What If… Wisconsin were Ohio?

Last year Ohio governor John Kasich passed a law restricting collective bargaining for state employees, much like the one we have here in Wisconsin — whether because Kasich is a defter political operator than Scott Walker or because Columbus and Madison are not very similar, he got SB 5 passed with substantially less hubbub than we had here in WI.

There’s another difference between Wisconsin and Ohio.  The Wisconsin constitution allows for recall of sitting elected officials; the Ohio constitution doesn’t.  But Ohio is one of 24 states were a popular referendum can overturn a statute passed by the state legislature.  Wisconsin is not.

Ohio voters go to the polls today to decide whether Kasich’s law stays on the books.  Polls suggest Kasich is headed for defeat, though polling on ballot referenda are generally considered less reliable than election surveys.  The Walker recall, meanwhile, is said to have a higher hill to climb, especially given Russ Feingold’s decision not to jump in.

What if Walker’s State Bill 11, instead of Walker himself, were facing recall by Wisconsin voters?  Would it be more or less likely to survive?

On one hand, I think there’s likely to be a substantial body of voters who oppose SB 11, and who will vote for a Democrat in the next regular election, but who think recalls should be reserved for criminal or at least plainly unethical conduct.  On the other hand, I think there are plenty of people who dislike Walker but also don’t care very much about collective bargaining, and might not show up for a referendum vote:  during the State Senate recall elections this spring, the dominant campaign theme for Democrats was not “restore collective bargaining” but “Scott Walker is a bad guy who wants to defund your school and fire station.”

(Speaking of the State Senate recalls — the GOP is now down to a one-vote majority in the chamber, and for all intents and purposes that vote belongs to centrist Sen. Dale Schultz of Richland Center.  Schultz crossed party lines last week to keep the new Republican-drawn district boundaries from going into effect a year early.  The measure was expected to help Republican incumbents defend against a new wave of legislative recall elections in 2012.)

What If….. The Bangles had recorded “Balloon Man?”

I learned from this thoroughly interesting AV Club interview with Robyn Hitchcock that he wrote “Balloon Man” for the Bangles.  He sent them the tape, and they never wrote back.

Bad move, Bangles!  This would have been a near-perfect Bangles song — it’s pretty, it’s weird, there’s room for much more harmony than Hitchock gives it, and the guitar breaks already sound like RH is imitating Vicki Peterson.  And the Bangles, of course, are ace cover artists, often outdoing the original:

Reader survey: what is the great American nerd novel?

This year’s Pulitzer winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a candidate; it begins with an epigraph from Galactus, and there’s hardly a page without a nod to Marvel Comics, Tolkien, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Like the many Spanish words and phrases, the nerd content isn’t translated. The Spanish you can usually work out from context — but if you’re a little shaky on the Witch-king of Angmar, or what it means to have an 18 charisma, or if you’re familiar with the Watcher’s role monitoring the timestreams from the Blue Area of the Moon but forgot that his given name is Uatu, you’re going to miss a lot.

Austin Grossman‘s Soon I Will Be Invincible, subject of this blog’s inaugural post, is in the running too — it’s not really a book about nerds, like Oscar Wao, but a book which inhabits a nerdy genre, the brooding supervillain autobio, and makes an honest novel out if it.

I don’t think the answer has to has anything to do with SF — one can engage with the soul of the nerd without raising the topic of hit points or Darkseid. Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is devoted to the nerd’s characteristically fervent attention to minutiae (in this case, the minutiae belong to a fantasically detailed baseball simulation played with dice.) And probably no one has ever treated the toxic fury of the nerd gaze, directed at the jock, as well as Frederick Exley did in the USC sections of A Fan’s Notes.

You could also give extra points for novels especially beloved by nerds — who wins in that case, Neal Stephenson? When I was a young nerd it would have been Douglas Adams by parsecs and maybe that’s still true.

More nominations in comments, please!