Sleepy doggerel of unknown origin

Arsen posted an interesting item on Ghulf Genes today (Morning Red, Evening Dead!) on the German phrase "Morgen rot" and its origins and meaning.  I, of course, had nothing so useful to post in reply, but a bit of a phrase I once heard came to mind and I produced this bit of doggerel:

"The early bird gets the worm,"
Or so the much used phrase is turned.
A worm for breakfast? I'd feel forsaken!
The late bird dines on eggs and bacon.

The exact phrasing is probably mine, since I couldn't remember where I'd heard the bit about the late bird dining on bacon and eggs or how I'd heard it phrased.  I wish I could tell you where the concept comes from, but if anybody knows a source for it, let me know and I'll be happy to cite it and its origin properly.

Regardless, I like it!  It makes me want to write an entire book of anti-nursery rhymes.

Photos from Paris: La Tour Eiffel

Yes, we're back from Paris.  I had meant to put up a few posts here with some pictures while we were away.  Alas, the electrical converter that Monique and I brought with us didn't work with our laptop, so there was no photo editing or posting while we were there, and darn little writing of anything since I didn't have a keyboard.  Instead we just had to settle for relaxing with family; taking long, leisurely strolls; and visiting the occasional museum.

Darn.

Since this entire trip was conceived as a relaxing Thanksgiving week family visit with Monique's sister Michelle and her clan -- Max, Stella, Henry, and Malcolm -- relaxing around the apartment and taking the occasional adventurous expedition was just the right pace for us.  It was a splendid visit.

The result of our non-photo-editing in Paris is that we've had a suspiciously 20th-century return from our trip, with the equivalent of 50 or 60 rolls of 24-shot film on a couple of little digital memory cards.  And now that we have our home wi-fi working again (long story) yesterday was like the day on which all those rolls of film came back from the developer.  Since I was home sick yesterday with a cold -- we brought that back from Paris, too -- I occasionally roused myself from the couch and did a bit of sorting of our photographic treasure trove.

If you want to see the big, basic photo album of the trip, your best bet is my Paris 2012 photo album on Facebook.  Unfortunately, you'll need to be logged into Facebook to see it.  You don't necessarily have to friend me, though.  I leave my privacy setting pretty low over there rather than indulge the delusion that there's any privacy on FB.

Instead of replicating the album here for you non-Facebookers (for Pete's sake, just go create an ID/password and lurk, if you're that desperate to see the full slide show) what I thought I'd do over here on the ol' Patio Boat is to write a few posts in which I pick a few pictures from the trip, then talk about them in a bit more depth, either with a bit of the story behind the photo or maybe a bit about why I like that particular photo.

So, let's start with the photo of the Eiffel Tower that I posted first over on FB, mostly as a test of our newly restored wi-fi:

This photo was one of a batch of Tour Eiffel photos I took on the evening of our first Sunday as Monique and I strolled along the Seine.  Incidentally, we didn't really intend to stroll along the Seine on Sunday night.  We intended to go to Musée du Stylo et de l'Écriture, which we dug out of our Lonely Planet: Paris guide book, and which is only open on Sundays from 2 pm to 6 pm.

Or, I should say, I supposedly open on Sundays from 2 pm to 6 pm.  Because when we arrived there at 4 pm on Sunday, this is what we found:

(photo by Monique)

Yes, that's me standing indignantly in front of the shuttered museum.  I'm not sure why it was closed, but it's really just a little museum and is probably a one-person show.  Now we'll have to go back to Paris to see the world's greatest collection of pens and historical handwriting.

Darn.

Since the museum was a no-go, we decided to stroll through the neighborhood down to the Seine, then along the Seine towards the Eiffel Tower. We're both quite fond of walking along the Seine in the evening after the initial plan doesn't work out, since I proposed to Monique on a stroll like that.

We eventually ended up at the Pont Bir-Hakeim, which is a nifty historic bridge ...

(photo by Monique)

... with a great view up the Seine to the Eiffel Tower:

I like the framing of the first photo above because of the framing of the trees on the left and the broader sweep of the Seine in the foreground.  But this one came out dandy, too.  We actually took quite a few photos at this spot. Most of them didn't come out well because we were trying to get ourselves in the photo, so we either ended up with the foreground overexposed by flash or the foreground totally dim.

One of my favorite photos from my first trip to Paris was an Eiffel Tower shot like this, with the light of the tower reflecting off the Seine.

