Eric The Blue

On Roy Campanella

I discovered by accident that MLB network has been airing Ken Burns's "Baseball" this past week. Having stumbled on a segment about baseball in New York City during the 1950s, I watched to the end and became curious about Roy Campanella. I've now looked at his career statistics and am wondering whether a catcher has ever had a better year at the bat than Campanella in 1953? He hit .312 with 41 homers, 26 doubles, 3 triples, 142 RBI, 103 runs scored, and an OPS (sum of on-base average and slugging percentage) of 1.006. Not surprising that he was named Most Valuable Player in the National League, an award he had won in 1951 and would win again in 1955. 

Maybe he wasn't so great behind the dish? Uh-uh. Over the course of his 10-year career in the majors, Campanella threw out 57% of runners who tried to steal while he was catching. 

That one of baseball's greats played for only 10 years is explained by his career having been foreshortened on both ends—by the color line on the front end and, on the back, by a 1958 car accident that left him paralyzed below the shoulders.  He had been a 26-year-old rookie in 1948, which was the year after Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Dodgers. Before that, Campanella had played ball in Mexico and in the Negro Leagues. 

The decade following World War II would have been the time to be a baseball fan, especially in New York. You had Brooklyn with Campanella catching, Gil Hodges and Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in the infield, Duke Snider and Carl Furillo in the outfield. Up in the Bronx, in the house that Ruth built, the Yankees had DiMaggio patrolling centerfield, the monuments behind him in the cavernous outfield, then later Mickey Mantle in the same position, and Yogi Berra behind the plate catching, for example, Whitey Ford once or twice a week through the 50s. At the Polo Grounds in northern Manhattan, a young Willie Mays. Mays was in the on-deck circle when on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard 'round the world." The Dodgers that season had led the Giants by 13 games in mid-August and everyone thinks they collapsed. Not really: over the last six weeks of the season, they won more games than they lost, but the Giants finished 37-7, including the last seven in a row to force a playoff for the pennant. 

That wasn't the only disappointment endured by Brooklyn fans. The Dodgers won pennants in 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953—and lost all four World Series, each time to the hated Yankees. Don't forget the manner in which they placed second in 1951. "Wait 'til next year!" became the cry of Brooklynites, which is why 1955 is known as "the year that was next year." After winning the pennant, the Dodgers were again matched with the Yankees in yet another "Trolley Series." The Yankees won the first two games in the Bronx, it was looking like a rerun, but in Game 3 at Ebbets Field Campanella hit a 2-out, 2-run homer in the bottom of the first inning that seemed to turn the Series around. It went to a seventh game, which the Dodgers won, 2-0, in Yankee Stadium: a complete game shutout pitched by a 23-year-old Johnny Podres. Campanella had one of just five Brooklyn hits and scored one of the runs. His car accident was 27 months in the future. 

 

Wisdom of Wiggen

Ring Lardner, about whom I wrote a couple days ago, was once criticized by F. Scott Fitzgerald for squandering his gifts writing about baseball, "a boy's game." To which the poet and critic John Berryman, rising for the defense, responded:

Yogi Berra is a boy? Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors or focuses of national attention. They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere. Here they are in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well.

I'm on Berryman's side of the argument, but it's a little weird that he begins with Yogi Berra and, in the next sentence, slides into big leaguers who are "in danger every second of demotion to the minors," which was not Berra's problem. It's the stars who are the focuses of national attention. The struggles of a borderline player to make it to the majors, or stay in the majors, are the focus of only his own attention. Though not in the spotlight, it's easy to imagine that the struggle can be a desperate one. In the minors, you are riding buses between mid-sized cities and, assuming no 7-figure signing bonus in the recent past, probably hustling for extra dollars in the off season. The minimum major league salary currently stands at $563,500, and getting vested in the players' pension plan is a pass to spend the rest of your life watching Law & Order reruns, if that's what you want. Which world you're in, as Crash Davis explains in Bull Durham, depends on whether over a week's worth of Triple-AAA games you go 7-for-25 or 8-for-25. It shouldn't be a mystery why, scanning lists of players busted for steroid use, there are perhaps 40 unfamiliar names for every established big leaguer. 

The Henry Wiggen books of Mark Harris that I've enjoyed so much may be said to cover this territory. The first, The Southpaw (1953), is in some respects a kid's daydream of being a big league star: in his rookie season, the narrator-hero Henry Wiggen wins the Player of the Year Award while pitching his team, the New York Mammoths, to the World Series championship. The final volume, It Looked Like Forever (1979), begins with the Mammoths unceremoniously releasing Wiggen. This isn't altogether unexpected, as he is 39 and now wholly dependent upon guile, which will not take you as far as a good fast ball, but Wiggen had expected to be the Mammoths' next manager and then that doesn't happen either. So a double disappointment leaves him suddenly adrift after a long and successful career—19 years, to be exact, after his fairy tale rookie season. The novel's epigraph is the Robert Frost poem that has the lines:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard.
Or keeps the end from being hard.

In the rest of the novel Wiggen has many adventures while, as the self-actualizers among us might say, "reinventing himself," though he doesn't talk that way and would probably make fun of people who do. It's my favorite of the four Wiggen books.

Between these bookends stand Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957). The former was made into a Hollywood movie starring Robert DeNiro and is probably the best known of the Wiggen books. It concerns the last season of Bruce Pearson, the Mammoths' third-string catcher who is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease before it begins. Lack of star power is not the only thing that distinguishes Pearson from Lou Gehrig. He does not have a dedicated day at the home stadium in New York in which he declares himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," but he does become a slightly better ballplayer in the short time before his progressing disease sidelines him—because, facing his end, he pays more attention, starts noticing how pitchers retire him so easily, and where the fielders are positioned when he bats, and is able for a short time to mount a kind of rearguard action against habitual failure. You can see how this might be a little hokey, and sometimes maybe it is, but it also could be a lot worse. Pearson dies in the off season and of his teammates only his road roommate Wiggen, who is a pallbearer, attends the funeral. This is partly because several of the Mammoths are black and Pearson was a racial bigot. Bang the Drum is an adult book, not Pride of the Mammoths. 

