The radio said today would be the last nice day of fall. Already this Monday they used the word snow. At first tentatively, like a kitten nudging a ball of yarn. Like an afterthought.

“Temperatures dropping into the 30s Friday night with a 40% chance of rain,” the weatherman says, then adding a whispered “… or snow.”

You can just see him hunching his shoulders and scrunching up his face when he says it. Or snow.

Well, you can’t see him since it’s radio and for all you know he’s a well-programmed computer somewhere in Bangladesh, but the effect is the same. And if it’s a computer they’ve done a nice job getting the inflections right.

The meteorologist’s job is not to inform (except in extreme cases, like storms), but to encourage. He’s a counselor, helping you put things into perspective. If Dr. Phil did not already have a successful television career, he could have a good shot at a successful television career.

In a way it surprises me that more meteorologists aren’t trained in psychology. The back page of the metro section, where the weather resides, is like group therapy for the whole state. It’s, “Didja see the weather t’day?” Or, “Looks like a crummy weekend comin’ up.” Or, “Jeez I tell ya’ it’s raining somethin’ awfull out there today!”

And the answer, no matter who you say it to, is always in the affirmative. Yes, we did see the weather. Yes, it will be a horrible weekend. Yes, it is raining.

This is how people bond. It’s our way of feeling like we belong. In this state, where winter (or some close relative) can last almost half the year, it’s not man versus machine. It’s not us against them. It’s Mother Nature; she is the common enemy, and without the constant stream of updates from the local meteorologist we couldn’t put a face on her.

Now, even in Minnesota Mother Nature takes some time off. This is called Summer. In the summer you don’t need to know the weather because the weather will be good, and you’ll find that out on your own, like a dollar bill left in an old pair of pants.

In the winter meteorology is equally useless (except, like I said before, as a sort of Freudian canvas on which to toss our collective feelings of shame and inadequacy). That’s because in the winter the weather will always be one thing: cold. It might be cold with snow; cold with ice; cold with more cold. But always cold.

It’s only in the spring and fall that the weatherman finds a true purpose. In those times, you need guidance, because beautiful-seeming weather can turn ugly in a matter of minutes. And if you’re not prepared, you’re left standing at the office door, looking out at your car (400 yards away) and hoping someone will trip and drop their umbrella so you can run off with it.

An example: I was born April 20, a full month after the start of spring, in a snowstorm. Had I been capable of standing upright, and had my just-immigrated parents been silly enough to let me do so, the snow would have almost doubled my height. Four days later leaves were beginning to sprout on the trees.

Fall works more or less the same way. Halloween evening, 1991, I went out to gather treats and threaten strangers with tricks wearing nothing but my mother’s nylons and a handkerchief (I was a pirate, argh). That night as I filled my pillowcase with refined sugars, a few drops of rain began to fall. Or snow?

The next morning school was cancelled, the world was white, and snow-laden pine-branches scraped the ground in a bitter lament. “Help,” one of them cried. “I have a bad back.”

But as falls go, this one has been spectacular. Almost every day since the end of summer (a date more felt than known) has been a prize specimen: brisk air, warm sunlight, trees as red as roses. And, for the most part, no need to check the weather. The mornings are cold, the evenings are cold, the days are gifts from forces greater than us.

Until today. This morning a heavy darkness has descended and you can almost hear the vampire-castle music in the background. It is a foreboding day, not just because it signifies the end of fall, but because it screams the beginning of winter.

Unless the weatherman was wrong…and oh, that’s always a possibility. Maybe a butterfly in Colorado will flap its wings (or fail to), and the jet stream will change direction, and Friday the will not be in the 30s but in the 70s. Not the Great Depression but the Sexual Revolution. Hippies! Long hair! Sunshine!

Another week of sunshine. Would that be too much to expect, in a place where, when it comes to the weather, almost anything can be expected?

Nah. My forecast for the rest of the week is resolutely sunny. Winter can come, but I, for one, am not going to herald its arrival.

The rest of the week will be beautiful, with warm temperatures and a light breeze. Friday will be especially nice, with only a very, very tiny chance of rain.

Or snow.

Finally, movie titles have gone pictorial. It was only a matter of time. With the release of “I ♥ Huckabees” last week, the floodgates have opened. Soon we’ll see things like “(Skull and Crossbones) Man Walking” and “The Passion of the (Little Picture of Jesus)”.

Now, you can debate the merits of this trend (I, for one, see it as a good thing, despite being a pain for the people who set up the theater marquees), but there’s no questioning “I Heart Huckabee’s” pivotal role in this cinematic innovation.

Unfortunately, that’s the only thing about the movie you can be sure of. The rest is a jumble, full of sound and fury, signifying, well … something. I think.

