Eric The Blue

American stories: Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," subtitled "A Story of Wall Street," was first published in two installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, the issues for November and December of 1853. It follows then by two years Moby Dick, and by a few more Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), concerning life on the islands of the South Seas, including among cannibals, popular travelogues now known mainly to solvers of crossword puzzles, where their utility as answers is boosted by a high vowel-to-consonant ratio.

"A story of Wall Street": definitely not an exotic adventure on a whaler or Polynesian isle. The narrator is a real estate lawyer, and the titular character a copyist hired, in these days before typewriters, to churn out handwritten legal instruments, the kinds of things that even back then were signed at real estate closings. The narrator introduces himself:

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never address a jury, or in any way draw down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man.

There soon follows a description of his "snug retreat," with an emphasis on the view from his office windows, which at one end afford a prospect of nothing but the blackened brick wall of the adjoining building. The gap between the buildings is so narrow that the picturesque effect is made visible at all only by a thin shaft of sunlight filtering into the crevice from the unseen sky above. The office is partitioned by swinging doors, the narrator occupying one side and his copyists the other, but, when Bartleby is hired, the new copyist is placed on the narrator's side, behind a screen, so that he can be quickly summoned—he's able to hear, though not see, his employer, the narrator, from his cell within a cell. Before the events of the story begin to unwind, with the narration of Bartleby's strange ways, the narrator describes the peculiarly offset eccentricities of his three more longstanding employees. If one were to speak of the "total effect" made by the story's opening, it might be of a dungeon inhabited by madmen, though the genial narrator seems quite unaware of the picture he's painted. 

Enter Bartleby, who in his job interview strikes the narrator as "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn." What everyone who's read the story will remember is, I would prefer not to. This is Bartleby's response to every request that he perform the miscellaneous duties of his position. Part of my affinity for the story arises, I'm afraid, from familiarity with the work Bartleby declines to perform. It's very detail-oriented and frequently involves comparing—that is, one person reading aloud one document while another follows along in the freshly minted one to make sure that "23 rods" hasn't become "32 rods" or "thence northeast" changed to "thence northwest," errors that would introduce a defect into the chain of title. Bartleby's accruing refusals do not seem to me as outlandish as they're meant to be. Once, where I worked for more than 25 years, a new employee being trained on her first day was told to take a break at around 10 o'clock. She asked whether what she'd been shown so far was a fair representation of the work she'd do, and, upon being told it was, she left for coffee and never came back. She'd prefer not to. 

If you think Bartleby's behavior is outlandish, the problem is to account for it, and the theories are about as numerous as the commentators. In one, the story is an allegory of Melville's career: scriveners are writers, of a kind, and the idea is that Melville would prefer not to supply the public with the kind of popular tales with which he'd achieved an initial success. This is at least in line with the biographical record. In the decade beginning with the publication of Moby Dick, Melville earned from his books an average of $228 per year. According to the PBS "American Experience" documentary about him, Melville's life after Moby Dick was "a battle against obscurity and financial ruin." He eventually retired from professional authorship to take a job as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. When he died, age 72, in 1891, the manuscript of Billy Budd, his second greatest work, was discovered among his papers, but remained unpublished for 33 more years. 

A related interpretation is unapologetically Marxist, or maybe Marxian, since I would prefer not to is muted compared to Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. In this view, it's pointed out that every request Bartleby declines relates to the advancement of the business enterprise. Suppose, asks Lionel Trilling in the last paragraph of his essay on the story, the narrator had one day told Bartleby that he felt faint and would like a glass of water after being helped to the couch. Would Bartleby have then replied I would prefer not to? We don't know. He's never asked to do anything like that.

It seems to me, however, that in the world according to Marx there would be no story at all. There would be no accruing episodes of inexplicable refusal and mounting exasperation on the part of the narrator/boss, because Bartleby would simply be cashiered after his first, or possibly his second or third, passive breach of duty. So there is, in addition to the mystery surrounding Bartleby, another concerning the narrator's tolerance and increasing accommodation of his blandly insubordinate employee. The narrator can't explain Bartleby but he takes a crack at explaining himself:

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity, then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps be driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.

There is in this a moral imagination and psychological subtlety that one would have thought was beyond the very safe real estate lawyer. What weighs more, Bartleby's survival or his own "delicious self-approval"? This passage occurs relatively early in the development of Bartleby's intransigence. As events unwind, Bartleby's behavior is a constant, but the narrator ratchets up his accommodations to such a point that, near the end, instead of firing Bartleby, he rents new office space, leaving Bartleby behind, and in this way finally being relieved of him. He executes this plan, though he is plainly vexed by the thought that he is abandoning Bartleby, a pang he treats by the gift of money. The upshot is that the new tenant of his old office space sends a complaint about a vagrant. A real estate lawyer would realize it wasn't his problem, but the narrator returns to his old haunts, verifies that Bartleby is indeed the source of the complaint, offers him more money, even invites him into his own house, but . . . I would prefer not to. Bartleby in the end is incarcerated at the Tombs, where the narrator visits him and, at last, is the first to discover that he's died. The story ends with a cri de coeur from the lips of the real estate lawyer: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah! humanity!"

I do not know what to make of it, but, to return again to the concept of "total effect," one reaches for words like desolating and bleak. It seems clear that "a tale of Wall Street" is meant ironically. The setting is Wall Street but the condition is general. The blackened brick wall less than ten feet from the narrator's office windows might seem like the opposite of the vistas of Moby Dick, but remember that in that novel, when Ishmael first goes aboard the Pequod for a job interview, he's asked why he wants to go whaling. He replies that he’d like to see the world. Captain Peleg answers that, in that case, he should "take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there." Ishmael's narration continues:

For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing toward the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see. 

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"

"Not much," I replied—"nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?"

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must. . . .

 

Defining deviancy down

The phrase "defining deviancy down," originally the title of a 1990s social science paper by New York Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, seems like an alliteratively satisfying description of President Trump's diverse transgressions against standards and decency. What in another administration would have attained the status of a headline-hogging scandal is noted on pg. 3 and then quickly forgotten in order to take up something newer and worse tomorrow, which is in turn supplanted by the next offense, and so on, until he is impeached for something, at which time it seems he is granted a de facto pardon for everything the Democrats, seeking to keep things tidy, don't put in an Article of Impeachment.

