Live-blogging the Presidential debate w/ kitten

9:12 p.m.  We hear noises upstairs (girls went to bed by 8:30).  We each stall and try to wait to see if the other guy will go deal with it.  Finally when the steps creak on the basement stairs I go and find the girls, who report that we didn’t snuggle on the couch on the porch as we’d said we would.  I hustle them upstairs and tell them we’ll have to do it tomorrow.  Sobbing.  Finally Sarah comes up.  I go down and pause the debate.  We end up losing 7 minutes which we never make up, meaning we’re stuck with the infuriating “Audience Reaction” graph on CNN.

9:29 p.m. Is it really wise for Sarah Palin’s running mate to say “I’m not Miss Congeniality” so often?

9:39 p.m.  Sarah declares that she’s feeling nervous and jittery and wants to make some popcorn to soothe her nerves.  This powdered cheese topping is surprisingly good.  Lose 8 more minutes.

9:52 p.m. Pot Luck comes down the stairs!  Up from his evening nap and ready to party.  Sarah makes me give up one of my Crocs for him to play with.

10:04 p.m.  Cannot stop myself from tracking the Audience Reaction although the graph does not seem to make sense — the colors don’t match up right.  It annoys me to no end that people are sitting there going “oh now Lehrer’s talking, I don’t feel as excited, let me turn this dial down.”  Or is like some kind of lie-detector test where it’s strapped to their chests?

10:12 p.m. It strikes me that Obama is completely holding his own and seeming deeply and precisely informed about all the foreign policy issues.

10:34 p.m. Our minds are blown that McCain tried to insult Obama by comparing him to Bush. (???!!?)

10:41  Pot Luck’s foreign policy is becoming alarmingly aggressive.  Someone needs to explain to this kitten that liveblogging is not a game of hunt the fingers.

10:48 p.m. Sarah points out that McCain gives the impression that he really only cares about veterans.  Freeze ALL spending except for veterans.

11:05 Watching the post-debate talking heads.  Sarah is worried Pot Luck’s legs are too short.  “I think we may have a midget cat here.”  I’m feeling pretty good about the debate.  Did not expect Obama to win big on this one, but he seemed well-informed, authoritative/Presidential, and quite hawkish.

Flailing

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We do — it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia — as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go?

It’s Alaska, It’s right over the border. It is from Alaska, that we send those out to make sure an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

Video Excerpt.

Someone on The Daily Dish compared this to a memory of a fifth grade book report that she tried to fake her way through.  I had similar thoughts — it reminded me of one of those really, really bad teaching days when you have a cold or something and are either underprepared or just lose your way and you realize you are mouthing absolute B.S.  That bizarre image of Putin “rearing his head” sums it up — this errant figure of speech, kind of a cliche that maybe she started to think better of midway through.

On a second viewing of the video, it almost seems plausible that Palin truly does not understand what Couric means by “foreign policy credentials.”

LOL Palin

This (which I found on Americablog.com) is perfect, injecting into the already-inexplicable oddness of the lolcats meme all the madness of this moose-dressing, polar-bear-deregulating, press-conference-fleeing VP candidate.

There’s something about lolcats that weirds me out. Is it just idiotic, or is there something clever there? Is it simply the apotheosis of internet stupidity, or an apotheosis that brilliantly lays bare the underlying conditions? Whatever, whenever I think of the walrus bucket meme I chuckle involuntarily, not sure why I am laughing and disconcerted by that uncertainty.

Btw, Chris Rock was really hilarious in his extended comparison of Palin to Michael Vick (vis a vis animal cruelty).

p.s.  Wikipedia on lolcats.

Between Santa and Hannah Montana

Age 4 3/4 (or whatever they are, almost five) is a transitional period, or so it would seem today.  First Iris handed me a “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert” poster that I was supposed to put on their bedroom wall, after writing “Iris” in indelible marker on the poster.  This was some kind of door prize at the “hair salon” — i.e. Great Clips — where Sarah took them for a trim today.  You get a Hannah Montana poster and a lollipop.  C&I LOVE going to the hair salon.

