Monthly Archives: October 2004

The Ghost of Election Day Past

I’ve been doing searches on where we were 4 years ago, just a few days before the election. I remembered polls showed the election was close. What I didn’t remember was that Bush had 47%, Gore had just 43%, and Nader had 5% (link). Despite those numbers, the election was too close to call, and Gore (despite this interesting curio of an article) won the popular vote.

The most recent Reuters/Zogby poll has Kerry up by one point. That actually looks a LOT better than last election. Cross your fingers, pray, whatever. And go Packers!!!

nail-biting supplies

If you’re going to be a nervous election-news junkie like me next Tuesday, “USA Election Atlas”:http://www.uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/ElectionNight2004/pe2004elecnighttime.php might be a useful page to bookmark. They have a map of when polls close in each state, and it looks like they’ll be filling in vote counts as they come in over time.

Or, like Ben, you could sleep the blissful sleep of one who doesn’t know what all the fuss about Red and Blue is.

cul-de-sac

From Yahoo News, via Deana: “In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have “uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_sc/dwarf_cavewoman marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.”

I love it when we discover puzzling new evidence. Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the process of learning such extraordinary new things is worth it all by itself.

“This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.”

You just know that writers wait for opportunities like these…

on polls and poles

I’m wary of posting links to anything pollish. Not that I have anything against polls, but they do tend to… what’s the word?… lie.

However, I’ve become mesmerized by the “Race 2004″:http://www.race2004.net/ poll summary site, mostly because it has pretty colors. Er, I mean it has a state-by-state breakdown of polling, with predictions of the election winner based on the electoral college, not the popular vote.

Watching the swing states shift from day to day underscores how tight this race really is, but looking at the “if the election were held today” numbers shows how a dramatic victory can be accomplished by shifting a few votes here, a few votes there…

If it gets too much for you, take your mind off it with some comedy: “You Forgot Poland”:http://www.youforgotpoland.com/. Fnord.