Brace for election night that’s long, slow
If only it ended today.
If the country can agree on one thing, it might be that everyone wants this election over. With differing desired outcomes, of course, but over as quickly as possible.
But it is 2020, and so in this regard the election is almost certain to disappoint everyone.
We are told that we may not know who the president is for days, or even weeks. Perhaps tonight, if a landslide occurs.
Don’t count on that.
And so starting sometime around 7 p.m. today, we will be battered by electoral maps and tortured by the squeaking of dry-erase boards. We will be cast into a furnace of cable news anchors and social media wrestling matches and the jokes that aren’t funny anymore.
There will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the gnashing teeth will be grinding greater-thanrecommended numbers of chewable antacids into a chalky paste.
It will do nothing to extinguish the fire in our bellies and our temples.
So before you settle in for extended suffering, here are a few slow-moving events that would be more fun to watch than the 2020 election results.
For instance, we could watch paint dry. Let us choose Glidden Premium indoor latex in a lovely shade of Split Pea Soup, which remarkably is a paint color actually offered by Glidden.
Per Glidden, if we sat in a room at 77 degrees and 50% humidity, our paint would dry to the touch in 30 to 60 minutes, far faster than we can expect election results in even the speediest of voting precincts.
If we were to watch the paint harden to a full cure we would be staring at the wall for 30 straight days, which is pretty much what we’ve done anyway for the past eight months.
We also might choose to watch a snail slime its way around a typical high school track – twice. According to the website Snail-world, the speed of snails is about a half-inch per second. If they moved without stopping, says Snail-world, it would take them more than a week to travel a little more than a half-mile. I didn’t check their math; I don’t check snail math.
Other interesting snail facts on Snail-world: Like some politicians, snails have no backbone and ingest their food through a mouth structure called the radula, which has several rows of tiny teeth inside.
If you’re not feeling the previous option, you could choose to watch someone hand-sew a quilt.
According to the website Sewing is Cool, a baby quilt may take 12 hours to make, while a queen-sized quilt could take eight weeks or more. Honestly, in the time it may take to declare a winner in this election, you could probably teach yourself to sew and then sew the queen-sized quilt.
That, however, might be too enjoyable to serve as a substitute to watching the election results trickle in.
Instead, you could try watching your grass grow. Granted, we’re close to the point where grass goes dormant for the winter and nothing much noteworthy happens for days on end. But that’s quite similar to the 2000 Bush v. Gore election dispute that left Chad and the rest of us hanging.
If you live in a 10th-story apartment or an environment similarly devoid of grass, have no fear. The internet shall provide, in the form of a 24/7 webcam that some guy in Colorado initially set up to monitor the health of his turf during a drought.
Of course this exceedingly dull purpose meant the website was destined to become a smash hit, and lawn voyeurs now delight in watching almost nothing happening. If you time it just right, though, the dude waves at the camera when passing with his lawnmower.
If that sounds too exciting, you could arrange for a Zamboni ice machine to drive across Canada.
This happened in 2001, when a Zamboni was driven west from St. John’s in Newfoundland to Victoria, British Columbia. Traveling about 9 mph, the trip to raise money for Canada’s Olympic hockey program took about four months.
If in four months we’re still waiting for election results, I don’t know what to tell you. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker