You know what no one says on his death bed? “If only I could have snarked more from the sidelines.”

— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) June 6, 2012

“From the sidelines” is a sports term. “Cheering from the sidelines” can be a nice phrase. It means “I am rooting you on while watching you play.” If we are not clothed in rags and eating from dumpsters on Sunday, we will be cheering on New York Marathon runners from the “sidelines,” perhaps as they hop downed power lines along the shore after they cross the Verrazano.

But sometimes the “game” in question is a metaphor. And if you are on the “sidelines,” you are necessarily then “not in the game.” The above tweet from Esquire contract-man Chris Jones is meant, obviously, to deflect and devalue critique by placing himself “in the game” and others outside of it. Anyone with an objection or a contrary idea is just a “hater” in this construction.

“From the sidelines” is a favorite construction of men, and crops up in the act of mansplaining, though women definitely use it too. (As Lil Kim pointed out: “playa-hatin’ from the sideline, get your own shit, why you riding mine?”) So people use the phrase to explain that they are the players, and you are the benchwarmer, at most, or maybe just whoever else is on the sidelines — Jack Nicholson, I guess? Or some groupie. Someone ignored, while the important people slam some dunks.

This can seem particularly off-putting, this statement of position and status, because often these assertions come from people that don’t even register in your own life. Lots of us aren’t in each others’ “games.” That’s how life works. But most of us aren’t self-centered enough to think in these terms, and certainly we wouldn’t think to assert this status so as to put others down.

Y’all can hate from the sidelines . I don’t get mad I just get $$$$$$ .

— Sha Monique. (@LilHoneyDip_X3) October 31, 2012

That’s right. Don’t get mad. Get $$$$$$. (Who doesn’t love $$$$$$? Just… so why are you telling us about it?) That’s a besieged point of view, a solipsistic and unrealistic kind of martyrdom.

Here are two pretty remarkable recent examples, where men stepped up to tell women who were making statements on Twitter that they were, in one case, “tweeting from the sidelines,” and in the other, “bitching from the sidelines.”

by Eric Spiegelman

Map from 270 To Win.

There’s been so much betting this election season. Mitt Romney bet that Texas mannequin $10,000 he’d never even heard of health care while Governor of Massachusetts. Donald Trump bet Barack Obama $5 million that the President got mediocre grades from an online terrorist college. And Nate Silver just bet Joe Scarborough $1,000 that math and statistics are more powerful than sorcery. Why should you be left out of this hot electoral action? Join us for The Awl’s first quadrennial electoral college pool!

Here’s how it works. Go over to 270 To Win and color the map according to how you think this election will pan out. It’s easy. Every time you click on a state it changes color. Red for Romney, Blue for Obama. Don’t forget to do the Maine and Nebraska splits at the bottom of the page!

Once you’ve predicted the outcome of the election, click the email icon from the “Share Map” button at the bottom of the page and address it to us at 2012@theawl.com.

As a tiebreaker (because we know how many wizards read this website), include in the body of the email the number of popular votes you think Obama will get. The closest guess breaks a tie. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 p.m. on Monday night.

Now, because of things like “the law” we’re not going to make this a money-based betting pool. Instead, The Awl will make two $250 donations in your name: one to the Henry Street Settlement and another to the Red Hook Initiative, both doing great work right now. Choire will also make you a custom Blingee based on your map that celebrates your triumph over the dark forces of pollstermancy.

In case you need help, here are some other people’s predictions:

• Nate Silver’s State By State Probabilities And Reagents Shoppe, which shows a decisive Obama victory.

• The UnSkewed Polls Totally Accurate And Not At All Biased No Way Why Would You Think That Projections, which show Romney carrying every state except Hawaii.

• The RealClearPolitics Battle for the White House Map, which shows 11 states going to neither Romney nor Obama.

• Astrologer Susan Miller’s predictions for the 2012 presidential race.

Now go forth and prognosticate!

Please note that The Awl disclaims any and all liability for the sudden appearance of demons, golems, curses, possession, occupancy of your body by a spirit or other foreign materials, hocus, pocus, and/or portals opened up to magickal dimensions that result from your participation in this pool, as well as any damage incurred by your use of ceremonial knives (including the practice of blood-letting), potions, alchemy, the poetry of William Blake, necromancy, cleromancy, hydromancy, augury, astral projection, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, hepatoscopy and any and all other forms of witchcraft. You accept all responsibility for your practitioning of the esoteric arts.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles and the proprietor of Awl Music.

