05 October 2008

The Up-Side to Palin's Campaign

I'll confess I'm no great fan of Sarah Palin. There is, however, one clear advantage to a Palin candidacy: the word moose now appears more often than ever before in major newspapers. Here, for instance, is a month-by-month breakdown, from January through September 2008, of the word moose in the major newspapers and magazines in the LexisNexis database:

Particularly striking is the sharp increase, from 243 to 794 references, between August and September — an increase by a factor of 3.27.

If, then, we make the perfectly reasonable assumption that moose references will continue to rise by a factor of 3.27 a month from now on, we can look forward to something like this:

It now seems inevitable that we can look forward to an average of more than three million occurrences of the word moose by May 2009. By next September, it should be around 350 million references a month, or more than 10 million mentions in newspapers and magazines every day.

See? — not all bad.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to admit that the moose jokes are a fantastic upside... but they will all immediately cease being funny if she wins.

Anonymous said...

You'll love this one: http://palinaspresident.us/

It is completely interactive version of the Oval Office with Palin as president; each time you open and close the office door, a new "thing" appears. I've spent hours clicking around this room.

Cheers,
Doug