Trump and the Jerk Pride Movement

Donald Trump, the gift that keeps on giving.

When David Letterman, the former host of the Late Night Show, heard that Donald Trump decided to enter the presidential race he moaned that he had retired too early.

Trump has truly been an inspiration for pundits to sharpen their wit.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, co author of "The Frontier in American Culture", called Trump the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement”  (www.denverpost.com/2015/12/18/limerick-jerk-studies-101/).

Her research, dating back many years established that the consensus of people who dealt with the public (waiters, hotel clerks, cab drivers, etc) was that 15% of the public were jerks.

Quoting from the article,

Trump should be understood as the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement,” in which the Fifteen Percent stride vigorously out of the closet and present themselves to the world, shouting out wildly over-generalized, destructive, and polarizing sentiments and then, still shouting, congratulating themselves for their impressive forthrightness.

Because Limerick claims that her “research” showed the percentage of jerks in the population is 15% she was surprised that a cab driver put the number at only 5%.   Five percent,” he repeated. “But they move around a lot.”

Thinking this could be the basis of a serious question in a research methods class (sociology, psychology, marketing, analytics, etc.)  I forwarded the information to several profs in those areas.

Yes, it’s part of a joke, but assuming that the cab driver were correct, that the true number is 5%, what other error other than exceptionally poor math skills, double counting, or really poor sampling technique would explain the discrepancy?

Flotsam from 2014

I discovered some mail and papers from 2014.  There were some medical bills, since paid, some phone numbers without associated names, some jokes which must have come from "Prairie Home Companion" on the back of an old final exam, and notes on the back of a quarterly statement from an annuity.

The annuity:

I remembered calling the annuity to find out what a "non-qualified annuity" was.  The guy I reached seemed delighted to enthusiastically explain everything in great detail.  I knew I had just become just-like-everyone-else because I couldn't follow him.

It is not supposed to be that way.  Maybe I was tired, It means that I should call again and this time record some definitive answers to some simple questions.  If I only knew what those simple questions might be.

The jokes:

"Cross-country skiing is easier in a small country."

"Go for the juggler."  (The punch line for a number of related jokes: "What should you if attacked by a mob of clowns?" and "How do you kill a circus?")

"What is all dressed up and no place to go?"  A Unitarian corpse.

A classic chemistry joke:

"I've lost an electron!"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."

And this, a joke many women have found funny:

Q: What is the difference between a married man and a dead man?
A: When you're dead you don't wish you were married."

Stumbled Across Two Books About Wine and Drink

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France (2013) by Kermit Lynch.  I read a bit here and there.  Lynch is a charming writer to whom I'm now grateful for the Billat-Savarin description of the two features which distinguish man from beast: 1) Fear of the future and 2) Desire for fermented liquors 

Notes on a Cellar-Book ((2008) by George Saintsbury and Thomas Pinney  According to the notation, Saintsbury was a gifted and prolific writer.  I stumbled around online and found this quote from his critical introduction to Gibbons: ""There were some things—not many—which he did not and could not know; but almost everything that there was for him to know he knew."  That seems to be the type of praise every critic would want.