I’ve gotten very familiar with the Urban Legend Reference Pages. I often get emails from close friends or family of supposed news stories and quotes that a quick search on the site demonstrate are false. Today, I hit one of the rarer “true” pages on the site. I received a quote in email by H. L. Mencken that has apparently been making the rounds on the political blogs that I am not currently reading due to my personal media blackout. The quote making the rounds is:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

Mencken actually did say this, though the above quote is cut down and taken slightly out of context. Here’s a larger version of the quote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

[Henry Louis Mencken, “Bayard vs. Lionheart”, Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920. Quoted from Snopes.com]

I like the longer version much better. The cutdown quote reads like an indictment of “the plain folks of the land”. The longer quote is more a cynical commentary on the process itself. He still predicts (accurately IMO) the election of a moron to the White House, but Mencken seems to lay the blame more on having to campaign “second and third hand” than on the people who elect said moron. Either way, you still have a moron, but the longer quote gives much more insight on how to deal with the issue going forward.

I wonder what Mencklen would have thought of the modern media?

Jeff Sandquist and Scoble have gotten their new ComCast boxes and apparently the service rocks. Mine gets installed Sunday.

(side note – Does anyone still use Scoble’s first name or has Scoble transcended the whole first-name/last-name thing and moved directly to single name status?)

I finally got around to updating my blog rolls from my news reader. I keep three separate ones – my team & architect evangelists bloggers, other MS bloggers and other non-MS bloggers – which is a pain to maintain (which explains why I haven’t updated  them in a long time).

Two new architect bloggers to report. Javed Sikander is an architect on the Architecture Strategy Team focusing on RFID. He links to a pair of articles about Microsoft and RFID plus provides his thoughts on why RFID is a big deal. David Solivan is an architect advisor and an ex-teammate from my old .NET Adoption Team days. So far, David appears to be blogging at conferences. He started in July at MGB and then went dark for a few months. He picked back up at SAF. I hear he’s at a conference this week, so maybe we’ll see some more from him.

That brings the total number of bloggers from my team to 14. That’s over half of the team and I know at least two more coming down the pipe.

I hadn’t realized how cool the Halo 2 stats site on bungie.net is until Scott blogged it . This really brings the online experience to a new level. It’s so cool, that I had to create a new flair for my blog linking to my stats page (I also put up a link to my games RSS feed). Granted, my stats so far are pretty lame – I’ve only played one multiplayer game so far and I came in 5th. (I did spend most of last night playing the campain.) Maybe the public nature of the stats will drive me to improve them. I haven’t joined a clan yet, but when I do I’ll create a flair for that too.

The coolest thing about this is that it sets a new bar for online experience. ESPN Video Games and EA Sports are nowhere near this level of detail, but I imagine they are taking notice.