the first act is co-operating with my plan, by doing three sets tomorrow, and starting at 20:00 sharp. so, they'll be doing 45 minute sets that start at 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00...

i would need to come in early to get the beethoven tickets.

if i can get on the bus at 21:00, i can make it to the late show before 22:00. but, i don't know set times, yet. if they're a little later, i could even catch two sets....

but, this was supposed to be a spring-has-sprung show, and the spike in temperatures this week has undone itself. so, do i want to be out all night?

i'll decide tomorrow.

knowing set times for the second show would help.

so, if i go to the jazz show, i'm going to be sitting nicely, in a behaved space for a few hours, and then come home. 

if i go to the funk show, i'm more going to an actual party.

the steve hackett show is $60 cdn, minimum, and i'm....i can watch it at home. it's a dad show....really....

i'm waiting on answers regarding set times, but this is what i want to do:

1) talking ear @ cliff bell's, 20:00-21:30 - first set.

2) take the bus to royal oak for roughly 10:00 and hopefully catch the last two acts, sunsquabi and the floozies. i want this to go late - until after 2:00.
3) get something to eat. it's a thursday, so i don't expect to find an after party. but, the bus runs all night, now. so, i can make my way back to detroit for the morning.

4) the beethoven concerto is running at 10:45 in the morning.

5) go home, shower, sleep.

i may then follow that up with a friday night funk show with headliners dizgo, at tangent. this will also require a late night, but i can take the early morning bus back on saturday.

this might not work, scheduling wise. but, i'd rather go party than go sit in a jazz bar....

all things considered, if sanders had won the important blue and purple states that he was supposed to win - maine, massachusetts, minnesota - then he'd be in a decent position, right now - because bloomberg came through and split the vote in the south.

it shouldn't matter if biden cheated or not, because sanders should have never ceded that much ground to buttigieg in the first place.

sanders didn't lose because of his policies, he lost because of poor tactical planning.

i've had a running commentary on this, and i hope it is useful to future candidates that run into this same problem of trying to find a way around these red states in the south.

what happened to bernie is kind of like what happened to the last romanov - he got involved in a pointless war brought on by his mindless ethnic solidarity for the serbs, and then had to face a revolution at home.

was the czar morally right to stand in solidarity with the serbs? well, you're ignoring the calculation of his own ambitions, as the romanovs had been seeking to swallow the slavic speaking areas of eastern europe for quite some time. standing in solidarity with the serbs over the death of the archduke was really just a cynical ploy. of course.

but, let's hope he keeps his head on for the rest of this and figures out how to get out of it.

i don't think they sing cardi b songs in church very often, bernie.

regarding the states in the south, this is nowhere near as bad as last time, and it might not be insurmountable for sanders - if he can figure out how to win in states like minnesota.

but, if michigan looks like minnesota, he's fucked....

my skepticism about the sanctity of the results aside, it had been clear for a while now that sanders's decision to focus on the south instead of shoring up support in the north was a major tactical mistake. he was never going to get all of these religious fundamentalists to vote for him, and he should have had the intuition to key in pretty quickly on the centrality of religion in the south. i heard him say things like "we have a big lead in the north and can afford to focus elsewhere", but that's just taking them for granted. you have to tend to your base, or you lose it.

he won all those states by huge margins four years ago. even with fishy results, why was a coalition of centrist candidates able to beat him in these states? why couldn't he get above 35% in states he dominated four years ago?

i've pointed this out before: he's running for commander in chief. that's a tactical mistake that a smart general just doesn't make. it's called "thinning out your troops". it's akin to fighting wars in foreign lands, instead of fixing the problems at home.

so, you can follow my arguments or reject them, but it doesn't change the reality that sanders' decision to put all of his efforts into winning in the south has backfired very, very badly. not only did he not win in the south, but he lost states in the north that he should have won very easily. this should be deeply concerning to him, as it may reflect badly on his ability to compete in a slew of other states he's expected to do well in. we may find out very soon that he's done, and this is over - not because biden cheated, although it seems as though he did, but because he didn't tend to his base, lost their enthusiasm and in the end lost their interest.

he can't win the nomination solely on the strength of hispanics and teenagers, but he ignored everybody else, and they appear to have moved on.

so, there's going to be a narrative about how sanders got beaten badly in the south, and it's inaccurate. he seems to have improved his totals in most places, and biden is not getting numbers anywhere close to the ones that clinton got - mostly due to bloomberg, who is just aimlessly splitting the vote out of vanity. if sanders does turn this around, bloomberg may find himself a rather hated person, because he's prevented biden from really putting him away.

rather, sanders got beat badly in the north - areas he was supposed to be dominant in, and this is a consequence of his tactical error of focusing resources on winning red states in the south.

this should be a lesson for the next northern liberal that tries this - don't make the same mistakes as bernie!

for right now, i want to say "if his campaign does not realize the error and course correct, it's days are numbered", but the truth is that it's probably too late.

he'll probably win arizona, though.

it's a farce. it's theatre.

i knew that.

i'm not sure bernie does...

let's see if i can try to make some sense of these results, one thing at a time.

i need to remind you that i made a guess, based on my gut. but, this site does not exist as a platform for my gut. it has enough work to do in digesting. and i don't give it a lot of energy.

i don't take my gut very seriously, and would suggest that you don't, either.

my official prediction was "anybody trying to tell you they can predict what's going to happen is full of shit."

there was no data...you need data to predict things....

but, i'm pretty skeptical about these "results". so, let's see if i can figure out how they cheated, or debunk claims that they did.