BTW, the phrase "took quite a few photos ... but most of them didn't come out well" is pretty much my key photographic strategy.  I like to think that I have a decent eye for framing things in the shot, but I will gladly admit that my camera (a Canon Rebel EOS T3i) is generally smarter about light exposures than I am.  So unless I have something very specific in mind (and the owner's manual in hand!) I generally let one of the automated settings do the heavy lifting. What surprises me is how often the first shot turns out to be the best shot.

I caught a couple more pretty good shots as we walked up towards the Trocadero:

The Eiffel Tower is, of course, so synonymous with Paris that it's become the ultimate tourist stereotype.  Sometimes you feel really un-hip pointing at it or taking photos of it. But it's also a lovely symbol for the city, in great part because of how it manages to pop out over rooftops or on the horizon at unexpected moments:

Photographically, it's just hard to take a badly composed shot of La Tour Eiffel because of its lines and the way it sweeps to a peak while crossing the horizon.  However it is possible to have photos of the Eiffel Tower go awry for a wide variety of other reasons, especially when you're shooting at night. One of our favorite views of the Eiffel Tower is from the window of my niece Stella's bedroom.  For the first day or two we were in Paris it was too foggy to see the Eiffel Tower from Stella's window, but on our first Saturday night there it finally popped out:

This is one of a long series of nighttime photos through Stella's window that didn't work out quite as intended because of low light and hand shake.  Next time we're in Paris I'll bring a tripod and just set it up next to her bed for the week. I'm sure she won't mind.

Even though none of the photos from Stella's window turned out crisply, some of them ended up looking pretty cool, anyway, especially since my zoom lens required such a long exposure:

This was one of a long series of blurry Tour Eiffel photos we took during the week.  In the evenings the tower also "shimmers" for about five minutes every hour on the hour.  It's a great looking effect that undoubtedly requires a bazillion strobe lights.  It also led to these two funky looking shots, which I'm quite fond of:

In the end, a couple of my favorite shots we took of the Eiffel Tower were from the misty day Monique and I toured the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, which is fairly close to Michelle's apartment on Rue Menilmontant.  As we climbed the hill, the fog lifted just enough for us to see it in the distance, keeping watch over all:

And that's how I think of La Tour Eiffel.  Always there, keeping watch over all Paris, past, present, and future:

The post in which this week's media obsession leads me to a brief rant

After a sordid week in the news I would like to state for the record that I have as little interest in the sex lives of our heterosexual soldiers as I have in the sex lives of our homosexual soldiers.  And I find none of it to be particularly relevant to the job at hand, fighting and winning wars.

I know that the military has enjoyed a completely chaste reputation throughout all history -- especially sailors on shore leave, renowned for their tendency to attend a brief church service before sipping a cup of tea and returning to their ship -- but I find it hard to fathom that in 2012 A.D. we are tossing generals overboard because of what they're doing with other consenting adults.  It's hard enough to find a good general, so frankly I don't care if he spends his off-hours hanging by his ankles from the ceiling at Mistress Crunchita's House o'Pain as long as he's doing a good job with his chunk of the war.

This seems a good time to remind everybody that by what seems to be our new standard, FDR and Eisenhower were unfit to lead us during World War II.  I'm just as happy we didn't throw them overboard for the second string.

Here's what I think these straying generals deserve: a few months on the couch, some frosty stares from their wives, and a few jokes at their expense.  (Yes, it is fair that "Hey there, hot stuff, want to write my biography?" is now America's favorite new pickup line, finally knocking, "Hey there, hot stuff, let's hike the Appalachian Trail," off its lofty perch.)

I will also admit that I have no idea what to make of the shirtless FBI guy, but as always with these sorts of things, it's mostly a question of whether the photo in question was welcomed by its recipient or unwanted.  Again: consenting adults.

As long as the media and Congress seem to have infinite time and resources to investigate sex scandals in the military, here's a real sex scandal for them:  the Defense Department estimates that 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the armed forces last year, but only 3,000 service members reported being assaulted, and about 240 cases were prosecuted.

There, there's your real scandal.  Go spend some ink on that.

In the meantime, we're still a nation at war, and it would be nice if everybody spent more time focusing on that instead of indulging in all this prurient hand-wringing over these pecadillos.

Four quick thoughts on yesterday's election

I have all sorts of thoughts about yesterday's election, but have instead been busy as heck at work all day and am running off to a village water management board meeting, so I'm just going to type like heck for a few minutes and let fly.

1) Congratulation, Democrats.  Don't get cocky.  The GOP somehow managed to nominate the living embodiment of everything that's gone wrong in our economy. Then he ran on a platform of everything that's wrong with GOP economic theory these days combined with a breathtaking cynicism and contempt for the truth.