A Ticket for a Seamstitch is the briefest of the Wiggen novels and was published the year after Bang the Drum, circumstances that have made me wonder whether at least the skeleton of it might have been cut from the earlier novel. In Ticket, the sense of abundant, bounding life that characterizes the other Wiggen books subsides and what one notices instead is a carefully constructed narrative, the two strands of which converge for a July 4, 1956, doubleheader between Washington and the home team Mammoths in New York. That is the day that Wiggen, pitching the nightcap, tries to win his sixteenth consecutive decision, which, had he succeeded, would have tied Carl Hubbell's record. It's also the day that the seamstitch of the title, having completed a transcontinental odyssey, realizes her ambition of seeing a big-league game featuring the Mammoths and, more particularly, her favorite player, Henry Wiggen. I think the climax would have been more satisfying if the separate but converging strands had been more fully rendered. Regarding the seamstitch, one gets the idea that the events of her journey are meant to establish her as the picaresque heroine of an American road novel. But we don't see enough of her. She has too few adventures and never becomes a vivid character. The situation is similar with the Mammoths and Wiggen's mounting win streak.

Yet the book gives pleasure. It's theme is congenial, at least to me, and certainly not what you'd expect from a baseball novel. Though the seamstitch's original fan letter had been directed to the married Wiggen, his new roommate, Piney Woods, replies, begins a correspondence, eventually recommends the trip, and eagerly awaits her arrival on July 3. The narrative interest generated by Ticket isn't much more than: What does the seamstitch look like, and what will happen when Piney meets her in the flesh?

Turns out she looks nothing like Woods had imagined, and he therefore deserts, leaving her alone with Wiggen, who spends the evening before his big game showing her around Manhattan and conducting himself like a charming gentleman. Here he is as narrator, indulging himself in a rhetorical flourish on the subject of the seamstitch and her half of humanity:

She has nice skin. You might as well say that for her, and decent hair and eyes and nose, average, nothing below average and nothing too much above, just exactly the average kind of girl you bump into everywhere you turn, waitresses and photo retouchers and switchboard girls, girls on trains and girls on planes, girls in depots and restaurants and nightclubs, girls in banks and insurance offices and tax offices, girls in the newspaper business and girls in the book business, girls selling tickets to the movies and girls tearing them in 1/2 at the door, girls in Queen City and all the towns of the 4-State Mountain League, and girls in New York and Chicago, girls, girls, girls, everywhere I go. I guess I ought to know. I keep an eye peeled. There was nothing wrong with the girl for God's sake.

A brief backwards glance. In Bang the Drum Wiggen, on his way to Pearson's hospital room in Rochester, Minnesota, meets up with an attractive airline employee who plainly signals her availability. Tempted, he nevertheless gives her the slip, and then congratulates himself on not "chasing after every pair of big white teeth" whose path crosses his. There are other incidents more or less like this in the Wiggen chronicle. He is interested, observant, "keeps an eye peeled," but, in the end, never asserts himself in the modest way necessary. His woman is his wife, Holly. When in a phone conversation he mentions to her the seamstitch, she replies:

"Maybe she will do your income tax for you, and nurse your baby through her cold, and write your letters to your fans, and keep on top of insurance matters, and polish up the grammar in your books, and live alone all summer." 

Wiggen asks what else is new. "Well," she said, "today I been repairing the furnace."

The novel thus places bleared scenes of matrimonial realism opposite the hot imaginings of Piney Woods and suggests that the wise man be happy with the former while abjuring the latter. Actually, more than "suggests": a moment before Woods bursts through a door with the seamstitch, one of the Mammoths, Red Traphagen, who is often in these novels the voice of wisdom, says, "Finally what Piney will find out is there is no place on earth like earth, and he will find a woman less than perfect, and if he loves her all he can, and she loves him, and their children, too, that will be the nearest he can expect to the moon."

Traphagen had to state the theme, as you wouldn't want to hear it from a 25-year-old who had won two World Series and twice been named Most Valuable Player.  

Lame duck twitter feed

I once saw a stand-up comic do a bit about ripostes to bumper stickers he'd seen. Part—probably the biggest part—of what made it funny was his droll, deadpan manner. The only example I can remember now was 

If you're rich, I'm single

to which he retorted

If you're single, I can see why.

Maybe the joke was on him, inasmuch as it appears to require the audience to agree that the universe is just, people are decent, and gold-digging never works. He had to be local, not a famous A-lister, else I would never have been at his act. For some reason I remember, or think I "remember," that he quit comedy in order to go into furniture making. The 8-to-5 with a 401K was not for him. 

I think I thought of this fellow this morning for the first time in around 30 years either because

a) I could use some new dining room chairs; or

b) I was watching a news segment today about some of our president's tweets from yesterday and this morning, and it occurred to me that they possess an ineffable quality of trashy throwaway shallowness—the same kind of empty and incriminating cultural artifacts that the comedian was endeavoring to lampoon. 

I think someone clever could create a Twitter account devoted only to replying with zingers to Trump's moronic tweets. Here's the sort of thing I'm talking about:

The restaurant business is being absolutely decimated. Congress should  step up and help. Time is of the essence!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2020

I said "ineffable" because it's kind of a challenge to describe what's wrong. It's just "off," but I'll try to put into words the "offness":

1. The President of the United States as perplexed, innocent bystander.

2. What has befallen the author of Art of the Deal? 

3. "Time is of the essence": such a shopworn expression that it doesn't even come up to the level of a cliche. 

4. You can try to perk up a tired expression with an exclamation point, but it won't change the fact that the restaurant business has been getting "decimated" for months, you're tweeting about it now, and the conclusion to your tardy tweet is, "Time is of the essence!"

Here's another, from this morning:

Rudy Giuliani will be on Greg Kelly Reports. 7:15 P.M. @newsmax

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2020

Newsmax: when you're too full of shit for Fox.

One more:

The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know. The Pennsylvania votes were RIGGED. All other swing states also. The world is watching! https://t.co/zmnk34Ny23

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2020

This one exhibits a layered idiocy that resists the one-line, smart-ass response. Trump retweets, appending his comment, the outrageous allegation of one of his fanboys in the Pennsylvania state legislature. Does he believe the allegation is true? Then it would actually be evidence of the kind of "irregularity" that his team of legal bumblers keeps getting thrown out of court for not possessing. A person of normal adult sophistication, though not Trump, would conclude the allegation is false, since if it were true the president's lawyers would be talking about it in court, and they're not. 

Of course the allegation isn't true. The details, though, are sort of fun. The figures for ballots mailed out (1,823,148) and ballots returned (1,462,302) are from Pennsylvania's presidential primary last June 2. The number of actual mail votes (2,589,242) is from the general election a couple of weeks ago. The dope in the legislature is saying there was fraud because the number of mail ballots cast in the general election exceeds the number that were mailed out for a different election! Then the dope in the White House retweets the dope in the legislature, adding, for good measure, that the laughable error, or artless lie, whichever it is, proves he won Pennsylvania—"by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know."

