And other ceilings held, a choice of either-or, and this is something we should not forget.  The work is barely begun.

It was a good speech, a fine American moment.  I played a little part and felt well for it.

But just now I’m feeling the impulse to stay words for a while.  It has been cropping up in my various pseudopods around les tubes.

I think I’ll follow that impulse a while.  Let the words circulate, perhaps spill out in venues unmarked on this, our concensus hallucination.  I don’t know.

I’ll be back.

“Screw my latent cynicism. I’ve got this big old grin that keeps popping out. I just got the email from the man himself (the tubes must be sluggish tonight!), I just watched that tremendous, inspiring, tough-minded acceptance speech, I helped protect my neighbor’s franchise this morning by vouching for her at the polls and I made GOTV calls from home while my little man slept this afternoon. And I just feel very good.”

Thanks to all who worked so hard.  Tomorrow, the hard work begins!

I’ve just got to unplug from all the information, and the illusion of useful engagement consuming it can generate, until this one is over.  So don’t hold it against me if I’m not getting back at your superpokes or whatever.  Judging from past performance my infobreak won’t hold out for too long.

While there, though, I notice something that I think pretty much sums up the uphill battle poor John McCain (yes, I am actually starting to feel sorry for him) is apparently screwing up even as I write this:  observe the comparative Twitter statuses of the two official campaign accounts that heads up the election page.

On top, BarackObama, smiling and looking hopeful, says “At Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Watch the debate tonight at 9pm ET. Reply with your thoughts after.”

Below him, JohnMcCain, looking grim and doughty, offers this: “DEBATE FACT #5: RATING THE TWO CANDIDATES: Summary:. When rating the candidates, John McCain.. “

And then one of those bastardly tinyurls that I’m not going to bother to copy (I don’t feel that sorry for him), suffice to say that it goes to some page on his campaign site that looks like something straight out of the congressional register with a stack of unengagingly typeset articles that pretty much say that conservative think tanks think Obama is a liberal.

Those quotes are verbatim.  I didn’t put that extraneous period after the colon or the improper “two dot” ellipsis in McCain’s statement to make him look bad.  Obama’s message is simple, clear and self-contained: his plain invitation to watch the debate expresses confidence in his performance, his invitation to respond to him afterward expresses engagement and interest in whoever he’s communicating with.

McCain, on the other hand, is directing you to his own spin: he’s basically trying to “prep” you for the debate.  But more interesting to me than the tactics is the ham handed delivery of the message.  I’ve been doing some professional writing on the side for feeds that go to text messages and I’m sensitive as a result to the challenges of delivering information in a highly length-restricted format.  The SHOUTY headline is utterly useless, the only information it delivers is that there are apparently at least five of these “facts” which should have been reinforced at the destination page (which it isn’t, it’s not intuitive to get to the assembled “facts” at all, and the page I eventually managed to find was a disordered mess).  Then there’s this - “Summary:.”? Purposeless period aside, what is this, a book report?  It’s not necessary to explicitly identify a brief statement as a summary.  People will get this on their own.

And how about this gem:  “RATING THE TWO CANDIDATES: Summary:. When rating the candidates…”  Wait, am I correct in assuming you are going to be RATING THE CANDIDATES? Are there two candidates in this race, that is fascinating I DID NOT KNOW THAT.  When you rate the two candidates how do  you think that the two candidates will rate?  The repetition of basically the same introduction just looks redundant and stupid.

In all it is 80 characters of almost completely useless preamble, and the upshot, so help me, is that the whole point - the distinction that is supposed to get drawn between the candidates, doesn’t fit into the tweet!  Unless you click the link the post is 100% information free (aside from knowing that John McCain has at least five DEBATE FACTS up his sleeve).

Just for the sake of academic interest I rewrote the thing so that it maintained the URL but also replicated the full title of the linked article which pretty succinctly captured the sentiment that article was trying to express.  Literally a minute’s work was all that was required to bring it in at 128 characters: this is the kind of thing I used to do routinely as a mid-level secretary.  Great job, boys.

(p.s. no, I won’t reprint the improved version, John McCain will never learn if I keep fixing these things for him)

Early feedback suggests that many people may be curious about how I’ve arrived at this revolutionary new standard in music pricing: I’m happy to say that it isn’t based on any “particular data point.” I just wanted to choose a really large number.

So head on over and pick yourself up one today!

P.S. I lied about the price not being based on any particular data point. Thanks for bailing helping me out, Working American!

Who cares: anyway.  So, this “oops, gotta call a time out” gambit from John McCain is some bullshit. I wouldn’t even bother to argue with someone who would take his call for a bipartisan postponement of election politics at face value.  This so-called economic crisis isn’t too important for the campaign to go on: this is the campaign.  I want to hear these two one on one now more than ever.  I hope to hell Obama decides to call this bluff.  On a less optimistic level I hope Johnny Public is just a teensy bit more circumspect about these fearsome warnings that the Wolf Fast Approacheth when the subject of all the haste is penning an Enormous Fucking Check against his future taxes…

A couple of nights ago I found myself in the now rare circumstances of being alone in my house at night, disinclined to wander very far from these circumstances, and I got the idea in my head that I’d like to check out Terry Gilliam’s version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again.  I saw the movie in the theater when it came out and didn’t exactly like it.  Part of this is doubtless the relationship I have with the book: it is one of a handful that set a hook in me and over a period of years I read it again and again.  Right off this sets any retelling at a disadvantage because every break with canon (particularly evident in a narration-heavy book) bangs this little discordant gong.