“Since September 11, 2001, there have been roughly 30 Americans killed by terrorism (depending on how you do the numbers). Meanwhile, extreme weather deaths in the same time period have totaled 6,408 as of 2011, according to the National Weather Service.”
 — But terrorism lets us blame scary foreigners!

Do you speak Korean? If you so, then you probably can hear that this elephant is saying, “Choah,” the Korean word for “good,” at the behest of one his human caretakers at the Everland Zoo in South Korea. The elephant’s name is Koshik, and he has learned to mimic human speech by sticking his trunk into his mouth and modulating his oral chamber. “He’s invented a new way of sound production to match his vocalisations with his human companions,” said the University of Vienna’s Dr. Angela Stoeger, who just published a study of Koshik in the scientific journal Current Biology. As the BBC’s Rebecca Morelle reports, Koshik can also say the Korean words “anja” (sit down), “nuwo” (lie down), “aniya” (no), and “annyeong,” which means “hello.” But I listened to a recording of him saying that last one, and I think it sounds more like he is saying the English word “annoying.” Which would make sense, in response to a human standing by his cage repeating the same five words over and over again.

A couple weeks ago, we heard about NOC, a beluga whale at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, who has also learned to mimic human voices. He sounds like a child playing a kazoo, but once told a diver to “get out” of his tank. Which, yeah, that’s what I’d say, too, if a found some weird-looking person in a mask swimming around my bedroom. (Well, actually, that depends on the mask…)

But I think it’d be cool to get Koshik and NOC together and leave a hidden recording device (I mean, we’re already keeping these huge, majestic wild creatures captive in tiny enclosures; it’s not like we can claim to be concerned with their right to privacy) so we can listen in on a their private conversation.

I’m imagining it might go like this:

Koshik: I wish I could die.

NOC: Me, too.

Koshik: Hey, do you like King Crimson?

NOC: Hmm. I don’t know. I’m not that familiar with their stuff. I remember when I visited Bowdoin college in Maine, when I was looking at schools to go to, I stayed with this guy Matt, who was the older brother of an old friend of mine named Pete. Matt lived in a fraternity — though, it was a hippie fraternity, it being Maine and all, so it was co-ed and everything. It was in this creepy old Victorian house, and he took me to smoke pot in this room that was like their special pot-smoking room, and the place was a mess of tapestries and frayed counces and beer bottles and melted down candles and everything like you’d expect it be. But one whole wall — and it was a huge room — was painted with a mural of the album cover for King Crimson’s first album

In the Court of the Crimson King. With that crazy red screaming face. It was really well done. Jesus, it was so freaky. But totally awesome, as far as a place to smoke pot. It was really one of the coolest wall murals I’ve ever seen. I wonder if it’s still there? I hope so.

Koshik: Hahaha. That’s awesome. College.

NOC: Yeah. They rejected me. Bowdoin, I mean, after I applied. I’m pretty sure the fraternities there were not allowed to reject anybody.

Koshik: That’s kinda better, if you ask me. I think fraternities and sororities kinda suck.

NOC: Yeah.

Koshik: Hey, but listen to this song. It’s from 1981, after king Crimson returned from a seven-year hiatus. Really, it was like a whole new band. Only Bill Buford and Robert Fripp remained from the original line-up. It’s from the album “Discipline.”

NOC: Oh, man! Yes! I love that song! Wow. I haven’t that in forever. WHTG used to play it, this radion station in Long Branch I used to listen to in high school. Huh! That’s King Crimson?! I think I used to always think it was the Talking Heads.

Koshik: Yeah, the new singer they got, Adrien Belew —

NOC: Oh, the guitarist. He used to play with Bowie, too.

Koshik: Right. Both he and Fripp were playing a lot with David Byrne and the Talking Heads around that time. So, there were obviously a lot of ideas being shared.

NOC: Huh. Yeah. Man, that’s a great song! Thanks.

Koshik: Yeah. I found it on YouTube after Googling myself.

With 11 complicated ballot measures — all of them state constitutional amendments, all of them far-reaching and bizarre — the ballot for election day in Florida runs to ten pages. Already several days before election day, lines are running long at voting places in Miami Beach — so long that candidates for local office can work the voting lines, reports a local spy, because the voters lined up are well over 100 feet from the actual polling place. Among other measures, the ballot gives voters the opportunity to amend the constitution to:

• Not use public funds for abortion

• A crazy Tea Party judge selection amendment, which is basically an attempt to get right-wing ideologue judges installed;

• The ol’ anti-Obamacare amendment, to outlaw any federal provisions that employers must provide healthcare, and to get rid of any federal penalties for large employers for not providing healthcare;

• Allowing the state to use tax dollars for churches and religious organizations.

