What if they held a political rally and a rock concert broke out?Posted on 10/31/2010 3:35:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
Big name acts, extensive crowd control, rules against video or audio taping even with your cell phone, boring political speeches ... this wasn't a rally, this was a U2 concert! But how many people attended?
What if they held a political rally and a rock concert broke out?
The “Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday looked like it was probably generally a lot of fun. The crowd looked cheerful, and I generally like Jon Stewart and sometimes like Stephen Colbert. The music was okay — I’m a big fan of Cat Stevens, and the guy with the beard (Yusuf something?) who sang “Peace Train” did a pretty credible cover version.
But Roger didn’t ask for a review; he wanted the now-traditional Pajamas Media crowd size estimate.
As always, this would be much easier if I could get a photo of the crowd from directly overhead, and as usual, I can’t find one. Apparently, for some reason, they no longer let aircraft fly over the Capitol and White House, so we have to settle for the usual photos from locations from the Washington Monument or the like.
The AP provides us several in a slideshow. Here’s a good one:
Of course, right away we notice something: large parts of the National Mall are blocked off to the crowds. If we’re going to make an estimate, we need to know how much. AP provides us with another shot with a little bit wider angle:
…and one more from behind the stage and toward the Washington Monument, so we can see that the crowd really does stop somewhere in the middle of the Mall. In these pictures, north is to the left, so we have the crowd coming a little west of the main entrance to the National Gallery of Art on the north:
On the other side of the Mall, the crowd seems to be roughly up to the end of the National Air and Space Museum:
… while on the east end, it appears the stage is set up somewhere a little west of 4th St NW.
So I constructed a generous rectangle as the perimeter of the crowd that includes a good bit of the buildings on the sides, but then doesn’t attempt to add in the lines of people along the dirt lanes across the Mall.
Here’s the polygon I constructed:
And once again using this excellent tool, I computed the are of the whole polygon as about 150,000 square meters. Before I screw myself up with unit changes, we’ll convert that and call it 1,620,000 square feet.
Which means we can, at last, estimate the size of the damned crowd. We’ll use exactly the same figures for crowd density we used for the One Nation rally and the Beck “Restore Honor” rally:
| Estimate | 10 square feet per person | 5 square feet per person | 2.5 square feet per person | |
| Maximum: | 162,000 |
|
324,000 | 648,000 |
| 90 percent | 145,800 | 291,600 | 583,200 | |
| 75 percent |
|
121,500 | 243,000 | 486,000 |
| 50 percent | 81,000 | 162,000 | 324,000 | |
| Based on CBS news estimate | 58,725 | 58,725 | 58,725 | |
| 40 percent | 64,800 | 129,600 |
|
259,200 |
The row labeled “based on CBS News estimate,” by the way, is using the CBS figure of 87,000 for the Beck 8/28 rally to derive a number for square feet per person, and applying that to the Stewart/Colbert rally.
It’s worth looking back at our table from the 8/28 rally for comparison.
| Estimate |
|
10 square feet per person | 5 square feet per person | 2.5 square feet per person |
| Maximum: | 215,000 people | 430,000 | 860,000 | |
| 90 percent | 200,000 | 400,000 | 800,000 | |
| 75 percent | 163,000 | 326,000 |
|
652,000 |
| 50 percent | 108,000 | 216,000 | 432,000 | |
| CBS News Estimate | 87,000 |
|
87,000 | 87,000 |
| 40 percent | 86,000 | 172,000 | 344,000 |
Of course, we could have shortened this considerably: the Beck rally covered about 2.4 million square feet, while the Stewart/Colbert rally only about 1.6 million square feet. In other words, we know from that alone that the Stewart/Colbert rally was about six-tenths as big as the Beck rally.
Back when I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, the common rumor was that Colorado had been left out of Playboy magazine’s rankings of the top party schools because “it was unfair for professionals to be included in competition with amateurs.” (It wasn’t true, and I presume lots of other schools had the same rumor; spare me from everyone’s story of how it was really their school.)
But in much the same way, it seems a bit unfair to compare either the 9/12 rally or Beck’s 8/28 rally with this one. The 9/12 2009 rally was more or less ad hoc; Beck’s rally was more organized, but still basically a rally.
