You heard the yawp! Now get down! Collections of Howard Dean remixes at MTV and on blogs on an Internet near you.
[Later:] Dean mix update! The definitive Dean mix page!
‘The Iowa Yell’
What did Howard Dean actually say in Iowa the other night? An exclusive review of how the Vermont governor’s post-caucus ejaculation was rendered into type:
San Francisco Chronicle analysis: “Yeahhaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
CNN transcipt: “Yeah!”
CNN graphic during Anderson Cooper’s “360” show: “Yeeeaaaggghhh!”
Washington Post post mortem: “Yaaaaaaaaaah!”
The Australian: “Yaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
New York Times recap: “… a throaty howl.”
Boston Globe: “… a yell that appeared part growl, part yodel.” (Extra points to the Globe for having the yell “appear.”)
Wall Street Journal: “… his hoarse voice rising to a scream.”
Baltimore Sun: “… And the final word in the quotation above was a surprising barbaric yawp, even from the emotive Dean – more of an extended “yeeeee-arrrghhhh” than a measly “yeah.” (Hey — the Sun has a Walt Whitman fan on staff!)
Newsday: ” … a guttural yell.”
Infospigot: The Data
At first, I thought Infospigot (the origin of the name: an early-morning rant a decade or so ago to the San Francisco Examiner copy desk) would be about all the things I look up every day (a couple of today’s examples: A. Has Nashville, Tennessee, switched time zones since December 1972? B. Which Red Sox player hit the fly ball that in a 1982 game with the White Sox led to centerfielder Ron LeFlore being charged with a four-base error?) But neither I nor my “site” are focused enough for that. You see the result.
But any moment can be an Information Spigot moment. As to the queries above:
B. Gary Allenson. There’s a story in it. Details later.
A. I don’t know. But I have an interest because someone in the newsroom asked whether Nashville is in the Eastern or Central zone. I said Eastern, going back to a night in December 1972 when I was driving through Nashville with my brothers and two friends, and we all had a very good reason to be preoccupied with the time. But the answer is Central. Have the time-zone boundaries changed there in the interim. Not likely, but possible. The closest I got to an answer was an archive published by a federal government computer scientist; it mentioned changes in other states, but not Tennessee. Along the way, I found out that the time zones are set by act of Congress and that the Department of Transportation actually administers the zones.
Time for bed, PST.
A Year from Today
Without commenting on last night’s caucus results from Iowa — despite all the spin, who knows what they mean, really, beyond John Kerry having a pulse for another week — one notes that our next scheduled inauguration is a year from today.
Molly Kelly
The lead paragraph from the AP obit in Friday’s New York Times:
SYDNEY, Australia, Jan. 15 — Molly Kelly, whose childhood trek across 1,000 miles of the Australian desert to return to her Aboriginal mother inspired the 2002 movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” died on Tuesday at her home in Jigalong in Western Australia, her family said. She was thought to be 87.
The movie is great.
What Bush’s Space Thing Will Cost
“Space thing,” because there’s no telling what it really is right now. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard who publishes the essential newsletter on space launches (Jonathan’s Space Report) raises some restrained but sobering questions about what will happen to NASA’s science mission under the Bush plan:
“… If …space science program funding is redirected to the (however worthy) human exploration program, it could be a major setback to our exploration of the wider universe.”
Mars Again …
To answer my own question (“who said anything about Mars”): Bush did. I did not see it in the New York Times excerpts of his speech. But I checked the White House transcript and watched video from the NASA site, and the president definitely said … “Mars.”
Who Said Anything About Mars?
Interesting that all the speculation about Bush’s space announcement today focused on launching a mission to Mars. But the president never said anything about Mars: He talked about some initiatives NASA already has under way (finishing the space station, retiring the shuttle), tweaked an existing initiative (building a new space plane, as NASA plans, but one with the ability to leave Earth orbit), and announced a new scheme: to go back to the moon. After that, he said something about preparing “for new journeys to worlds beyond our own,” but nothing about how any of this will be paid for after a second Bush term, especially given the massive deficit he’s creating.
One is tempted to recall the first loud call to boldly go to the Red Planet, from Spiro Agnew in 1969. NASA had lots of people, including Wernher von Braun, all ready to dive into a Mars program as soon as the Apollo missions to the moon proved successful. As I recall it — caveat there — Agnew made a speech soon after the Apollo 11 launch talking about how we’d go to Mars next. His remarks inspired Chicago Sun-Times cartoonist Bill Mauldin to sketch the vice president wearing a bubble helmet, soaring into the air and saying with a wave, “See you on Mars!”
Nixon and his people dismissed Agnew and his support for the idea as if he were the village idiot. Nixon had decided the to curtail the space program, and that was that. Personally, I think Agnew was too mean to be the village idiot. Just like Bush. But maybe a more solid connection between the two initiatives is politics. The political realities of 1969 — dominated by the Vietnam War — didn’t support a big new space program. And it’s doubtful that the political realities of today — dominated by a much less defined but expensive military effort and the likely reality that future administrations will have very little discretion to commit tens or hundreds of billions to something like Mars — will support one either.
Night Cycling
The best thing:
–The unexpected sights. Tonight: the view of Sirius appearing just above a ridge top as I rode up Claremont; the mist lapping over the saddle at the top of Claremont Canyon as I finished the slow, steep climb; the fog blanketing the valleys to the east.
Breaking the poetic mood:
–The uncertainty whether cars approaching from behind on the dark hills roads really see you.
–The discovery as I started to descend Grizzly Peak toward home that the nice, bright white lines on the right side of the road were nearly invisible, obscured by leaves and mud and other storm litter. Made the descent a little tricky.
Are We Stupid, Or …
… Really, really stupid?
Something else from that Pew Research Center study on where people get campaign news: The utter cluelessness of most survey respondents on basic factual questions about candidates and issues. The survey found:
“…Most Americans are not familiar with the ins and outs of the campaign” and “public awareness of facts about the candidates’ backgrounds also is relatively low.”
“Relatively low” is a charitable description. The survey asked two questions about Democriatic candidates’ backgrounds: Which one is a former general? Which one used to be House majority leader? The survey reports that 31 percent of respondents knew the answer to the first question (clue: not Tippecanoe, or Ulysses S. Grant, neither), and 26 percent answered question two correctly (a guy from Missouri, but not Harry Truman).
On the other hand, the survey found that older people and those who say they regularly get news from the Net, from NPR, or newsmagazines seem to be more on the ball. A full third of that group answered both questions correctly.
New spin on the 2000 election: We elected a true man of the people. Pass the pretzels.