No November birthday for the Bean.

The Department of Homeland Security Pinto Bean Warning Level remains at: Lemon Yellow. Stay vigilant!

Yes, we have no beans. We have no beans today.

Guess it's off to work for me tomorrow. How unfortunate.

Still no baby. We're doing fine, although I am getting a little concerned that I might have to go to work on Monday. Apart from that, Mother, Bean and I are in no particular hurry.

We remain beanless. We will serve no bean before its time.

Alas, the only beans making an appearance this Thanksgiving Day were green. Let my people go!

No baby yet. Watch this space.

When I was a teenager, I got myself a shortwave radio and used to stay up late listening to international broadcasters. I remember being thrilled to hear – very faintly – a broadcast of Radio Cairo and sending to them for a QSL card, a sort of postcard confirming a reception report. When it came, I couldn’t believe I had this object came all the way from Egypt. I remember being astounded by the dust on it. There was no way I could know that 15 years later I would be standing in the State Information Service building pictured on the card requesting a press permit to find out more about mythical man-eating dogs, or that that dust would someday permeate everything I owned.

When I was desperate and couldn’t get any other signal, I would listen to the Voice of America. It was always the easiest to get, but the least interesting. The stories were very staid and depthless, and the announcers never sounded like any Americans – or other humans – I had ever heard. It was like a parody of American pronounciation.

Well, now you can learn to pronounce like a freak in about a zillion different languages (including Guinea Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, and Guines-Bissau). Turns out they actually have a whole database to show them how to mispronounce things. Dammit, there’s no such name as “Akmed”!

A friend sent me this chart today, purporting to represent an inverse relationship between IQ and Republicanism:



It didn’t seem right to me. I mean, what statistic-gathering organization is it that supposedly collects IQ data by state? I looked it up on Snopes, and it is indeed a fake. I knew it – it must be because I’m from Massachusetts.

Seeing the familiar wild look in my eye, Julie asked me to leave it at that, but she must have known that I could not. It occured to me that the census department does collect data on education by state. A little Google here, a little Excel there, and:



Make of it what you will.

This can't be for real.

The BBC reports on the proceedings of the Fourth World Toilet Summit in Beijing.

“The entire toilet movement [Eeww – Ed.] is taking on the world scale. People are saying, ‘We want good toilets’… because you see a toilet is a basic human right and this basic human right has been neglected. So the world deserves better toilets,” says Jack Sim, the founder of the World Toilet Organization.

The WTO (snicker) has 17 members:

• Restroom Association of Singapore
  
• Japan Toilet Association
  
• Korea Clean Toilet Association
  
• Taiwan Toilet Association
  
• Australia Toilet Association
  
• Beijing Tourism Bureau
  
• British Toilet Association
  
• Global Sanitet Club Finland (formerly known as Finland Toilet Association).
  
• Gramalaya, India
  
• Indonesia Toilet Association
  
• Malaysia Toilet Committee
  
• Moscow Toilet Association
  
• Paruresis Society, USA
  
• Society of Continence
  
• Sulabh International
  
• Toilet & Toilet India
  
• Philippines Toilet Association
  
• Metroped Inc

All interested parties are encouraged to attend thusly:

Attend this WORLD Toilet Summit held for the FIRST TIME here in CHINA - Meet the KEY DECISION MAKERS, KEY OFFICIALS and the MOVERS & SHAKERS of the Industry [Again: eeww – Ed.]! Make a Date!

REGISTER TODAY For Early Bird Discounts

You don’t want to miss out on those early bird discounts.

Your country has been struck with a devastating terrorist attack, and everyone agrees that another is inevitable. You have gone to war in a faraway country, tying down your military, sapping your treasury, and killing your soldiers, based on intelligence that is badly flawed at best, or ruthlessly manipulated at worst. What do you do?

Why, you purge your intelligence agencies of those you deem “disloyal” to the Great Leader, of course!

Spotted on the Metro last night: a somewhat rumpled man engrossed in the hagiographic A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush. Behind him: a sharply dressed guy with his nose stuck in a copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

It’s like Donnie Darko: clearly it means something profound, I am just not quite sure what it is.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I find this stuff interesting.

Another map with an interesting perspective. Again, I think this tends to indicate that some of our red state friends may be getting a little over-excited.

Conservative Christian radio commentator Frank Pastore waxed crusader in the LA Times on Friday:

The left bewitches with its potions and elixirs, served daily in its strongholds of academe, Hollywood and old media. It vomits upon the morals, values and traditions we hold sacred: God, family and country. As we learned Tuesday, it is clear the left holds the majority of Americans, the majority of us, in contempt.

Simply, a majority of Americans have rejected John Kerry and John Edwards and the left because they are wrong. They are wrong because there are not two Americas. We are one nation under a God they reject. We remain indivisible despite their attempts to divide Americans through their relentless warfare against class, ethnic and religious unity.

I think this may betray a smidge of overconfidence, given that George W. Bush spent more money than any other candidate in the history of the world to beat an uninspiring Bostonian Catholic during wartime by 51%-49%.

But hey, maybe I have a new tagline: “Vomiting on the morals, values and traditions you hold sacred since 1998!”

It seems we are on the verge of a “decisive moment” in Fallujah. However, as the BBC observes: “The problem with decisive moments is that they tend to be followed by other decisive moments.”

Can we please have this engraved over the entrance to the Pentagon?

Much been written about the election result this week. Much of it has been more passionate, inspiring, or intelligent than anything I could add, even if I had the energy. But I am very interested in what the result tells us about our country, and since we were split essentially right down the middle, the best way of seeing that is with maps.

Everyone has seen the red and blue map, which is fairly striking:



It’s even more striking when you look county-by-county:



This size doesn’t do it justice; check out the larger version at the excellent electoral-vote.com.

If it seems amazing to you that the election could be so close when so little of the map is blue, here is a cartogram that relates size to population density:



Someone drew a map showing the states in various shades of purple, depending on the mix of votes:



And this comparison has been floating around the Internet for much of the week:




But I think what was most interesting to me has been the historical data from the University of Virginia. Check it out; note that they use blue and green instead of blue and red:

1972
1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000 (from the New York Times)

Finally, there is this modest proposal: