Techfun

If you walked into a room and encountered nine black men, three black women, six white men, and thirteen white women you could be forgiven for thinking you were at a faculty meeting at a community college or even a meeting of regional heads of ACORN organizations. If I told you that seven of them were dead you might think it was a random sampling of Chicago voters, but you would still be wrong. Nobody would fault you for not knowing that you were looking at the new face of the Republican Party… at least according to the GOP.

The GOP website has a cute rotating banner at the top with GOP spelled out using a person’s head in place of the capital O. When I first arrived there was a lovely black woman smiling at me from the banner. I refreshed the page and got a dead black man and then a white woman. I kept refreshing, and counting, and finally on my twelfth refresh I saw a white man. I do not discount the presence of women and ethnic minorities in the Republican party in any way. I am, however, interested in marketing spin and how numbers play out in the real world.

I decided to deconstruct the banner and see how it worked. Its a very straight forward rotation based on image URLs stored in an XML file so I grabbed the XML file and downloaded all the images. Thats how I got the count listed in the opening paragraph. The XML file has images numbered from 01 through 44 but only thirtythree images total.

The thirtythree images in rotation are shown below:

Of course, I HAD to download the missing images just to see what images the GOP decided to exclude from rotation. Those thirteen are included below.

And my two favorite of the excluded are these:

Favorite Reject #1

Favorite Reject #2