Something overdue but interesting

This would have been more relevant in 2000 (or 2001, when the census results came out), and I've been thinking about it for a while, but for some reason I decided to do it today. And this is my response to people talking about the 2000 election and saying "the majority of people voted for Gore."



Voted for Bush: 50,456,002

Voted for Gore: 50,999,897

Voted for Others: 3,949,201

Total who voted: 105,405,100^*

US population: 290,867,001^**

19 and under: 78,537,000⁺

Total of voting age: 212,300,001

Percentage who voted: 49.65



So, as I suspected, the answer is...The majority of Americans didn't vote for anybody!



Regardless of what you think of the 2000 election results, that's pretty dispiriting.



References:

^*From Official 2000 Presidential Election Results

^**From Census Bureau.

⁺Based on Census Bureau's 2000 estimated U.S. population by age (estimated from 1990 results). This is slightly skewed because it doesn't have 18 and under, just 19 and under.

Referring

Hey, someone actually went from here to New Directions! Woo-hoo! (Now let's see how long it takes to get into Yahoo!) (Question of the day: When you end a sentence with "Yahoo!" do you put a period at the end of it? Probably not.)

Stats

Costa Rica, Taiwan, Australia. (I think Costa Rica was just a robot, though.)



Costa Rica's TLD is .cr; when I saw it in the log I assumed it was Croatia. But, no, Croatia is .hr. Which I thought was strange, so I looked in up in the CIA World Factbook, wherein I learned that the official name of Croatia is Republika Hrvatska. I'm guessing that H is pronounced "kh," hence the hard C sound at the beginning of the English version. (It's not the strangest discrepancy between official name and English name; there's Deutschland-Germany, Ellas-Greece, Sak'art'velo-Georgia, and, my favorite, Suomi-Finland.)

The latest Bush speech

Well, I've downloaded the transcript and haven't found Syria, Korea, or Iran in it anywhere. Good speechwriter. You get a biscuit. (He did mention Palestine, but immediately preceded by the adjective "peaceful," as opposed to the verbal phrase "bomb the hell out of.")



Quote of the day:



"American values and American interests lead in the same direction. We stand for human liberty...."



...unless you are an adult who wants to have consensual sex with another adult who is not your legally-married only spouse of the opposite gender.



Well, that's another fight (PDF link).



Immediately after the speech, someone actually set off firecrackers outside. That's South Philly for ya. (The noise then set off the dogs next door. If only the firecrackers and the dogs had been in closer proximity...)

People who suck

This list will doubtless grow as I think of more of them. At the moment, my list of people who suck includes:

• Whoever decided to reduce yogurt container sizes from 8 oz. to 6 oz., and, in some cases, 4 oz. I'd rather they had raised the price and kept the same amount of yogurt. Maybe it's a fiendish plot to make people have to buy two containers of yogurt to get as much as they actually want.



• Whoever first started using capital letters in the middle of names. I'm copyediting a book about software, and I'm constantly checking company Web sites to find out things like "Is it PrintQuest, Print Quest, or Printquest?" I think that person should be beaten with a BigStick.



• Whoever decided the official, formal spelling of a site on the Web should be "Web site," and whoever at the University of Chicago press decided to recommend it in the CMS. C'mon, hurry up and change it to "website"! (This is probably not annoying to people who don't copyedit.)



• Whoever bred the first small dog. "Hm...what we really need are yappier, more annoying animals that can easily bite our ankles."



• People who buy small dogs. Especially my neighbors.

To be continued...

Stats

Yes, I have become stats-obsessed. Not that I'm getting thousands of hits, but I'm collecting some nice international IPs. So far, Ukraine, Lithuania, UK, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and, of all things, the Seychelles. (I'm guessing they've sold their TLD to someone.) Whence/whyfore cometh the Eastern Europeans? (Is Lithuania officially Eastern European? "Baltic" is more accurate. Well, it's one of those ex-Soviet places, anyway.)



Dear Google:



Hurry up and index me, I want to get disturbing search requests.

Attire

Well, the shirt I'm wearing has turned out to be somewhat more daring than I anticipated. (Well, what did I expect from something I ordered from Victoria's Secret?) Still, it looks more daring on me than on their models, who are somewhat below me in the full-bosom category. I'm wearing a light sweater over it, but if it gets warmer I suppose I'll take it off, and then the guys in the office will pretend not to be looking. Ever since the Summer o' Mania I've been toning down the physical-appearance stuff; and especially over the winter, when it's all turtlenecks and sweaters. Well, what the heck, I'm wearing what I'm wearing. And it's not like that shirt I had in college, which I referred to as the "taking my breasts for a walk" shirt. (I'm not too old for this, am I?)



Long pants, though. Long pants now and forever. Maybe long skirts. Long dresses. But no short dresses, no shorts (unless I'm not leaving the house), and no bathing suits. At least not until I'm reincarnated as Cindy Crawford's stunt double.