We're all Bozos on this bus.

In that partisan politics do not encourage positive discussions, and in that FT is employed by an international crowd, the usual "Here's why," and "They were right/wrong," observations regarding the recent American Presidential election don't belong here.

As such, they won't appear. What will appear is this: Regardless of one's position in favor or opposition to the results, what remains is that there were a remarkable number of people who voted for the first time this election, and not because of age. One may point to any of a small number of demographic parameters as the cause and probably be mostly right. But even that isn't terribly important per se.

What is important is that our new President is perceived by a larger-than-usual segment of the American population as being somehow able to grant a larger degree of blessing - social, economic, political - than past occupiers of The Oval Office. Along about Easter, there will come the revelation that no one man is above the influences, necessities and conundrae of The Presidency. Once that segment that saw some kind of Rooseveltian rescuer appear realizes that business as usual is the rule of the day, things could get sticky, fast.

Hopefully he will take steps to alleviate this during the first 100 days, typically the quadrennial "Era of Good Feelings" for a first-term President. For his sake and the sake of the innocent, I hope he does.

And that's all. 

Twice today, I gave the Country Badge a danged good shot. And, twice, today, I was defeated by what was called an incorrect answer but was in fact correct.

The problem is that I can't go back and send a correction request or advisement to the author of the quiz.

In both cases, I found direct evidence on the web indicating a particular answer. When submitting that answer, I was confronted with "Incorrect" and another answer which was not what I had just found in an independent source.

It's really frustrating to find the exact answer to a question you had no clue to, only to be told something else. It makes you wonder if the website for Colorguard Floors actually knows what the count for catching a rifle double-toss is (Two, according to them, but three according to whoever wrote the quiz). Why would a color guard website know anything about tossing rifles?

I'm really peeved about losing the badge on the 7th question of the 4th quiz to an undeniably wrong answer. The Wars of the Roses were definitively over when Henry, Earl of Richmond, was crowned Henry VII on Bosworth Field in 1485 after defeating Richard III. It was the end of the Plantagenet line and the beginning of Renaissance England (or at least the end of the Medieval feudal period) under the House of Tudor.

WRONG. It was Henry VI according to somebody out there whose quiz foiled my plans to answer rightly.  Things must have been different back in the 15th Century. Henry VI died in prison in 1471. Yet he was still able to win a major battle 14 years later.

Golly, those guys were tough. But not as tough as this badge. Who knew you had to not only have the right answers, but the occasionaly well-timed wrong ones?

Huh.

     In the US, there's a standard reply given to children who protest parental prohibitions by whining, "But everybody's [going, doing it, being there, having some]":

     "If everybody jumped off a cliff, would you?"

     Now, I don't know if there are equivalent expressions in the other English-speaking countries whose citizens virtually cohabitate here. I don't know if parents in England even tell their children 'no' anymore. Nonetheless, it's a common concept that the number of people doing something has no real effect on its correctness. If you believe otherwise, I direct you to Germany, 1938. QED.

     "So what?" you may ask and well you may. "What" is the fact that there are a definite few irritations that interfere with allowing the FT experience to reach the pristine level of trivial ecstasy it has such potential to be.

     What?

     As with a small rock in my shoe, I am irritated by the occasion, every so often, of taking a quiz that happens to overlap the turn of the hour. Thus, when the Submit button is hit, there is no record of me ever having taken that quiz!

     As well, even though I see the green dot in the radio button, I am told that I did not answer certain questions.

     And finally, in the Global quizzes and Hourly games, there are occasionally questions pulled from quizzes constructed in a manner that depends on an initial set of concepts or instructions. Within the realm of the quiz itself as published, the questions will make perfect sense. But, culled and placed in the hodge-podge of the Global & Hourly games, they lay naked and writhing in their irrelevance to anything around them, making their answer nearly impossible if a timely score is desired.

     When I have raised the question of these discrepancies, the answer has come back that "everybody suffers the same handicaps." As if putting a tack on everybody's chair would make the universal discomfort easier for each butt to absorb.

     There is no logic in this. I wonder if it would be posssible to alter the code so that:

A) A quiz begun before the turn of the hour would be finished, even if not visibly scored and/or ranked.

B) A more definitive marker could be worked to ensure the recognition of answered questions, and

C) Quizzes that are constructed in a conjugal or cascading fashion could have their questions somehow tagged so that they would not ever be pulled and placed into an out-of-context combination game.

     Perhaps not. Such improvements may involve too much work and detail to be justified. They may be pert' near imposssible.  Regardless, they stand in the way of FT being perfect. 

     But I won't stop just because there's a rock in my shoe every so often. Even if it does feel like Gibraltar once in a while.

If words are typed into cyberspace, but nobody is there to read them, do they make a blog?

     Is the point of the exercise to vent one's own mind, regardless of audience (or lack thereof), or is it to stimulate response by randomly flinging thoughts out across the virtual universe; sowing them like seeds upon rocky, fallow or fertile ground and hoping they gain purchase wherever they may land? 

     Consequently, what becomes of the nature of the words thus typed, once observed and perhaps even commented upon? Does the Heisenberg Principle apply? Do they retain their essence? Does conceptual inertia keep them steady and unaffected by reaction, or do they then become part of a greater whole; agglomerated into an uber-concept whose nature bouces randomly from contributor to contributor until it becomes a melange of ideas more representative of its past than of its present?

     And lastly, what of the contributor? There are two divergent paths, one being affected by encounter and the other not. One persists until by single contact suffers permanent immolation, at which point the other permeates immutably, creating an abstract Moebius reality; one-sided in perptuity yet with two distinct edges at any given point. Can the single dimension of virtual concept thus influence, in 3 dimensions, the ideas of their creator?

     Who knows? I'm getting a beer.