Actually, barista’s got it pegged. Whoever mashed this up—an actuary, I presume—gave me an ‘oh, of course’ moment in realising the hat-tip to Ken Burns. But it’s also obviously ill-fitting.

Sudden terrifying thought: the actual inspiration may been the early Ficciones of Borges. Now I won’t sleep…

Nowadays, you can just multiply Bush’s approval rating x the population, and get a pretty accurate figure.

In mock frustration at my kids’ (10 & 7) incessant requests for money and incessant complaints about the unfairness of their lives, I took to calling them “a bunch of Communists”—a term which they eventually asked me to explain. My convoluted, fact-lite explanation involved bearded men fomenting a revolution aimed at making the world a better place for hoboes.

So now the kids, in games/activities that lend themselves to the coining of team names, will often label one side “the Communists” and the other “the Hobo-Haters”.

It will be up to some poor Social Studies teacher to sort all this out for them.

That much is pure partisanship. FDR kept the presidential hover yacht—in fact, he had it retooled with leather upholstery and gold plating after he nationalized the bullion supply—but you don’t hear about that from liberal historians, do you.

In fact every president used the executive hover yacht until Nixon had it melted down in 1971 to pay CReeP expenses.