You can do all the WIZARD SORCERY you want on comparing polls, Nate Silver. But what polls have a hard time with is assessing voter turnout, and the wingnut brigade will be out in force, which should technically take Florida out of “toss-up” status — currently Romney is up .5% on average! — and into Rick Scott-Mitt Romney party of tea sandwich.

by Josh Fruhlinger

As National Novel Writing Month gets underway, here’s the first in a month-long series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

In the fall of 1998, I was at UC Berkeley, mired in the early stages of a history Ph.D. program that, even in a best-case scenario, would last until 2003 and then spit me out into an increasingly tenuous academic job market — and my performance in grad school so far didn’t necessarily promise a best-case scenario. I had few friends and had just had my heart broken rather badly; the latter, thankfully, served as a catalyst for some life reforms. 18 months later, I had left school with a fig-leaf master’s degree, spent the money I had saved for tuition on a month in Italy, got a new job at a dot-com (it was the Bay Area in the late 90s), moved out of my grad student digs into a great new apartment, and found a new social circle of fun people who were not depressive future academics.

I was happier than I had been in years. And yet, I still felt a nagging sense of failure. I had spent a considerable amount of money (mostly my parents’, admittedly) getting a history degree, and now I was editing articles about Java and Linux and not using any of that knowledge, either to better mankind or to make money. So why not write a historical novel, I thought? And since I’ve left academia behind, why not write the only kind of historical novel that sells: a historical romance? Thus was hatched my idea to write a book in a genre I’d never read, which would be set in a time period I hadn’t actually studied, and would have a plot that hinged on the interpretation of a story from the Old Testament. It was, as far as I was concerned, a plan that could not possibly fail.

***

Let’s start with the genre: historical romance. I did zero research about how lucrative writing a historical novel would be; I just made a bet, comparing the number of titles in the Historical Romance section at the local Barnes & Noble (dozens) to the number of historical novels elsewhere in the store (very few), that this was a market with room to break into. I also made the extremely presumptuous and almost certainly sexist assumption that a historical romance novel would be easy to write. I had failed to come anywhere close to writing a doctoral thesis, but surely I could churn out some sexy historical schlock that would pass the muster of the bored housewives who read this stuff! (I’m pretty sure I used the phrase “bored housewives” in my head, which fills me with terrible regret now.)

I picked up a couple of books off that Historical Romance shelf, more or less at random. (I wasn’t quite so arrogant as to think that I could write a historical romance novel without actually reading any.) I started with the The Last Knight. I didn’t like the title — it took place in the 1180s, and nothing in the book or actual history indicated that knighthood as an institution was going to end anytime soon — but other than that I enjoyed it! It was about a feisty young woman, Attica d’Alerion, who disguises herself as a boy for reasons I no longer remember (something about saving her brother?) and hooks up with brooding knight Damion de Jarnac. They spend most of the book travelling to the plot-resolving destination together, and they butt heads, and eventually he figures out she’s a lady, and they fall in love. I think he impresses Henry II somehow at the end and is rewarded for it.

The second book I didn’t like and didn’t finish. It took place in antebellum Florida and involved a rich man’s daughter being kidnapped by a Seminole “half-breed.” It was kinda rapey and really racist, and by this time I had sort of lost interest in reading these things anyway. I had gotten through about one and a third historical romance novels! It was time to stop dreaming and start doing.

***

I needed to come up with two things before I could start writing my historical romance: A setting and a plot. Since I was writing this book with the explicit intention of cashing in on my hard-earned historical knowledge, this should have been a simple matter of picking a book off my shelf and weaving a plot atop the events described therein. There was only one problem: my specialty had been the late Roman Empire and early middle ages. This time period had once sort of fallen forgotten between the classicists and the medievalists, but by the 90s it had the exciting new label “Late Antiquity” and was in vogue and considered quite sexy in historical circles. Unfortunately, this did not translate into sex appeal of the sort beloved by historical romance enthusiasts. In fact, many of the people I had spent a lot of time studying were bishops and thus completely unacceptable as romantic protagonists, under my understanding of the somewhat straight-laced rules of the genre.

From my extremely half-assed Barnes & Noble research, it seemed to me that the two most popular historical romance subgenres were “European knights and ladies from the 1100s on” and “The American South, 1830–1865.” The former was closer to my interests. I eventually settled on a setting that was on the fringes of Late Antiquity but also close enough to classic medieval Europe as to be wedged into the usual marketing: Spain in the early 700s, just after the Muslim conquest, in the inaccessible mountainous north of the country where a few Christian principalities still held out. The slight hitch was that I had never studied this period and knew next to nothing about it, but I figured my version of next to nothing was several steps ahead of the average reader’s next to nothing, plus I still had my Berkeley library card.