Then Iris and Celie were asking me “how can Santa and the Easter bunny know where everyone lives?  Are there different Santas and Easter Bunnies in every place?”  I kind of hedged and dodged the question, and Celie speculated, “well, if Santa and the Easter Bunny have a printer, they could print out everybody’s address.”  (Do they think Santa and the E. Bunny are a couple?)  The girls also love printing things out — preferably their names in purple and pink.

Netherland

So, about 4/5 of the way through The Savage Detectives I dropped it (do plan to go back to finish) for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is kind of the polar opposite of Bolano: where The Savage Detectives is sprawling, wild, passionately raw, and multi-voiced, every small chapter introducing a brand new speaker, sometimes, with his or her own worldview, cadence, & set of references — reminding me of On the Road more than anything — Netherland is a classically realist novel with everything focalized through the precise lens of its almost fussy central consciousness.  O’Neill’s protagonist, Hans van der Broek, is a Dutch banker living in NYC with his British wife and son.  After 9/11 the marriage founders and his wife takes the son back to London on a trial separation, and Hans in his loneliness and disorientation gets involved in a cricket-playing outer-boroughs subculture in which he is usually the only white man.

The novel revolves around Hans’s friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian cricket enthusiast and would-be entrepreneur who adds a jolt of ethnic striver/hustler energy to Hans’s rarefied life.  (When Hans drives around Brooklyn with Chuck, who is supposedly assisting him in getting his U.S. driver’s license, I thought of the car service in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn).  Hans’s comment about his wife — “She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon,… of perpetuating a white man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man” — serves as a tacit admission that the novel could almost be accused of (a very subtle version of) the same thing, in that Chuck brings a kind of “life” and vitality to an otherwise pallid elite white world.  (The novel made me think of Louis Begley, too, in the glimpse it offers into the higher reaches of NYC professional life.)  But cricket functions in this 9/11 novel as a hopeful model of polyglot globalization.  Cricket is loaded with colonialist legacies, but for both Hans and Chuck, the sport is all about form, ritual, skill, memory, and beauty:

the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converse in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.

Netherland made me want to go back to CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary.  I still really do not understand how cricket works.

Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day

That’s a funny Onion t-shirt (I think it may originally have been a headline with no article, just a photo — brilliant).  It definitely evokes Pot Luck these days.  In other words, he is thriving: he’s a real tussling, pouncing, biting fighting kitty now.  He’s off the bottle and eats slightly diluted canned food in a dish.  He still lives in the bathtub but usually when we’re home we let him wander around.

My pick for the funniest thing he does is tussle with my Croc.  I’m not sure why he likes/hates it so much — I suspect that the rubber is a nice consistency to bite.  He stalks it and ends up entirely inside it, kicking and squirming, as if it’s a little boat or space ship or something.

Another hilarious thing is when he’s in the middle of some energetic tussling, suddenly runs out of steam and falls asleep lying on his back with his paws in the air.

Here’s a nicely diabolical shot (taken by my laptop as Sarah’s camera charger has been misplaced):

Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

Sarah and I have been reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!– sort of stealing it back and forth from one another. It’s actually laugh out loud funny (and it takes a lot to make this grumpy old man laugh OL as opposed to just doing a sort of Cheney lip-curl of mild amusement). Sandra Loh is an NPR commentator and comic/performance artist (she does one-woman-shows); the book is partly a memoir about how she became a public-school parental activist in L.A.  It’s really smart and biting about parenting and especially the insanities of parental competitiveness, gifted-children mania, and private school admissions craziness.

The “motherf%#$@” in the subtitle is less gratuitous than it may seem in that part of the plot of the memoir involves her getting fired from her gig at the L.A. NPR station for the inadvertent use of an obscenity, which ends up temporarily turning her into a cause celebre.  (Coincidentally, this happened to me too — I was suspended from my college radio station for one week in a crackdown when I read something from the back of a New Jersey punk band’s record cover that contained a curse. Unaccountably, though, I did not become a first amendment hero on campus for this brave act.)

One moment I love occurs when she is bitterly regretting the quasi-bohemian life she and her husband Mike have lived in L.A. with no attention paid to property values and school districts:

And look at this house we bought.  What were we thinking?  It seemed so charming, this thirteen-hundred-square-foot 1926 Spanish-style bungalow.  We were the sort of wide-eyed, barefoot, idealistic, Joni Mitchell-style bohemians who were so amazed we could buy a structure that we bought it without FIRST VETTING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.  Our method of buying a house?  Look at that sunshine!  Look at that cactus!  So pretty!  Pretty cactus!  Pretty, pretty cactus!  Idiots!… We paid little attention as to whether we were doing the smart thing — moving to a good school district, next to lawyers or bankers or periodontal surgeons.  Idiots, we would have insisted on NOT living next to such bourgeois sellouts!  Oh, how we laughed and partied on this sagging deck, with its Chinese paper lanterns and Miles Davis records and Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.

Another hilarious recurring theme has to do with her dismayed realization that while certain friends’ children were preparing for private school exams with Baby Einstein and “kinderjazzbastics,” her own kids were engaged in random activities with no educational value:

I notice that there is quite a bit of pointless dancing around in underwear in this house, to wild keenings of jazz.  There is much fussy making of messy blanket nests in discarded cardboard boxes.  There is much random shampooing of bears.

Sarah and I keep chucking about the shampooing of bears.  So true!

In the end the book is also inspiring in its call for upper-middle-class parents to rethink their reflexive phobia of urban public schools. Here’s an interesting interview with Loh in Salon.com.

“We are the lost civilization”

The notoriously apolitical David Letterman on a lengthy rant about global warming.  Paul Shaffer’s inane little noises of assent add a surreal touch.  Here’s a partial transcript:

Until we get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we are screwed.  We are walking dead people.  We are the lost civilization.  You’re looking at us right here.  Time to go, the cab is coming…. I’ll tell you why it’s too late.  We’ve had no leadership… nobody has stepped forward…. We have to find alternative forms of energy.  On the other hand, I don’t even know why I’m talking about this, because it’s TOO LATE.  We are DEAD MEAT.   The Republicans have taken climate change out of their platform.  As far as they’re concerned, everything’s fine.  “96 degrees in March, yeah, just how we like it!”  We are so screwed….

I adored Letterman in his early days in the 1980s.  I eventually cooled on him when the witty, sarcastic irony that had seemed so pointed started to seem to turn into a more predictable show-biz attitude.  I used to feel there was a real edge of absurdist critique there, but the “critique” part became harder to glimpse through all the celebrity interviews and so on.

Anyway, I like it when he surprises me.  I do still think he’s an intriguingly weird & smart guy who has never been 100% swallowed up by celebrity and television culture.

And a Hoosier, of course.  Wiki: “According to the Ball State Daily News, he originally had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades weren’t good enough, so he decided to attend Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.”  I wonder if anyone has ever used that fact to argue against IU’s raising/tightening admissions standards.

Thinking vs. imagining; Swordy

On Sunday I took Celie and Iris to a special classical music concert for kids (a really neat event; peer pressure somehow led all the little kids to sit relatively quietly on the floor in front — very sweet).  I was explaining to them on the way there that the music (it was Ravel and Debussy) is intended to help you imagine things.  Iris said, “I’m always so busy thinking things that there isn’t any room for imagining.”  When I pressed further, she said, “well, maybe I can tell my body to push all the thoughts out so I can try to imagine.”  (The contradicts, btw, a recent comment she made that she’s always thinking of secret stories in her head.  Although maybe that’s what she means by thinking.)

Years ago a friend of ours commented that the following experience finally made her believe that gender is to some degree hard-wired: they gave their (2 year old?) daughter a toy train, which she lovingly swaddled and put to bed.  The girls did something yesterday that reminded me of that.  C&I were playing and having play-fights with this “sword” (a plastic extendable thingy that looks kind of like a light saber).  At one point we overheard Iris murmur, “I’m the mommy and I’m putting on my goodest fighting gloves.”  (These are gardening gloves Sarah bought them recently that they primarily use to play with Pot Luck.)  Later they put “Swordy” to bed for the night — put him in the cloth napkin drawer where they tucked him in like a baby.