I mean, I'm not shocked that the president should be a scoundrel, but to my surprise I'm offended that his low character and dim intellect are so easy to perceive. As president, his villainy should be hidden and sinister, to honor his high office.

 

Sotomayor and pope spike Gorsuch's lob serve

The Supreme Court's decision striking down restrictions on religious services in New York State was announced a few ticks before midnight on Thanksgiving Eve. The restrictions were intended to combat the spread of Covid-19 and had been recommended by public health officials. I at first was inclined to attribute the timing of the announcement to sheepishness, such as probably explains the language, in Bush v Gore, about how the case was "unusual" and the Court's decision therefore not to be regarded as a precedent. But Justice Gorsuch doesn't sound sheepish:

At the same time, [New York] Governor [Cuomo] has chosen to impose no capacity restrictions on certain businesses he considers "essential." And it turns out the businesses the Governor considers essential include hardware stores, acupuncturists, and liquor stores. Bicycle repair shops, certain signage companies, accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents are all essential, too. So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew that public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?

I'm not a graduate of an Ivy League law school, but I have been to church and liquor stores, also hardware stores and bike shops, and am here to tell you that Justice Gorsuch's reasoning faculties appear to have been overcome by a desire to make a rhetorical splash. When I "pick up another bottle of wine" at South Lyndale Liquors, I do not sit, for an hour or more, in an enclosed space, potentially shoulder-to-shoulder with vocalizing fellow parishioners who, in the ordinary course of things, recite aloud prayers and liturgies and belt out hymns. It's perfectly obvious that, considering what we know about how the coronavirus spreads, religious services are poisonous compared to the activities to which Justice Gorsuch implausibly connects them. This isn't  theoretical. The CDC has linked a single church choir practice in Washington State to 52 new infections resulting in three hospitalizations and two deaths. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have forsworn public health recommendations in order to pursue their usual religious practices, have fueled outbreaks in New York City. The same calamitous effect has played out within orthodox communities in Israel. 

There are activities that, for purposes of limiting the spread of Covid-19, are roughly analogous to religious services. These would include, for example, musical and theater performances, stand-up comedy shows, spectator sports, and indoor dining and bar service. There is a reason Justice Gorsuch doesn't compare religious services to any of these activities that they actually resemble. The reason is that New York State has subjected them to the same kinds of restrictions that it applied to religious services. Justice Sotomayor's dissenting opinion hits the bullseye:

Unlike religious services, which "have every one of th[ose] risk factors," Brief for AMA 6, bike repair shops and liquor stores generally do not feature customers gathering inside to sing and speak together for an hour or more at a time. Id., at 7 ("Epidemiologists and physicians generally agree that religious services are among the riskiest activities"). Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily. . . .

Like the States in South Bay and Calvary Chapel, New York applies "[s]imilar or more severe restrictions . . . to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time." Ibid. Likewise, New York "treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods." Ibid. That should be enough to decide this case. 

So it is possible after all to ascend to the Supreme Court while maintaining a grip on the obvious! I suppose, however, that Justice Sotomayor, having been appointed by a Democratic president (Obama), can be dismissed as a purveyor of "secular convenience." How about the pope? It happens that on Thanksgiving Day the New York Times published on its Op-Ed page an essay on this general topic by Pope Francis, who wrote:

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak. 

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions—as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

It is all too easy for some to take an idea—in this case, for example, personal freedom—and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

Amen Fran! I'm with you on this one.

Sports books

According to my parents, when I was first old enough to express wishes at Christmas or as my birthday approached, I always asked for "a book and a ball," which shows I guess that at least some people don't change much after they're three years old. Naturally, I got a lot of sports books as gifts, and I have to say that most of them were a disappointment. The fiction was corny and unrealistic; the biographies were worshipful; the histories as sanitary as the bios. Babe Ruth keeps his promise to hit a home run for a sick boy in the hospital! I read them all anyway, repeatedly. When I got older, I found my way to grittier fare, like Instant Replay, Ball Four, and Foul (about the basketball player, Connie Hawkins). I think I liked them mainly because they seemed like great snags of phlegm in an apparently bottomless can of whitewash. 

The disappointments persisted, however. I read and loved a novel by Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, and so was really eager to consume his "baseball novel" called The Natural, which turned out to be a colossal bore. I suppose mainly it just wasn't what I expected, since I was interested in baseball as baseball, the game itself, whereas in the novel it's just a kind of vehicle for the delivery of an American Arthurian legend—this probably isn't fair, the only thing I remember for sure is being bored. The movie starring Robert Redford is also dull and it's possible that one, the movie or the book, is more oppressive than the other and that I'm conflating the two. 

Ring Lardner is who I should have loved. I reacted against the phony elevation of sports and sports stars and no one more savagely knocked down the pedestal erected for them than Lardner. To give a taste, here are a few sentences from a 5-page essay on Lardner by Elizabeth Hardwick, a sure guide to any topic she ever took up:

[H]is subjects are dishonesty, social climbing, boastfulness, and waste. . . .  Lardner's characters have every mean fault, but they lack the patience to do much with their meanness. The busher is boastful and stingy, and yet quite unable, for all his surface shrewdness, to discover his real place in the scheme of things. He is always being dropped by the women he had boasted about and all his stinginess cannot help to manage his affairs. Lardner's stories are filled with greedy, grasping people who nevertheless go bankrupt. . . .  Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. . . .  "Haircut" is one of the cruelest pieces of American fiction. Even Lardner seems to have felt some need for relief from the relentless evil of the smalltown joker and so he has him killed in the end. This cruel story is just about the only one that has the contrast of decent people preyed upon by a maniac. . . . [Lardner] wrapped his dreadful events in a comic language, as you would put insecticide in a bright can.

I say I should have loved him, but if, as Hardwick suggests, the author himself could not bear the "relentless evil" of his fictions, why shouldn't I have the same desire to escape? (I have that desire.) Just because there's a lot of sentimental rubbish about doesn't mean the whole world and everyone in it is sogged in sewage water. At first Lardner thrills you, you laugh at the jokes, which as they accrue are more plainly bitter ones, an aspect of the cold blank stare at depravity made trivial by its small objects, like "getting ahead," and finally making one's way through The Ring Lardner Reader is a suffocating slog. I think I persisted through 650 pages only on account of the puritanical notion that what's begun ought to be finished. Maybe one month I'll do it again since I'm also subject to the belief that unpleasantness is good for you. The jokes, or gags, might be funny if it were possible to divorce them from the underlying bitterness, which is unrelenting. From "A Caddy's Diary":

Mr. Thomas is one of the kind of players that when it has took him more than 6 shots to get on the green he will turn to you and say how many have I had caddy and you are suppose to pretend like you were thinking a minute and then say 4, then he will say to the man he is playing with well I did not know if I had shot 4 or 5 but the caddy says it is 4. You see in this way it is not him that is cheating but the caddy but he makes it up to the caddy afterwards with a $1.00 tip. 

Enjoyable by the half pint but not the tanker load.

Lardner, however, has a successor, Mark Harris, who puts to gentler use some of Lardner's subjects, techniques, and stratagems. I'm thinking of Harris's series of four novels narrated by baseball pitcher Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths. I've written about these books before, here and here; they are the closest thing I know to exceptions to the rule I've been describing about sports fictions being generally disappointing. Whereas Lardner's athletes get kicked off the pedestal to join a democratic parade of human depravity, Harris makes them participants in a human comedy. Lardner's world of depravity is in Harris transmuted into something more like mere folly and the folly is ameliorated by humor, high spirits, and an admixture of visible decency percolating occasionally to the surface. There are neither saints nor villains. My own heterodox opinion is that the first in the series, The Southpaw (1953), is the weakest, and that successive installments keep getting better and better, concluding with the last and best, It Looked Like Forever (1979)—though I'll admit that the third book in the series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), is by far the briefest and seems less ambitious than the others. Before the Thanksgiving weekend is over I'll write something more about the Wiggen books, with an eye perhaps toward explaining my fondness for the one about the seamstitch. I feel lucky—thankful—to enjoy solitary pursuits like reading that aren't precluded by public health considerations, especially since I also like restaurants and bars. At the neighborhood joint, I used to nurse beers through an entire ball game, plus a burger or small pizza at halftime or during the middle innings, but those days are gone for now. It's probably good for my liver that I'm bookish.

Stay safe! Happy Thanksgiving!

Last golf of the year

Straightening up around the house, which I do twice a year whether it needs it or not, I found this golf scorecard mixed in with some unopened mail. On inspection, it shows my scores for what turned out to be my last round of the year, on an October Wednesday at Pheasant Acres Golf Course in Rogers, or Corcoran, or another of those amorphous northwestern exurbs. For me, an approximately typical day on the links: a disastrous front nine out of which I salvaged mediocrity by playing the last eight holes in five over par. 

Trying now to remember anything of interest, I recall that my second shot on the eleventh hole was really good—a 7- or maybe 8-iron to within about 10 feet of the hole. Missed the birdie putt, naturally. For some reason, I also remember the last hole. Long but crooked drive, way right. Trees prevented me from aiming my second at the green, but I could hit low, just to the left of a tree trunk, toward the very left front edge of the green. I did that pretty well and, since the pin was at the front of the green, I was probably only 15 yards from the hole. I chipped it close and one of my charitable partners who was already on the green knocked the ball back to me—appropriate, as there was probably about a 60 percent chance I'd have made the putt. A rock solid par on the card!

I can't remember a thing about the front 9. How did I manage to make a 7 on the sixth hole, a nondescript par 4 of no special difficulty?  Must have missed my putt for a 6 but the memory is gone. We sat outside afterwards, and I think I had whiskey, not beer, because it was a little chilly plus I like whiskey.

Sometimes, when I've played golf and had a couple, I like to imagine that the game had never been invented and some drinkers in their drunkenness were making it up. You have these sticks, some with mallets and others with blades at the end, and you grip the opposite end and whack this ball off the ground. It's about the size of a ping pong ball, but with a hard cover and wound tight so that it flies nice if you catch it right. Around a quarter of a mile away, there is a hole in the ground about twice as big as the ball. The object is to strike the ball into this distant hole using as few "hits" as possible. Various factors abet and hinder the goal. The sticks are specially designed, different ones for different distances. On your first "hit," you get to prop the ball up on a peg, so that you can really whack it with a "mallet stick"; after that, you can only strike the ball as it lies on the ground, for which the bladed sticks are designed, though you can't hit the ball as far with them. Once you start hitting, you can't touch the ball: you just have to keep striking it again and again from wherever the last strike caused it to come to rest. The area between the starting point and the hole is free of obstructions, just grass cut short, but, if you hit it crooked, there might be long grass, trees, water, or—I know this sounds odd but we've been drinking—sand pits off to the sides. Once you get close to the hole, however, there is a special kind of grass, cut very short, so that the ball rolls easily along it, though since the ground might be sloped you can't always aim right at the hole but have to judge how much the ball will curve after you start it rolling with the stick designed for use on the special grass.

Now you're on your third drink and the question arises: about how many times do you think you'd have to hit the ball to get it into this hole a quarter mile away? I think I'd say 20, maybe 30. I couldn't imagine 18 separate tests or trials: it would take more than a day. Maybe one thing I like about this exercise is that it makes me feel okay about averaging around 5, maybe 6 on the ones no closer than a quarter mile. Have to admit that the technology for the equipment, especially the sticks, is really very good and benefits me more than I'd imagine possible, even if others seem to derive even greater benefits. 

More oddities

I. The rural and small town versus metropolitan political chasm was vividly displayed in this year's presidential election result within my home state of Minnesota. We have 87 counties. Trump carried 74 of them. His cumulative margin in these 74 counties was 310,315 votes. Biden carried the state's biggest county, Hennepin, home to Minneapolis and most of its suburbs, by 322,047 votes. So Biden won Hennepin County by more than Trump won 74 counties combined.

I culled that factoid from this MPR article evaluating State Republican Chair Jennifer Carnahan's claim that Minnesota's result exhibits "extreme abnormalities and statistical variations from Minnesota's historic voter trends." If you're going to click on the link, do it before reading another word because, spoiler alert, she's full of it.

II. Team Trump's clown show gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, since for pure entertainment pleasure it's hard to top Rudy Giuliani shouting "Fraud!" in front of the entry to Four Seasons Total Landscaping next to the dildo shop at a mini-mall in North Philadelphia. More recently, of course, Rudy gave an encore performance while brown rivulets of Just For Men trickled down the creases of his jowls. This might have been on the same day that some other legal sharpies working overtime on behalf of Trump filed an affidavit alleging fraud in Michigan based on returns from Minnesota towns and townships. Who can possibly keep straight the postal abbreviations for all those M-states?  And who could have doubted that Detroit Lakes must be in Michigan? (Because, you know, Detroit.) These lawyers are sophisticated.