And we still only managed to beat him by a few percent. More thoughts on what we should be doing better in the future later.

But in the meantime, despite my criticism above I'm extremely proud that we re-elected Barack Obama as president.  All in all I think he did a very good job in a difficult situation during his first four years. And I'm excited to see what he does with the next four.


2) Republicans, you don't want to hear this from me, but you've now been defeated in the popular vote for president in five of the last six elections.  If you want this trend to continue, by all means come away from this election thinking that the problem was that Mitt Romney wasn't nearly conservative enough.

Your real problem is that apparently most of you have abandoned reality for the Fox News / Rush Limbaugh fantasy bubble.  One thing I used to like about conservative opinion was that it prided itself on being a fact-based alternative to the muddle-headed fuzzy thinking of liberals who preferred wish-fulfilment policies to reality. Now the Democratic Party seems to have a monopoly on science and math and reality.

If you bought into your punditry's criticism of the polls or its criticism of Nate Silver's analysis of the polls, last night you got a good dose of how far from reality you've been living over the last four years.  And guess what? It hasn't just been polling.  It's been pretty much everything.  You can either plunge back into denial or you can begin to deal with it like an adult.

You want to compete for votes in the 21st Century?  Here's a place to start: global warming is real and man-made. What should we do about it?  If you want to argue that point by denying climate change or its causes, you're not ready to govern in the 21st Century. You deserve the future drubbings you're going to take at the polls.


3) The gerrymander is alive and well.  I'll do the math later, but the outcome in this race would've looked much different if we had fair and competitive legislative seats at the federal, state, and county levels.  There was a lot of attention yesterday on all the ways that some people were disenfranchised at the polls. But there's not nearly attention paid to the ways in which we're all disenfranchised by the redistricting process before the voting even starts.

3A) The Electoral College must go.


4) For the most part I'm really proud of the way voters cut through a lot of tough decisions yesterday.  But there was one item that made me think that 10,809 voters in my own township need to go back to Remedial Voter school.  From the Spinal Column's Election Results Coverage:

Commerce Township Clerk

Even though township Clerk Dan Munro said he would resign the clerk’s job if elected in the Tuesday, Nov. 6 general election to work in the private sector, voters overwhelmingly chose him over independent candidate Janet Bushey, who Munro is backing. 

Munro received 66 percent of the vote (10,809 votes) to Bushey’s 33 percent (5,376 votes).

Munro has stated publicly that if he was elected, he would resign effective in January 2013 and recommend that the township Board of Trustees appoint Bushey. 


If you voted for Dan Munro for Commerce Township clerk yesterday, you might want to consider that you're letting the "R" next to a name lead you into some bad decisions in the ol' voting booth.  Dan's a good guy, but he took another job, and was only on the ballot because it was too late to get off the ballot.  For Pete's sake, he endorsed his opponent!

And then she lost to him by 33%!!!

I get that I live in a Republican-leaning area and that it was a long, long ballot.  But, seriously, some of you need to pay a bit more attention to what you're doing.

If that ballot was a car, I'd be issuing 10,809 of you a traffic ticket and sending you back to remedial driving school.

Presidential Campaign Update: One Week Remaining. (Thank God!)

A week from now, the presidential campaigns will be trying to drag the last few recalcitrant voters to the polls before collapsing in exhaustion as they await the final result. (The polls close at 8 pm here in Michigan. Results begin to flow by 9 pm.)  Usually campaign workers themselves are the most tired people in all the land by the end of Election Day, since most of them finish the last four days in a doughnut-and-caffeine driven sleepless frenzy.  Honestly, I've known campaign workers who were so tired by the time the polls closed that they went home, fell asleep, and didn't even find out the result until the next morning.

But this time around, I'm pretty sure all of America is equally tired of this campaign.  And why not? Thanks to an entrenched opposition in Congress and broadcast platforms dominated by Fox News and the various right-wing radio commentators it has lasted for all four years of Obama's presidency. As a Democrat I would've greatly appreciated it if Obama had begun campaigning himself in response, since he left the field open for the GOP electoral wave of 2010.  But after two years or so of his re-election campaign, I must confess that I've now had more than my fill of fundraising pleas and viral videos from the home team, too.

Worse yet, since I decided in an act of sheer masochism to pay attention to the GOP primary and write a few blog posts about it, I've been paying far too much attention to the whole thing myself for nearly a year.

Believe me, I'm as ready as anybody for 8 pm on Nov. 6 to arrive!