(Let me add that I would never claim that this proves anything about biological gender — at this point, almost age five, C&I’s veins course with princess-y gender ideology that is way beyond our control.)

Canvassing for Obama

The whole family went canvassing Saturday on a semi-rural stretch south of town.  Sarah had been assigned this cluster of 30 or so residences in this area and handed a google map with the addresses highlighted.  These were people whom the campaign had reason to suspect of being undecided or wavering or persuadable.  We parked the minivan in the Laminated Tops store parking lot (closed on Sat.) and hauled the girls on the wagon.  We’d brought along coloring books and markers, and had stopped at Kroeger’s on the way for a bag of Tootsie Roll pops to dole out to the girls for good behavior bribe the girls.

Our first pass was in a little mini… not sure what to call it, a tiny subdivision?  Basically just a big driveway off the main road with 5 or 6 multifamily apartments.  My guess is that these places might rent for $500-600 a month, I’m not really sure.  Not fancy at all, with a touch of trailer-park feeling, but in a way, nice; one good thing about living here, if you want to go this way, is that you can have this kind of rural existence with a forest off your back yard and still be a 10-15 drive to town.

Anyway, the first name on our list turned out to have a big POW-MIA poster in the window, so we weren’t hopeful, and he didn’t really want to talk.  Wasn’t rude, but did not want to tell us anything about his political views (part of the task here is to mark down whether the person is leaning toward Obama or McCain, and what political issues matter most to them).

The next guy was a sleepy-faced 22 year old, maybe, with no shirt on.  He was friendly, especially when he saw Celie and Iris — he mentioned that he was a twin too.  He told us that he was probably leaning toward Obama because his sense was that Obama is “probably more for the working man.”  He is a construction worker and a member of the union; he sort of apologized for his appearance and mentioned that he had a shoulder injury and had slept in late because of the medication. He did not seem to know much about the election; when I said something about Biden, I wasn’t sure if he knew who I meant.  I mentioned a factoid about McCain planning to give the top 1% wealthiest members of the population an over $100,000 tax cut, and that seemed to make an impression.  Overall, talking to this guy felt useful if only to associate some friendly local faces with the Obama campaign (Celie and Iris probably helped).  Also, we left him with two voter registration forms which he seemed happy to have.

There was one other encounter like that – a nice mom type whose very friendly 3-year-old daughter was eager to invite Celie and Iris in to play in her bedroom.  I missed this conversation, but S. says that the woman explained that her husband is McCain all the way, much of her own family are Obama supporters, and she’s kind of wavering or in between.  We were excited to hear that she said she was turned off by the bitterness and rancor of the RNC.  Sarah’s strategy was to stress what Obama will do for the middle class and on economic issues and to point people towards the campaign website.  She commented that it suddenly felt very useful to self-identify as a Middle-Class Mom (probably better than an oil painter and hugelkultur practitioner, for this purpose).

We found it kind of surprising to witness how many people are truly undecided.  We talked with a friendly man who explained that he and his wife generally wait until the last week or so to decide.  I wasn’t sure if this indicated a basically personality-based approach to the decision — deciding which candidate they feel most personally comfortable about — or whether it was more a sign of a set of political beliefs that is truly squarely in the center, whatever that means.  Sarah was struck by how determining family seemed to be; many of the people we spoke to immediately made reference to what their husband or wife or siblings thought, and that really seemed to be the most important single factor.

A lot of people were not home and I can’t imagine this little stint was hugely meaningful, but it felt good to have put a bit of sweat equity into the campaign (dragging that wagon is hard work!)

I’d urge everyone to consider doing some canvassing.  Remember, there are people in your neighborhoods (or nearby) who may barely know who the candidates are, or know little beyond what their spouse told them, and people who will not bother registering if someone doesn’t physically hand them a form.  Just call the Obama campaign and say you can do some Neighbor-to-Neighbor canvassing.

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n