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.