INTERMEDIATE RESULTS!

Ten Foot Poll, a new polling blogsite, has been collecting polling results for more than a twelve-hundredth of a century. It’s time for presenting some intermediary results and making wild assumptions about the world we live in.

Way back on October 12, 2005, the Ten Foot Poll made its first attempt to gauge the mood of the nation. To find out the state of aggressiveness, we asked the question “Are you gonna do something about it?” The results are shocking: Fully one-third of people said, yes, they are going to do something about it. 16.7% of people said that no, they were not going to do something about it. And 50% of those polled said, “You and what army?” It’s an aggressive world we live in.

To find out just what kind of people are around us, Ten Foot Poll asked the question, “Who are you?” Fortunately, 55.6% of respondents said they were Us, and only 11.1% said they were Them. We’re glad to be living with our own kind. Somewhat disturbingly, though, 11.1% of people said, “I'm Them! Us suck!” Even more disturbingly, 11.1% of people said, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” This has the Ten Foot Poll quite confused.

Informing the world is the raison d'être of the Ten Foot Poll, so to get a feel for the task we have ahead of us, we set about determining what proportion of our audience needed information. The results were not encouraging. In response to the question, “Are you ignorant,” a full 54.5% of respondents said they didn’t know.

We are happy to report, however, that we live in a Law-and-Order society. In response to the question, “Should Karl Rove and Scooter Libby be indicted?,” 58.8% of people answered, “Hang the bastards!”

We also discovered that we live in a world changing its habits regarding news. We asked, “What’s the best source of news?” and only 16% thought it was “Media.” 4% of people thought their own blogs were the best source of news, but the old sources are still the most popular: 20% of people said the best news is on the back of Rice Krispies boxes.

A poll to determine people’s political affiliations reported much more variety than we would have thought. 28.2% of respondents said they were Democrats, 7.7% Republicans, and 20.5% independents. But 2.6% said they were Greens, 7.7% were Monarchists, 2.6% Neoreactionary Progressives, and 5.1% were whatever their wives wanted them to be. In addition, 7.7% said, “Elephants. No, I mean...what are those other things? Mules? Wait--do they have pandas?”

Possibly the most revealing poll is our most recent: “What do you do when you get a pistachio nut with a shell you can't open?” A plurality of respondents, 36.4%, said, “Throw it back in the jar and worry about it later.” This kind of procrastination does not auger well. Although 18.2% said, “Get out the power tools,” a proactive if unsubtle stance, thankfully not one person responded “Curse this God-forsaken world!” The Ten Foot Poll congratulates its audience on it’s lack of pessimism.

Please remember, the polls are always open at the Ten Foot Poll. Go to http://tenfootpoll.blogspot.com/ and vote in as many polls as you like, as many times as you like. Democracy is what makes America great.

In the words of that great champion of democracy Boss Tweed, “I count the votes. So what are you gonna do about it?” And likewise, in the words of the great mass of unwashed Ten Foot Poll readers, “You and what army?”