To take at random an example: Who can now remember that Trump, according to the Mueller Report, ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to ring up the Justice Department and tell them to fire Mueller; then, when the New York Times found this out and reported it, told McGahn to deny the true report and to fabricate a false and back-dated document "for our file"? Wtf! Directing your lawyer to manufacture false evidence!  I guess that's not a criminal offense. It's just one of many golden oldies, however, and besides, the Democrats are at fault, too: "they failed to craft a compelling narrative the public could understand." 

That deviancy has been defined down seems more plausible.

Probably the most spectacular illustration of what I'm talking about occurred in last week's televised impeachment hearings. One of the defenses advanced by Trump's congressional defenders was that there was no shake down of the Ukrainian government: on the contrary, our president was only performing an exercise in due diligence, which required him to determine that Ukraine's new head of state was a reformer worthy of our assistance. But, under our Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. If the Congress votes $400 million in military assistance for Ukraine, Trump doesn't get to say no. It was Congress's call about whether Ukraine was pure enough for our aid in their war against Russia. It's bad enough that the money was withheld. That the purpose for the withholding was to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations of Trump's domestic political foes is obviously way worse—so much worse, I guess, that a minor offense (withholding congressionally approved funding) is repurposed as a defense of a major one (bribery of a foreign leader). The big crimes explained away by the little ones.

There is a law with a fancy name—The Impoundment Control Act of 1974—that allows the President to cancel or defer congressionally approved spending if he (or she) follows a process described in the law. In this case, however, the "deferral" was secret. Congress found out the money wasn't being released not from Trump but from the whistleblower. A couple days after that, the money was released, preparing the way for another defense of the President: Ukraine, without announcing any investigations, got its money, nothing bad happened, "there’s no there there." Yes, the money was released—right after Team Trump found out they'd been caught.

“Calm down, I tried to shoot you but missed."

Well, all this is probably less convincing than the hilarity associated with the notion that President Trump is a corruption fighter concerned about misconduct in the Ukraine, in particular this one obscure energy company that hired Joe Biden's son. When did he develop this passion for antiseptic pursuits? After he founded Trump University? After his personal "fixer" bought the silence of a porn actress with a six-figure check? We lavish foreign aid on Israel, whose Prime Minister was just indicted for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust—no doubt Trump is reassessing! 

The cartoon is by Adam Zyglis.

Badgers v. Gophers: context and preview

Both teams won yesterday, so when they play each other here in Minneapolis, next Saturday, the championship of the Big Ten West division will be at stake, as well as Paul Bunyan's axe.

When I was a kid, the dad of one of my neighborhood friends worked at the U; they had season tickets for Gopher football, and once or twice a season for several seasons I'd be invited along. This would have been in the late 60s, before I was even a teenager, and maybe for that reason I don't have any memory of a particular game, a big win or painful loss, or of any especially memorable play. What I do remember is the atmosphere on campus, especially walking along University Avenue toward the stadium, past the frat houses, banners flying, bands playing, people singing/chanting the Rouser, rowdy-seeming kids racing around shouting insults at anyone dressed in the opponent's colors. I realize now they'd probably been overserved already, or were maybe keeping it going from the night before. Anyway, it was exciting to me, but it was soon to end, dissipated by a long succession of mediocre teams and home games played indoors and off campus at the colorless Metrodome. I had season tickets for many of those years and sometimes overserved myself to make it bearable. The late collapses! I saw us blow a 17-0 halftime lead against Iowa; the Hawkeyes won when, after their last-second field goal attempt failed, they received a reprieve because the Gophers were called for too many men on the field. How does that happen? The next try, from closer in, was good. I saw Northwestern beat us on a hail Mary pass on the last play of the game. I saw Purdue beat us after moving about 50 yards on two plays in less than 20 seconds, without benefit of a timeout, before kicking a long, game-tying field goal on the last play of regulation. You don't have to guess who won in overtime. The worst ever was a game against Michigan in 2003, the hundredth anniversary of the first battle for the Little Brown Jug. We led after three quarters, 28-7, and, despite scoring a touchdown ourselves in the fourth quarter, lost the game: Michigan scored five times—four touchdowns and a field goal in the fourth quarter—to win, 38-35. Again, how does that happen? I think I remember reading somewhere that it's the only known game in the history of Big Ten football in which the losing team rushed for more than 400 yards. 

I'm just describing a few close ones. More often, we were obliterated. On September 17, 1983, Nebraska defeated us in the Metrodome by the score of 84-13. In case you are wondering, we did not miss an extra point. We kicked two field goals. The second, in the third quarter, drew us within 56-13, but we couldn't get any closer. Nebraska scored twelve touchdowns, three in each quarter. Another time, in an early-season game, some unheralded squad from a so-called minor conference moved the ball up and down the field on us all afternoon long. I think it was early in the fourth quarter when one of our guys finally caused an incompletion with a big hit just as the ball arrived. As he celebrated himself, the receiver got to his feet, tapped our guy on the shoulder pad, and, when he turned around, gestured toward the scoreboard, which showed the Gophers trailing by 20-some points. 

So that is just a bit of context for the tilt on Saturday against the Badgers, when for the first time ever ESPN's College GameDay will be broadcasting from the site of a Gopher home game. The week-long build-up is going to be fun, and come next Saturday morning, I suspect the atmosphere on campus is going to surpass anything I remember from the 60s—to say nothing of the 80s and 90s and aughts. Who knows what will happen? In yesterday's games, the weaknesses of the respective teams appeared to match their next opponent's strength. We beat winless (in conference games) Northwestern, but they scored three touchdowns, all on drives featuring their running plays and our bad tackling. It's not promising, therefore, that later in the afternoon Wisconsin rushed for more than 400 yards in their win over Purdue. If you prefer optimism, the Boilermakers, with no running game to keep the Badgers honest, completed 27 of 44 passes for 326 yards and three touchdowns. The Gophers' Tyler Johnson and Rashod Bateman are the only two Big Ten players north of 1000 yards in pass receiving this season, and they are tied for first in touchdown receptions—ten each. Our quarterback, Tanner Morgan, ranks second in the conference for passing efficiency, behind only Ohio State's Justin Fields, who is widely regarded as a Heisman candidate.

My dour Norwegian genes are advising me to keep expectations low. But I can't help myself. Row the boat! Go Gophers!

It was a landslide!

While watching the televised impeachment hearings this week, I noticed that, more than once, Republicans on the committee complained about how Democrats were attempting to throw out the result of a presidential election that Trump had won "in a landslide." Since more Americans actually voted for Clinton, and it seems sort of odd for the popular vote loser to have "won in a landslide," some of the more careful complainers referred to Trump's "electoral college landslide." My ears perk up like a hunting dog's whenever I hear a phrase including the words "electoral college," and I'd just like to point up that there are layers of wrongness with this defense.

