When life gives you lemons...

Glenn Reynolds finds something to cheer him up:

HMM: J-prof uses satellite images to calculate that 800,000 attended inauguration ceremony. Plus, Michael Silence offers a cautionary note on crowd estimates. Anyway, if the turnout’s disappointing, I blame Adrian Fenty!

UPDATE: Good news and bad news on the TV front. It was the most-watched televised inaugural since 1981 — but it got beat out by American Idol.

Posted at 2:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

Of course, Nielsen ratings are for households. The ratings don't include the likely millions who watched in large groups at work, in schools and theaters, in the middle of the street, in bars, etc., nor the vast numbers who had it streaming on their laptops, or the millions who watched around the world who probably never had much of a connection to the ol' Gipper, but never mind.

Fortunately, there is something for Glenn to console himself with:

NBC's "The Biggest Loser" was on the rise (3.9/9 in 18-49, 10.2 million viewers overall), spiking sharply in its second hour after "Idol" went off the air.

As for those crowd estimates...

This is, in other words, no time for moderation. And on the Mall today, you could believe it. The press was seated directly before the podium -- I had a second-row seat to history, you might say -- and behind us stretched the long lawn. And all we could do was gape. It was a sea of people. Millions of people. A mass of moving, yelling, dancing, joyous humanity, filling every patch of green and surrounding the Washington Monument. The image richly recalled the iconic photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. And the assembled politicians knew it. Up on the podium, you could see senators snapping pictures on their digital cameras, pointing at the crowd, shaking their heads in disbelief. They weren't pretending to be blase about the scene. This was different. This was dramatic. It was a screaming, laughing, cheering rejoinder to those who would constrain the scale of Obama's ambitions, or question his political assets.

It's going to be open mocking season on wingnuttarians for a long time to come.