More than ever we need Nixon now!

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Back on March 5, when Ohioans decided to vote for Clinton in their primary, despite the fact that she had already lost the fight for the nomination, I predicted the following results:

3/8 Wyoming > Obamaland
3/11 Mississippi > Obamaland
4/22 Pennsylvania > Clinton country
5/3 Guam > Obamaland
5/6 Indiana > Clinton country
5/6 North Carolina > Obamaland
5/13 West Virginia > Clinton country
5/20 Kentucky > Clinton country
5/20 Oregon > Obamaland
6/3 Montana > Obamaland
6/3 South Dakota > Obamaland
6/7 Puerto Rico > Clinton country

When Montana and South Dakota finally wrap this thing up on Tuesday, every single state and territory will have voted exactly as common sense predicted they would.

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The new episodes of the AAAE Office made their debut last week to rave reviews at the Wynn Las Vegas. You can see what all the fuss is about:



"THE SWAP" --- Van decides to resolve the age old conflict between the administrative and marketing staffs by making everyone in the office "swap" jobs. Meanwhile, Leyla has a new attitude, but can the office survive it? (35 minutes).

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House Republicans are doomed. Coming off a 30 seat gain in 2006, every single Democratic congressional district must now be considered "safe," while not a single Republican district can be placed in the "safe" column.

The Democratic Party just won its third straight win in a formerly "safe" Republican district, this one in the third special US House election of the year. In a Mississippi district that voted 62% to re-elect Bush in 2004, Democrat Travis Childers just posted a 52-48 win over his Republican opponent.

The Republicans pulled out every stop they had. The President and Laura Bush recorded calls, Dick Cheney actually went to Mississippi to campaign. The RNCC spent 20% of its cash on hand for advertising. And the GOP was still slaughtered in one of their safest seats.

The Republicans are doomed this year. They ought to call it quits now and allow a legitimate opposition party to form in their place.

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John made a delicious dinner tonight.



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Here in Ann Arbor we don't have much of a social life. After being a hermit ever since the beginning of the year, I decided to plan a trip to Milwaukee and Chicago to visit a bunch of friends and generally spend a few days being a socialite.

Here are some photos of everyone I was fortunate enough to visit:


Mini high school reunion in Greendale, Wisconsin: from left, Jillian (Machi) Smith, me, Sam Emerson, Bob Heinrich and Jeanne Marquette.



Happy hour at Milwaukee's swanky Third Ward bar Water Buffalo with Jeanne and her friend Sheila.



Dinner with more of Jeanne's friends at De Marini's in Bayview: from left, Dana and her husband Alan, Perry, Jeanne and me.



Brunch at Lula Cafe on Logan Square in Chicago with my old college friend Jill (Bzibziak) Dugan.



Jill and her husband CJ on the steps of their house near Logan Square.



Night out at Roscoe's in Boystown, Chicago: Joshua Simmett (left), Martin from Philadelphia (right) and the friendly woman with the coat (below).



Me with my gracious host Ron Ullrich, aspiring chef and giver of free culinary advice.



Freezing our butts off while outside on a smoke break: clockwise from left, me, woman whose name I forgot, Alex the Japanese major, Ron, and Joshua.



After brunch with William Boulware, my old friend from college.



A stop by the Riverside, Illinois house of my old college friend Evan Menk and his wife Jan, both of them rising stars in the field of architecture.



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I watched a pretty cool documentary on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple the other night. It was fascinating, but I still dozed off before the end. Prior to that time, the church had moved from Indiana to California before finally carving a thriving community out of the jungles of South America. Their town was growing and despite their diverse backgrounds, all the people seemed pretty unified. Too bad I didn't get to see how it turned out.

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I woke up this morning at precisely 10am — I think my body thought it was 9am (which is when I usually wake up). My internal clock is pretty good, but it apparently doesn't auto-adjust for daylight savings.