In the first place, impeachment is a constitutional process. To the degree that it involves an effort to overturn an election result, it always does. For example, in 1999, when Clinton was impeached, the Republicans were attempting to overturn an election result—unless they weren't, in which case the Democrats aren't now. The complaint seems like a bit of an overstatement. I suppose that if in 1999 any Democrat had complained about how Republicans were trying to overturn an election result, the reply would have been: Not really, since the result of conviction in the Senate will be President Al Gore. And now the consequence of a successful impeachment will be President Pence. Because that's what the Constitution requires.

Moreover, the notion that Trump won a "landslide" in the electoral college is unusual, one might almost say, outlandish. What's the definition of "landslide"? Trump won 306 electoral votes. In the ten presidential elections of my voting life, the winning candidate has received fewer than 306 electoral votes only twice. The average number of electoral votes received by the winner has been 375. If Trump won a "landslide," then the same could be said of almost all presidential elections, and, in that case, "landslide" loses its meaning: it's just a hyperventilating synonym for "election result." 

All the other defenses I heard Republicans advance are similarly laughable, and I might take up a couple of them in future posts. It'll be enjoyable, because laughable = fun. 

The Further Education of Jake Gittes

In the movie Chinatown, one of my favorites, the central character, Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, is a private investigator specializing in marital investigations—that is, his clients are married people who suspect that their spouse has a little something-something going on a back burner. Gittes investigates and collects evidence, often in the form of photographs—the "ocular proof" lacked by Othello—that he then provides to the client in order to confirm their suspicions. He's been hired by someone pretending to be Evelyn Mulwray, wife of Hollis Mulwray, who heads the water department of the City of Los Angeles. Gittes gets the pictures, which are published in the newspaper, thereby discrediting Mulwray, whereupon the real Mrs. Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, shows up in his office at about the same time her husband shows up dead, the evident victim of an accidental drowning at a reservoir during a drought. Gittes, pissed about having been played, continues to investigate, which draws him into a vast corruption scheme involving preeminently Mrs. Mulwray's father, played by John Huston. Great, great movie.

In the climactic last scene, where the extent of the corruption is revealed to Gittes and the moviegoer, Evelyn pulls a gun to defend against her monstrous father. Gittes urges her to put the gun down. "Let the police handle it," he advises, but she replies, chillingly, "He owns the police!" There follows a double shooting, the second victim being Evelyn, whose head pitches forward onto the horn of the car she's escaping in. A stunned Gittes is led away from the scene by a cop who, trying to console him, speaks the film's last words of dialog, barely audible on account of the blaring horn: "Forget it, Jake," he says. "It's just Chinatown."

The desolating force of these words derives from the way in which, over the course of the movie, the career path of Jake Gittes is sketched in. He hadn't always been in marital investigations. He had been a cop, a detective, investigating crime. He was assigned to the Chinatown district. Corruption was rampant—to such a degree that a dutiful cop, such as Gittes was, would either have to get on the supplemental payroll or get out of police work. Gittes got out, and into the more lucrative business of marital investigations. He wears nice suits, has a nice car, an assistant, and well-appointed office space. He also has the proud, hard-bitten demeanor of a man who has put away youthful delusions and succeeded. All this background is so skillfully inserted, or suggested, that you hardly notice, often because you are only  conscious of being entertained. For example, Gittes's everlasting contempt for all the dumb dirty cops he knows from his former career is conveyed in a scene in which he converses with one such ex-colleague who has had the water to his residence shut off. Gittes asks him how he could know he had no water service, since (I'm going from memory, but try to imagine Jack Nicholson's voice):

You don't drink it [because you're an alcoholic]. You don't bathe in it. Did the water department write you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.

The upshot of this strain in the movie is that Gittes, in his mind, associates his Chinatown experience with the corruption that had stripped him of his idealism and driven him from the police department, which exists to advance the public interest, into the tawdry realm of marital investigations—a more remunerative form of private sector employment that's a different flavor of tawdry than what he knew from police work. He considers himself a man of the world well versed in the ways of Chinatown. But the movie is in some sense "The Further Education of Jake Gittes." The consolatory speech with which the movie ends is overwhelmingly ironic. It's not "just Chinatown." The corruption isn't limited to that part of L.A. It's pervasive, beyond anything that the hard-bitten Jake Gittes could have imagined.

I guess I've seen the movie enough times so that it's become a permanent part of my brain's furniture. I think of it frequently, often as a kind of interpretive tool to explain to myself things that happen in the world, like yesterday's testimony of Gordon Sondland, who bristled when the lawyer questioning him used the term "irregular channel" to describe the drug deal he was pursuing on behalf of Trump in Ukraine:

I'm not sure how someone could characterize something as an irregular channel. When you're talking to the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff of the White House, the Secretary of Energy. I don't know how that's irregular. If a bunch of folks who are not in that channel are aggrieved for some reason for not being included, I don't know how they can consider us to be the irregular channel and they to be the regular channel when its the leadership that makes the decisions.

Or, as Fiona Hill explained today, she regarded Sondland with a mixture of annoyance and pity, "[b]ecause he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy, and those two things had just diverged." So some people in the employ of the federal government were still pursuing the national interest. That was the "irregular channel" of dutiful cops. The "regular channel" is for all the high-ranking White House officials trying to swim in the dirty water sluicing out of the Oval Office—Chinatown. 

Another "family math" problem

"Family math": that's what my 6th-grader's math teacher calls these somewhat elaborate word problems that she hands out once per month. At first, I was alarmed, because: is my 6th-grader really supposed to be able to figure this out? But now that I know it's called "family math," I've formed the theory that the teacher knows these problems are over challenging for kids this age, and the idea, perhaps, is just to get them talking with a parent about a math problem. If so, here is the way it works at this house: "Dad, the family math problem is due Friday. Have you figured it out yet?" 

Here's the problem due on Friday:

You have five bales of hay. For some reason, instead of being weighed individually, they were weighed in all possible combinations of two: bales 1 and 2, bales 1 and 3, bales 1 and 4, bales 1 and 5, bales 2 and 3, bales 2 and 4, and so on. The weights of each of these combinations were written down and arranged in numerical order, without keeping track of which weight matched which pair of bales. The weights in kilograms were 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, and 91.

