Fun with numbers

At risk of beating a dead horse, we’re going to look at some entertaining trends that were exposed in the election. I really think these are kind of funny. I got started on the topic when I was talking with The Redhead about how everyone was quiet yesterday after they heard the results of the election. They all seemed depressed, even more so than when the Redskins lose. People shuffled around my office in despair and where The Redhead works at American University they were all quiet and disappointed. The Redhead said, “I bet 90% of people in DC voted for Kerry.” I suggested that we look it up on CNN, and sure enough, she was exactly right: 90% of DC voted for Kerry, 9% for Bush, and 1% for Nader. (Go Nader!) This means that DC is even more Democratic than Utah is Republican (only 71% of Utah voted for Bush). I guess I know what liberals feel like in Utah. In a way, moving back and forth between Utah and DC is a practice in opposites. As conservative as Utah may be, DC is more extreme in its liberal tendencies. A fun and informative way to see how these two ideologies mix is to watch the headlines from the Washington Post and the Washington Times. For example, when the commission concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, the Post’s headline said “No WMD’s in Iraq” and the Times’ front page said “Commission report released.” Even though it represents my ideology better, I really don’t read the Times. The Post is a first-rate newspaper, and my bias against it is only due to the fact that I like the NY Times Web site better and read it more often.

I was sitting in my cubicle and showing my fellow intern Laurence the Slap the Candidate Web site and one of my supervisors walked in. She’s a group leader, just under the division director. I thought to my self, “Uh oh, caught slacking on the job.” Instead she thought it was funny and made me slap the candidates at different speeds to see what faces popped up. Heh, this is a great job sometimes. Oh, hey, another funny thing: outside The Redhead’s uncle’s work there are some black guys that preach a religion where the 12 tribes of Israel are 12 groups of black people, like Ethiopians, etc. They have a bull horn and heckle every person that walks into Metro Center that is white, Asian, Hispanic, or anything other than black. (I might call this racism, but then I would be called a racist.) They get a little rowdy sometimes and the police have to quiet them down, but for the most part they’re somewhat entertaining. My favorite part about them is their insistence that Jesus was black. Um, sorry to break it to you, guys, but he was Jewish.

So here are some more numbers to wrap up this short and largely pointless blog entry:

51% percentage of people hopeful about the upcoming four years
71% percentage of Utahans that voted for Bush, the highest ratio in the nation
90% percentage of people in the District of Columbia that voted for Kerry
86% percentage of people in Mississippi that voted for the gay marriage ban
72% percentage of my coworkers with hangovers on Wednesday morning