Pancake City

Larry Sabato argues in his book, “A More Perfect Constitution“, that many of the current problems with the American political system are structural and can only be remedied by updating the U.S. Constitution to handle issues the founding fathers were unable to anticipate.

For example, once you get elected to Congress, getting reelected is almost automatic. The reelection rate for House members for the past 40 years has been 85% or higher, and it is often 95% or higher. The Senate is more competitive but not by much.

One reason, among many, is that Congressional districts are gerrymandered, drawn in odd shapes to ensure favorable demographics for the member of Congress. The practice has been brazen recently, such as when former Rep. Tom Delay redrew his district in the shape of a middle finger.

A common-sense solution is to divide states into districts using a grid system with the process managed by a non-partisan group such as a panel of judges. Yet the fact that this would make House races more competitive is precisely why Congress will never pass a law to do this, along with anything related to term limits, reduction of franking privileges and so on. As difficult as it would be to pass a Constitutional amendment implementing this process, it’s probably the only way it will ever be done.

It’s a great book with many interesting ideas. I highly recommend it. One of his ideas came to mind with the media storm around the Iowa caucus.

With Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states leapfrogging each others’ caucus or primary date so they would be one of the first states (and few that are relevant), we are now in a situation where the primary system starts in the beginning of January, yet will likely be over by the beginning of February (”Super Tuesday”). Some talking heads are even suggesting the Democratic nomination will be over by the third state, South Carolina, if Barack Obama can win in N.H. and S.C.

It’s the longest election process in the world, gives a disproportionate power to the same, few states every four years to elect a candidate, and thus disfranchises most of the country. In Presidential re-election years, the sitting President is distracted and essentially out of commission for an entire year, 1/4 his or her elected term.

I’m recounting Larry Sabato’s idea to fix this by memory so the details will be off, but the spirit is the same. Divide the country into four quadrants: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. On February 1st, select by random drawing which month each quadrant will be able to hold its primaries: e.g. April, May, June, and July. (Edit: I found his write-up of this idea after posting this. The details are different and more in-depth, but the basic idea is the same.)

There is a large benefit to having two small states hold the first caucus and primary though. Small states give unknown and underfunded candidates a chance to gain traction with with retail politics, face-to-face interaction, and town hall debates, something that would be impossible in a state like California.

That is why, in addition, two out of the 10 smallest states by population will be randomly selected to have the first two primaries in the nation, a week before the first regional month. This retains the benefits of involving a small state early on and gives a state besides Iowa and New Hampshire a chance to be relevant.

I enjoy watching politics and being informed, but the primary season continues to get longer with no limit in site, and practically forces every state to push their date earlier is they want a chance to be relevant. The result is that Iowa + N.H. gets months of attention and input, and the other states, forced to have their primaries on the same day plus early in the calendar, get almost no attention and input.

This year, there are 24 states who are holding their primary on Feb. 5th. That’s ridiculous. It’s the longest short campaign in American history. Six months for Iowa + N.H., one month for the rest of the country, and nine months of a general election with no good TV to pass the time because of the writer’s strike. I’m am going to kidnap Jon Stewart and force him to write comedy at gunpoint.

It would be ideal to fix this without a Constitutional amendment, but this has been a problem for several elections so far and I think if the national parties were able to implement and enforce a plan like this on their own, they would have done so by now.

We (Westerners) currently read left-to-right, snapping our eyes all the way back to the left after reaching the end of the line. This snapping back is a huge inefficiency. People, once they got comfortable with the method, would be able to read faster if text were printed so the next word after the end of the line was directly below, not across the page.

There are some obvious problems with changing to this system, and it would be impossible to do on a national scale. America can’t even change to the metric system, and that makes a lot more sense than this idea.

It is currently near impossible to do on a personal level too. The comfort of reading in one style for decades may be too difficult to overcome. Even if one had the desire, the number of books and newspapers printed in this wraparound format is either zero or close to it, and every publisher would find the thought of doing so ridiculous.

The Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle–two EBook readers that display text electronically on a handheld device–got me thinking of a time in the near future that would at least remove the technological roadblocks. It would be a trivial matter for an EBook reader to automatically display text in a wraparound format. The Kindle allows for one to read online newspapers and blogs too, so presumably wrapping text for these would be easy as well.

What if these EBook readers decided to offer an option to switch to this reading mode at the press of a button? It may end up a novelty, but perhaps it turns out that one can feel comfortable with this new reading style after a few hours, and the benefits make it worth it.

There’s no extra publishing cost, no large technical hurdles to overcome, and it’s optional. It’s also a feature not offered in print, and probably never will be. Shouldn’t these EBook readers do something better than their print counterparts?

I think if one were to switch to a different reading style, the majority of what we read–at home, at work, on the web–would need to be electronic plus convertible to this new style. We are many years from that becoming the everyday environment, but electronic publishing is at a point where, with the help of a few yet-to-be-developed computers programs, a motivated individual could experiment and get a good sense of the costs and benefits of learning a more efficient reading style.

I bought a popular book at midnight on Friday, and finished reading it late last night. The title? I’m not telling. That would be a spoiler. Unlike lesser publications like the New York Times, Pancake City likes children and is 100% spoiler-free. Did I like it? Maybe. Maybe not. I shall not risk tainting anyone’s experience by offering my opinion on it.

The previous sentence does not mean it is an experience that one would want to be untainted, and it doesn’t mean one wouldn’t want it untainted either. Also, as you can tell, double negatives are great for covering all your spoiler bases.

Here is my story about why I am fervently anti-spoiler. Over eight years ago, I went to see Citizen Kane with a good friend of mine. Right before the movie started, I spoiled the ending for her, assuming that she knew it already. What is worse is that I had the ending spoiled for me after reading a Washington Post movie review of it that said, “By now, everyone knows that…[famous ending that I didn't know]“

I felt guilty that I stole from her the pleasure of making that discovery on her own. From that day, I do my best not to even drop hints when someone asks about the plot of a movie, TV show, or plot. If someone really wants that information, they can find it easily somewhere else.

At least for 2006.

“O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened”

The follow-up interview: “If I did it, and happened to videotape it, here’s what the videotape would look like.”

I’ll be writing a new post every day for the next five days, starting today.

Michele, my sister, went to see The Da Vinci Code last weekend. When the credits began rolling, a woman in front of her yelled, “That was good! The critics were wrong!”

Michele then yelled, “I’m Roger Ebert’s wife! Fuck you!”

Okay, Michele didn’t really say that. But why? I know you were thinking it. It’s not like people were going to think, “That first lady, the one shouting to one in particular, she had a good point. But I don’t know what Roger Ebert’s wife was thinking about.

I don’t understand the appeal of watching The Da Vinci Code for those who read the book. I look forward to movie adaptations of books that create a rich, elaborate world, particularly those of fantasy and science fiction. The Da Vinci Code’s idea of cleverness is to use italics on evey page. (Seriously. Do you have the book with you? Open it. Any part. Italics. That’s how you know he’s thinking.)

What is interesting about the book are the ideas behind it, not the world constructed to support the ideas. Am I wrong? If you read the book and are looking forward to seeing the movie, tell me why.

Mark Twain is the king of quotes. I’m glad he’s not alive today because if we met, I’d be disappointed when he said hi. This one made me smile:

It’s been a few months since I’ve read anything beyond magazine articles or essay collections. Does anyone have a recommendation on a good book to read? Fiction or non-fiction, although preferably something I could find at a library.

You don’t need to be a member of Blogger to leave a comment. Just click on “Anonymous” or “Other” (allows you to enter personal info).

Many of these are hilarious (thanks Amy).

His online chat about his new book on Presidential pets is very funny. Although I think he wrote all of the questions himself.

Mt. Rainier, Md.: Mo, I love horses. Does Bush have horses on his ranch, and does he know how to ride them? Did any other presidents love riding horses?

Mo Rocca: Bush accidentally ran over his horse with his SUV.

Has anyone read “America: The Book” written by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show Writers? Amazom.com has a pretty funny video intro by Stewart on their site.

I’ve read a fair share of “Questions to Ask the Candidates” articles in reference to tomorrow’s Presidential debate. This one is the best by far. The questions are directed to President Bush, so if anyone has a good article with questions Kerry should be asked to recommend, go ahead.