Your initial task is to find out how much each bale weighs. In particular, you should determine if there is more than one possible set of weights, and explain how you know. Once you are done looking for solutions, look back over the problem to see if you can find some easier or more efficient way to find the weights.

First observation would be that it's good there are ten data points, because there are indeed ten ways of "choosing two from five." If we complete the job of setting them out, using letters instead of numbers (so that the bale identifiers don't get mixed up with their weights), they are a+b, a+c, a+d, a+e, b+c, b+d, b+e, c+d, c+e, and d+e. 

Second observation is that the heaviest bale has to weigh at least 46 kilograms (else there is no way for the heaviest result of 91 kilograms) and the lightest bale can be no more than 40 kilograms (else there is no way for the lightest result of 80 kilograms). 

Third observation is that the ten data points range from a low of 80 to a high of 91—not much variation, indicating that there isn't very much variation in the weights of the individual bales, either. 

Fourth observation is that no result occurs twice but two possible results within the range do not occur at all—namely, 81 and 89. I think this must mean that the weights of the individual bales, though tightly bunched, are nonconsecutive. (Notice, for example, that if you are making all possible simple sums of 1, 2, 3, and 4, the results are 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, and 7—two 5s and no "gaps." We have gaps but no double results.) Also, if two individual bales had the same weight, then there would have to be a "double result"—for example, if a and b are both 40, then a+c=b+c, and you'd have the same result twice.

Last observation is that one of our gaps (81) occurs near the low end of the range of data points and the other (89) occurs toward the high end of the range. Since the gaps in the outputs occur near the low end and near the high end of the range, the gaps in the inputs are likely also toward the bookends.

If we put this all together, it seems a reasonable guess might be that the two lightest bales weigh 39 and 41 kilograms (thus yielding the 80 result) and that the two heaviest weigh 44 and 47 kilograms (thus yielding the 91 result). Let's see if we can make that work.

If our individual bales a through e are in ascending order of weight, then we are guessing that a is 39, b is 41, d is 44, and e is 47. So,

a+b=39+41=80

a+c=39+c

a+d=39+44=83

a+e=39+47=86

b+c=41+c

b+d=41+44=85

b+e=41+47=88

c+d=c+44

c+e=c+47

d+e=91 

The six completed sums—80, 83, 85, 86, 88, and 91—match up with six of the results that we're given. The four incomplete sums are 39+c, 41+c, 44+c, and 47+c. We're hoping to match them to the four results that haven't been accounted for, which are 82, 84, 87, and 90. And they can be matched if c is 43. One solution, therefore, is that the five bales weigh 39, 41, 43, 44, and 47 kilograms.

When looking for more solutions, it seems there's a pretty small number of possibilities that don't contradict any of the above observations. For example, if a is 36 and b is 44 (thus yielding the lightest result of 80), the range becomes too wide and there is no way to hold the heaviest result to just 91. If a is 37 and b is 43, the others could be 44, 45, and 46—but you can't have both 44 and 45, since 89 is not among the results. You have to run through the possibilities related to a being 38 and b being 42, but none of them can be made to work. I think the solution we've found must be the only one.

Not going to be easy making Lydia take an interest in this.

UPDATE: She was less resistant than I guessed and, in talking through it with her, I thought of a more "elegant" method. It seems almost trivial to note that a+b has to be 80, and d+e has to be 91. An "observation" that I should have made, as it's at least as helpful as any I mentioned, is that a+c has to be the second lightest result (82) and c+e has to be the second heaviest result (90). The possible weights for bales (a, b), then, are (40, 40), (39, 41), (38, 42), (37, 43), etc. But (40, 40) doesn't work, since if a=b then, for example, a+c=b+c, and it doesn't, since there are no "double" results—each result is unique. If a is 39, then b is 41, and c is 43, so that a+c=82. Further, if c is 43, then e is 47, so that c+e=90; and in that case, d has to be 44 in order to make d+e=91. That's the solution we arrived at above.

Next check (38, 42) for (a, b). Then c has to be 44, d has to 45, and e has to be 46. But in that case, c+d=89, and 89 is not one of the results.

Next check (37, 43) for (a, b). Then, for a+c to be 82, c has to be 45. But now there is no way to hold the heaviest result to only 91. The same problem arises for (36, 44), (35, 45), (34, 46), etc. So the only solution is a=39, b=41, c=43, d=44, and e=47.

Running on health care in the Bayou

Louisiana's governor's race was Saturday, so the returns were coming in on Saturday evening, when the cable news shows are hibernating, and perhaps for that reason it hasn't gotten a lot of attention. The incumbent Democrat, John Bel Edwards, was reelected by about 2.5 points, or by 40,000 votes out of 1.5 million cast. He owes his victory, as Democrats do in states red or blue, to the vote in and around the state's urban centers. Edwards carried Orleans Parish, home to New Orleans, by more than 100,000 votes, so he lost the rest of the state by 60,000. The story is more complicated, however: Hillary Clinton also carried Orleans Parish by more than 100,000 votes and she lost the state by 58-38 percent. Louisiana's most populous parish is East Baton Rouge. Edwards carried it by 66-34; Clinton carried it, too, but only by 52-43. Perhaps the most startling turnaround occurred in Jefferson Parish, the second most populous in the state. It's suburban New Orleans. Trump carried it by 15 points. Edwards carried it on Saturday—by 14 points.

Edwards is not the kind of candidate national Democrats would ever nominate—he loves guns about as much as he hates abortion—and I'm sure Trump doesn't have to worry about Louisiana's eight electoral votes. But there are encouraging signs for Democrats. If the candidates could not be distinguished by their views on guns or abortion, what made so many people in Jefferson Parish change their vote? Probably health insurance. Under Edwards, Louisiana opted into the Obamacare provision permitting states to expand Medicaid eligibility to people with qualifying incomes—less than 138% of the federal poverty level. It's a poor state, lots of people qualified, and the uninsured rate has dropped to 8%, down from 16.6% when Edwards took office. 

Medicaid expansion in Louisiana is too popular for Edwards's Republican opponent to have opposed it on the campaign trail, but he did run on imposing stiffer restrictions on who could qualify. It often seems as if Republicans are really annoyed when people get health insurance. They're against gun control, abortion, and poor people going to the doctor. In Louisiana, the candidate who was opposed to only two of those things won. Nationally, the four states with the highest percentage of uninsured residents are Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Florida. All have Republican governors who chose not to opt into Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. 

Football! Math! Football math!

