Thread by @GidMK

Thoughts on the American election:

- it is a shame the meteor didn't run again
- too many states start with M, not enough with E or Y, this strikes me as unfair
- red and blue remain boring colours, why not try a nice fuschia?

- if you were to combine the Midwest into one state you could call it Megahio. This is very ridiculous, but quite a good name

- New York is similarly a silly name. Presumably it came into being at roughly the same time as Old York when the Earth's crust was formed, and so it should be renamed Also York

- counting votes is meant to take time, unless we reimagine time as non-linear

- if we imagine time as non-linear, then Biden and Trump have both won and lost and should accept their defeat/victory with magnanimity/anger

- Massachusetts is a challenging word to spell correctly

- if the American election was held in Australia, a huge number of people would simply be arrested for trying to unfairly influence the result

- this is a strong reason to hold the US election in Sydney, which would be very democratic but challenging logistically

- I now know the names of more American states than Australian ones, which is somewhat disconcerting

- this is perhaps an unsurprising fact, given that there are only 6 Australian states, but I am nevertheless disappointed in myself somehow

- people keep complaining about the electoral college being confusing and antiquated, which is odd because that's true of the whole election really

- as one of the pivotal states still counting, it is annoying that Pennsylvania has so many syllables in its name

- American state lines are all drawn badly, except for Wyoming and Colorado, which are pleasingly regular and thus the Best States

- there are either too many or too few counties in Georgia, depending on how you feel about pointless redundancy

- people seem overly fond of chanting, given that votes are in fact on paper and thus cannot be changed by words alone

- unless the chanting is some kind of wizardy, in which case there are more wizards in Arizona/Pennsylvania than I was expecting

- too many people are saying the words "Joe Biden is on top" which raises disturbing imagery of a Trump/Biden embrace

- this is, thankfully, better than saying "Trump is on the bottom" which is far more evocative a phrase

- American accents elide the words "polls" and "Poles", giving the confusing impression that Polish people are pivotal to the election in some way

- clearly the solution to this is to hire more Australians to comment on the US election

- there is no particular magic in "calling" a vote, unless you are an electoral official

- thus, I would like to call the presidential election in my favour, despite not running, and being Australian, because the gig pays somewhat better than an epidemiologists salary