I’m moving and thinking very slowly today, trying to steer chains of reasoning around the sharp headache that keeps flickering behind my eyes; I had a couple posts I wanted to work on today, along with sermon work and some other things, but nothing’s happening very fast.I do want to mention, though, something that amused me last night. I have to admit, I didn’t watch the debate—I already had a headache, and figured I could catch up with it later—so I was bewildered, sometime after 9:30, to get up and check my blog traffic and find it going clean through the roof. Turns out, when John McCain made his comment about Barack Obama’s overhead-projector earmarks, that hordes of people pulled up Google and went looking; and for whatever reason, when you Google Obama overhead projector or some variant of that, my post “Barack Obama as overhead-projector screen” from this past July is right there near the top. It’s just a short post that has nothing to do with the earmarks Sen. McCain was talking about—rather, it’s a brief comment on a remarkable column by the redoubtable Shelby Steele—but there you go: that one post got more hits in half an hour last night than the whole blog had gotten over the previous week, as one person after another checked it out. I do hope most of those folks kept going on down their search lists (as I did, with one of them) to find the information they wanted on Sen. Obama’s earmarks. (If so, they might also have found a link to this piece on Sarah Palin’s record on earmarks, which is much stronger.) As it is, though, I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard a time or two before that the problem with Internet searches is that they lack serendipity. The usual comparison is to looking a word up in the dictionary, and all the other interesting words you run across while you’re trying to find the one you want; supposedly, the precision of our Internet searches means that people don’t experience those accidental discoveries anymore (which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending). Offhand, though, I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point. My blog bears me witness.
Rob, as much as I think we need to curb earmarks, the “overhead projector” is acutally a very important piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, to replace an old one installed in the 70’s that is no longer functioning well. I don’t know who should pay for it, but I can see the need, and I can see why someone representing Chicago would try to find money for it. That planetarium is visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year, and used as a school field trip by half the schools in Illinois. I wish that whoever is feeding Sen. MacCain these tidbits for use in his speeches would find out the real story behind them. Otherwise, they risk making the candidate look foolish and building resentment against him.
I don’t have a problem with a new projector for the Adler Planetarium (or, from what little I know, with the other, larger projector request); I’ll certainly agree that there are better earmarks to go after, even if they don’t lend themselves quite so easily to a dismissive offhand comment. (The ones to Will County and Sen. Obama’s old crony Larry Walsh come to mind.) I’m just amused at the online reaction to the comment.