And anyway, this gave me a chance to build on a Biblical story that had been rattling around in my head. It’s found at 1 Kings 3:16–28, and even if you’ve never read the Bible you probably know it as the “judgment of Solomon.” The gist: Two prostitutes come before Solomon with a baby, each claiming to be its mother. Solomon decrees that, since he cannot tell which woman is lying, the baby should be cut in half, with part given to each. One of the women instantly recoils and agrees to give the baby to the other; Solomon declares that she is the true mother, since she’d rather see the child live than killed.

It’s usually read as a parable about love, or maternal love specifically, but there’s an alternative political interpretation. The story appears in the Biblical narrative soon after Solomon becomes king of Israel; his older brother had just briefly and unsuccessfully made a bid for the throne, and there were still scions of Israel’s original royal family, the one that Solomon’s father David had displaced, lurking around. By spreading this story to his people, Solomon is essentially saying that he was more than willing to cut the baby — the country — in half in civil war. If you love Israel, you let the false mother — him — stay in charge.

Now jump back to early 8th-century Spain. Spain had been ruled by the Visigoths up to the Arab invasion in 711. After the conquest, all that was left of Christian Spain was the Kingdom of Asturias, a tiny statelet in the Pyrenees, ruled by Pelagius, a nobleman of obscure origins who was not related to the former royal family, at least not closely. So I suddenly had a hero: A Visigothic prince, who understands that unity in the face of the Saracens is necessary to Christendom’s survival, but still smolders with resentment because he had to swear allegiance to some minor noble when the throne should rightfully be his. Smoldering is, after all, the key quality for a romance novel love interest. (The fact that Visigothic royals tended to have distinctly unromantic names like “Wamba,” “Erwig,” and “Wittiza” would have to be reckoned with at some point.)

The heroine would be a plucky, headstrong peasant girl who would meet up with our fallen prince, and the two of them would travel across rocky northern Spain to some destination and argue a lot (sound familiar?). At some point the King Solomon story would come up in conversation (hey, they’re Christians, they’d be familiar with it), and the heroine would talk about a mother’s love and how much that tale meant to her, and the prince would laugh and mansplain the secret political meaning, hard. But the heroine wouldn’t know that he was a prince yet, and only later would she find out and realize why he’s so angry all the time.

At some later point, the heroine would be captured by a Muslim raiding party and brought to the Arab general, who would actually be an OK guy and not, despite what I thought might be genre conventions, ravish her. She and he would sort of have a meeting of the minds a bit, though he would be distant and not a romantic rival for our prince. Later, she would escape and negotiate a truce between the Arab general and the Christians, under which her home village would be protected because the Visigothic prince would take it over and swear ill-defined loyalty to both Pelagius and the Arab general. This would be the heroine’s idea, and she and the hero would get married and have babies that were not cut in half and live happily ever after.

***

Needless to say, I never wrote this book. In fact, the murky outline I’ve presented here is literally as far as I got in the planning process. You might notice that almost all of the concrete details that I did come up with have to do with things that I find interesting, whereas the falling-in-love storyline — the thing that the potential readers of this book would like, presumably — had only been vaguely sketched out and was in form mostly cribbed from another novel. This would not have been a good or successful book.

I wish I could say that it had been derailed by a sudden epiphany, that I realized how insulting it was to assume that, based on five semesters of middling graduate study and a certain facility with the English language, I could break into an established genre and become a professional. (Oh, did I mention that I had already picked out my pseudonym? “Jacqueline Primavera,” because “primavera” means “spring” and so does “Fruhling” and yes, I am cringing as hard as you are right now.) I thought it would be easy to write this specifically because I held my imagined audience in contempt. This is, I think it goes without saying, a terrible reason to write a novel.

But I didn’t actually realize that until years later. At the time, I just lost interest and didn’t write it. Don’t let anyone tell you that losing interest in difficult tasks is always a sign of sloth or lack of character. It can also be your mind’s way of stopping you from embarking on monumental but misguided tasks. I did get one concrete thing out of the whole experience: a friend was setting up a new forums section for her tech site, and hired me on the sly to put up some fake seed posts to make it look like people were using it, and I borrowed names for my online personae from The Last Knight. So I spent a week or two having Attica d’Alerion and Damion de Jarnac squabbling about computer stuff, complete with sublimated romantic yearning. This was a thing you got paid to do, in the year 2000.

