The WSJ reports

But in recent days, Gov. Palin flubbed quasi-mock debates in New York City and Philadelphia, some operatives said.

I wonder how a quasi-mock debate differs from a mock debate.

The campaign is sending in Sen. McCain's debate coach, Brett O'Donnell, to help with her preparation, advisers said. Though he always was expected to help out after Sen. McCain's debate Friday in Oxford, Miss., Mr. O'Donnell now needs to "undo" much of her previous debate prep, which has resulted in occasional "rote" responses, one adviser said.

"We've got four days," another adviser said Sunday. "People love Sarah Palin and she's got a unique personality and presence we need to bring out -- not shut down." Aides will work with her this week to be certain her responses use "her words," this adviser said.

Oh cool. We can get more of her own words, like "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska"


By the way,
I can't say for sure, but it looks like the McCain campaign probably owns the domain name voteforthemilf.com. It was registered shortly after McCain announced Palin as his running mate, and it resolves to the same address (64.203.107.149) that johnmccain.com does.

(Putin-over-Alaska image derived from boingboing)

The Obama/McCain debate this evening touched on how the credit crisis could affect Main Street, not just Wall Street.

I realize this is a small, meaningless sample, but--
perhaps I've already been affected, and in a welcome way even. It occurs to me that it's been a while since a credit card company sent me a bunch of checks to induce me to spend their money.

T-cells.

In Washington, a crisis is an opportunity. The same administration that capitalized on 9/11-induced fear to pass the Patriot Act is trying to pull off a similar maneuver. The Secretary of the Treasury is telling us that the sky is falling, thus we must give him $0.7 trillion with no oversight whatsoever on how it is used. And we must do this muy pronto.

Are people susceptible to fear, or what.

In a dream a few nights ago, I was checking out all the features of a cell phone that (I dreamed) I'd just gotten. It unfolded several times and had everything but the kitchen sink. I mean, it had a cassette player.

Happy nineteenth, and happy TLaPD.

N.B. I don't own a cell phone (yet).

I have a cactus that blooms now and then. Each flower grows s l o w l y for about a month, then leaps a couple inches in the last few days before it opens, which it does around dawn. Then, before the day is over, it wilts.

Echinopsis subdenudata

A YouTube video that's making the rounds shows Mitt Romney saying

I think Senator McCain was called out for what everyone has said was a false accusation. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Bill Bennett, everybody has said what he said was simply wrong and reprehensible. I think it was a huge mistake on his part. ...

Several blogs embedded the video without realizing it's not current, but rather dates from January of this year.

Andrew Sullivan got suckered in; he posted it this morning (screenshot here) and took it down an hour later. In the now-purged entry, he'd said "I used to trust John McCain."

Anyone who's just now noticing that McCain is full of shit hasn't been paying attention.

While we're on the topic of not being aware of something...
CNN reporter Allan Chernoff didn't know what was going on behind him in a recent live report from the sidewalk at 745 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan:

Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.   - John Cole

PARIS, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A court official in Paris said a dog named Scooby has become the first animal called to testify before a court in France.
...
A witness said the dog "barked furiously" when presented with a suspect at the hearing, the newspaper reported.

Although the judge praised Scooby for his "exemplary behavior and invaluable assistance", there is no word yet on whether the judge deemed the barking probative.

Had the dog not barked, we would have landed in Sherlock Holmes territory:

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Scooby's "furious" barking may have been instrumental in attracting the attention of the media. We do not know whether a reporter would have deemed a silent appearance newsworthy.

Silence is, after all, not furious. We are now nearing Noam Chomsky territory, or even a certain climbing route in my neighborhood:

afternoon storminess.

From a want ad for a software engineering position:

For immediate consideration please do the following:

1) Prepare a cover letter.
2) Flip a coin 50 times. Record the results on your resume as a sequence of heads (H) or tails (T) symbols.
3) Email your cover letter and resume to us.

My guess: it's not a joke. If you get an interview, I suspect they will tell you whether you made up the sequence yourself or whether you used a random method (coin or some automated simulation). Then they will ask how you think they could tell the difference.

If you don't follow directions, i.e. if you don't include 50 symbols, they ignore your submission (again, my guess). That weeds out candidates who can't imagine how the request might be relevant to the hiring process. At the same time, it weeds out people who mass-email their résumé in response to every ad on the list.

Having read hundreds of résumés and interviewed dozens of people for software jobs at companies I've worked for, I have an appreciation for methods that prune down the task.

She's [Palin's] the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster on local television.   - Newt Gingrich

In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan was a sportscaster for WHO radio in Des Moines. His specialty was simulating play-by-play reports as if he were at a baseball game--when he was actually in a studio, reading telegraph dispatches of the action.

Unrelatedly--
I've tried Chrome, the browser that Google released today. It has a clean, minimal interface; Google gets that right, in my opinion. I like that it doesn't bring up a separate download manager window ("Download files in peace", as they say). It has bugs (imagine that) and is a little shy on features (e.g., no live bookmarks from syndication feeds) but it's an OK first release.

I'm back from a few days on the road.

Yesterday:

my car's check engine light came on (just after entering California, heh)

at home, my computer's monitor failed

an hour later, the computer's power supply failed (with smoke from, yes, a capacitor)

I was struck by how strong the urge was to give undue credence to the idea of all that being more than just coincidence.