The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos)

Nate Silver on The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos)

Surveys find that about one-quarter of the United States population, or between 75 and 80 million people, follow college football regularly. But which teams do they align themselves with?

This question is not easy to answer, but we’re going to make an effort to resolve it, and then use the results to shine a light on college football’s increasingly complicated realignment picture.

Today’s Birthday Boy

Aidan’s birth announcement graced the pages of this site 8 years ago today. Happy Birthday, Aidan.

Aidan, always ready to pose, at a Washington Nationals game in August.
Catching the wave at Virginia Beach over Labor Day weekend. Note that Aidan has just about worn out that boogie board.

Here’s a couple more over the years:

Anticipating a visit from the Tooth Fairy, 2010.
Keeping his eye on the ball, 2009.
Aidan, on the bus, on his first day of school, 2009.
More ice cream than boy, 2007.
Pony rides are for kids, 2007.
Sometimes you don't want your picture taken on your birthday, 2005.

Albuquerque Journal

The Albuquerque Journal has launched an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch app that makes a replica of the newspaper available daily. The app is free and for the rest of September you can download the daily edition free too.

What will be interesting is whether the Journal will make electronic subscriptions available at a reasonable price without requiring a subscription to the printed version as has been the case. By reasonable I’m thinking something like the San Francisco Chronicle‘s $5.99/month, $59.99/year.

Personally I don’t care much for most newspaper websites, though their content is often superb. I find the homepages inordinately cluttered, as if in printed version parlance they were trying to get the whole newspaper onto the front page. Various apps generally are much better at presenting digestible portions. For example, I think the best way to see what’s in The New York Times is the Times Skimmer.

The internet has proven an insurmountable challenge for most newspapers. Not only do they still — necessarily — rely on the printed edition for most of their revenue, but — and I think this has been the bigger underlying problem — there is no longer much need for their amalgamation of news, sports, comics, features, weather, gossip, advice to the lovelorn, photos, TV listings, movie reviews, etc. We can find all that and more in great detail with just a few clicks. Perhaps newspapers should have honed their uniqueness — local news and local sports — and foregone the rest. I don’t know.

Four Places I’d Like to See

Lake Louise, Canadian Rockies

The Colosseum and Rome

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland

Mt. Cook, the Southern Alps, and New Zealand

For the record I have already been to:

São Paulo
Montevideo
Buenos Aires
Lisbon
Madrid
Geneva
Cologne (airport only)
Bonn
Frankfurt (airport only)
Tokyo
Beijing
Hong Kong
Macau
St. Petersburg
Helsinki
Stockholm
Ankara
Istanbul
Nicosia
Athens
Yaounde
Douala
Lagos
Zurich (airport only)
Paris
Havana
Warsaw
Moscow
Alma Ata
Prague (airport only)
Bratislava
Vienna
All 50 states, Canada and Mexico.

September 18th

Robert Blake is 78 today.

Frankie Avalon is 71. (Annette will be 69 next month.)

Otis Sistrunk is 65. He played for the Oakland Raiders, 1972-1978. From Wikipedia:

During a Monday Night Football telecast, a television camera beamed a sideline shot of the 6’5″, 265-pound Sistrunk’s steaming bald head to the nation. That, along with his lack of a college education resulting in the team program listing Sistrunk’s academic background as “U.S. Mars” (short for U.S. Marines), prompted ABC commentator and ex-NFL player Alex Karras to suggest that the extraterrestrial-looking Sistrunk’s alma mater was the “University of Mars.”

Coach Rick Pitino is 59.

Baseball hall-of-famer Ryne Sandberg is 52.

Dazzling defensive flair and a tremendous knack for power enabled Ryne Sandberg to join the list of greats at second base. As the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1984, Sandberg led the Chicago Cubs to their first postseason appearance since 1945. His amazing range and strong, accurate throwing arm, led to nine consecutive Gold Glove Awards at the keystone position, and helped him pace NL second basemen in assists seven times, and in fielding average and total chances four times each. With the bat, Sandberg launched 282 career home runs, and in 1990 he become the first second baseman since Rogers Hornsby in 1922 to hit 40 homers in a single-season.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

James Gandolfini is 50.

Jada Pinkett Smith is 40.

Lance Armstrong is 40 today, too. Or so he says.

Greta Garbo was born on September 18, 1905. This is from her New York Times obituary in 1990:

The finest element in a Garbo film was Garbo. She invariably played a disillusioned woman of the world who falls hopelessly and giddily in love. Tragedy is often imminent, and her tarnished-lady roles usually required her to die or otherwise give up her lover. No one could suffer like Garbo.

Mysterious and aloof, she appealed to both men and women, and she exerted a major influence on women’s fashions, hair styles and makeup. On screen and off, she was a remote figure of loveliness.

Garbo’s career spanned only 19 years. In 1941, at the age of 36, she made the last of her 27 movies, a slight comedy called ”Two Faced Woman.” She went into what was to be temporary retirement, but she never returned to the screen.

