I am utterly fascinated with the Indiana primary coverage on CNN. I could do without the talking head spin people yelling at each other and I zoned out whenever the candidates started speaking, but that big map thing that John King is playing with has me absolutely hypnotized. It's like a super version of Google Maps projected on a 72" version of the iPhone, with a touch screen display that he can zoom in and out on and draw on in different colors using only his fingers. The display shows the counties color-coded by which candidate they've voted for, but he can also bring up results from past elections, show histograms that represent the county population, or zoom in on the county to show the precise voting numbers, which update in real time as they come in. At one point he even turned the display into a satellite photo of the state to show which areas were rural and which were urban, which officially blew my mind. I don't know where one procures a 6-foot election board touch screen, but I really, really want one for Christmas.
My second-favorite part of the coverage was watching a senile, twitchy Larry King berate some poor hick mayor from Evansville for late election results, when Evansville's in a completely different part of the state than the tardy county. The poor guy looked completely shell-shocked (not that I'd have performed any better), and they mercifully cut away to talk to the mayor of Hammond, who was extremely nervous at first but warmed to the spotlight after a few minutes. It looks like they've finished with him, which is good, because you could literally see his ego swelling out of control the more time he spent on camera.
Gotta go. They just busted out the map thing again.
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