But it's odd how pyrotechnic incompetence tends to outshine very prosaic reasons to conclude that Trump's bumblers are gaslighting us. Compared to four years ago, Trump's margin in Kentucky shrank by 4 points, in Kansas by 6 points, in Alaska by 5 points, in South Dakota by 4 points, in Montana by 4 points, etc., etc. Meanwhile, Trump's deficit in Oregon increased by 5 points, in Maine by 7 points, in Virginia by 5 points, in New Hampshire by 7 points, in Colorado by 8 points, etc., etc. No one is questioning these "suspicious" outcomes, yet we are told that shifts toward the Democratic candidate in Michigan (3 points), Pennsylvania (2 points), Arizona (4 points), Georgia (5 points), and Wisconsin (2 points) must be attributed to massive fraud. LOL!

III. When one considers some of the specific complaints of Team Trump, oddness multiplies. In Michigan, for example, their attention is centered on Wayne County, in particular the city of Detroit, where Biden outpolled Trump by 227,865 votes. But Clinton beat Trump in Detroit by 227,189 votes. Massive fraud in Detroit, 2020? Really? Meanwhile, relatively populous parts of western Michigan, such as Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, swung hard against Trump: in 2016, he carried the county by 10,000 votes, but this year he lost it by 22,000. Why does Trump shout "Fraud!" concerning the result in a venue where there was no shift while alleging nothing about one where he incurred a 30,000-plus meltdown?--enough, on its own, to put the state in Biden's column, since in 2016 Trump carried Michigan by only about 11,000 votes.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with a calculation about whether his supporters might be more ready to believe a lie about Detroit than a lie about Grand Rapids.

IV. I'll admit that there are people I'm ready to believe the worst about, too—for example, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota. If her state were a country, it would have ranked second in the world for most new COVID cases per capita since October 1 (unless North Dakota were also a country, in which case Kristi's state takes the bronze). Yet the governor apparently has nothing better to do than go on Fox News to yammer about freedom, except for the days when she's posting to social media pictures of herself carrying a shotgun in a corn field. Here's an oddity: more people have died of COVID in South Dakota than in South Korea.

The population of South Dakota is 885,000. The population of South Korea, which has about half the area of South Dakota, is 51.7 million. South Korea and the United States reported their first COVID cases on the same day, January 20, 2020. 

TDS

 

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you"—I had always attributed this quip to a Woody Allen character, which isn't altogether wrong, but having googled it this morning I see that Allen apparently was appropriating a passage from the Joseph Heller novel Catch-22. It seems like the underlying principle might be expanded. Just because you can't sleep at night doesn't prove you got nothing to worry about. Speaking personally, what some people call my TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) doesn't prove the current occupant isn't worthy of contempt. He hasn't done anything since Election Day to make me recant. Ever since the guy he mocked for holing up in the basement beat him, Trump's been holed up in the White House with Twitter. (I know, an exaggeration: he's gone golfing a few times.) Meanwhile, the COVID body count is accruing at the rate of about three 9/11s per week. I guess it's never gotten warm enough for the plague to "lift, like a miracle." It's almost as if there was no Plan B to wishful thinking. He gives himself an A+ while admitting that, on account of the Fake News, some people fail to perceive his genius. But just because millions can see you've failed doesn't make you a success.

Trump appears so obsessed with having lost that he can't take obvious steps, like claiming credit for the good news about vaccines. Maybe the problem is that, if vaccines are about to save us, it makes even more sense to listen to people like Fauci, in order to avoid being the last soldier killed before the armistice is signed. But Trump, bored with the crisis, tweets his private grievances, especially the fantasy about how the election was stolen. By chance, the magnitude of his Electoral College loss matches almost exactly the magnitude of his Electoral College victory four years ago—on the morning after which Clinton conceded and Obama invited him to the White House to meet about the transition. His legal maneuverings are so pathetic as to obscure somewhat his intent, which is to remain in office by disenfranchising voters and overturning the election result. I think it was just yesterday, maybe the day before, that the following exchange occurred in a Pennsylvania courtroom:

RUDY GIULIANI: In the plaintiffs' counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity. I'm not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE MATTHEW BRANN: It means you can't.

GIULIANI: Big words, your honor.

Just because Giuliani is as incompetent as his client doesn't prove the country hasn't been driven off a cliff. 

Post game analysis

I'm reading David Copperfield like its first readers did, in installments, only in my case the delay is caused not by a publishing schedule but by an intervening event—the election, the wherefores and whys of the result consuming my attention as if it were a season's worth of Twins games. This morning I came across the above map in The New York Times. As the legend indicates, it shows, at the precinct level, the shift in Georgia's presidential vote from 2016 to 2020. The most immediately striking aspect of the map is the wide blue ring around the south-central part of the Atlanta metro, where the city's African-American population is concentrated. Biden made no gains in the "doughnut hole"—these precincts are so overwhelmingly Democratic that there was hardly any upside for him. He could have hoped to boost turnout in this area, and in fact he did, but not by as much as the state's overall turnout was up. The result was that African-Americans made a smaller part of the Georgia electorate, and, if anything, Trump won a bigger share of their votes: the doughnut hole is mostly whitish pink, not light blue.

But Trump suffered a meltdown in Atlanta's sprawling, populous suburbs. I don't think race plays much of a part in the formation of the doughnut. Some Trumpists have hinted darkly at "voting irregularities" in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, but Biden did no better in these urban centers than Hillary Clinton had four years ago. He might have done a little worse. In Georgia, the suburban ring around Atlanta was the difference maker. For example, in Gwinnett County, in the northeastern part of the blue ring, Biden won by 58-40 compared to Clinton's 50-44. The biggest county in the northwest of the doughnut is Cobb, which went for Clinton by 50-46: Biden carried it by 56-42. The statewide impact of these large swings in suburban counties was augmented by growing populations and high turnouts. In Gwinnett County, the Democratic nominee's raw vote margin went from 19,000 to 75,000; in Cobb County, from 9000 to 56,000. 

It's not black and brown voters who are mainly responsible for supplying these margins. You can get an idea who they are by zooming out from Georgia. Sean Trende, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, posted to Twitter today a list of the 50 states ranked by the percentage of eligible voters who are white with a college degree. "Can you spot the pattern?" Trende asked. Well, in the top quintile, #1 Maryland through #10 New Mexico, Biden went 10-for-10. In the next quintile, Illinois through Arizona, he went 8-for-10, the exceptions being Texas (12) and Utah (19). Biden only won 25 states, so he was 7-for-30 in the bottom three quintiles. That's a lot of correlation!

It's sort of comical to contemplate Republicans reflexively blaming a presidential election loss on the cheating inner-city blacks & browns. They think they have an Atlanta-Philadelphia-Detroit-Minneapolis problem, and they're not all wrong about that, but what's really dimmed their prospects now is a Marietta-Upper Darby Township-Bloomfield Hills-Minnetonka problem. 