An upside of the Gophers' disappointing loss in Iowa City yesterday is that, assuming Wisconsin wins at home next weekend against Purdue, the regular season will end with the Badgers playing here in Minneapolis on Saturday, November 30, not only for Paul Bunyan's axe but also for the championship of the Big Ten West. That'll be the second consecutive Gopher home football game with more championship significance than any in program history since the 1960s.

Of the various "what ifs" that people love to discuss after a close loss, the one that sticks in my mind relates to the plays at the end of the first half. The Gophers, trailing 20-3, had the ball inside Iowa's 10-yard line with 10 seconds left and no time outs. We threw into the end zone, where Iowa's d-back interfered with our guy—actually, he interfered with him for the entire pass route and kept it up while the ball was in the air. So the referee called the obvious interference and, by rule, we get the ball, first down, on the 2-yard line. There were now 4 seconds left in the half. We decided to kick a field goal, which our kicker bounced off the inside of one of the uprights, ricocheting it through for 3 points: 20-6 at the half. We ended up losing 23-19.

First thing this makes me think of is that the penalty for defensive pass interference in the end zone at the end of one of the halves seems insufficient. That the offense gets a first down is completely irrelevant if there is only time left for one play anyway. So the defense, to prevent a touchdown, might as well interfere, hold, rough, grab, spit, trip, whatever. If it's not called, great; and, if it is called, you're a few more seconds toward zeros on the clock without a touchdown having been scored. In yesterday's game, the Gophers decided to kick a field goal with the ball on the 2 and 4 seconds left. We were already inside the 10, so holding us to a field goal attempt was the best Iowa could hope for. There was no penalty at all for the touchdown-saving interference.

Second thing I stew about is the decision to kick. It's a hard choice and I'm not saying Fleck was necessarily wrong. But, had we gone for it and scored, then kicked the point, we would have had 4 more points, which in the end is what we lost by—4 points. I tend to think of these hard choices in a mathematical way. A touchdown is twice as many points as a field goal, plus you get the try for a point after. This means that the number of expected points scored is higher if you try for a touchdown, so long as the probability of scoring a touchdown is close to half what the chance of making a field goal is. Just to demonstrate, let's say that the chance of scoring a touchdown on one play from the 2-yard line is 48%, and the chance of kicking for the extra point, or making a field goal of about the same length, is 95%. Then the expected points scored from trying for a touchdown is 

(.48)(6) + (.48)(.95) = 2.88 + .456 = 3.336

whereas the expected points scored from trying a field goal is

(.95)(3) = 2.85 

and 3.336 > 2.85. It's a significant difference. The chance of scoring a touchdown on one play from the 2 would have to be somewhat less than 48% for the expected points scored from a field goal attempt to be greater. (For what it's worth, the success rate for a 2-point conversion after touchdown in the NFL is 47.9%; the try comes from the 2-yard line, just where the Gophers were after the interference penalty.)

In the event, we almost missed the field goal, which brings up a further little bit of mathematical football that I've sometimes wondered about. In professional football, the hash marks on the field line up with the uprights on the goal posts, which are 18.5 feet apart. Width-wise, then, the ball is always pretty close to the middle of the field. In college football, however, the hash marks are 40 feet apart. This means that if the ball is on the left or right hash mark and near the goal line, the angle to the goal posts is rather severe, and I've wondered whether, mathematically, that makes a field goal try more difficult. It happened yesterday that the Gophers had to kick that short field goal before halftime from the right hash mark, and, from the shot behind the goal posts you usually get on TV, it looks like it might have an effect. It's not a crazy thought, right? If you were kicking a "0 yard field goal" from the right hash mark, there'd be no opening to kick the ball through. If you were kicking a "1 yard field goal" from the right hash mark, almost your only chance would be to kick the ball just in front of the right upright and then bounce it off the inside of the left upright and through. How far back must you go before the effect becomes negligible? I was curious enough to start dusting off my high school trigonometry before remembering it's 2019, so instead I googled "trigonometry of field goal kicking," which led me to this article. My takeaways are:

(1) I was wise not to try and figure it out myself; and  

(2) The situation gets better so fast that, considering that the goal posts are at the back of the end zone, and that the try always comes from about 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage, there are no field goal attempts that are short enough so that being on the hash mark means there is less margin for error on the kick. If, for example, you are near the goal line on the hash mark, it would never be wise, from the standpoint of the mathematics, to take a penalty in order to widen the angle: being closer with a slightly smaller angle allows for more error in direction than being a little farther with a wider angle.

 

 

Foxy interlude

Sometimes, while watching TV in the evening, especially if it's been a day of big political news, I'll switch over to Fox, just to be either amused or angered, and occasionally to reap the reward of experiencing an odd brew of these two sensations. So last night qualified, what with the day's public impeachment hearing, etc. It happened that Tucker Carlson was on. His guest was a woman, "a former federal prosecutor" who fulsomely expressed the view that women everywhere should be outraged by the way the Democrats had treated Marie Yovanovitch, our former ambassador to Ukraine who was 86'd so that Trump and Giuliani could get their stooge, Sondland, in there to help work up some dirty doings against Biden.  The whole point of the hearing, in her telling, was to get a sympathetic woman on TV to weep about having been treated badly by Big Bad Trump. She doesn't know anything, but could pull on our heart strings, and it was an affront to any genuine feminist sensibility that Democrats had found a girl to cry and make Trump look like a meany. That's what she said, and whenever she paused for air Tucker interrupted his fond gaze to agree wholeheartedly in words.

I was recoiling from that huge turd during the commercial break and so forgot to change channels. When the show resumed, the next segment was about Roger Stone, who while Yovanovitch was testifying had been convicted of seven criminal counts. The guest was Stone's daughter. She whimpered and sighed through the whole interview, if you want to call it an interview: Tucker mainly kept quiet so that, voice quavering, she could mewl about how awful it was that her father had been taken from the family. Once he interjected, morosely, "All because he supported the wrong political candidate." Had I died and gone to heaven, the previous guest would at this point have walked back on the set, holding the world's smallest violin to her chin, and mentioned the fact that the weepy girl's father is a lying sack of shit before beginning to play, but I was still alive, it was still Fox News, and Roger Stone's dewy-eyed daughter was beseeching the president for a pardon. "Donald Trump, if you're listening, save our family!" I'm not making this up, honest.