Actor Jack Warden was born on this date in 1920. Warden was nominated twice for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — for Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. NewMexiKen liked him best as juror # 7 in 12 Angry Men.

The first edition of The New York Times was published 160 years ago today (1851).

President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol on September 18 in 1793.

Well I’ll Be Dammed

“Over the past century, dams made in the West have become more mismatched with their ambient climate. The Hoover Dam, for instance, was designed based on a 30-year period that had markedly higher precipitation levels than today. As a result of a decade of drought, the dam is now operating at only 30 percent of its capacity, said Matthews, and new mechanisms have been added to cope with the lower water levels.”

World’s Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions: Scientific American

Best redux line of the day

From two years ago today.

“Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organized and run by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized and run by the Italians.”

America’s Bloodiest Day

“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.”

Stephen W. Sears
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam

The New York Times coverage from 1862 is online.

Antietam gave Lincoln the military victory he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd. It stated that slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. The objective of the war had changed.

America’s bloodiest day:

Killed: Union 2,000 Confederate 1,550 Total Killed: 3,650
Wounded: Union 9,550 Confederate 7,750 Total Wounded: 17,300
Missing/Captured: Union 750 Confederate 1,020 Total Missing: 1,770
Total: Union 12,400 Confederate 10,320 Total Casualties: 22,720

As a rule of thumb, about 20% of the wounded died of their wounds and 30% of the missing had been killed (in the days before dog-tags to identify the dead). Accordingly, an estimate of the total dead from the one-day battle: 7,640.

Source: National Park Service

The best single volume on Antietam is Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam.

It ought to be a national holiday

Hiram Williams was born 88 years ago today (1923). We know him as Hank. Arguably he is one of the two or three most important individuals in American music history. Hank Williams is an inductee of both the Country Music (the first inductee) and Rock and Roll (its second year) halls of fame.

Entering local talent talent contests soon after moving to Montgomery in 1937, Hank had served a ten-year apprenticeship by the time he scored his first hit, “Move It on Over,” in 1947. He was twenty-three then, and twenty-five when the success of “Lovesick Blues” (a minstrel era song he did not write) earned him an invitation to join the preeminent radio barndance, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. His star rose rapidly. He wrote songs compulsively, and his producer/music publisher, Fred Rose, helped him isolate and refine those that held promise. The result was an unbroken string of hits that included “Honky Tonkin’,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Jambalaya,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and “You Win Again.” He was a recording artist for six years, and, during that time, recorded just 66 songs under his own name (together with a few more as part of a husband-and-wife act, Hank & Audrey, and a more still under his moralistic alter ego, Luke the Drifter). Of the 66 songs recorded under his own name, an astonishing 37 were hits. More than once, he cut three songs that became standards in one afternoon.

American Masters

The words and music of Hank Williams echo across the decades with a timelessness that transcends genre. He brought country music into the modern era, and his influence spilled over into the folk and rock arenas as well. Artists ranging from Gram Parsons and John Fogerty (who recorded an entire album of Williams’ songs after leaving Creedence Clearwater Revival) to the Georgia Satellites and Uncle Tupelo have adapted elements of Williams’ persona, especially the aura of emotional forthrightness and bruised idealism communicated in his songs. Some of Williams’ more upbeat country and blues-flavored numbers, on the other hand, anticipated the playful abandon of rockabilly.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Hank Williams’s legend has long overtaken the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Almost singlehandedly, Williams set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft, but his appeal rests as much in the myth that even now surrounds his short life. His is the standard by which success is measured in country music on every level, even self-destruction.

Country Music Hall of Fame

Again from American Masters:

It all fell apart remarkably quickly. Hank Williams grew disillusioned with success, and the unending travel compounded his back problem. A spinal operation in December 1951 only worsened the condition. Career pressures and almost ceaseless pain led to recurrent bouts of alcoholism. He missed an increasing number of showdates, frustrating those who attempted to manage or help him. His wife, Audrey, ordered him out of their house in January 1952, and he was dismissed from the Grand Ole Opry in August that year for failing to appear on Opry-sponsored showdates. Returning to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he’d been an up-and-coming star in 1948, he took a second wife, Billie Jean Jones, and hired a bogus doctor who compounded his already serious physical problems with potentially lethal drugs.

Hank Williams died in the back seat of his Cadillac. He was found and declared dead on New Year’s Day 1953. He was 29.

Yes, that is June Carter in the video.

Today’s Painting

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy (1940). The original is in the House of Representatives Wing of the U.S. Capitol. 39 of the 55 delegates are pictured — but not the three who did not sign or the 13 who had left the convention. Washington is standing; Franklin seated, turned to face us; Hamilton is directly behind Franklin; Madison is seated to Franklin’s left. The person credited with writing the preamble, Gouverneur Morris, is standing behind and just a little to the left of Hamilton, facing us.

Click image for a much larger version.

Best line for this date

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787

Best line of the day

“And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the ‘common hazards of life’ through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Paul Krugman in Friday’s column.