Speaking of which, you may see a few cut-a-ways during the debate of John Kerry scratching his crotch, or George W. Bush waving a pair of flip-flops to the camera and making a jerk-off motion with his hand. Guess who’s going to control the camera shots during the debates? No, really. Guess! You’ll never guess who it is. Not in a million, bazillion years. Okay, here’s a hint:

IT’S FUCKING FOX NEWS.

The last paragraph in this excerpt from Bob Woodward’s new book is hilarious.

On Jan. 10, a Wednesday morning 10 days before the inauguration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell went to the Pentagon to meet with Cohen. Afterward, Bush and his team went downstairs to the Tank, the secure domain and meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.

Many years ago, Lynne Cheney wrote “Sisters,” a novel of “a strong and beautiful woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier.”

I didn’t know the American frontier had rules. I thought not having rules was the whole point of the frontier. Who wants to travel 500 miles west and have to deal with a homeowner’s association? But that’s besides the point.

The book has received attention recently because it has some naughty bits, at least for a prim conservative in the public spot light. Naughty bits such as lesbian relationships, feminism ideals, and an overbearing, misogynistic man who can only express his sexuality in the crudest forms, such as demanding people call him by the name of his wiener. (Okay, I’m making the last one up.) The publisher was going to re-release the book but canceled plans a few weeks ago at the request of Ms. Cheney.

Some of the reviews of it on Amazon.com are quite funny.

What makes “The Da Vinci Code,” a thriller that has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for months now, worth reading is the many fascinating facts about art history, word origins, pagan symbols and Christianity that author Dan Brown weaves into the story.

These bits of trivia may be obvious to art students and etymology buffs, but for me, moments like finding out how the Egyptian god and goddess for fertility, Amon and Isis (whose ancient pictogram was once called L’ISA) inspired the name for one of Da Vinci’s most famous paintings is enough to make the book worth reading. (Brown gives several examples of Da Vinci inserting symbols of paganism and subtle digs at Christianity in his works. News to me.)

The “Da Vinci Code” reminds me of old science fiction that survived on the strength of its ideas rather than the quality of its writing. The writing in this book is terrible. Brown uses adjectives and adverbs in his sentences the way McDoanld’s uses salt on its fries. And his descriptions of places and people ring hollow. When the main character has a flashback to a symbolism class at Harvard he taught, I thought:

1) Dan Brown has never taught a class at Harvard, or any college.
2) “Saved By The Bell” is going to sue his ass.

While the plot isn’t particularly inventive, it kept me turning the pages. It is kind of like watching a soap opera that makes you roll your eyes with the cheesy music and lingering close-ups, but keeps you watching when the heiress’ husband, supposedly dead, shows up drenching wet at her door before the commercial break.

In short, this is a book of very interesting ideas about symbols and history with a decent plot that makes up for the poor writing. I won’t go into the central and most interesting argument in the book, but it involves the Holy Grail not being a grail, and Brown provides enough evidence to at least make one wonder if it could be true.

My rating:

Rich people: Buy it.
Middle class people: Worth $12-$15.
Poor people: Borrow it from the library.

It’s been months since I’ve read an intellectually challenging book. That’s why I borrowed Nobel prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” from the library. It’s an amazing book, which I’ll start right after I finish reading Jeff Smith’s “Bone: The Great Cow Race.” And the new Sandman book by Neil Gaiman. After avoiding the book gym for several months, I can’t jump back in pressing 450. Especially since my membership to the analogy gym expired last February.

My goal is to undertake a diet of successively complex picture books, move on to “The Early History of Comic Books,” work out with some Dave Barry, kick it up to Steve Martin, followed by Norton’s Anthology of Science Fiction, Norton’s Anthology of Science Fiction for Adults, at which point my brain will be as absorbent and flexible as a pizza crust kneaded by Stephen Hawking (”WHEELCHAIR: FORWARD. WHEELCHAIR: BACK. WHEELCHAIR: FORWARD…”) and ready to take on the pus-filled pleasures of “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

If you blog in the middle of the night and no one is up to read it, does your keyboard make a sound?

While searching for an image for the last post, I came across a man with–and I say this with no exaggeration–one of the coolest names ever.