The presidential race: not that close, but very close

I think some of my like-minded fellows, perhaps eager to dump on Trump, have been overstating the magnitude of Biden's victory in the presidential race. For example, one claim in wide circulation holds that "not since FDR defeated Hoover in 1932 has a challenger received a higher percentage of the national vote than Biden." Unless I'm overlooking something, this is a true fact, not an alternate one, but it also elides other relevant facts, such as that since 1932 only three incumbents seeking another term have been defeated. These were Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and Geo H W Bush in 1992, the victors being Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, respectively. Perhaps the rarity of an incumbent losing might be adduced to add to Trump's humiliation, but in two of those three other instances there was an independent third party candidate who pulled a significant percentage of the vote: Ohio congressman John Anderson got about 7% of all votes cast in 1980, and Texas businessman Ross Perot got close to 20% of the vote in 1992. It was these relatively successful third-party candidacies that held Reagan's share of the vote (50.7%) and Clinton's (43.0%) below Biden's share, which currently stands at 50.9%. The Reagan and Clinton victories were both somewhat wider than Biden's in terms of percentage margin over their nearest rival. 

Another thing one hears is that in 2016 Trump won the presidency by less than 78,000 votes across three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and that this year Biden won those states by well over 230,000. This is another true fact. The problem is that the comparison isn't parallel. Trump's three narrowest victories in the named states boosted his electoral vote count from 260 to 306. Biden's three narrowest victories are going to be in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (not Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), and those wins lifted his electoral vote tally from 269 to 306. So both Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 crossed the 270 finish line with their third narrowest victory, then settled at 306 by adding their second narrowest and narrowest wins. But while Trump's margin was just under 78,000 in his three states, Biden's looks as if it's going to be under 50,000 in his. Biden won the Electoral College by less than Trump did.

Another true statement about the election, one that I think isn't in any respect misleading, would be that Trump, though he is going to lose the popular vote by at least 51-47 percent, in the range of 6 to 7 million ballots, came within a shallow breath of "winning" the election. Or try another formulation, also true. Trump, to get 306 electoral votes in 2016, had only to come within 3 million of his opponent. In 2020, Biden did 9 million better than that—he's going to win by at least 6 million instead of lose by 3 million—and also got 306 electoral votes. The Washington Post draws the necessary conclusion. 

Fiddling, burning

700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020

Not a parody account. 

Meanwhile, in other news, a Utah hospital reports that it has turned away a group of COVID skeptics trying to enter the ICU with video cameras for the purpose of proving that reports of sick people filling all the beds are fake news. They should take their cameras on down the road to El Paso, where props for the fake news include ten mobile morgues traveling between hospitals and funeral parlors. 

Black mood being brightened a bit by the sound of my kids and the neighbor girl shouting at each other in English accents as they play Harry Potter upstairs. 

Oddities

Clicking around on the New York Times election map, I stumbled on this result, from Los Angeles County:

Biden     2,947,568

Trump    1,107,090

In terms of percent, this was 71.2 to 26.7, a familiar story about a Democratic landslide in a major metropolitan area. But more than a million votes for Trump! He currently has around 72.4 million in the whole country, so that's more than 1 percent of his total out of a single county in which he got about one vote out of every four.

I have a kind of grudging respect for the Trump voter in LA County. The Electoral College makes their ballot worthless. They know there's no way Trump is going to win California's electoral votes. If they cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes; and, if they don't cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes. It's impossible for them to help Trump win. They know this beforehand. At the presidential level, they are as a practical matter disenfranchised. Yet they vote anyway. Of course, the ones who don't vote aren't reflected in the tally. I wonder how many of them there are.

I had the idea to click around some more to see how many states Trump won with fewer votes than he got in LA County. I think the answer is 14. They are, in no particular order: Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Alaska. In all these states, a vote for Trump helped him win a packet of electoral votes—a total of 65 of them, which is 10 more than California has, even though California's population is roughly half again as great as that of these 14 states combined.  Since you don't get any electoral votes for losing a county, more than a million Trump votes in LA County were lost in the Electoral College shuffle. Of course, in other venues the vote massacre cuts in the other direction. In the recent past, more Democratic votes have been wiped out. This year, for example, Biden, whose advantage in the national vote is 5.3 million and growing, prevailed in the Electoral College only because he won three states—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—by a total of fewer than 50,000 ballots. 

The Georgia run-offs, which will determine control of the Senate, are going to consume attention between now and January 5. In the new Senate, there will be 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and two seats yet to be determined from Georgia. Of the 48 Democrats, two will be from California. The residents of LA County will share those two senators with around 30 million other Californians. Of the 50 Republican senators, 26 will be from the 14 states identified above. Leaving Georgia out of it, 21 states will be represented by two Democrats, 22 others will be represented by two Republicans, and six will have one senator from each party. The population of the 21 states represented by two Democrats is about 157 million. The population of the 22 states represented by two Republicans is about 126 million. Assuming a Republican wins at least one of the Georgia runoffs, we will be told, for example when climate change legislation is blocked in the Senate or Biden nominates a new justice to the Supreme Court, that "the American people" wanted Republicans to control the Senate. But it won't be true. The Democratic minority will represent many millions more Americans than the Republican majority. 

 

Fraud?

Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016

This is what Trump always does when he loses. The identity of his opponent is irrelevant. It's just a reflex, like the one that causes you to gag.

I've been reading up on some of the election fraud allegations, with an eye toward debunking them. The problem is that the allegations tend to be so sketchy that they do not really permit a non-sketchy rebuttal. For example, the referent of pronouns is always unknown: who is the corrupt and cheating "they"? Presumably, sinister operatives loyal to the Democratic party who possess unlimited subtle skills which they nevertheless chose not to exercise in races for the Senate, House of Representatives, and state legislatures. As is often the case, it's pretty easy to discern a racial undertone to some of the complaints—for example, vague references to "what's happening in Detroit and Philadelphia." Since we aren't told exactly what's happening, let's check the results. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton carried Detroit's county by 66.4 to 29.3 percent; Biden's margin in the county is 68.0 to 30.6 percent. Hillary Clinton carried Philadelphia's county by 82.3 to 15.3 percent; Biden is winning the county by 80.9 to 18.1 percent. 

The obvious conclusion is that the 2016 election in these venues was fair but that this year there was "massive fraud." 

I'll mention another tactic that involves a kind of dangling, unspecific accusation that seems intended to foster suspicion and distrust. By this technique, the alleger of fraud adopts a pose of requisite skepticism regarding the high rates of voter turnout in the crucial Great Lakes states won by Biden. For example:

Wisconsin has 3,684,726 active registered voters.

