thewayne: (Default)
As it happens, the day that we're inaugurating that weird old felon from Florida also falls on the day that we're remembering Martin Luther King Jr., and it's a federal holiday, which means a lot of us have the day off.

What are we doing to commemorate the changing of the guard on this day, or this week?

The weird guy is obsessed with numbers and crowd sizes. He's already losing on this as his ceremony is being moved into the Capitol Rotunda as temperatures in Washington are far too cold for an outdoor swearing. And I've heard that hotel bookings, rather than their normal near 100%, are down to about 50-60%, which amuses me to no end.

But there's another number that matters: TV ratings. And what matters is both what you watch, and what you don't watch.

It's one thing if you don't watch the ceremony. That's fine. BUT... if your TV is showing something else instead all day long, you're skewing the numbers away from the ceremony! Not only are you denying viewership numbers to the ceremony, you're showing that you were home, and watching TV, and chose not to watch it!

For me, my TV is going to alternate between watching the movie The Apprentice, which apparently the weird felon hates, and the Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds. I don't like the latter, and haven't seen the former, but I feel it's a bit of a statement on my part. My stereo will be turned off, basically I'll set a timer on my watch to change the movie after it's done.

There's no doubt that this is almost entirely a symbolic gesture, but it makes me feel slightly warm and fuzzy. So I'll do it.

We are not a Neilson-ratings household, but streaming reports their own numbers independently. I don't think that really matters much.
thewayne: (Default)
We went to Las Cruces this morning and participated in the march which was sort of co-promoted with the Earth Day people. I sported a sign that said Dog > Dogma on one side and Free Cookies on the other: I carried a small Igloo cooler with my oatmeal/chocolate/macadamia nut cookies that I baked last night, gave away about 50 of 'em. Russet's sign on one side said Science flies us to the moon, Dogma flies us in to buildings, the other side said Man wrote the bible, God wrote the stars. I had told her about the Science flies us to the moon, religion flies us in to buildings, and we agreed that Las Cruces and Alamogordo is too religious and it could be somewhat provocative to word it quite that way.

One astronomer from Apache Point who lives up on the mountain came with us, another who lives in Las Cruces was there along with an observatory retiree and a friend. People were chanting "What do we want?" "Science!" "When do we want it?" "Now!" With the "Now!", we started shouting "After peer review!" which got people laughing and shouting it with us.

The retiree and her friend had the most awesome knit hats! They weren't pussy hats, they weren't brain hats, they were pussy/brain hats! I WANT ONE!

Every time I gave away cookies I'd talk about how baking was precise measurements, repeatability, controlled environments, etc. I should have added chemical reactions to my shpeel. I once got mobbed by about a dozen polite kids, it was tremendous fun.  I wanted a large sign that said Baking Is Science, but I just didn't feel like driving down to Alamogordo on Friday to get the materials for it.  Still, Russet cobbled together some decent little signs for us. Next year I think I'll have a proper placard: I doubt these marches will stop as long as The Orange One is in office, and Earth Day is the perfect day for a science march.

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