WHAT STATE? WHAT UNION?

I will confess that I avoided the State of the Union address like the black death. I have enough misery, disappointment, and hypocrisy in my life already, and I simply couldn’t face one more performance by the dreadful simian, and so resolutely stared at reruns of Law & Order even though I’d seen them before, and fumed that Bush's unspeakable gall to preempt Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. About the only consolation was that I received a link to something called SOTU that described itself as follows…

“State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2008. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.”

Or, in other words, one those cyber devices where you push words around with the cursor without a totally clear idea of what exactly is being demonstrated to you. (Click to play)

The secret words are Mouse Pad