Crowd estimate fun

Pamela "Damn, Left My Thorazine at Home Again" Geller claims 40,000 attended her anti-freedom hate rally to dance on the graves of the 9/11 dead in Manhattan today.

Politico put the number at about 1,500.

From the pictures Geller herself provides at the link above, my guess (based on taking some sample counts from various lengths-of-field and multiplying them out across like lengths-of-field sections) is that Politico lowballed the number, maybe by as much as 500-1,000.

By 38,500? Not a chance. The only way that crowd was over 2,500 is if several hundred attendees had midget barber shop quartets in their pockets.

Hundreds of protests against rally agaist the proposed "Ground Zero" Islamic mosque as thousands turned up to show support or opposition to the proposed Islamic mosque and community right on September 11, 2010 in New York City. UPI /Monika Graff

Hundreds of protests against rally agaist the proposed "Ground Zero" Islamic mosque as thousands turned up to show support or opposition to the proposed Islamic mosque and community right on September 11, 2010 in New York City. UPI /Monika Graff

What do you think? This isn't one of those "guess the number of nuts in the jar and win a Volkswagen" deal, just a fun thing to do if, um, you think estimating crowd sizes is a a fun thing to do.

I'm hoping Reuters/Fotoglif will turn up some more photos to make it easier; if so, I'll post one here [update: Got a Reuters/Fotoglif shot up now, but I've seen no "full-crowd" pics other than Geller's yet].