Webcelt,

I agree with what you say about electing delegates, but apparently this year at least, the straw poll is bing. From http://www.dfl.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={2BE3D424-1840-40A8-A92F-D645DE69E8AF}

Cast your Presidential Preference Ballot. Make your voice heard on who you think should be the next Democratic President. The DFL ballot is binding, which means that the results actually determine how many delegates each candidate gets at the national convention.

It sounds to me like Romney was trying to sound a bit like Garrison Keillor. Without hearing the quote in context it is hard to know.

One of these days I'm going to have two browsers going. One to write a letter, the other on your article so I can cite things better.

If you haven't tried tabs with your browser, you should.

After you finish an article, open the letter's section in a new tab. Tabs are much nicer that multiple browser windows.

This post along wiht a recent one over at Beyond the Multiplex (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/2008/01/22/oscars/index.html), lead me to think that movies are becoming more like other entertainment.

In the golden years (defined diffentely by different people), Hollywood blockbusters were often award winners. Films like Casablanca, Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Godfather did well at the box office as well as winning the Oscar for Best Picture. So the mass market aligned fairly well with critically acclaimed movies, so studios threw money behind those sorts of pictures.

It is true that these days fewer big studio pictures get great reviews, and fewer great movies make a lot of money. But this doesn't mean that Hollywood has given up on making movies that critics will like. Instead, the studio now have subsidiaries for making those pictures. Disney and Twentieth Century Fox may not many Best Picture nominations these days, but Miramax and Fox Searchlight certainly do.

So yes, the movie market is more fragmented than it used to be. But I think that it is just catching up to the same processes that have been happening with books and music for a long time.

I think that it is fairly rare that winners of prestigious book prizes are at the top of the best seller charts. Instead most publishing houses have their literary lines and separate popular and genre lines.

Similarly, music companies have separate labels for different kinds of music. Music is so fragmented that it is harder to compare what is happening with awards to movies. There are separate awards for a variety genres

including popular music, but most critics favor one or two genres, so it is harder to come to any kind of consensus on the best songs or albums of a given year.

So yes, popular culture is probably both dumbing down and becoming less popular, but it is not just movies. And Hollywood is not giving up on critically acclaimed movies, they are just supporting them differently.

Should Mr Fair's forecast prove anywhere near accurate, it would constitute something of a revolution in American political history. The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won the presidency with more than half the vote was in 1976 when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford. But that came little more than a year after the Watergate crisis had unseated Richard Nixon and cast a toxic pall over the Republicans.

Talk about silly hair splitting. While it has been a while since a Democrat won by 10% or more, that is largely a result of having had some moderately competitive third party candidates in 1992, 1996, and 2000. In 1996, Clinton had 49.2 %, Dole had 40.7 %, and Perot had 8.4 %. In a two way race, Clinton may well won 10%.

If a Democrat wins handily this year, historians may well argue that GWB "cast a toxic pall over the Republicans" just like Nixon did in 1976.

Regardless, though these models are fun to play with, the data that goes into them is so limited, it is hard to take them too seriously. There are relatively few elections to be basing the model on. I can't believe that predicting an election just on economic factors is valid, especially in the middle of a war.

Heath Ledger is not the right comparison to make.

On many levels Michael Jackson is the right comparison to make. They both are former child pop stars whose lives have fallen apart under the spot light. Also, at this point they both have sold more magazines than CDs.

For most people an entry-level LED light is probably probably more than sufficient. I have got a decent one that I got from a bike shop a couple of years ago for $30. It four standard double A batteries (I use rechargeables) and it gives more light and better battery life than the series of incandescents I went through. Its plenty of light for my usual just before dawn or just after dusk riding, though if I am going to be out when it is darker I sometimes supplement it with another LED headlamp on my head.

Like most things in cycling, there is huge range on what you can spend. I can't see spending $100 on a light, since if I did I would probably take a spill and bust it. Besides, $100 is more than I have spent to buy most of my bikes!

King,

Over the years you have made it clear that you can't stand Bobby Knight. Please do me a favor and refrain from writing an obituary for him.