Samuel Sewall in his Diary

Chasing after some scrap of information the other day, I ended up leafing through a book I bought once for a college course—an anthology, America in Literature, volume 1, covering the colonial period up to the Civil War, edited by David Levin and Theodore Gross. I don't think the editor's selections are at all idiosyncratic and one thing their anthology makes you realize is that, before 1850, America had contributed virtually nothing to the world's literature. Quick, name a great work written by an American within a normal lifetime of our Declaration. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography? I've read it more than once, and enjoy it, but I'm not sure it qualifies, and anyway, supposing it's allowed, name another. This anthology is filled with diaries, personal narratives, sermons, pamphlets, and poetry in imitation of European models. The interest is largely historical. What was it like to be a pioneer, a Puritan in 17th-century America, a slave? Our early "literature" can shed light on such questions, but when Jane Austen and William Wordsworth were at work there was no American of genius similarly employed. And then, suddenly, without warning or barely a sense that the field had been ploughed: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), and, though it wasn't published till later, the poetry of Emily Dickinson composed mostly during the Civil War years. It's almost as if a civilization, like a teenager, has to attain the age of majority before you can expect anything of it.

Paging through that book: what a bleak landscape—I'd rather watch Fox News's coverage of the impeachment hearings than read again the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, or Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, or any of the ghoulish theologizing of the Puritans. The professor, Edward Griffin, assigned the Journal of John Woolman, a Quaker who lived from 1720 to 1772, and I was an earnest enough student to force my eyes to pass over all the words, but, seeing it again in this anthology, all I could remember of it was trying to whip up artificial interest by tracking how much time elapsed between the author's nocturnal emissions, which he duly and self-laceratingly recorded in his journal. 

There is one glorious exception, and that is the Diary of Samuel Sewall. Sewall, who lived from 1652 to 1730, was one of New England's leading citizens. If he hadn't kept a diary through almost his entire life, he'd be known, if he was known, only as one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. To his credit, he was in later life ashamed of the part he'd played, though a cynic might say that both his legal judgments and subsequent renunciation were in line with current public opinion. But he kept this diary, too. He makes no visible effort to be eloquent, just notes things that happened, lots of weather reports, lots of church-going, and, most notably, lots of death, including in his own family, children, not an excess of emotion in these parts or any other, just the facts, and you get the idea that it wasn't that he was at all stone-hearted: death was just more common then, it happened all the time and was normal. Finally, when he's in his mid-60s, his wife dies, and, a couple years later, he undertakes the courtship of a widow whom he identifies as Madam Winthrop. In Boston in 1720 you did not "date"; you paid visits and talked, then, after awhile, you'd pop the question—that part was the same. The reader of the diary can deduce, though Sewall never spells it out himself, that notwithstanding his prominence he is much more interested in her than she is in him. For example, she always seems to be away when he calls on her—suspicious, since when taking his leave he'd usually mention when he expected to call again, or  would send a note a few days in advance (which she would not answer). Consequently, he spent a lot of time sitting around with her maid and her kids, waiting for her to show up, and you can again deduce, from his very spare prose, that they know the score and feel a little sorry for him: there's a fair amount of, "Well, she should be back soon" or "You might want to call on her at So-and-So's." He sends her gifts (always noting in his diary how much the gift cost) and then notes later, after seeing her, that she failed to thank him for it. He persists with the courtship, and persists too in recording, Dragnet-style, the many small indignities he suffers. It's hard, but intriguing, and somewhat humorous, to imagine him returning home from these defeats and recording them in his diary. At first, she had been polite but expert in parrying his gallantries. As time passes and he doesn't give up, she adopts more aggressive strategies. For example, she tells him she's noticed that he doesn't travel in a horse-drawn carriage. Niceties soon give way altogether and the "courtship" takes on a purely mercenary aspect: he tells her, directly, what she could expect to receive if they were to marry and he then die first. She's not impressed. His next-to-last visit took place on Friday, November 4, 1720:

Went again about 7. a-clock; found there Mr. John Walley and his wife: sat discoursing pleasantly. I showed them Isaac Moses's writing. Madam W. served comfits to us. After awhile a table was set. I urged Mr. Walley to crave a blessing; but he put it upon me. About 9. they went away. I asked Madam what fashioned necklace I should present her with, she said None at all. I asked her whereabout we left off last time; mentioned what I had offered to give her; asked her what she would give me; she said she could not change her condition: she had said so from the beginning; could not be so far from her children, the Lecture. Quoted the Apostle Paul affirming that a single life was better than a married. I answered that was for the present distress. She said she had not pleasure in things of that nature as formerly: I said, you are the fitter to make me a wife.

Paul, especially in his first letter to the Corinthians, does take a dim view of matrimonial love, asserting famously that he thought it best for people to remain single, like him, though allowing that "it's better to marry than burn." This is the biblical text Madam Winthrop refers to, not (one suspects) because she esteems it but because she hopes to encourage Sam Sewall to leave (and not return). The sophisticated judge and lay biblical scholar replies that Paul's instruction was guidance for another time, when it was thought the world would soon end. Just in case you missed it, she then plays what she must have hoped would be the ace of trumps—she's no longer interested in sex—to which he replies (in effect), "Great, neither am I!" The "courtship" arrived at this point on November 4 after having begun with Sam's first mention of Madam Winthrop on October 11. There'd be one more visit, on November 7, when Sam, before a dying fire (symbolism!), announces his intention to call no more, eliciting from Madam Winthrop some kind words in which one might detect more relief than kindness. A question raised by this remarkable document is just how much of what the reader detects was first detected by Sam Sewall. He might seem obtuse, but it's his words that reveal the truth of the situation, all of it modestly conveyed, in few words, a possible small masterpiece of precision, humor, and humanity.

Sewall was also the author of "The Selling of Joseph," one of the first anti-slavery tracts published in North America.

Slime

 

Annoyed, but more amused, to see that I am suddenly out of shaving cream again although the person shown seems to have copious supplies of homemade slime that I occasionally find smeared on walls, mirrors, windows, and once in the school yearbook over the portrait of a boy she doesn't like. There will be a cessation of domestic tranquility, however, if she tries to tell me that cheap red wine has fun properties that I don't already know about.

Go Gophers!

Yesterday on the radio I heard Gopher football coach P.J. Fleck say that today's game against Penn State would be the biggest in the history of TCF Bank Stadium, which opened in 2009. For once I think the ebullient Fleck was understating the case: it's probably the biggest home football game the Gophers have had in more than 50 years. I guess it's the first time since 1903—or was it 1904?—that we have, this late on the calendar, played an undefeated team while being undefeated ourselves. Enthusiasm and apprehension are at war in the souls of long-suffering fans—or maybe I should just speak for myself. Our schedule till today has been soft. I have to think Penn State is better. But what if the turnover differential were +2 in our favor, and we bust a couple long ones for touchdowns, and they miss a field goal and we don't? What if we're just better than I think? Here I go, getting set up to be crushed.