But particularly with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I was also jarred by how different the tone of the movie seemed to me than the book: darker, more enmeshed in delirious drug visuals, the whip-smart and mordant humor of the text dulled by Johnny Depp’s slurred and deadpan impersonation of Thompson’s characteristic voice (silent forever, alas, alas).

But I thought from time to time (my serial reading habit for the book having gone by the wayside) that perhaps Gilliam’s was the fairer interpretation of the work: strip away Thompson’s more polished literary voice and what remains is a tale of nearly nihilistic, drug-fueled mayhem.  At some point I thought I’d have to give the movie another viewing.

I don’t really do video on demand.  Actually I’m generally hopelessly behind the technological times.  I was late getting a CD player, a computer, way behind the curve on the mobile phone. I caught up with the broadcast version of Lost once, having gotten partway via DVDs (having arrived, late to the party, at Netflix) but didn’t care for watching television on the computer.  The Netflix on-demand option won’t talk to my computer or the Tivo and while I’m sure Comcast has a host of options they’d love to place at my disposal, I have avoided this additional time and money drain by the expedient of just not bothering to figure it out.  I have to press enough buttons to watch teevee as it is.

But a friend recently made me the generous birthday gift of an iPod Touch  and I thought I’d check out the iTunes Music Store experience of renting a movie (such bad branding, call it the Media store or something) and the brave not-so-new world of portable media at the same time.

I recently maligned the hell out of the iTMS but like a hypocrite I continue to go there when convenient (it lives in my damn music player! It’s evil genius!), demonstrating maybe that getting someone to set up an account with a recurring pay option is the true holy grail of online selling.  It is easy: the reasonable $3 rental option made it easier still.  That’s a cup of coffee (and not a fancy one).  I was not impressed with the download time or the time to transfer to the iPod, but these days I can never tell how much of any internet-related lag is my ridiculously obsolete computer, so Apple dodged a bullet there.  Beyond time, the process had what I have generally found to be the Apple appeal: it pretty much did itself, download the movie, plug in the iPod, and there it was. Ready to watch.

Sometimes it’s not so bad to be technologically remidial: I was very much the old world ape at that moment, astonished and delighted as the magic stone in my paws opened up a business-card lozenge and entertained me with moving pictures.  I thought the movie held up well, and I enjoyed watching it a lot, despite the pint-sized format. (I could get into the fact that my primary television box cannot talk to the media center on my computer, despite being connected to it by an ethernet cable, but Tivo will have to wait another day for my lash).

I discovered that “rental” is a magic word that makes DRM not mean squat to me, which may be an ethically inconsistent position, but my relationship to intellectual property is nothing if not ethically inconsistent.  Honestly the fact that it vanished after a day seemed like a feature: rental without the return trip.  I still can’t dredge up much interest in the all-access, no ownership model of music delivery, but then I never wanted to rent music in the first place.  I wouldn’t say my life has been revolutionized.  But I did enjoy bringing my movie with me to take a pee.

Finally a year later I actually follow up on the idea.  While Jonah played in the playground sand I wandered in the shade of the big old trees, looking for acorns that appear whole and clean.  The park is also a squirrel metropolis, and I soon discovered I had stiff competition for this resource.  The volume of empty acorn caps around the trees was astonishing.  Most of the acorns left behind are damaged or rotten.  Maybe I left it too late.  Nevertheless, over a few days I collected a couple of handfuls of wholesome-seeming nuts.

As I carry out my inefficient harvest, I wonder about the gather-to-nutrition energy ratio on the nuts. I’m prone to survivalist contemplations.  Such considerations are a little closer to the surface in these days of financial instability and global warming.  But I’ve tended to dwell on the possibilities of life without civilization since I was a child, when I used to pore over a slim paperback on wilderness survival from my father’s library.  The contemplation was almost wholly theoretical. I read about wickiups, fire without matches, and handmade hunting spears with fascination but made little attempt to practice any of these skills in reality.  Who can imagine what a real social collapse would look like in the 21st century?  Negotiating black markets and rolling with the irrational punches of government interference seem more likely skills than the local wild nut harvest.  I keep my imaginary survivalism at arms length: dwelling too heavily on such considerations seems pathological.  Focus on paying the mortgage, keeping civilization limping along for now.  I make a mental note that one would probably be better off harvesting the squirrels.

The acorns went into a bowl to dry out.  This morning I took a glance at them and found nearly every one had sprouted one or two little holes, as neat and round as if they’d been made with a power drill.  At the bottom of the bowl a dozen or two suet-colored grubs wriggled.  Acorn weevil larvae, the internet informs me later.

I wonder what the protein content  on those is like.