Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Solar Eclipse Play List

I saw a very slim crescent moon last night which means you can now watch the moon and literally count days until it passes right smack in the way of the sun on the August 21 total eclipse.

I've got about a 5 1/2 hour drive to Columbia, Missouri, where I'll be watching the eclipse, and when I have a drive, I need a playlist. It's unfortunately old and uncool, but long time readers know I quit caring.

Let 's get THIS over with first:



Bonnie Tyler's overwrought camp classic has very little if anything to do with astronomy, even if you really stretch and count "your love is like a shadow on me all of the time." Eclipses do involve shadows but they don't happen All Of The Time. In fact, on average any given place on Earth only sees a total eclipse every 375 years. (Carbondale, Illinois is above average and double dipping; they get another one in just seven years on April 8, 2024.)

"Total Eclipse Of The Heart" is just a turn of a phrase by Jim Steinman, the man who gave us Meat Loaf. And if either the moon or sun were heart shaped there would be serious issues with gravity.  But because it's the only song most people can think of that actually has "Total Eclipse" right there in the name, we'll be hearing it all of eclipse week, just like we heard "1999" all over again that one New Years.




Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon is a better listen, and concludes with astronomical accuracy: "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." The closing song is even called "Eclipse" and it runs just over two minutes, the approximate duration of totality.

As the narrator notes, "dark side of the moon" is often used incorrectly to refer to the FAR side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth. The far side of the moon will be the LIGHT side of the moon during the eclipse, and the near side will be the dark side as it blocks the sun. You may be able to glimpse the surface features of the moon, lit by "earthshine," during totality.

Despite claims by Tori Amos on her 2007 American Doll Posse album, there is absolutely no "Dark Side Of The Sun." Tori clearly flunked Astronomy 101 and needs to listen to They Might Be Giants:



Nice beret. They also offer classes in Turkish geography.

Let's see what more we can learn about eclipses from our playlist.

"Moon Shadow" by Cat Stevens - because an eclipse is the moon's shadow on the earth. If you're being followed by a moon shadow, it'll catch up to you very, very quickly since it's traveling at about 1600 MPH.

I always found this song's imagery of losing parts of your body kind of disturbing when I was a kid. And if I ever lose my eyes... well, then, I guess I won't see the eclipse, will I?




Planet Earth is still mourning the loss of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell but you can sing "black hole sun, won't you come" as you wait for totality, because that's what it looks like. His later effort with Audioslave, "Shadow On The Sun," is astronomically inaccurate. Honorable mention: "Under The Big Black Sun" by X.


"Blinded By The Light" - You can choose the Springsteen original (the eclipse is only 78% total in Asbury Park, New Jersey) or the Manfred Mann hit version, but you'll be Blinded by The Light if you look at the partial phases of the eclipse without proper eye protection. For this reason, "Cheap Sunglasses" by ZZ Top should not be on the playlist.

My eclipse glasses are Stevie Wonder/Ray Charles dark, but looking at the sun through them looks like a rising orange full moon. Honorable mention: U2's "Staring At The Sun."




"Total Eclipse," Iron Maiden: From the classic The Number Of The Beast album, which you know is totally kick-ass because the cover looks like Tipper Gore's nightmare.  This one captures the superstition and fear ancient societies felt about eclipses:
Cold as steel the darkness waits, it's hour will come
A cry of fear for the chosen worshipping the sun
Mother natures black revenge on those who waste her life
War babies in the garden of Eden shall turn our ashes to ice
They could have just cranked this one to 11 and it would have scared the shit out of the sun-eating dragon. Speaking of goes to 11, you do NOT want to hear Spinal Tap's "Rainy Day Sun" on August 21.



"New Moon On Monday," Duran Duran: Because the eclipse is on a Monday and a total eclipse only occurs at new moon. No word on whether a lonely satellite will be visible during totality, but it may be a cold day; there will be a noticeable temperature drop even in places with a significant partial eclipse. The loss of light is enough that it'll affect solar power generation.

"Earth And Sun and Moon," Midnight Oil: Actually that should be "Earth and Moon And Sun." The lineup of Earth, sun, moon would be Bad.


And while the end of totality may be bittersweet, the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" is an easy choice.

If you want less music and more actual information, nationaleclipse.com is a great resource. You're probably too late for a day off work or booking a hotel, and traffic may be challenging on E-Day. (Normally when I say "E-Day" I mean Election Day.) But I've seen a heavy partial eclipse, in 1979, and even that is pretty cool.

A total eclipse, though, has been on my bucket list since the March 7, 1970 eclipse that Carly Simon so famously sang about. Pro tip: If you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia, you'd be in one of the worst places to watch with just 57% totality.

Not on the list: "It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding," Bob Dylan. Opening line "Darkness at the break of noon" should make it an automatic. But he loses points for the astronomically impossible "eclipses both the sun and moon," and gets crossed off entirely for "even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." Not even Melania wants to see that.
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Caucuses set for February 5, 2018

For me the big news out of Saturday's Democratic state central committee meeting wasn't the much-deserved election of Troy Price as the new party chair. It was the approval of the 2018 Caucus To Convention Calendar:
  • Caucus: Monday, February 5
  • County Conventions: Saturday, March 24
  • District Conventions: Saturday, April 28, sites to be set later by district committees
  • State Convention: Saturday, June 16, Des Moines
Good. Now I can get some work done.

There had been rumours of Saturday, February 3, but those didn't materialize. I've always liked the Saturday idea but historically, there have been Jewish objections. (My Saturday night idea never caught on.) We tried it once, in 2010, and got our usual low off-year turnout.
Technical tangent: Officially, the governor year caucuses aren't "off year caucuses," they're just "caucuses." The same precinct-based process except no presidential stuff. The "off year caucus" is a county-wide event held in the spring of odd years that functionally is just a big central committee meeting where we pass resolutions. In my opinion, the off-year caucus is one of the less useful things we do. And it's cost me this paragraph. From here on out, any references to "off-year" mean governor year, not odd year.
The reason for going back to the traditional Monday is probably because, as near as I can tell, Republicans have chosen the same night. That's not as critical in an off-year, but it's essential in a presidential year.

The caucuses are a party meeting, not an election, and the check and balance against people participating in both parties is holding them at the same time. All it would take would be one person in a presidential year bragging about attending both caucuses and "voting" twice, and there would be a likely fatal wound to our First in The Nation status.

Any discussion of caucuses, even off year, invariably leads into a discussion of process and First, and that's what happened yesterday on my Twitter feed (that's now my primary medium, though the ole blog stays around for long form stuff like this).

My sense is that most people who are willing to give up First and just vote in the June primary have no concept what that will mean. In January 2020 they'd be asking "where are the candidates? It's only five months till the primary!" In May 2020, Presumptive Nominee will be in California and New York raising money.

See, people forget that most nomination contests don't play out like 2008 and 2016, with a close campaign going through every primary state and every state having at least some significance. (Though `16 wasn't really that close.) Most years are more like 2004, when one candidate gets a big lead and the others recognize reality and quit. The June state ballots look more like this:
However, in the last 18 months I've heard more and more Iowans saying yes, they would be happy to give up the hoopla and simply vote in a primary. I'm actually more agnostic on that existential question than people think. Part of me would rather get paid extra overtime in a presidential primary than burn vacation days doing stuff that is almost exactly like my job to set up caucuses. But I just want people to understand that it's an either/or trade off.

Anyway, if you're really interested in the presidential year stuff go back and look at my posts from that era; my thoughts haven't changed much. But since I'm not good enough for the caucus review committee, what do I know.
 Let's get back to the matter at hand: February 5, 2018.

These caucuses may draw a bit more attention than a typical off-year cycle because of the large field for governor. As anyone reading a political blog on a weekend knows, Iowa law requires a candidate to win 35% in a primary to be nominated, or else the party convention chooses a nominee. Republicans had an epic convention in the 3rd CD in 2014, and since then convention loser Brad Zaun has been trying to change the law and institute a runoff instead.

Democrats haven't had a convention because of the 35% law in a long time. The last I know of was in a Waterloo legislative seat in 2002. There was some talk of it in 2006 when we initially had four serious candidates for governor plus a Some Dude. But not long before the caucuses Patty Judge dropped out of the governor's race to become Chet Culver's running mate.

Still, with three serious candidates, a primary stalemate could have happened if things had broken exactly even. It almost happened to Republicans in 2002 when nominee Doug Gross was at just 35.6%, and Culver only won with about 39.

This year the field is even bigger with six serious contenders and a couple more guys who are a notch or two above Some Dude. And the overall process awareness, activist interest, and internal contentiousness level is higher than it's been in a long time. So we can expect very high attendance by the off-year standard, though certainly nothing approaching the Who Live In Cincinnati levels Johnson County saw in 2016.

In 2006, Johnson County saw preference groups in a handful of precincts. I'm not sure if rules have changed but at that time preference groups could happen if 15% of the room wants them.