They counted 3,288,771 votes.

That's, um, a bit unbelievable.

89% turnout? Ok sure. 🙄

— HARLAN Z. HILL 🇺🇸 (@Harlan) November 4, 2020

If 89 percent turnout seems high, that is because "voter turnout" is usually defined as votes cast divided by eligible voters. This fellow is redefining it as votes cast divided by registered voters. Fine, but if that's the way you want to do it, then "89 percent turnout" isn't unusual, since—believe it or not!—registered voters are very much more likely to vote than people who aren't registered. Moreover, the distortion is amplified by the fact that Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration and these ballots are included in his numerator (votes cast) but not his denominator (which is the number of registered voters in Wisconsin at sunrise on election day). Just a fundamentally dishonest apples-to-oranges "analysis."

Hill, a Republican political consultant who was fired by Fox News after tweeting that Kamala Harris is an "insufferable lying bitch," purports to show that there must have been voter fraud in Wisconsin. Alas, it's simply a case of him being a lying hack—unless he's fooled by his own crapola, in which case he's a dope. 

Pointy headed college girls and boys

I was texting yesterday with someone whose political views are a near match for my own—my sister, so no light shed on the nature v. nurture question as both genes and environment overlap. I teased her that the Minnesota county she lives in, Rice, had voted for Trump by 69 votes. She held out hope that the estimated 5% of outstanding ballots would lift Biden over the top. If that happened, Rice would be the fifth Minnesota county that went from red in 2016 to blue in 2020. The other four are Clay, Nicollet, Blue Earth, and Winona. (None went the other direction.) When I ticked through this list, she immediately replied that the county seats of these counties—Moorhead, St. Peter, Mankato, and Winona—are all college towns. Faribault is the county seat for Rice, but the second biggest town is Northfield, where there are two colleges—the road sign welcoming you to town advertises "cows, colleges, and contentment." 

She's onto something, of course. The professors and administrators and support staff, such as the food service workers, prefer the Democrats. Same for the students, though this year most probably voted absentee in the venue where their parents live. If not for a "college effect," I don't know how to account for the voting patterns around these outstate counties. For example, regarding Clay County, where Biden won 51% of the vote: in the county just to the north (Norman), he got 41%; in the county just to the east (Becker), he got 34%; and in the county just to the south (Wilkin), he got 30%. The county just to the west is Cass County, North Dakota, home to Fargo and North Dakota State University. Biden won 47% of the vote there. 

The main campus of the University of Minnesota is in the middle of a major metropolitan area that would be a Dem stronghold in any event. Many of the other Big Ten universities, however, are in relatively small towns. Does a similar pattern hold? Penn State, which is in the middle of nowhere in central Pennsylvania, might be the best test. Here's how the state voted, by county:

Want to take a guess where Penn State is? (It's in the blue county surrounded by red at the very center of the map.) Here's Indiana:

My question is where's Indiana University and my hint is that it's not at Indianapolis. Since there's only two dark blue counties in the state, that's a very good clue. For Iowa, no clue needed:

Got it, right? Johnson County, home to Iowa City, which is in turn home to the University of Iowa, is the only dark blue one on the map. And on and on it goes, not just in the Big Ten. On the map for North Carolina, you can make out the Research Triangle area in the north central part of the state, where Duke, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State are all served by the same airport. I have a funny story about that. Our dad worked as a physicist and liked telling a story about how, when he was young, there was a conference at one of these three universities. A famous physicist flew in for the event but, perhaps because his mind was full with the contemplation of the actions of subatomic particles, forgot which campus he had to go to. This would have been in the early 1960s. Instead of panicking, he approached one of the uniformed airport assistants who helped you with bags, getting a cab, renting a car, etc. "Say," says the physicist, "if you've noticed a lot of dweeby looking guys coming through, white shirts, pocket protectors, luggage mainly papers and journals and the like, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me which university they're all going to." Worked!

Back then, the conference attendees shared a look but probably divided their votes in roughly equal fashion between candidates of the different parties. Their descendants have a more diverse appearance but form a voting bloc. They aren't likely to support a candidate who holds that climate change is a hoax, and they tend not to regard mask wearing as an absurd or excessive burden on their "freedom." 

More notes and an amendment

The older daughter, on the cusp of teenager-hood, might be near done with speech acts that make me smile, but today she reported a conversation she'd had with a friend.

Her friend: No one despises Trump more than my mom and dad.

My daughter: Um, you might want to reconsider . . . .

The other day, trying to have some snarky fun with Packer and Badger fans, I think I gave a false impression about this year's presidential balloting in the suburbs of Milwaukee. It's true that Milwaukee's suburbs are a lot more Republican-friendly than Twin Cities suburbs. It's also true that Trump carried them by wide margins in both 2016 and 2020. But, after running down the numbers of Trump's steep decline in the suburban counties adjoining Hennepin (Minneapolis) and Ramsey (St. Paul) Counties, I said that from 2016 to 2020 Trump's numbers "barely budged" in the WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington) encircling Milwaukee. Here's the actual percentage numbers for Trump's victories in WOW, first 2016, then 2020:

Waukesha 60-33; 60-39

Ozaukee 56-37; 55-43

Washington 67-27; 68-30

I think my sin was looking only at Trump's number, which doesn't budge. The margin does, however. I won't tax your attention with the arithmetic details, but, in raw votes, Trump in 2016 carried the WOW counties by 104,501. This year, in the votes tabulated so far, essentially all of them, his margin in the WOW counties fell to 96,751. On further review, that's a budge. The statewide swing toward the Democrat was only about 40,000. Almost a fifth of the total was in these three suburban counties.

I watch mainly MSNBC. Their election numbers cruncher, Steve Kornacki, is an ace: energetic but sober, knowledgeable but no pedant. His ability to do arithmetic in his head, on-air at a moment's notice, is preternatural. He also gets points with me for not being a TV dandy. Assuming he changes and launders clothes at a normal rate, I'd gauge he owns six pairs of khaki trousers and eight long-sleeved white shirts, which he always rolls to the elbow for his sessions before The Big Board. One blue blazer that may or may not be his—he rarely wears it. I'm not his only fan. I saw a lady on social media wishing aloud that he'd spend a long night treating her body as if it were a map of Pennsylvania. Touch me in the Lehigh Valley! Erie County! Philadelphia! Philadelphia! Philadelphia!

It's super crazy and weird that we have to obsess over 71 new votes posted out of the state of Georgia while, from sea to shining sea, Biden's lead chugs past 4 million. 

