking to death; "Tuberculosis?" they may have thought. It hasn't been as bad since then, and I thought maybe it was just becoming acclimated.

Nope. I saw the first dusting about a week ago, then here it comes. Two of the boys went to Cary for a movie Friday night. By Saturday morning, the new pollen on the hood of the Jeep was so thick, it rolled off in blowing drifts as I drove to the store. Washing the car seems a pointless exercise; by the next day, it looks like a crime scene after the investigators finish dusting for prints (hmm, there are clearly nine people involved with this vehicle). There are piles of pollen in the gutters. The dog's nose is greenish-yellow; how does a hound survive in this?

The news reports that this is the heaviest pollen count in about eight years. Yep, that sounds about right. But it reminds me of my granny's house in Sumter -- short grass, hard dirt, piles of oak catkins, and a slight greenish cast to everything. At least the azaleas are pretty.

===
Allusion note: A very old English round

Geeks at Play

Son John is working on trigonometry with wife Melanie this morning. I had to share the Beaver cheer with them:

I'm a Beaver,

You're a Beaver,

We are Beavers all

And when we get together,

we do the Beaver call!

E to the U du dx

E to the X dx

Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,

3.14159

Integral radical mu dv

Slipstick, sliderule, MIT!

Go Tech!

Not that I have any claim to it, I just appreciate the poetry of it.

(The title of the post is borrowed from a website where I read it some time ago)

The Utility's Lament

While I was working with the power company, I found that we all watched the weather -- not just to see if a hurricane or a winter storm was going to disrupt our weekend plans, but longer-term, if the mild weather was going to cut into the expected revenues from air conditioning and heaters. It's been so unseasonably warm this winter, I sketched out this doggerel ... and now that we have a prediction of winter precipitation of the wrong kind today, I thought I'd better go ahead and post before it's overtaken by events ...

=====

Oh, the weather outside's displeasing
'Cause it's hardly got to freezing
And we've got to make the meters go --
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

When the weatherman says there's ice,
Oh, we hate going out in the storm
But a little snow would be nice
People stay home and stay warm!

But our profit will be declining
If the sun continues shining
And the PSC persists with "No" --
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

This, however, may be a bit much

The merchandise section of Old Lutheran is ... how to say it ... a phenomenon of its own.

For example, I am not ready for socks with the Luther rose and the motto, "Here I Stand", even in navy, or the "Clergy Girl" doll with collar. Nor the Martin Luther bobblehead doll, bundled with the Luther DVD.

Ach du lieber.

(HT: Purgatorio)

A little diversion

Ready for a bit of humor? See the new link on the right sidebar. Let me recommend The Sacred Sandwich with a Pepsi (be sure to slurp up the top couple of inches as soon as they hit the ice).

"A positive result of an unhappy memory"

A slightly odd perspective on a phenomenon seen from time to time. I don't know if RWE is a private-sector business or a government agency. Item appeared in "This Week in Germany", November 10, 2006, a publication of the German Information Center.

German Parents Garner Gifts from Blackout Baby Boom

While this weekend's power outage affected more people, other recent blackouts in Germany have had bigger consequences for energy customers. When 82 high-voltage towers collapsed under the weight of snow in Münsterland last November, 250,000 people had to live for days without heat or power during the winter storm.

Fertility agent? Fallen towers in the Münsterland region, Photo, dpa

Nine months later, maternity wards at local hospitals noticed a spike in the number of babies born. A coincidence? Gudrun Fahling of the civil registry in Steinfurt thinks not. "We have about 50 births a month," she told the N-TV in August. "This month, it will probably be 65. It's probably the power outage."

Hospital spokesperson Stephan Schonhoven, on the other hand, is skeptical. "I am very doubtful that the icy cold and lack of food really put anyone in the mood."

The more romantically inclined in Münsterland would prefer to imagine that the power outage did lead to at least a few candlelight conceptions. Not the least of these is RWE, the utility that owned the towers. The energy concern is now giving all the parents who conceived during the outage a gift of 300 euros ($385).

"People had a hard time," said RWE spokesperson Klaus Schultebraucks. "If more children are being born there now, then that is certainly a positive result of an unhappy memory."