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Well, my predictions fell flat. Still, although Hillary's impressive wins in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas keep her from pulling out today, I don't think they put her on a trajectory for victory. To win the delegates and the nomination, she needs to win nearly all the remaining primaries. Unless Obama has a bigger stumble than one of his advisors talking to the PM of Canada, the calendar doesn't allow for that. Momentum apparently matters little this primary season. If the terrain variables stay constant, this is the calendar we have to look forward to:

3/8 Wyoming > Obamaland
3/11 Mississippi > Obamaland
4/22 Pennsylvania > Clinton country
5/3 Guam > Obamaland
5/6 Indiana > Clinton country
5/6 North Carolina > Obamaland
5/13 West Virginia > Clinton country
5/20 Kentucky > Clinton country
5/20 Oregon > Obamaland
6/3 Montana > Obamaland
6/3 South Dakota > Obamaland
6/7 Puerto Rico > Clinton country
June-something Michigan-redo > Clinton country
June-something Florida-redo > Clinton country

She's not going to sweep Obamaland, and without a big sweep, she's not catching up with him. I think last night's votes will prove to be like Huckabee's victories on Super Tuesday. They technically resurrect the campaign while simultaneously moving a potential for victory into miracle territory.


D'oh!

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Last Christmas John gave me a GPS device. This is something that I had been excited about for about five years, but was waiting patiently for prices to come down and features to improve. Now I am the proud owner of an adorable little TomTom GPS which I can always rely on to tell me, in its elegant British voice, to "go straight on and take the motorway."

Our first roll-out of the GPS was on our Southern New Mexico road trip just after Christmas. It helped us navigate the loopy streets of Las Cruces, and we were even able to make use of its built-in point-of-interest database to locate some empty college bars and, to my delight, a big Gadsden Purchase themed sports bar, where we were able to have a couple draft beers and watch a sport on the big screen that I think was football.

That trip had two main themes: food and geology. In anticipation of this immersion in six days of geological ecstasy, I had made a trip to the Arizona Geological Survey bookstore in Tucson, where I had for the first time in my life seen and talked to an actual real-life geologist, complete with wide-brimmed hat, and where I picked up several publications of varying degrees of inscrutability.

One of these items was the 1975 reprint of the Arizona Bureau of Mines Bulletin 176, a geological road log covering Arizona state highways 77 and 177. I couldn't understand why, 32 years after the booklet was reprinted, they still hadn't sold out of something like this which has such universal appeal.

Here is an example from Milepost 61.9 on AZ-77:

To the south, lower Paleozoic formations are well exposed. The Cambrian Bolsa Quartzite forms a dip slope ledge 100 yards to the south. The distant slope is on the Devonian Martin Formation. The high cliff is formed by the Mississippian Escabrosa Limestone (Plate 6).

Exhilarating, I know. This booklet has a comment about the roadside geology for every few tenths of a mile along a 272-mile stretch of AZ-77. It's obviously overkill for all but the most insufferable geology snobs, but it gave me an idea.

I may be the only person who cares about the Cambrian Bolsa Quartzite, but I am definitely not the only person who enjoys taking a nice road trip. More and more people are owners of GPS devices, and it seems like a technology with growth potential and staying power. This geology road guide made me think, wouldn't it be cool to have road guide plug-ins for your GPS? Since the GPS always knows where you are, these plug-ins would have audio files triggered by different latitude and longitude coordinates that narrate what it is that you see around you at that spot.

For example, say you are driving across Nebraska on I-80. You could pay a couple dollars to download an I-80 road guide so that your GPS would talk to you about the places you are driving past, pointing out interesting landmarks, or talking about local history, geology, nearby attractions, or whatever is relevant. The software would know that when you hit a particular latitude and longitude, the GPS should play the associated audio file.

If program memory isn't an issue, you could also get a file that covers an entire region, not just one long-haul highway. So if you live in Dallas, you could turn on this program and wherever you happen to drive in the metro area, you would get informative interludes from your GPS based on your particular location.

These downloads could also have pre-programmed itineraries so the GPS would tell you where to go to see all the stops on a particular tour, and explain each stop to you when you get there. This would work well with an architecture tour of a particular city, for example.

This would be a great way to publish special-interest tours, like the geology road guide I mentioned earlier, or a Civil War sites series for Virginia. A Yellowstone guide would even know which geyser you are walking up to and tell you all about it.

From a technical perspective, it shouldn't be hard at all to program this software for GPS devices. Distribution of the tour files would be easy: you would just download them from the internet before you leave home, or over your cellular connection. State welcome centers along freeways or city visitor centers could offer a variety of different tours that you could download when you stop in. This would turn the whole country into one giant museum.

So this is what I want. Somebody needs to get on the ball and design this system so that I can have another excuse to go drive around everywhere.



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