Post out of tune

As I write this, George Allen is holding onto a twelve thousand-vote lead in the Virginia Senate race. He might win, he might not. I’m sick of him either way, I just didn’t want to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.

The Washington Post needs a good kicking, though, for its treatment of Virginia regionalism in the final weeks of the campaign. Sunday’s inset under the front page banner headline, titled Md., Va. Challengers’ Fate May Depend on Inner Suburbs’ Muscle, was perhaps the most clear in its arrogant dismissal of downstate opinions as relevant to the national picture.

In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb’s challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.

Let’s do a little bit of math here, starting from estimates of a basically even country and state (which seem obvious). I’m going to slightly overstate Northern Virginia’s size for the sake of estimation, and call it 1/3 of the state’s population. I’ll further estimate that downstate is roughly 60-40 Republican, which puts them 10% out of sway with an even country. If that’s the case, downstate Republicans are 40% (3/5 * 2/3 == 6/15) of the state, and downstate Dems are about 27% (2/5 * 2/3 == 4/15). To make up for this kind of a split and get it to even, Northern Virginia has to go 70/30 to the Democrats (NoVA R: 1.5/15 or 10% of the state; NoVA D 3.5/15 or 23%).

To boil that down: NoVA is considerably less than half the state’s population. If the state is even, and NoVA is to provide an even counterweight at a statewide level to the Republican downstate, NoVA has to be MUCH more disproportionately blue than the rest of the Commonwealth is red. The country would have to be 55% Democratic to make this kind of divergence even (15 points either way). It’s not.

So, Posties, give us a break with the superiority crap. NoVA isn’t more in tune with the rest of the country, it’s just more in tune with the rest of your country — which doesn’t appear to stretch much more than 100 miles or so from the tracks of the Northeast Corridor.

Orioles: Not My Home Team

Tuesday night, I made my first try at attending a weeknight Baltimore Orioles home game as a Northern Virginia resident. According to O’s owner Peter Angelos, this has always been an easy, convenient and reasonable thing to do, and therefore it was completely unnecessary for Washington to have its own team.

So let’s look at the timeline for a 1905 (7:05 pm) start at Camden Yards.

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Photoblogging: passing the time

See the full Honeymoon set

Normally I’m the one with baseball on the brain.

See the full DC Scenes Seen set

Game 2 and Hockey Cultures

Taking a quick run around the blogs in response to Eric’s excellent-as-always roundup on Game 2 — the first game I’ve gotten to watch since Game 5 in the Eastern finals. Something about other priorities.

That was a good, old-fashioned beating the Canes handed to Edmonton last night, and the Caniac blog crew is mostly keeping their heads about them. I have one slight disagreement to make with Cason out in Tucson (does that rhyme?) over Laraque’s third period and the Canes’ non-reaction, though.

Seriously, that crap out of Dredy Locks Laraque was absolute thuggery. He takes a run at Wallin’s legs then boards Andrew Ladd when the boy’s head is down. And the Canes take it?

First problem: my initial reaction, like his, was that Laraque was out on an intent-to-injure mission. I have a small suspicion, though, that at 6’3”/240 with a pronounced tendency for mayhem, if he had really wanted to cause an injury, he’d have been successful. Furthermore, the Canes handled it exactly right. In the first round, Calgary began to lose control against Anaheim when Jarome Iginla let François Beauchemin goad him into a scrap. Any of our players on the ice are worth more than that goon. When you’re about to go up 2 games to none in the Stanley Cup Finals, you can let your opposition rage up to anything short of death or dismemberment. You’ve made your point already — it’s hanging above center ice in lights. Read More »

Callouts and Conspiracies

Today is a momentous day in BTN history. (Actually, last Thursday was; I just didn’t notice until lunch today.) I have now received my first-ever blog calling-out, wherein someone I don’t know devotes an entire post toward drawing my attention. So, congratulations, LawDawg; you have ascended the heights above such BTN luminaries as Tina the American Idol fan, and far surpassed Fanblogs’s legions of WVU-supporting morons, and gotten me to respond in a full post.

And perhaps I should be afraid, being called out by a law student with an unusual interest in (a) infectious diseases and (b) my current town of residence. Unfortunately for LD, though, I moved to Reston last fall, so I wasn’t around for the 1989 Ebola outbreak. And I was 9 years old anyway, so I probably wouldn’t have noticed unless everybody started wearing surgical masks or something. Sorry to disappoint. As for potential causes of death in Reston today, I’m more worried about speeding dot-commers in Range Rovers than killer monkey viruses.

But there’s one thing we’re all missing here. According to Wikipedia (not the most reliable source, I know), the infected monkey house was closed and converted to — get this — a day care center. And none of the kiddies have even gotten sick that we know of. A hop, skip, and a conspiracy-minded jump later, one might wonder: is someone using an unassuming suburban preschool to create legions of Ebola-resistant supertoddlers to take over the world? We are awfully close to DC, after all.

You might say that I have no proof they are. But can you prove they’re not?