So what I can I write as it all comes down to the end that you haven't already read a hundred times on a hundred other blog posts?  What have I learned in the last year that's worth passing along?

Well, let's see.  Since the last post I wrote was back in mid-September when Obama had gained a lead in the polls while Romney was still in mid-implosion from his intemperate remarks around Libya and the 47% tape, a quick recap of events since then might be in order.

The biggest development since then was the debates, especially Romney's decisive victory in the first debate in Denver.  Going into that night Obama had opened enough of a lead that an excellent chance had developed that some of the GOP SuperPACs would pull much of their funding from the presidential race and redirect it into the Congressional races.  Romney's victory didn't just close the gap in the polls. It rescued his campaign's ability to muster the resources they would need to compete down the stretch. Obama flubbed the one real opportunity either campaign has had to deliver a knockout blow.

Fortunately for the Dems after a couple of weeks of full-panic mode, Obama bounced back with better performances in the final two debates to right the ship and return the race to what it has pretty much been all along ... a really close national race with a slight edge for Obama in a few Midwestern swing states, most notably Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  (As always, I recommend Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.com blog for a good look at the overall state of the polls.)

So, what do Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan have in common?

Yup, it's the auto industry.  Barrels of virtual ink have already been spilled online about how this race may ultimately come down to 2009 and what Romney wrote ("Let Detroit Go Bankrupt") versus what Obama did to rescue the auto industry when it faced bankruptcy and dissolution.  I'll simply add that I think there's a lot of justice if this election comes down to that one issue.  It's a good distillation of their core beliefs, and in retrospect it's quite apparent that Obama made the right call.

I expected the debates to be the last newsworthy event in the campaign.  Then Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast last night and caused widespread damage.  It's too early to tell whether there will be any impact on the final voting numbers, but it seems likely to be a good test of Obama's efforts to revamp FEMA and to improve the nation's disaster response. The chance to act Presidential during the last week of the campaign has to be good news for Obama, especially given the contrast with Romney's remarks during a primary debate in favor of eliminating or privatizing federal disaster relief.  A few kind remarks from New Jersey Governor and GOP keynoter Chris Christie probably don't hurt, either.

(In saner times Christie's remarks would go under the heading of "common courtesy during a disaster".  But one week before Election Day is not a sane time, so Christie's comments seem to have caused quite a stir among the punditocracy today.)

However, the truth is that there are very, very few undecided voters left at this point.  The vast majority of the electorate will watch this crisis play out with partisan eyes, especially since they will generally watch the disaster response play out this week through media channels that will reinforce their preconceived notions.  I have a sneaky suspicion that Fox News won't discuss climate change much this week, but MSNBC will invoke Hurricane Katrina more than a thousand times 'twixt now and Nov. 6. Righteous indignation will rise on both sides, but few minds will be changed.

In nitty-gritty electoral details, the states that suffered the most damage weren't particularly in play this year, though Virginia, Ohio, and New Hampshire did all receive a bit of damage from the storm.  I'd guess that nothing that comes out of the Sandy aftermath is likely to change many minds in Ohio or to motivate a sporadic voter in Virginia to show up on Nov. 6.  But I do predict that pundits will cite Sandy and its aftermath as a key turning point, no matter who wins when the votes are counted.

What else have we learned from this election? Well, I did recently finish off a really interesting book called The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg. It had a lot to say about how genuine campaign experimentation has taken hold in a lot of corners of the campaign biz, and how the results are changing the ways that campaigns try to reach voters to change minds and push them to the polls.  But if you want to know more about it, rather than drag you through the details let me send you to this recent Slate article written by Issenberg: Obama Does It Better: When it comes to targeting and persuading voters, the Democrats have a bigger advantage over the GOP than either party has ever had in the modern campaign era.  I'm not sure I entirely agree with the conclusion in the article's title, but it's an interesting read and you'll learn a ton about modern campaigning.

And that's about it.  The 2012 campaign has been one of the strangest electoral sagas I can recall, especially on the GOP side where that unbelievably loopy assortment tried and failed to knock Romney out of his seemingly inevitable front-runner spot: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Thaddeus McCotter (Good God, that's right! Thaddeus McCotter was in this thing before resigning his office in disgrace!), Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer, Rick Perry (Ooops!), Ron Pawlenty (more dull than loopy, really), Jon Hunstman, and probably another dozen too obscure to even mention with this gang.

And let us never forget that even Jimmy McMillan, the founder of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party also declared at one point that he would enter this year's Republican field.  Though he never qualified for a ballot, in retrospect we can all agree that he would've been a better selection than Donald Trump.

And yet here we are with what everybody pretty much predicted at least a couple of years ago: a close election between Obama and Romney that'll probably come down to what a hundred-thousand or so Buckeye fans decide to do on Election Day.

So with all that, what's my own prediction for the outcome one week from today?

Well, Nate Silver is my guiding star, so I reckon I'll go with a 294-244 electoral victory and a 50%-49% popular vote edge for Obama.  We shall see.

Random pre-storm Hurricane Sandy commentary...

... from my Facebook account today:


John Magee 
We're already seeing cloud bands and wind from Hurricane Sandy in Detroit. I sincerely hope all of my friends and family on the East Coast have battened down the hatches and gotten themselves out of flood zones. I have a feeling this is going to be a bad one.

Phil Gaven 
I haven't any hatches to batten. I'm hatchless.

John Magee 
Phil, strap down the beehives and put little teeny weeny life jackets on all the bees!

Jeffrey Kofsky 
I just wish I had a wheelbarrow full of booze!

John Magee 
Jeff, It's not enough to just have a wheelbarrow full of booze when Frankenstorm hits. I had to do important pre-storm preparations ... like making sure I had a cooler full of mixers on hand and ready to go.

Jeffrey Kofsky 
And most of those are sold at stores that actually require you to wear pants in order to be served, I suppose. Tough life!

John Magee 
In these trying times we need to pull together as a nation and stop worrying about the arbitrary issues that politicians use to divide us, like who is and who isn't wearing pants at the store.

How Gerrymandering Is Destroying Our Democracy

Okay, so that headline sounds a bit grandiose, but if you asked me to name the most corrosive element in our democracy right now, it wouldn't be campaign finance, media outrage machines, lobbying gone wild, or any of a dozen other very real problems that we have.

I would nominate the widespread practice of gerrymandering: drawing voting districts along partisan lines either to give one party or the other an advantage in a legislature, or to give both parties safe seats that leave incumbents more accountable to challenges from the far wing of their own party than from opponents from the other party or from the middle of the electorate.  A lot of voters are unaware that this activity even happens, much less how it has become a rigged system to choose your lawmaker for you.

Before I go much farther down this path, I'm going to recommend to you an article on gerrymandering in this month's Atlantic magazine: The League of Dangerous Mapmakers by Robert Draper.  Go give it a read ... I'll be here when you get back.


[Brief interlude of whistling while I wait.]


Okay, you're back?  Fascinating, isn't it?!

That's pretty much the article that I would have liked to have written on this topic, if I had more time and actual journalism skills.  The only difference is that I probably would've used some local Michigan examples that appear on my own ballot: the Thaddeus McCotter saga in Michigan's 11th U.S. House District, the bizarre and brutal story of the redistricting re-legislation for the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, and a half-dozen other good examples from the Republican-controlled redistricting process in Michigan.  Rest assured, they're all as good as anything in that article.  A couple of them are even more colorful and egregious.

But rather than depress you with a long saga of political malfeasance and skulduggery, let me just state the problem as I see it, and talk about how we can fix it.

When I look at the U.S. Congress and our state legislature in Michigan these days, I wonder how these institutions became so broken.  The biggest problem that I see is that moderate lawmakers from either party are nearly extinct. There will always be a certain number of safe districts, but the systematic push to ensure that the vast majority of our legislatures will only be chosen in a primary means that moderate and independent voters -- by far the biggest bloc of voters in America -- are almost entirely unrepresented by their lawmakers.

Is it any wonder that our state and federal legislatures look broken and gridlocked most of the time?  We take the people most stridently opposed to one another, leave them unaccountable to the voters, and then ask them all to work it out nicely.  Good luck with that!

The good news is that this is one thing that is broken in our system that I think we can fix.  As mentioned in the Atlantic article, several states have adopted non-partisan redistricting commissions. And although partisan shenanigans were often involved in their adoption, it still strikes me as a very big step in the right direction.

After this year's election, I plan to follow up with a look at the results.  My theory is that the states with nonpartisan redistricting boards will have much closer general election results than the states whose boundaries were drawn by boards dominated by a single party or boards drawn by bipartisan commissions.  Meanwhile the average margin of victory in the other states will have grown even larger as everybody settles into their new and comfy safe districts.  Believe it or not, my general expectation is that the next Congress will be even more intransigent than the current disaster.

Comfy, safe districts are the problem here, folks.  We have an awful lot of lawmakers who are far too comfortable in their position and far too unwilling to compromise with one another to get things done.  It needs to stop, and we need to be the ones to put a stop to it.