Something different (trust me): An exhibition of my photography of Chicago architecture

Posts have been particularly brief for the last several days, and there is generally a reason when that happens. I was at the Midwest Political Science Association conference, in Chicago.* Great city. Chicago is known for many things, including its architecture. Just walk around the city, and look up. You will see something interesting. When I walked out of my hotel lobby and looked up, I saw this. It was so interesting that I thought I needed to take a photograph, so here it is, in all its splendor.

Now, please understand that photography is not truly my art. I am a musician, if I have an art. Really, though, I was attempting to capture what may or may not have been a paranormal phenomenon. Do... do you see... an extended middle finger floating in front of that bigly building? It was the strangest thing. Every time I looked at it, I saw an extended middle finger. I looked away, and the middle finger disappeared from my field of vision. OK, here's where it gets really weird. I covered up the top portion of the lowest building segment with a hand-- either hand-- and the middle finger went away! It was a phantom middle finger, blinking in and out of existence. I tried to snap a photo of it, just to convince myself that I wasn't going crazy, but... you see it, right? There really is a middle finger there, right?

I asked some passers-by to look at that building, and determine whether or not they could see an extended middle finger floating in front of it, and to make matters stranger still, some could see it, and some couldn't. It's like that "what color is the dress" thing. Or maybe "middle finger blindness." As a statistically-minded empiricist, though, I couldn't help but notice some empirical patterns. African-Americans and Latinos were more likely than whites to see extended middle fingers, and women were slightly more likely than men to see extended middle fingers, but the pattern wasn't as clear. Now, men are more likely to be color-blind than women, but I know of no such phenomenon on race, which has an ambiguous-at-best biological basis anyway.

So, is there or is there not an extended middle finger floating in front of this building? This requires investigation. Is the phantom middle finger a phenomenon unique to the Trump building in Chicago, or do its bizarre properties operate at other locations? What about in other countries? Do the patterns for who does and does not see the middle finger vary by location? By country? These are important questions, amenable to serious investigation.

After all, we've already done the research on that voter fraud stuff, so why the fuck not?

*Typing on my iPad sucks.