But look at the Comedy Central “Sanity/Fear” rally. As PJTV’s Richard Pollock found out, it was very carefully organized, with limited press access — or at least attempts to limit press access — and with the announcement that video and photography was prohibited except for Comedy Central.
(On the National Mall? Good luck with that, bunky.)
There was a big proscenium stage, with a lovely setup framing the Capitol — as a sometimes theater guy, I really admired it, it was gorgeous — and a large controlled area behind the stage for performers and technical people. Professional sound set ups, with big name acts flying in for a few numbers.
Big name acts, extensive crowd control, rules against video or audio taping even with your cell phone, boring political speeches … this wasn’t a rally, this was a U2 concert!
And that tells us the real story: they held a rock/comedy concert, with pro acts including two of the hottest TV comedians around, and professional production, with free admission and with Arianna Huffington paying for bus rides — and no matter what you think a “dense” crowd is, it was still only about six-tenths of Beck’s open-air church service.
But the bearded guy really wasn’t a bad imitation of Cat Stevens. Not like the real thing, of course. I wonder if he’s thought of going pro?
Great line. I like the part about the Cat Stevens imitator, too ;-).
I’m sure the author knows that, and that was written with a BIG dose of sarcasm. Note how he comes back to it in his closing remarks.
All I want to hear from Scott Tenorman, er, Hesh, er Jon Stewart after Demoggedon Tuesday is "de lamentation of de[se two] women".
How does this happen? Wasn't this event held in a public space?
ML/NJ
|
RALLY TO RESTORE STEWART'S BANKROLL |
The birds are still grounded waiting for air to clear.
Yeah, how the hell did Yusaf get into the country anyway?
"Restore Sanity"
Yeah they're for "Restoring Sanity" alright.
Like in this Picture: Pic 10 of 98 (link only, AP © photo)
The caption is: Man lies down atop portable toilet
At his feet is a sign that says; 'Team Sanity' 
An aside;
What everyone needs in todays world of Digital Photography is an 'EXIF' Viewer app. That gives you ALL embedded info (metadata) about the photo: Time, Place, Owner (copyright), and... any caption of Photo's description. All that, and more, is embedded - part of the 'metadata'. You can use it for any picture that's on any web page. And for these 98 Pics of the moonbats, the 'captions' of the AP photographer are beauty's. (no bias what so ever)(/s)
There's a FREE Exif Viewer app I use. Jeffery's Exif Viewer.
Just follow the Drag & Drop instructions at the Top Right of the page.
No Downloading is required.
ps: It is much better than the Firefox add-on.
(Which I also have. In addition to my Nikon Photo Imaging Software.
As others have noted, it was sarcasm. And what was the reason for the sarcasm? Well, he was introduced simply as “Yusuf,” not Yusuf Islam. So, the super-smart hipsters who say we’re all operating on fear were afraid to use the name of a religion followed by over a billion people.
What a bunch of tools.
So if a sonami came thru and wiped them out - what would we have lost?
Lol. Good to know, but you know, it wouldn't surprise me if it had not been. People are not generally aware how big a mover and shaker Yusuf/Cat is in the jihad, both in England and places like Kosovo. Nasty character. Didn't think they had lifted the ban on him flying into the US, but of course this administration would probably put up Mohammed Atta in the Lincoln bedroom if they could...
Don’t know what it is - but that’s not a photo of 9-12
Compare:
http://www.pbase.com/wm25burke/ninetwelve
the only thing funny about this rally is the neutral, at best, impact it will have on getting out the dem vote. half of that crowd won’t bother to vote and half of the voting half will vote repub. they just went for the freebies. Any broke partying college student will jump at the chance for free food, transportation, entertainment etc. regardless of ideology. I will say that while this rally was totally inane, it was refreshingly apolitical so kudos to the clowns for that.
are u sure about that?
not a leaf on the trees and folks bundled up in down and wool hats on October 30 in DC ?
i think I have seen that pic before here
i looked it up....from Bro’s Inaguration Day.
I sure don't how they could even suggest that, let alone enforce it. I always thought that the National Mall was public and you couldn't prevent someone from taking pictures or recording an event happening there. Were their real DC cops and security hauling people away from the Mall that Federal taxes pay for?
I think the sign that stated they masturbated to COD pretty well somes up the answer to that.
Was Cat Stevens at the rally? I thought he was barred from entering the U.S.
Re: your tagline “gigaton warheads”...for Mecca?
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