Thursday, November 06, 2008

Election Maps, Steelers and Great Authors

My life the last few days has focused almost entirely on the election and the Steelers’ Monday night game, though not necessarily in that order. I have a few links about both:

I love maps and have spent way too much time looking at the county-by-county results of the Presidential election.

From the map, only one county in the six New England states went to McCain: Piscataquis, Maine.

Conversely, McCain won every Oklahoma county, and Obama only won two counties each in Wyoming and Utah and three counties in Kansas and Nevada. Of course, winning Clark County, home of Las Vegas, was enough for Obama to carry that state.

McCain also won both Mineral counties. That would be Mineral County, Nevada where 49 total people voted and Mineral County, Colorado which had a whopping 64 voters. I spent over 20 minutes trying to verify these numbers from the Mineral County government websites, but I don’t think these counties have actual websites.

According to the Pennsylvania map from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, John McCain won Mercer County with 24,321 votes versus Obama’s 24,319. That’s a difference of only two votes. Amazing! However, the Mercer County government site actually shows that Obama won 24,955-24,792. Did they find an extra thousand people at the Grove City Prime Outlets to vote late Tuesday night?

There are a lot of angry Redskins fans in and around Washington. It’s not the team lost handily to Pittsburgh on Monday night; it’s the fact that there were thousands of Steelers fans in attendance. Personally, I thought there were a larger percentage of Steelers fans at the game I attended in Jacksonville earlier this season (I thought about 25%) than at Monday’s game, but I have seen some people put the percentage of Steelers fans on Monday as high as 30%. Much more about this as well as some fun comments from Washington fans on the DC Sports Bog here, here and here (this one is the Redskins player reactions to the Steelers fans. The offense needed to use a silent count...at home!).

In other Steelers news (sort of), PSAMP and One for the Other Thumb interviewed Amos Zereoue.

Finally, I am always on the lookout for good books to read. While I am enjoying Don’t Know Much About Anything Else by Kenneth C. Davis (I like receiving free books), which has facts and quizzes on a variety of topics, there is not a plot or protagonist. Therefore, I am thinking about reading some books by historic authors. If you could choose one book each by Ernest Hemmingway, Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck, what would you recommend? I remember reading Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck in high school, and I must have read a Dickens book at some point, but I don’t recall which one. Any suggestions of books by these authors or others are appreciated.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jim Wexell's "Steeler Nation" is a no-brainer. Great book.

Anonymous said...

Oh my god. I'm at work right now and having to recode some very weird character in my data, and it turns out it's a problem with the way some data entry person coded Piscataquis County. Out of aaaaaaaall the counties in the U.S.

Weird.

Anonymous said...

shouldn't DC sports fans be used to a disproportionate number of visting team fans at the DC teams' home games? the phone booth is like pittsburgh on the potomac when the pens come to town...

oh, and I hated hemmingway's the old man and the sea when I had to read it in high school...

Carrie M said...

my English degree will get ripped off my wall for this, but oh well. Skip Hemingway and Dickens and go for some other classics. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye; Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird; White - The Once and Future King. The third one is kind of an odd choice for a classic, but for that reason, I name it!

Anonymous said...

It's crazy how much red is on the map. Thank goodness for large population centers! Monroe county, where I am is the only blue county in our metro area. Of course it's the largest county in the metro area.

Sean said...

Thanks for you message, Jim Wexell, I mean anonymous.

Joanna - That is very wierd. Apparently Piscataquis County is a strange place.

Captain - I agree with you. I also seem to recall thousands of Steelers fans attending preseason games at FedEx Field over the years. I guess Redskins fans figured that wouldn't happen for a regular season game?

Carrie - To Kill a Mockingbird may be my favorite book and I tend to read it every few years. I also read Catcher in the Rye about once every 7 years. I don't know The Once and Future King. I'll check it out. Any other suggestions?

Paul - The amount of red counties is amazing. For years, I remember seeing Tompkins County, New York completely surrounded by red. I was surprised that Cortland went blue this election. Monroe County did well!