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results of 2020 election, day two
Thursday, November 5 2020
Throughout the day, all I could do was hit refresh on the various news sites and blogs (particularly TalkingPointsMemo.com and PalmerReport.com) for fresh takes on what was happening in the presidential election ("the longest Tuesday ever"). At any moment, I expected Biden to pull ahead in Pennsylvania, where mailed-in ballots were being counted and were quickly diminishing Trump's lead in the state. But it was all happening too slowly. I'm used to the timeline of the coronavirus, where news seems to happen faster than my ability to follow it. The votes were being counted, but not very quickly. Also, there were crazed mobs massing outside vote-counting centers making disparate demands. In Arizona, the MAGA people demanded the counting continue, since it seemed that might erase Biden's lead. But in Pennsylvania, they wanted vote counting to stop, because it was working against them. The lack of consistency was so very Trumpian.
This afternoon, my boss Alex demonstrated the app we've been building to a large group of municipality tax professionals, but he used collaboration software called join.me, a sort of business-targeted Zoom, and it had problems. Whenever Alex was sharing his screen, his audio was clipped and hard to follow, a problem we'd identified in early testing and one that seemed to get worse the more people joined the session. In the end, the presentation ended up being a bit of a disaster just because of these technical problems. The app itself worked great.
[REDACTED]
The day had been gorgeous, with sunny skies and temperatures in the upper 60s or perhaps lower 70s. It was also the birthday of Leah, the woman who runs the Garden Café, so I suggested to Gretchen that we have dinner there tonight. There wouldn't, after all, be many more evenings left of such glorious weather before the arrival of winter. So Gretchen baked a bunch of cupcakes and at 5:00pm, she, Powerful, and I drove out to Woodstock. There were a fair number of people in the Garden's garden when we arrived, but our favorite table in the back was empty, so we went there. As I have of late, I ordered the vegetable quesadilla and drank two full Abbey Ales. I'd brought a frost-blackened ghost pepper to spice up my food as much as I could tolerate. Leah joined our table for a long time near the end of our meal, [REDACTED].
After drinking one and a half Abbey Ales (they're strong, something like 9% alcohol), I checked my blood alcohol level with a pocket breathalyzer I got back in October. My BAC was only 0.01%, which is one eighth of the legal limit. It's frightening to know I can legally drive at eight times that level.
On the drive home, we heard part of Donald Trump's latest insane statement to the press, the one where he claimed he would be the clear winner of the presidential election if only "legal" votes were counted. He also complained that the polls that showed him doing badly had suppressed turnout by his supporters. It was pathetic, but also somewhat scary. He clearly wants to hold on to power no matter what the facts of the election happen to be. The statement was so full of lies that the public radio network cut away from it before it was over.
Back at the house, Biden had yet to pull ahead in Pennsylvania.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?201105 feedback
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