Would you like to read about some romance novels that did get written? Romance Novels: The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing

Would rather read some writing advice instead? Here you go: 21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves (And How They Can Stop Lying To Themselves And Become Awesome!) and Ask Polly: How Do I Beat Procrastination

Josh Fruhlinger is writing a novel now that will be done by late next year and he promises not to lose interest in it. Then after that he might start shopping this one around. He has a Tumblr and a Twitter.

• “I’d bet anything that if the president staked out such an Obama Plan, Buffett and a lot of other business leaders would endorse it.” — Thomas Friedman
• “To his immense credit he took a big gamble on killing Osama Bin Laden.” — Roger Cohen
• “I’ll bet he’s not a Charlie Stross reader; if he were, he’d know about the scene in The Jennifer Morgue involving a PowerPoint presentation that turns anyone who watches it into a murderous zombie.” — Paul Krugman
• “The bet Punch Sulzberger made his whole career is that people wanted — and would pay for — great journalism.” — Joe Nocera
• “If I had to bet which candidate was more likely to launch airstrikes against Iran or to up the military ante in Syria, I’d be inclined to give a slight edge to Obama.” — Bill Keller
• “Still, I bet the Democrats keep the Senate.” — David Brooks
• “But to a voter who doesn’t bring strong ideological priors to the table, neither party’s vision for how to manage this transition probably looks like a sure bet.” — Ross Douthat
• “But it’s a reasonable bet. Researchers have estimated that one American dies every 20 minutes for lack of health insurance.” — Nicholas D. Kristof
• “Our bet is that when you visit NYTimes.com, you’re looking for urbane and literate content, and our comments sections seek to live by that same standard.” — NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan

Photo via Poker Listings.

★★★ There was a building shining white, far off in New Jersey. Morning sun angled in under the clouds and pried them apart: blue sky! A new day! White clouds above, the gleaming yellow of moving taxicabs below. The tree was still down on that unfortunate car, though. And before long, the clouds darkened and closed back in. Eventually a crew came to trim away the tree limbs, leaving the bare trunk still lying there on the diagonal, driver’s-side headlight to passenger-side taillight. The air was chilly and breezy, ordinary damp autumn leaking in behind the apocalyptic convergence. There were still no eggs at the Fairway, but the trick-or-treating was indoors and vertical anyway, the children well-behaved. A few Garden State refugees rode the elevators among them, in costume. I fished the lone glow stick out of the bin of emergency flashlights, broke and shook it, and tucked it in the jack-o’-lantern outside the apartment door.

Um, no, but oh thank God I needed a laugh today.

Football Pick Haikus For Week 9

Thursday, November 1

At San Diego -7.5 Kansas City

I’m hoping Chiefs’ star
cornerback Brandon Flowers
gets six pick sixes PICK: CHIEFS

Sunday, November 4

Denver -3.5 At Cincinnati

The Bengals will play
great and then Peyton Manning
will steal their candy. PICK: BRONCOS

At Green Bay -11 Arizona

I’m sick of losing cash
betting against the Green Bay
Packers every week. PICK: PACKERS

Miami -2.5 At Indianapolis

Why do I like the
Colts this year? Everyone loves
an Indydog, right? PICK: COLTS

Baltimore -3.5 At Cleveland

I keep picking “Browns.”
Sadomasochism is
what I’m all about. PICK: BROWNS

At Houston -10 Buffalo

If you gave me ten
points I’d pick my mom and dad
over all the Bills. PICK: BILLS

At Washington -3 Carolina

When hype meets hype the
winner is ESPN
and the booyah guy. PICK: REDSKINS

Detroit -4 At Jacksonville

Lions played great at
home but can they win in an
empty stadium? PICK: LIONS

Chicago -3.5 At Tennessee

The Bears seem destined
for great things and the Titans’
uniforms are crap PICK: BEARS

At Seattle -5 Minnesota

Seahawks love to play
at home because other teams
play so far away. PICK: SEAHAWKS

At Oakland -1.5 Tampa Bay

Pirate mascots
Battle for supremacy
and the wooden leg. PICK: RAIDERS

At NY Giants -3 Pittsburgh

It would be nice to
give the state of New Jersey
something fun to watch. PICK: GIANTS

At Atlanta -4 Dallas

I just get the strange
feeling that Dez Bryant will
get his hand in bounds. PICK: COWBOYS

Monday, November 5

At New Orleans -3.5 Philadelphia

The Eagles couldn’t
beat the cheese whiz out of a
Tony Luke’s cheesesteak. PICK: SAINTS

Last week’s Haiku Picks went 4–10. That’s 50–66–3 for the season. Monkeys do better writing haikus with their feces. We need to go 16–0 to even it up. Sadly, there aren’t 16 games this week.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.