Let's go Minnesota!

UPDATE: Half time, 24-13 Minnesota. I see neighbors out raking leaves and such. Martians. Who would have predicted we'd shred their defense like this? On that last set of downs before the half, wasn't it a mistake for Penn State to spike the ball on first down? They had a timeout and, if they'd used it, they would have had three downs to pass into the end zone. Instead, they had to settle for a field goal after we kept them from scoring on two plays. Ahead by 11 instead of 7: huge.

UPDATE 2: Didn't know a stadium full of people dressed in maroon and gold could look so good. That third down conversion at the end of the third quarter was as good for us as the fumble was bad. Penn State has 4th-and-goal, trailing 31-19. If we hold . . . we held! Now if we can get a couple of first downs . . . 

UPDATE 3: Okay, we got two first downs. Now let's cover this punt. No big plays for them.

I hate to see guys get hurt. Worst thing about football.

Keep their guys in front of us and tackle them!

UPDATE 4: Doesn't look like they got that touchdown play off in time. Big break for them. Will they kick it deep? Yes. We need a first down. Pass on 1st-and-10? No, 2nd-and-11. And now a sack. Disastrous sequence for us. It's going to be on our defense.

UPDATE 5: God this is nerve wracking. My mom, mystified, used to advise, "It's just a game, Eric." A sack might finish them, and their quarterback is a little nicked up, maybe not able to escape and throw as well as usual. Intercepted! We're gonna win! 

Iowa is next! Prolly qualifies as the biggest road game in more than 50 years. Ski-u-mah!

More on Tuesday's elections

I seem to have set out a blow-by-blow account of the Kentucky governor's race without making a mention of any of the other elections held last Tuesday. So, briefly:

A Republican won Mississippi's gubernatorial election by 5.5 points, 52.1 to 46.6 percent. 

Democrats took control of both houses of Virginia's state assembly. In addition, the governor is a Democrat, both US senators are Democrats, seven of the eleven congressional districts are represented by Democrats, and the state has given its electoral votes to the Democratic presidential candidate for the last three elections. If the electoral college tempts us to designate each state either "red," "blue," or "swing," it's maybe time to reassign Virginia to the blue team.

Possibly my favorite outcome from Tuesday's elections was also from Virginia.  Juli Briskman, the cyclist pictured above waving at Trump's motorcade in 2017 with her shortest fingers folded down, was elected to the Board of Supervisors in Loudon County, which is in northern Virginia across the Potomac from D.C. Briskman was fired from her job as a marketing executive after the picture went viral. Seems to have landed on her feet, however. So far, it's hard to detect evidence of voters punishing Democrats for their "shams" and "witch hunts" and generalized spitefulness.

Watching off-year election returns

I benefited from watching election returns on tv last night because

(1) the close Kentucky governor's race set my metabolism into overdrive, making me feel alive; and

(2) I learned how to pronounce "Louisville," the largest city in Kentucky.

Regarding (2), it's not "Looey-ville," as I have always said, almost exclusively to refer to the University of Louisville in the month of March. In addition to a basketball team, the university has a Department of Linguistics, and one of its professors, Elizabeth Patton, grades diverse pronunciations:

(a) Looey-ville: F

(b) Louis-ville: F

(c) Loo-a-vul: Passing

(d) Loo-a-ville: Passing

It can be hard to distinguish (c) from (d), which I guess is okay, since either is acceptable. If you're wrong, however, people who know will notice. MSNBC may not be at the top of the ratings in Kentucky, but I wonder whether some of their on-air personalities have gotten mail, because I noticed last night that Rachel Maddow and Steve Kornacki both seemed to make a point of saying Loo-a-vul. Or possibly they are just woke. If you're curious about how Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham pronounces "Louisville," you'll have to wait for another day, because Fox was not covering Kentucky's gubernatorial election last night.

First notice that something was up came during the 7 o'clock hour with Chris Hayes. More than half the vote was in, and Bevin, the incumbent Republican, was ahead by 52-46 percent, which isn't a lot for a Republican in Kentucky, but it's not neck-and-neck, either. Yet there was Steve Kornacki gesticulating somewhat wildly in front of "the big board" showing returns by county. He was highlighting the data from Jefferson County, home to Louisville. It's one of the few reliably Democratic counties in Kentucky, and it's also the biggest—its population is well over twice that of the second most populous county. Only about a fifth of the precincts in Jefferson had reported their totals, and in those Beshear, the Democratic challenger, was getting 65% of the vote. Since about three-fifths of the statewide precincts were counted, but only one-fifth in Jefferson County, the outstanding vote was concentrated in Jefferson County, where Beshear was doubling Bevin's vote total. Kornacki said that explained why the race was still deemed "too close to call." 

Sure enough, by the time Hayes had handed off to Maddow, the percentage of statewide precincts reporting had risen to 90, the percentage of reporting precincts within Jefferson County had shot up to 96, and Beshear, instead of trailing 52-46, was ahead by 50-48. In raw votes, the margin was 30,000, and there then began the agonizing crawl to the finish as votes from the last scattered precincts were tabulated. These were mainly from rural Kentucky, and the narrow gap kept narrowing. The raw vote difference dropped below 10,000 at about the time that the percentage of uncounted precincts had dipped to 4%, so Bevins was gaining at a rate that would have put him over the top by the end, but then suddenly the difference shot up to about 13,000—the last remains of the Jefferson County vote, perhaps. Within a few minutes Rachel had to interrupt whoever she was interviewing to announce that NBC had called the race for Beshear.

Trump won Kentucky by 30 points. Kornacki, explicating the upset later in the evening, stressed three factors.

(I.) Beshear did much better than anticipated in rural eastern Kentucky—coal country. In some counties  that Trump had won with two-thirds or more of the vote, Beshear actually prevailed. These counties are so small that it was a matter of winning by a hundred votes instead of losing by a few hundred, but, considering that the final difference was about 5,000, that's significant. This surprising result in parts of rural Kentucky should probably be attributed to factors unique to the state and the particular candidates. Bevin, for example, is so widely disliked that last night one Republican commentator quipped that the result proved how, in Kentucky, being an a-hole is still marginally worse than being a lib-hole.

