Saturday, November 13, 2004

Dichotomies

To revive an old line, there are two kinds of people - those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

Well, you can't argue with it for sure, but it's not too useful either. But some dichotomies are useful - it just wouldn't be right if there weren't two kinds.

Glenn Reynolds links to this, which divides the world into the kind of people who might have written or swallowed this crap from Jane Smiley and the rest of us. She has concluded that there are people who think like her, and the "unteachably ignorant" who voted for George W. Bush.

C. P. Snow had his own theory 45 years ago with his "The Two Cultures". See it reviewed by the incomparable Orrin Judd here.

For my money the best entry is "A Conflict of Visions:Ideological Origins of Political Struggles" by Thomas Sowell. His "constrained" vs. "unconstrained" visions correspond fairly well with our conservative/liberal divide today.

Alas, some of us have more time to blog today, and I don't. See ya!

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

The deep end

By now you've probably heard about how hard some Dems have taken Kerry's loss. Like this one, who decided to take his life with a shotgun at the WTC site.

I've decided to take up a collection for his family. Please send more shotgun shells to....

No, that's way beyond the pale. In defense I'll merely note that I have read too many lefty blogs lately, and the rhetorical style just kinda crept in. Consider me self-flagellated.

But really now people, this was a Presidential election. Any suicides should have been confined to the likes of Bin Laden, Zarkawi et al for knowing that the best they can hope for for the next four years is living in holes on the run.

Would I have been happy if Bush lost? Certainly not. I know that a lot of my countrymen are under- or misinformed by the MSM, but to find that a majority were so would have been disheartening at best.

Am I thrilled with Bush? Compared to "JFK", yes. But I'd like better. And that has nothing to do with his extemporaneous language skills or alleged resemblance to lower primates.

Maybe we'll get better this time, with some of the riffraff like Daschle out of the Senate. If these hardcore lefties really believe "worse is better", then let's see them go along with the Republican agenda, let some judges be seated, et al.

Given some bigger margins in both houses, maybe we'll see a more fiscally responsible Bush come forward. I sure hope so.

But if he doesn't, well...we survived Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: It appears that something else inspired the suicide reported by CNN and cited above. What made CNN conclude that the suicide was related to the election?

Nasty hit

Sunday is Football Day, doggone it. And this past Sunday I saw one of the nastiest hits ever, and I never saw the victim twitch a muscle afterward. Yeah, you expect that from football, but at the time I was watching figure skating.

The girl was up in the air for some sort of lift and her partner had both of her hands. So when she fell from about shoulder height she hit more or less head first.

As it turns out she's recovering and is planning to come back very soon.

There was another potentially nasty fall too, but the girl managed to flip over in the air and land on her skates in a position only a chiropractor could love. But they kept going.

Monday, November 08, 2004

Huge dancesport event in Columbus next week

If you want to see ballroom dancing as done by the best pros anywhere, you need to go to the 2004 Ohio Star Ball Championships in Columbus, Ohio.

You'll see all ages and skill levels and about any reasonably common dance you can think of climaxing on Friday and Saturday nights. If you're not a dance junkie you'll miss a lot, and if you use constructions like "the dance" I suppose you'll sniff a lot, but I enjoyed watching it even before I knew what was going on.

And things go wrong once in a while. You have to wonder how a woman could catch her heel on a skirt that barely covers her bum, but I've seen it happen - she almost tore it off getting loose, and for the rest of the event she dropped her hand down to pull it back up whenever she could while staying in synch with a professional routine.

Anyway, it's something different, it's big, and it's right out there in God's own RED STATES...

Mystery

I keep asking Kerry voters what they thought he would have done in Iraq. It seems that none of them have a clue.

Fair enough - I didn't either. But then I didn't vote for him.

Slow

It's been slow around here lately and that'll probably continue for a while. This week is a frenzy while I prepare for a long road trip, and I'll be out of town all next week. Sheesh, I barely even got in any gloating about the election.