Mmm, debate.

At home again, sadly. This time, we have Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and half a Subway sandwich. I am hooked into a chat room, though, and I’m hoping my friends say entertaining things. If so, I’ll post transcripts.

Pre-Debate: I’m watching the Top Model clip show instead of Olbermann. I will smile with my eyes during the debate. I’m thinking I might watch the debate on CNN this time so I can see the squiggly lines. I wish I knew which channel CNN was.

The debate is at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, which is on Lawn Guyland. I do not like Hempstead. I went there for a job interview once. An hour out of Brooklyn on the LIRR and what I got for my trouble is one of those suburbs that forces you to have a bigger carbon footprint by virtue of the fact that it has no sidewalks.

Oh my god, you guys, how insane is this season of Top Model?!

I haven’t really been following politics this week as I’ve been insanely busy, so if something really remarkable has happened since, like, Friday, I haven’t heard about it. That might color my interpretation of the debate.

Okay, I’m done stalling now. Let’s get to the debatin’.

9:00 So domestic issues this time, and Bob Sheiffer (sp?). The candidates come out and we have an intimate, sit-down chatty debate. Sheiffer says no talking points. And there was apparently another bad day on Wall Street?

Whose economic plan is better? We start with McCain. McCain says Nancy Reagan is in the hospital. Oh, sad. (So is my TV boyfriend Gale Harold, who was in a motorcycle accident yesterday! Speedy recovery to everyone!)

Anyhoodle, McCain goes on about home values and fixing the mortgage crisis, and he reiterates what everyone thought was the suicidal plan to bail out all Americans with bad mortgages. Which is kind of confounding, because that would go against McCain’s anti-spending plan. Also, McCain is talking like he’s explaining rocket science to a 2 year old.

Obama: bailout was a first step. Obama says some stuff, but I got distracted by the chat room. (My regular bar isn’t showing the debate, so I’m trying to lead the flock to greener pastures from afar. It’s fun.)

McCain rebuts with a “regular guy” anecdote. Drink! He mentions Joe the Plumber, who sounds like an excellent horror movie villain.

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So it’s that time again: Debate #3. It’s just me and my feline roommate Molly tonight, and there isn’t even any booze (although I do have Diet Pepsi and Milanos… tasty, but not really the same) so this might be less entertaining.

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Pre-debate: Watching Olbermann. I’m pretty grossed out by McCain campaign tactics with both the Ayres stuff and with the racism in the McCain crowds. Also, Milanos are tasty.

9:05: Urgh, I have the hiccups. This should be fun. Okay, here we go. Town hall format. Tom Brokaw. Uncommitted voters gave their questions to the Brokaw. Should be fun. Plus Brokaw just gave us permission to jeer at home! Read more

at the mahablog.

+ Fun fact: the Harper of HarperCollins was once mayor of New York, although he had some anti-Irish feelings, which I can’t endorse.

+ Barack Obama might be a Star Trek nerd. If anything, that’s one more reason to vote for him.

+ After months of saying he wasn’t gonna do it, Mayor Bloomberg is running for a third term despite term limits.

And a programming note: I’ll be live-blogging tomorrow’s vice presidential debate at the Mahablog. Should be a good time.

I wanted to write a report on the debates based on my relative wealth of debate experience. (11 or so years debating/judging/coaching policy debate on both the high school and college levels.) I’ve been thinking it would be entertaining, to me anyway, if the candidates had to adhere to the format of a policy debate. Policy debate rounds are structured basically like this: there are two teams of two. Each team member has to give an 8-minute constructive speech (9 minutes in college debate), after which their opponent gets a 3-minute cross-examination period. Then each team member gives a 5-minute rebuttal (6 minutes in college debate). It means we’d have to talk about substance instead of in sound bites. But alas.

I watched Friday’s presidential debate from the comfort of one of my favorite bars. It’s hard to be objective in a crowd, I’ll say that. The bar was in the West Village and, except for a couple of off-hours Wall Street type dudes in backwards baseball caps hanging around near the arcade games in the back of the bar, everyone was overwhelmingly pro-Obama. So I was trying to be objective, but it’s hard to do that when everyone cheers when Obama makes a good point.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I think the debate was a wash. McCain loses points for smiling smugly. Obama loses points for being correct but not being as aggressive as he could have been. Obama clearly understands nuance, but I don’t know if the audience would. Also, the debate was largely about foreign policy which is, well, foreign to most Americans. When we start talking about health care and domestic issues, I think there’s an opportunity for Obama to really hit it out of the park. That’s the kind of stuff that actually hits home for most Americans.

I’d give a slight advantage to Obama for being articulate and much less smug than McCain, but I don’t think it was a home run, you know?

I took notes. I was intending to write up a report based on these, but I think it might be more fun to just transpose my notes, particularly those I wrote after the third beer. So, here goes:

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I’m totally late to the party on this, but HBO recently aired a documentary called Resolved.

You can view the trailer by going to the official website. Jezebel has a clip up that that explains what those kids are up to.

And, yes, I did that. I spoke just as fast as those kids and was a part of the culture for all four years I was in high school, and I kept on going in college and even coached and judged for a while, both high school and college level, afterwards. I had to quit with great reluctance a couple of years ago because I couldn’t take the travel anymore, and I miss it a lot, so it’s fun to run into things like this. It’s all coming back to me! (Proof: I was interviewed for an article about debate way back in 1997.)

But, yeah, high school debate is a cult. It’s got its own language. It’s incomprehensible to outsiders. It’s competitive as hell. It’s a lot of fun.

See also the awesome movie Rocket Science, maybe the most accurate cinematic portrayal of debate I’ve seen.

+ Check out the Brooklyn Literary 100.

+ 65% of women aged 25-45 have disordered eating. Not surprising, but still alarming.

+ A man in Italy was arrested for staring at a woman. Sure, it seems extreme punishment, but I’m conflicted because I’ve also been the woman stared at. Women should be able to feel safe when traveling, and if it takes threatening to arrest men who make women feel unsafe in obvious ways (staring unrelentingly at a woman for an hour, say) then maybe it’s something to consider? I don’t know.

+ Mandy Kaling, who is awesome, tells you 10 things you don’t know about women.

+ The Times has a profile of the American Worker. The gist: Americans are overworked and underpaid. Gee whiz, I never could have guessed that!

+ On the other hand, Jezebel says it’s called work for a reason.

+ The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere

+ I’m still annoyed about that Tyra-hosted show about people competing for an editorial job at Elle. It’s apparently not just me.

+ Why is it we work hard to cover up something that is natural and happens to almost every woman. *sigh*

+ How expensive is the beer at Yankee Stadium? I feel like saying, “I paid $9.50 for flat Miller Lite” kind of says it all, though.

+ In case you missed it, a few weeks ago, Peter Sagal of NPR had an awesome feminist rant about Horton Hears a Who.

+ Speech and Debate have a lot in common with sports. Damn right they do! Our debate team in high school brought home more trophies than our sports teams in fact. Does this mean I can say I was a jock in high school?

Also, I bought Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner. Perhaps I’ll review it for the blog after I read.