Infinitive Splitter

Among the enduring traditions af American travel is the breakfast-time persual of USA Today in hotel foyers.

Yesterday’s paper included a story on the Halloween-weekend festivities in Madison, Wis., and the (purportedly) successful management thereof. It contains the following:

In Madison, an annual street party drew 35,000 costumed revelers Saturday night, less than half the 80,000 that showed up last year.

Arrests were down over the Friday-to-Sunday period: about 250 were arrested, compared with 566 last year, police Sgt. Richard Scanlon said. Most of the arrests were for alcohol-related offenses, he said.

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz called Saturday a success. “We met all …my goals,” he said. “We did not have to use pepper spray or have our police in riot gear. We reduced the amount of over-consumption of alcohol.”

Did they?

In 2005, if 80,000 revelers showed up and 566 were arrested, that means 70.8 people were arrested for every 10,000. In 2006, 250 arrested out of 35,000 works out to 71.4 per 10,000.

Granted, the lack of pepper spray or riot gear eliminates some of the more shocking photography, but it looks like the proportion of bad apples actually rose.

Happy Halloween!

I leave tomorrow for a week and a half of election madness somewhere in this great country of ours; posting will be light, if it happens at all, until November 8.

In the meantime, enjoy the picture above, which was taken on October 26 outside the local Goodwill Industries retailer. That’s me under the light, for all you over-curious readers who have been frustrated by the mystery of my identity.

Please vote. It’s really the least you can do.

Do you enjoy this website but wish I would post more often?

Forget it!

But here’s a compromise: the internet is full of websites that I think are interesting, but I am a lazy writer. I don’t want to talk about every link I see, but I do want lots and lots of people to see things that I find interesting. The classic dilemma.

Starting now — and continuing until I tire of it — you can find such links under the “Quick Hits” label on the right-hand sidebar of this website. It will show the last five links I’ve thought to tag, along with a note about each (usually a quote from the linked page). If you fall behind, you can catch up here:

• http://del.icio.us/infinitivesplitter

And that’s that. If I’ve judged my audience correctly, this should tide everyone over between posts.

For some reason, this feels like it might be a lucky day for me, which means — naturally — that it’s a good day to make my official predictions for the composition of the 110th Congress.

Get your popcorn ready.

We’ll start with the Senate, since handicapping House races is about 13 times harder. (There are 435 House elections on November 7, compared with just 33 Senate elections. Never mind how many of each are actually contested; you can look those numbers up on your own.)

Most of these 33 races are already decided, whether because of a total lack of opposition (Lugar in Indiana); a lack of strong opposition (Clinton in New York, Hatch in Utah, and so on); or a lack of sane opposition (Nelson in Florida should defeat Katherine Harris by a comfortable margin). Here are my picks for those that remain, assuming that the incumbent or the incumbent’s party wins for the races I omit:

The incumbent or candidate from the incumbent’s party is listed in bold, and states with open-seat races are marked with asterisks.

• Connecticut: Lieberman (?) over Lamont (D)
• Maryland*: Cardin (D) over Steele (R)
• Missouri: McCaskill (D) over Talent (R)
  
• Montana: Tester (D) over Burns (R)
• New Jersey: Menendez (D) over Kean (R)
• Ohio: Brown (D) over Dewine (R)
• Pennsylvania: Casey (D) over Santorum (R)
• Rhode Island: Whitehouse (D) over Chafee (R)
• Tennessee*: Corker (R) over Ford (D)
• Virginia: Allen (R) over Webb (D)

If you haven’t been keeping track, that comes to a total of 50 Republicans; 48 Democrats; 1 Independent voting with Democrats (Bernie Sanders will take over for Jim Jeffords, who is retiring); and one Joe Lieberman, who I think will probably vote for Democratic leadership. In a 50-50 Senate, the vice president casts the tiebreaker, so Republicans will maintain control.

Now to the House of Representatives. I was guessing pretty wildly about the Senate; my House picks are based on little more than a cursory look at some old polls and some gut feeling. Also, if you think I’m going to list my specific picks on even a tenth of these, you’re mistaken. (I do have a list, but who wants to read lists?)

Here’s a haphazard collection of thoughts on a random selection of competitive races.

• I’ll take Murphy (D) over Gerlach (R) in Pennsylvania’s 6th, but not Murphy (D) over Fitzpatrick (R) in PA-8 or Murphy (D) over Johnson (R) in Connecticut’s 5th. Murphy (R) is not facing a serious challenge from Kluko (D) in PA-18. Two for four.
• Weldon (R) has got some significant problems. I like Sestak (D) in PA-7.
• Delay (R) and Foley (R), who will appear on ballots in TX-22 and FL-16, respectively, are likely to be defeated.
• I like former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler (D) over African dictator Charles Taylor (R) in NC-11. For the record, this Shuler really is the former quarterback, but the incumbent congressman from western North Carolina is not a Liberian war criminal.
• Barring the disclosure of his own affair involving strangled mistresses, Carney (D) should unseat Sherwood (R) in PA-10.
• “Congressman Hill on Capitol Hill” isn’t as good as “Whitehouse White House,” which is what we’d have if Rhode Island’s Democratic Senate challenger someday won the presidency, but it’s good enough. I’ll take Hill (D) over Sodrel (R) in IN-9, Ellsworth (D) over Hostettler (R) in IN-8, and Donnelly (D) over Chris “Count” Chocola (R) in IN-2.

That’s about enough. None of these races — and indeed none of the races on the list from which I plucked these examples — involve incumbent Democrats. This is very good news for incumbent Democrats.

Final projected House tally: 237 Democrats and 198 Republicans.

Some people read horoscopes and find relevance in them that seems impossible to ascribe to coincidence. (Have I written something like this before? Yes!)

I think I now know why a disproportionate number of outgoing links on this website point to qwantz.com: Ryan North, author of Dinosaur Comics, is my Tyler Durden. He stays up late at night to organize underground boxing clubs and terrorist cells write webcomics that relate to my real life. The evidence has been accumulating for some time.

To wit: I explained to an otherwise-enlightened friend just yesterday that dukes is a fairly standard synonym for fists; today T-Rex and friends discuss other options. Last week, T-Rex asked himself a question that I had a reason to ask myself on the same day: “When you break up with someone, can you still be friends?” (He also answered the way I would have: “Yep! SURE CAN!”)

It goes on and on. A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a discussion of the shortcomings of supposedly meritocratic hiring systems (how can they possibly know?); the next day, T-Rex wondered the same thing. The Monday before that, when I called in sick to work, T-Rex complained about feeling under the weather.

Coincidence is an insufficient explanation.

Tyler Durden and “Jack”; Ryan North and me. The correct answer to a standard SAT question.

The difference is that, in the big revelation scene, my Tyler Durden will not say, “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not”; he will say, “I write webcomics the way you would if you were more clever… and wrote webcomics.”