{"id":76194,"date":"2019-05-20T15:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T20:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=76194"},"modified":"2019-05-20T15:00:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T20:00:18","slug":"the-view-from-the-balcony-double-decker-by-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/the-view-from-the-balcony-double-decker-by-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"The View from the Balcony: Double Decker by the Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Randy Weeks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From where I sat The Double Decker Arts\nFestival was a smashing success. The weather was darn near perfect, the music\nwas top shelf, and the crowds were teeming. Everyone who had a part in making\nit happen deserves a standing O. My hat\u2019s off to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While watching all this go down, I had a question pop into my head. I wondered how anyone could figure out about how many people were there. I knew there would be an estimate, but just how it would be calculated stymied me. There aren\u2019t any tickets to get in, and there\u2019s no one at any entrance to The Square with a clicker to count folks walking in or out. I pondered that while I enjoyed my Greyhound and pipe. Not being able to come up with anything plausible and being true to the five-minute-no-Google Code of The Balcony, I turned to my balcony-dwelling friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CPW Thoreau, Mr. Velvet Bitch, spoke\nwith flair as he always does. \u201cOh, I can\u2019t believe you don\u2019t know this. You\nsee, now they have these drones equipped with lasers that are able to identify every\nindividual and put the information in a database that automatically calculates\nthe size of the crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I said, \u201cBut I didn\u2019t see any drones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He replied, \u201cThat\u2019s because they\u2019re\ninvisible. They use a cloaking app that hides them so people won\u2019t think it\u2019s\nThe War of the Worlds 2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Z.Z. Bullfrog, a pythy man, chimed in.\n\u201cYeah. Seems I recall an article about \u2018em in Consumer Retorts<\/em> magazine when those things first came out. They\nhad to do a recall and overhaul on \u2019em \u2019cause the programmer had misunderstood\n\u2018crowd size\u2019 to mean, how should I say . . . girth. I think they were made by\nSamsung.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mrs. Tarzan the Amazon Woman poo-pooed\nthat one. \u201cYou dolts! The way they do it is to send out people with a specific\nnumber of stickers of some kind\u2014counterfeits of those you might normally see in\ntown like \u2018Fins Up\u2019 or \u2018Take the Bait, Vote for Tate\u2019 or \u2018Delbert\u2019s Dead\u2019 or \u2018A\nHood for Governor.\u2019 They put a sticker on everyone\u2019s back that they can\u2014it\u2019s\neasy in a crowd like this. At the end of the day they count the stickers they\nhave left, subtract that from the number they started with, and viol\u00e0! There\u2019s\nyour crowd size.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sheik interjected dismissively.\n\u201cY\u2019all are too worried about something you can\u2019t do. You can\u2019t get a good estimate.\nYou just can\u2019t. And if you could, what\u2019s it gonna matter anyway? So I just go\nwith the Hindenburg Method.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Hindenburg Method?\u201d we asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d said the Sheik. \u201cLeon! Hold my\nbeer and watch this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that he handed his beer to my good friend Leon, an inciteful man, stood facing the crowd below, raised his arms and yelled, \u201cOh, the humanity! Oh, the Humanity!\u201d Then he took his beer back from Leon, sat down, and said, \u201cAnd that\u2019s how I do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

King Cobra was making his rounds but had\nstopped to eavesdrop on our discussion. \u201cLet me first say that I don\u2019t know exactly\nhow they do it, but I can tell you how I think it outta be done.\u201d King Cobra\nleaned in as if this were some kind of top-secret plan. We sat on the edges of\nour chairs and cocked our ears towards him. \u201cI think they should use Donald\nDigits.\u201d We quizzically shifted our eyes to each other, then leaned in a little\nmore. \u201cThat\u2019s the method President T-rump used to estimate the size of the\ncrowd at his inauguration. He looked out over the crowd and saw that there were\nabout 600,000 people at the most. Then he multiplied that by four and came up\nwith 2.4 million. I think we should run with that. Yep. Donald Digits is the\nway to go.\u201d With that he laughed and left while we hooted and howled until our\ndrinks shot out of our noses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo nobody\u2019s really got a good idea of\nhow to even get a ballpark figure of how many were here,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leon\u2019s main squeeze, No Account Addie,\nspoke up. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to get a ballpark figure, Randy. You should know\nthat. You can only get a ballpark figure in a ballpark.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guess I\u2019ll never know how they do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s the view from The Balcony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Randy Weeks From where I sat The Double Decker Arts Festival was a smashing success. The weather<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":39753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11902],"tags":[4272,10286,10878],"class_list":["post-76194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-randy-weeks","tag-double-decker","tag-randy-weeks","tag-the-view-from-the-balcony"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/2017-5-11-View-from-the-Balcony.jpg?fit=600%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}