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Authors: Abigail Padgett
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should seem to replicate American place names. I don’t believe in coincidence. Neither do I believe in attaching too
much significance to these things.
“Chicago!” called the quail again, its black-feather topknot looking oddly Mayan against the pale blue sky.
I wondered what possible evolutionary function was served by quails’ topknots. They seemed merely decorative, like plumes
on hats Dorothy Parker might have worn to lunch at the Algonquin in 1926. That’s when it hit me.
“Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross were women!” I yelled to Brontë. “Come on, we’re going back!”
It was the quail’s topknot and the notion of hats, of fashion, that did it. Women politicians are subject to a type of scrutiny
by the media that would be ludicrous if applied to their male counterparts. Imagine an article headed, “Port Commissioner
Brad Thompson Opts for Black Velvet Cummerbund at Gala.”
Back at my computer I went to the
San Diego Union-Tribune
archives, which are complete for the previous year. The analysis had to be e-mailed to Rox in two hours. I had no time to
read all hundred and seventy-three article headers referencing Mary Harriet Grossinger or Dixie Ross. This is where the concept
of statistical randomness becomes useful. A random sampling of data makes it possible to draw conclusions about that data
based on a very small number. I wanted to know about the article headers Sword
hadn’t
selected to paste on the letter, and about the likelihood of those chosen being chosen by chance rather than design.
In the back of Blalock’s
Social Statistics
are tables of random numbers. I picked a set of twenty-five and assigned them to the hundred and seventy-three articles,
got twenty-five randomly, then fed the data into the same word-frequency program I’d used earlier. In minutes I knew that
roughly fourteen percent of the articles printed last year about these two women politicians referenced clothing, hairstyles,
and personal domestic routines. My favorite was “Senator Grossinger Changes Diaper on Road,” an article about Grossinger having
taken a grandchild with her on a trip to inspect irrigation ditches.
If Sword were choosing headers randomly from all available articles, then fourteen percent would involve references to traditional
female interests because fourteen percent of all the articles did so. Fashion, cooking, cleaning, babies. Another analysis
of the letter revealed no such references. None. This could not happen by chance, so I assumed the traditional female stuff
had been excluded deliberately. Sword had told us that these women had to die because they were trying to be like men, and
then pasted examples of their authoritarian pronouncements all over the letter in case somebody missed the point. Changing
diapers was okay. Women were supposed to do that. But heading land use committees wasn’t. Women who did that had to die.
I was running out of time, and had yet to address the big question. Was Sword more likely to be male or female? I was leaning
toward male, but a mistake at this juncture would mislead the whole investigation. Sword might be a rotten speller, but he
or she wasn’t stupid. If things were as bad as they seemed to be, Sword had already managed to kill two people and endanger
a third without leaving a trace. If the killing were to stop now, the odds against apprehension would be very high. But Sword
wasn’t going to stop now. I didn’t need a computer program to tell me that.
“Women are more likely to poison than men,” I told Brontë. “But men are much more likely than women to demand acknowledgment
for their accomplishments, including murder.”
With her nose my dog nudged a yellow rubber ball toward my feet and smiled. I kicked it across the carpet with my foot and
watched her run into a wall chasing it. Brontë has never grasped the constraints involved in chasing balls indoors. So I took
the ball outdoors
much significance to these things.
“Chicago!” called the quail again, its black-feather topknot looking oddly Mayan against the pale blue sky.
I wondered what possible evolutionary function was served by quails’ topknots. They seemed merely decorative, like plumes
on hats Dorothy Parker might have worn to lunch at the Algonquin in 1926. That’s when it hit me.
“Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross were women!” I yelled to Brontë. “Come on, we’re going back!”
It was the quail’s topknot and the notion of hats, of fashion, that did it. Women politicians are subject to a type of scrutiny
by the media that would be ludicrous if applied to their male counterparts. Imagine an article headed, “Port Commissioner
Brad Thompson Opts for Black Velvet Cummerbund at Gala.”
Back at my computer I went to the
San Diego Union-Tribune
archives, which are complete for the previous year. The analysis had to be e-mailed to Rox in two hours. I had no time to
read all hundred and seventy-three article headers referencing Mary Harriet Grossinger or Dixie Ross. This is where the concept
of statistical randomness becomes useful. A random sampling of data makes it possible to draw conclusions about that data
based on a very small number. I wanted to know about the article headers Sword
hadn’t
selected to paste on the letter, and about the likelihood of those chosen being chosen by chance rather than design.
In the back of Blalock’s
Social Statistics
are tables of random numbers. I picked a set of twenty-five and assigned them to the hundred and seventy-three articles,
got twenty-five randomly, then fed the data into the same word-frequency program I’d used earlier. In minutes I knew that
roughly fourteen percent of the articles printed last year about these two women politicians referenced clothing, hairstyles,
and personal domestic routines. My favorite was “Senator Grossinger Changes Diaper on Road,” an article about Grossinger having
taken a grandchild with her on a trip to inspect irrigation ditches.
If Sword were choosing headers randomly from all available articles, then fourteen percent would involve references to traditional
female interests because fourteen percent of all the articles did so. Fashion, cooking, cleaning, babies. Another analysis
of the letter revealed no such references. None. This could not happen by chance, so I assumed the traditional female stuff
had been excluded deliberately. Sword had told us that these women had to die because they were trying to be like men, and
then pasted examples of their authoritarian pronouncements all over the letter in case somebody missed the point. Changing
diapers was okay. Women were supposed to do that. But heading land use committees wasn’t. Women who did that had to die.
I was running out of time, and had yet to address the big question. Was Sword more likely to be male or female? I was leaning
toward male, but a mistake at this juncture would mislead the whole investigation. Sword might be a rotten speller, but he
or she wasn’t stupid. If things were as bad as they seemed to be, Sword had already managed to kill two people and endanger
a third without leaving a trace. If the killing were to stop now, the odds against apprehension would be very high. But Sword
wasn’t going to stop now. I didn’t need a computer program to tell me that.
“Women are more likely to poison than men,” I told Brontë. “But men are much more likely than women to demand acknowledgment
for their accomplishments, including murder.”
With her nose my dog nudged a yellow rubber ball toward my feet and smiled. I kicked it across the carpet with my foot and
watched her run into a wall chasing it. Brontë has never grasped the constraints involved in chasing balls indoors. So I took
the ball outdoors
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