Offhand notes about the election

Whew, this election drama is disrupting my usual sleep schedule. Not an expert on actuarial data pertaining to Supreme Court justices, but the apparent Biden win, together with the recent debacle relating to RBG's death, and the string of Republican victories last night in the most contested senate races, suggest to me that 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer should announce his retirement in the early evening hours of Inauguration Day.  And the Biden team should start looking now for his replacement, some Ivy League legal beagle who doesn't belong to the Federalist Society but does have a healthy lifestyle and the underlying biology of a teenager. 

I shouldn't laugh, because it's repulsive, but Trump is such a child. His two-thirty-in-the-morning statement last night: what a joke. Boils down to, I'm going to catch up in Arizona and Nevada when all the votes are counted; meanwhile "they" are trying to steal the election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—by counting all the votes. It's even better than that when he says it since I'm not up to the challenge of reproducing the clownish aspects of his delivery. It's like nothing anyone has ever seen before. In a tweet, he may have inadvertently hinted at the identity of "they" by referring to "Poles," unless  he meant "polls." 

It just occurred to me, father of daughters, that when Biden delivers his first State of the Union Address the two people sitting behind him—the Speaker of the House and the Vice President—will both be women. It'll be good not seeing Pence back there smiling down on Trump like he was a broad-shouldered John the Baptist or something. 

One thing that's puzzled me, here in the Upper Midwest, is the facts of life relating to other parts of the U.S. For example, why is New Hampshire nothing like Vermont, politically? Are they not, as the election gurus are fond of saying, "geographically, culturally, and demographically similar"? Yet Vermont is one of the bluest states and New Hampshire, I hate the word, a "battleground."

But maybe I should look closer to home for my puzzles. When Scott Walker was governing, so to speak, Wisconsin, we had in Minnesota a Democratic governor. Then in 2016 Wisconsin got into bed with Trump while we only flirted with him. Then last night we walked away from him while Wisconsin almost fell into his bed again. Aren't Minnesotans and Wisconsinites "geographically, culturally, and demographically similar"? Do Leinenkugels kill more brain cells?

Scanning election returns, it appears that the difference is that Twin Citians diverge from the residents of greater Milwaukee. The so-called WOW counties—for Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington—surrounding Milwaukee went for Trump by roughly 2-to-1 in 2016, and last night they barely budged. The Twin Cities suburbs, on the other hand, are behaving more sensibly. Two of our suburban counties, Washington and Dakota, voted narrowly for Hillary Clinton and then for Biden by double-digits last night. In the others, Trump's margins were reduced considerably: in Anoka County from ten points to two, in Scott County from fifteen points to six, and in Carver County from thirteen points to five. Trump's deficit statewide grew from around 40,000 to more than 230,000.

It's going to be obvious that I don't know how to account for this, but I think I've noticed, when traveling into the interior of Wisconsin, that somewhere around Tomah the people start to look different—bigger, especially in the head and hands, with a lot of flesh under the chin and frequently broken blood vessels visible in the cheeks and nose. In my mind, the way the people look is associated with the billboards along the interstate, which advertise the availability, at the next exit, of LIQUOR! CIGARETTES! FIREWORKS! CHEESE! For some reason, it does seem sort of Trumpy, even if Trump himself does not partake in any of the pleasures. I like how, cruising along again, the cheese curds squeak against your teeth as you wonder about the oversized native you just observed smoking a heater while pumping gas. 

Political geography

War, it's said, is God's way of teaching Americans world geography, and I'm pretty sure that I could not name three cities in either Vietnam or Iraq but for two wars fought in my lifetime.

Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)

Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad

If you'll trust I didn't whip up those answers in the cyber ether, I'll confess that the number three was strategically selected. I think that Khe Sanh—

Had a brother at Khe Sanh
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there
He's all gone . . . .

—refers to a region, not a town, so yeah, three's my limit. Just thought of Fallujah, but had to look up how to spell it: maybe only counts if the test is oral. 

Consuming political journalism during an election season, on the other hand, can be a primer in the geography of our own country. For example, I've been reading about the remarkable voter turnout in Texas, where the number of ballots cast in the recently concluded early voting period surpassed the total votes cast in any previous statewide election. Tuesday's voters will only pad the record. Readers of tea leaves are naturally curious about where in the state early voting has been especially heavy, and what this might portend. The usual unit of comparison is the county: that is, ballots cast in a particular county in the 2016 presidential election compared to the number of presidential ballots cast in the same county so far this year. One therefore comes across lists such as this, showing counties with the largest percentage increase (so far):

Hays +20%
Montgomery +18%
Williamson +15%
Denton +14%
Comal +14%
Collin +12%
Fort Bend +11%
Rockwall +6%
Travis +6%
Guadalupe +5%

Nice, but means nothing unless you know where these counties are and what they're like politically. I won't bore you with every detail uncovered in my google searches, but only one county on the list, Travis, is home to a major Texas city, Austin. High turnout there is good news for Biden and M.J. Hegar as Austin is overwhelmingly Democratic: Clinton beat Trump in Travis County by 66 to 27 percent and netted over 180,000 votes. Most of the others are part of a big city metro and are a more mixed bag politically, but what they have in common is large, growing populations that are trending Democratic. In this respect, they resemble the big cities they abut. Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties sandwich Harris, which is home to Houston. In 2012, Obama beat Romney in Harris County by 585 votes and lost the state by about 1.2 million; four years later, when Trump was the Republican candidate, Clinton won the county by 161,959 and lost the state by around 800,000; two years after that, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, challenging incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz, carried Harris County by 201,298 and lost the state by about 215,000. What will happen in 2020?

We'll find out in a few days, but you can see, perhaps, why the Republican party in Texas has asked a federal judge to throw out about 127,000 early votes cast in Harris County. The complaint doesn't allege that the voters did anything wrong. Plaintiffs just object to the method, "drive thru voting," the plan for which had been announced well in advance. The Republicans waited, however, till  127,000 people had voted that way before discovering . . . nothing, really, the voting all came off according to the publicized plan. But it was looking as if the election might be pretty close and they know who appointed the judges. It's voter suppression, straight-up: they hardly bother denying it anymore.

I see I've strayed from my geographical theme!

UPDATE: This afternoon (Nov. 2) the judge, Andrew Hanen, a W Bush appointee with a reputation for being a bit of a conservative crank, told Plaintiff (Republicans): "Get out of here! It's the day before the party, you're late, and you have no standing." (I paraphrase.) The Texas Supreme Court had already said the same thing about the virtually identical state case. So the ballots will be counted (although Hanen also said they should be separated so that, in the event of more litigation, everyone will know which ones they are.)