That could be a training issue, as it was in the 2012 presidential year. Chairs went in expecting no preference groups and were startled when Uncommitted groups emerged. In some places in 2012 people were simply told, incorrectly, "there are no preference groups."

My sense is that compared to a presidential race, even compared to an Obama vs. Uncommitted "race," the governor nomination four months out is still very inside baseball, even to the core party activists who attend this stuff. My sense is also that by the time we get to February 5 the field for governor will shrink and the urgency of a caucus strategy will recede.

Still, the smart campaigns will have a strategy. Even without alignment, there may be contested races for the delegate seats that usually go begging in an off-year. And with alignment you may see some strange coalitions. Attendance will likely be low enough that the groups will default to Candidate Putting Most Emphasis On Convention vs. Everyone Else In Uncommitted.

So the work of scheduling the sites and recruiting and training the chairs begins. Once again, in Johnson County the Republicans and Democrats are planning to work together, and I highly recommend that approach to everyone else.

Typically in an off year we cluster our caucuses, hosting multiple precincts in different rooms of the same building and doing some of the explanation and presentation stuff in one large group. That also means that in the places where you can't recruit a chair or where your chair is a rookie, there's an experienced "cluster commander" on hand to help. I've run as many as three caucuses at once, with the caveat that one was just the one person who showed up and another was three people.

Clustering is tricky and you can overdo it depending on the geography of your county. In 2012 Chicago was telling us that they wanted five sites total in our county. The emphasis was on the live video link with the president (which one of the Uncommitteds called "the Obama Nuremburg rally").  We pushed back to add a couple more in the outlying towns. We weren't going to tell Solon they had to come in to the east side of Iowa City. On the other hand, some small counties may choose to have just one cluster, and then the same exact people will meet in the same exact place on March 24 for the county convention.

Anyway, friendly advice. Now is the time to get started on this stuff, and now is the time to talk to your county leaders about it. And if you want a better process, don't complain, volunteer.

Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, July 06, 2017

Lazy Dynamite or Power Cut?


There was never any PLAN for a five week hiatus, it just happened that way. With the legislative session over, I didn't feel the need for long-form hyper-detailed posts, and as for local stuff, I have a Grand Unifying Theory but what I know I'm not saying.

I kept tweeting, of course - Twitter's really my main medium now. But all I really intended was a brief British Election Break.
But when I saw people on Facebook saying "I didn't know you had a blog," I knew I had been slacking.

I still don't have anything lengthy to say so I'll just look back over June, string the fragments together, and hope it turns out like side two of "Abbey Road" and not like side two of "Red Rose Speedway." Younger readers may need to look that up.  I had to explain my joke "I heard rumours but I prefer Tusk" to a young prospective candidate this week.
Trump came to Cedar Rapids and I mostly ignored him.

There was the debacle in House District 22 where Democrat Ray "The Streak" Stevens didn't get his papers turned in. Confession: I would have made the same mistake in 1996 when I was a late-starting convention candidate, but the state party had a staffer follow up with me. So whose fault?

It was always a long shot, but maybe a lost opportunity: the two Republicans (Slightly Silly and Very Silly) split the vote almost equally with the winner at only 44%, and the Libertarian drew off a few.

Sadly we have another special election with the death of Fairfield Democrat Curt Hanson. This one promises to be much more competitive; the 2009 special in which Hanson was first elected drew national attention and outside spending.

And there's a special election for Iowa Democratic Party chair... but no one seems to want the job.
I'm less upset by fireworks than most of my liberal friends, perhaps because I have teenage boys and thus used to unpredictable loud noises. But I never understood why fireworks were SUCH a high priority for Republicans and why they are considered SO important as a FREEDOM! thing.

My unpopular but strongly held opinion: The 4th CD is unwinnable for a Democrat, but we need someone credible who can run, maintain dignity, and boost the rest of the ticket. That's a lot to ask of someone for a no-shot race. Do any of our 74 candidates for governor live there?
Ross Wilburn does: I discovered the former Iowa City mayor's (he moved to Ames) committee for governor without even trying. I was looking at the Iowa Ethics website looking for SCHOOL candidates when I saw his committee had been sitting out there for a week. So I tweeted it and it looks like I was first.  Mainstream press accounts started about six hours later, none mentioning my minor scoop.

I finally found a clip that sums up my feelings about the platform committee:



Must follow Twitter Accounts:


I don't really have an ending so I'll close with a reprise of the British election beginning like Pink Floyd closed "Animals."


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)