(II.) When Bevin was first elected governor four years ago, he lost Jefferson County by about 37,000 votes. Last night, he lost it by 99,000. In addition to losing in the city of Louisville, he suffered something like a meltdown in the surrounding suburban areas. This is part of a national trend that also explains, for example, why Texas is becoming competitive.

(III.) Kornacki's third point amounted to an amplification of the second. Kentucky's three most northerly counties adjoin one another at the top of the boot on the south bank of the Ohio River, just across from Cincinnati, Ohio. Though these suburban counties are small in area, they are home to one of every ten Kentuckians. Trump won all three counties, and his narrowest margin was a whopping 59-35. Last night, Beshear carried two of them. In the third, which Trump won by 68-26, Bevin won by 55-43—twelve points, instead of forty-two!

Trump traveled to Kentucky to campaign with Bevin on Election Eve. He tweeted today that, but for his efforts, Bevin would have lost by fifteen points. Maybe, but it's also possible that one a-hole campaigning for another makes for a losing look, including in Kentucky.

The Lone Ranger &c

As a kid, I was a huge fan of The Lone Ranger television series starring Clayton Moore in the title role and Jay Silverheels as his faithful sidekick, Tonto. I see now that they stopped making new shows in 1957, so all my viewing pleasure in the mid 60s had to be courtesy of reruns. I'm watching reruns again in 2019, because one night, zipping around on the remote, I found a cable channel that airs several episodes in a row at off hours. Lots of air time to fill, no doubt. It's sort of fun to watch and wonder about what the attraction might have been for 6-year-old me. I haven't seen a single episode wherein the plot seemed at all familiar. Maybe that's partly because the plot lines are so similar that they would slur together in anyone's mind and then be forgotten altogether over 55 years. But I think it's more likely that they were beyond me. I do remember the opening sequence, especially the part where the Lone Ranger's horse, Silver, rears up, and the Lone Ranger, astride him, takes on the aspect of a colossus. What a man! Another thing I remember is a recurring technique, a kind of scene divider, where the camera backs away to watch Tonto and the Lone Ranger riding their faithful horses Scout and Silver, respectively, over rough terrain, in a mad sprint, like they were in the Preakness Stakes. It didn't occur to me then, but it does now, that, often as not, there is no reason supplied by the plot for them to be in such a hurry. It just looks cool, and I must have thought it looked cool, because it's familiar to me after more than 50 years.

The network that airs these shows is called WHT, channel 367 in my Direct TV lineup. Strange to say, their specialty is not old westerns but, rather, religious programming of the very battiest variety. I know this because sometimes, using Guide on the remote, I zip through their schedule for the day to see when I might be able to see "The Lone Ranger." Of course, the names of the shows come up, together with the "description." I wrote some of these down today.

At 8 this evening, you could watch "End-Time Insights" with host Steve Cochran, a show that "offers new 'Never Before Seen' Biblical End Time Revelations, one of which is called, 'The Graph' and offers a hidden timeline as seen in the Book of Revelation." I can't fill in any details, as I was watching the Ravens beat the Patriots, but something about the sentence does arouse my editorial impulses. For one thing, the capitalization is about as eccentric as in our president's tweets. Also, if the timeline is as seen in the Bible, is it, strictly speaking, accurate to say that it's hidden? I guess that's the hook: it's only hidden if you don't watch the show.

The 8:30 time slot this evening was filled by "End of the Age With Reverend Irwin Baxter." It seems WHT's Sunday night programming is devoted to the end of the world. The description for Rev. Baxter's show is bland: "The prophecies of the Bible explained." This was followed at 9 by "The Coming Apocalypse": "Understanding today's world events from a biblical perspective with Pastor Paul Begley." I'm going to guess that today's events pertaining to "the coming apocalypse" involve unrest and controversy in the Middle East. If Pastor Begley is smart, he will be "intrigued" by what is going on but not so confident about what he sees as to be able to assign a date to the apocalypse. That's a rookie mistake made by some of these clergymen. If you're wrong, you look sort of ridiculous, and there is no real pleasure in being right, because, due to the world having ended, no one can hear you say "told ya so"—not that anyone in a couple millennia has yet experienced this frustration.

At some time late at night, like maybe about now, there airs a show called "It's Supernatural" in which "investigative reporter Sid Roth verifies the supernatural," though probably not to everyone's satisfaction, since one idiosyncratic definition of supernatural is something like "that which cannot be verified." At 6 tomorrow morning, you can skip "Morning Joe" on MSNBC and watch instead "The Jim Bakker Show." I take it this is the guy who used to be married to Tammy Faye and that he's out of prison? 

No "Lone Ranger" till 2 in the afternoon. Hi-yo Silver, away!

Demographics of the Brexit vote

In Middlemarch, chapter 56, a character who I believe is never again mentioned may be heard, or overheard, talking angrily:

"Why, they're Lunnon chaps, I reckon," said Hiram, who had a dim notion of London as a centre of hostility to the country.

Hiram lived in rural Warwickshire, near the nonfictive town of Nuneaton in what the Brits call the east Midlands, and his bitterness made me wonder whether the Brexit vote in the UK exhibited the same rural-urban divide that's present in our country. In the accompanying maps, the rusty color indicates the area voted to "stay" while blue is for "leave" precincts. The map on the right appears distorted  because the colored subdivisions have been blown up or shrunk according to population; also, darker hues represent a more lopsided result. You can see that it's generally true that the votes to stay came from London and Scotland, the great metropolis and the northern hinterland, and that almost everywhere else majorities voted to leave. This map allows you to zoom in on any region that interests you. English urban centers outside of London tended to have a pretty evenly divided vote, but in Scotland, "stay" got about two-thirds of the Glasgow vote, and in Edinburgh it was closer to three-fourths. Meanwhile, in the more rustic parts of Scotland, the vote to stay remained above or very near 60%, almost the same as in London. Nuneaton voted by 2-to-1 to leave. Lots of Hirams, still.

The geographic principle in play in the Brexit vote does not seem to have been rural versus urban. Scotland wanted to stay, and England wanted to leave, except for London, which voted like Scotland. But there were other demographic characteristics of the Brexit vote that seem more closely related to voting patterns and behavior in the United States. For example, of the 30 areas in the UK with the highest percentage of people 65 or older, 27 voted to leave (but three-fourths of voters under 25 voted to stay). Of the 30 areas with the lowest percentage of college graduates, 28 voted to leave. And of the 30 areas with the highest percentage of people identifying as English, all 30 voted to leave.