Concentration

Before there was "Jeopardy!", there was "Concentration". 1964 and 1958 (or 1963, depending on how you measure) respectively. Both were of the brainiac game show genre, with "Concentration" aimed at short term memory and visual translation. For those who weren't there: there was a game board, which was a grid of squares (just like "Jeopardy!"). Each square contained stacked cards. The outer card was just the serial number of the grid slot. Contestants called for two cards, which revealed the names of prizes; if the names matched, the contestant had the prize added to his/her cache. Then the cards were removed from the stack, revealing parts of the underlying rebus puzzle. The first to solve the puzzle won his/her list of prizes. Concentration to remember which prizes went with which squares, and translating the rebus pictures into a coherent statement.

What jogged my memory (and never a very good one) was a comment by Tom Cordle to the posting of From Sea to Shining Sea on Open Salon, where these posting are duplicated (and those readers make the effort to comment). "It's also a geography lesson, too, because in the latter images, one can identify many major metro areas of the US as blue patches in a sea of red." Concentration. The graphics worked.

I've mentioned in the past that the Tea Baggers' days are short, supposing that the Federal Courts don't curtail free and fair elections (which is in no way a given), in that urbanization leads to liberalism. Demographers and poli-sci types have known this for decades, and is one of those factoids which sits at the back of my brain stem and occasionally barks at me. I usually then pen something, making the point.

You can see what Tom refers to in this back link from the original citation. The first display is a time series of Red/Blue state morphing. So long as militia folks don't get to be the only legal voters, Tea Bagging is a flash in the pan. One can note that the resistance to Nasty Capitalism in Europe is stronger, in part because Europe is more urbanized.

The distinction exists in the current posting by Sparks, which sparked my interest, but it doesn't jump out quite so strongly in the static images.