The Donald

Seth Meyers Saturday night, at White House Correspondents Dinner: “Donald Trump often talks about running as a Republican, which is surprising. I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Donald Trump Sunday at Fox, on Seth Meyers: "I thought Seth Meyers, frankly his delivery was not good, he’s a stutterer and he really was having a hard time."

The Birth Certificate

Katie Jacobs Stanton (@KatieS) on Twitter Friday "Tomorrow’s goal: bring a copy of @barackobama‘s birth certificate and have the Donald autograph it. #nerdprom"

According to her, Trump didn’t hear a word she said as she asked him to sign the President’s Birth Certificate - but he did. Guess he can't now say he hasn't seen it.

Sorry For Trump

"Viewers are now running away from The Apprentice television show in droves, with advertiser boycotts being launched by several groups across the nation. Also, I can't imagine any Obama supporter being excited about staying in a hotel with the name "Trump" in front of it. Trump's tirades will cost him billions, his shareholders and employees will suffer, and after it's all said and done, he still won't have a chance to become president." - Dr. Royce Watkins, president of Syracuse University.

It all makes sense, though, if the Criminal Investigation Division is planning to put Trump in prison, and he believes his only hope is to make people think the prosecution is politically motivated.

The Book Doesn’t Matter

"A book, as an object, has no inherent, objective power. Which is why it’s so hard to predict bestsellers, why you can’t judge a book by its cover." - Hugh MacLeod

"And if your publisher doesn’t really get that, then find another one. Seriously," he adds. Except that he points out that a famous author has always been a global microbrand. Why do you need a publisher in an era when dead-tree books are obsolete?

Twenty years ago, I spoke to Dick Dell about doing a "corporate biography" of a company that had recently been bought by another. Sales would probably be in the hundreds, I pointed out, mostly being sales to people who had worked there. Is it even an economic project at that level of sales, I asked. He said that with the vast majority of books, fewer than 1000 books are even sent to the bindery, and the sale of 400 books is actually fairly respectable. I was flabberghasted that standards for "success" were so low.

Joan Reeves has just reached 1000 sales for "Just One Look" in one month. She's an established writer, but this isn't even a new book; it was previously published in dead-tree format in the 1980s, although she's edited it to update the cultural references.

Statistical Significance

On the morning call-in show, they were discussing a new poll on C-SPAN. It seems that the population trusts the GOP to do a better job with the budget, the Democrats with health care, and in four other areas, they was very little difference between the parties. The difference wasn't statistically significant, the host explained, reading from a Reuters story.

My old boss at Drackett, Dr. Roger Reavill, would hit the roof any time he heard someone misusing that terminology. Statistics can show important differences, and they can show statistically significant differences. Statistical significance simply means that you have enough data points to trust the survey. If you ask 200 million americans whether McDonald's fries are better with ketchup or without, and 10 more people say "with" than "without", that's not an important difference, but it is statistically significant. If you ask 20 teenaged boys whether they prefer a picture of a pretty girl nekkid or in a snowsuit, and 19 prefer nekkid, that's an important finding - but there are too few data points to be statistically significant.

And Fox News is supposed to be stupid, but C-SPAN oughta be a little smarter than that.

Almost Strangled

Last night on the news, they reported an area man was arrested for attempted homicide; his mother said he had strangled her until she had almost passed out.

Yeah? I'd like to hear a defense attorney cross-examine her. "How close to passing out is 'almost' passing out, ma'am? Have you ever been strangled to the point of passing out, so that you know where the passing out point is? What symptoms do you exhibit right before you pass out?"

I'm not saying that it's not a serious matter. It obviously is serious. On the other hand, this sounds an awful lot like the guy who tells a stranger to the area, that he needs to take a left turn 2 miles before he gets to the barn that was torn down 10 years ago. How do you know Mama isn't exaggerating?

And while it's shameful that someone would try to strangle his parent, it's also shameful to be the kind of parent that an adult kid would try to strangle.

Palm Sunday, 1965

The horrid recent events in Tuscaloosa bring to mind the Palm Sunday, 1965 tornadoes. Where I lived, we were without electricity until Friday, which meant that the dry ice we bought on Monday to keep the stuff frozen in the deep freeze ran out, and there wasn't any more to buy at that point, so we ate really well on suddenly defrosting foods for a few days.

In Upper Darby, PECO turned off the electricity to a small international grocery. A lot of their foods were refrigerated or frozen, so the owners of the store acted quickly to set up a generator to keep the stuff from going bad. Running a generator indoors, however, allows carbon monoxide to accumulate, and come morning, two men, living in separate apartments on the second floor, woke up dead.

They're bringing homicide charges against the store's owners, I understand, but it's obviously too late for those men, and it probably won't do anything to keep this sort of thing from happening again, five years from now. We probably ought to do something to prevent recurrences, but it's not really clear to me what we should do.

Doghouse On Junior High

Doghouse Riley always has an interesting take on things. I rarely agree with him when I start reading what he's written, and if I don't agree with him afterwards, well, I don't agree with my prior position, either. He says that "Junior high is just hormone prison. All junior high teachers deserve merit pay."

Mamma wanted to teach third grade. She didn't have the energy to get down on the floor and to chase around running first graders, and she didn't have the oomph to stand up to junior high kids. Third grade, she figured she could make a real difference, and she could survive. And, in fact, she was pretty good at third grade. Lots of parents of second-graders went to the principal towards the end of the year and asked that their kids be assigned to Mamma's classroom, and usually, the answer was no. The principal had his own idea, and gave Mamma the toughest kids to teach, because the other teachers weren't worth a hill of beans.

Mind you, the rhetorical hill of beans is subjective. Once we are exposed to excellence, that becomes our standard of competence, and merely average seems mediocre from then on, a phenomenon that has become codified as Sturgeon's Law.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
birth certificate - Boyce Watkins - carbon monoxide - Dick Dell - Doghouse Riley - Donald Trump - dry ice - exaggeration - Fox News - generator - hormones - Hugh MacLeod - Joan Reeves - junior high - Katie Jacobs Stanton - PECO - publishing - Seth Meyers - statistical significance - strangulation - Sturgeon's Law - Tuscaloosa - Upper Darby - White House Correspondents Dinner