“I Heart Huckabees” has one distinguishing characteristic, aside from its unusual name. There are an inordinate number of scenes in which all the characters are yelling. Apparently, this has something to do with the meaning of life, which is nice to know, since it reminds me a lot of what our family dinners were like when I was a kid. Lots of loud talking by people who weren’t necessarily talking to each other.

As a kid this never bothered me. I just took it as a challenge. But in the film, I couldn’t help being annoyed; every fifteen minutes or so a scene would come along in which all the characters were yelling at every other character, and the purpose of the exercise was unclear.

But maybe that was the point. Huckabees is billed as an existential comedy; it deals with three or four (or five?) people trying to find meaning in meaninglessness. That may seem like a lot for a film to handle while remaining funny, but “I Heart Huckabees” manages by being really, really long. Or at least seeming it.

In fact, it lasts only an hour and a half, but like any good philosophy class, the time stretches forever. It’s not that the film, directed by David Russell (of Three Kings fame), isn’t funny. It is. And I have no complaints about the acting; Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and especially Mark Wahlberg, put up great performances.

No. In fact, “I Heart Huckabees” is brilliant at times. I’m thinking of a scene in which Wahlberg, playing a philosophical firefighter, refuses to ride in the fire truck because he believes the use of petroleum is inhumane. So he rides his bike to the fire, weaving between cars on the clogged L.A. freeway.

Scenes like that one are funny and poignant and just kind of cool in that weirder-than-you-expected, Wes Anderson sort of way. But unlike Anderson’s Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums, this film is weighed down by its purpose.

The problem is that Russell has created a film about existentialism, rather than an existential film. Instead of showing us a plot where the existential dilemmas of life are evident, he shows us characters talking about those dilemmas. So while the theme – that existence is a balance between meaning and meaninglessness – still comes across, it feels more like a lecture than a movie.

As a lecture, it’s not bad at all. But as a film, its intellectual meanderings overwhelm rather than inform. Every philosophy discussion becomes mush after an hour. If you spend long enough talking about the meaning of life, eventually you’ll just want to stop and go for a walk or something.

But hey, if that’s all “I ♥ Huckabees” accomplishes, it’s plenty.

Oh lord, the marketing gimmicks have fooled me again.

In which: I get suckered into ordering DVDs of ill-repute; I violate Yahoo’s terms of service; I try to convince you to do the same.

Rumors circulate on the Internet like pieces of excrement in a toilet: they are kept afloat only because stupid people keep picking them up.

I am one of those stupid people. A few weeks ago a friend of mine passed along an e-mail that mentioned an Internet Web site claiming it was giving away mp3 players. Maybe a scam, my friend said, but maybe not. It was tempting.

After all, these weren’t any mp3 players. These were iPods.

Ahhhhhhh.

Yes, those magical white boxes, like little bars of free-hotel soap, were something I’d never wanted until one was offered to me free of cost. Then I wanted twenty. Never mind that I have very few mp3s. My iTunes play-list consists mainly of Italian language-instruction programs. Most of the other songs I refuse to listen to, because they get stuck in my head and keep me from sleeping.

And yet, free things are free things. Ipods are cool and gadgety. Hotel-sized bars of soap are convenient and it’s not a big deal if you lose one under the radiator.

Twenty bars of soap, I can say from experience, are easy to get for free. Just bring a paper bag to your hotel room. The rest will take care of itself.

Twenty iPods have been more difficult.

After doing a bit of research it appeared the offer was valid. The goal could be realized with little more than some e-mail trickery. All you had to do was sign up for a free e-mail account. Then, you signed up at www.freeipods.com using that new account, because it would soon be bombarded with Spam. Of both the real and the electronic variety.

I created chichomydog@yahoo.com. Chicho was the name of a dog we got from the humane society when I was a kid. It barked tremendously. All the time. Tore through its leash. Then its muzzle. After a week we sent him back.

Don’t even start. I still feel horrible about it. So horrible that when I signed up for my Yahoo! mail account I couldn’t give my real name.

To Yahoo! I am not “Bruno Bornsztein” but “Bobana Bobana”. This is because “Bob Bob” was taken. Apparently Yahoo! is not familiar with the American custom of not giving people the same first and last name and using a common first name for both.

In any case, they didn’t say anything.

So, now sufficiently pseudonymized, I returned to the free iPods site, ready to collect my bounty. Would they send it today? Tomorrow? By e-mail?

OF COURSE! Right after I completed a simple promotional offer, requiring the use of both my real name and my credit card. I’d come this far; I couldn’t turn back. So I caved and signed up for the first one that looked reputable: Columbia House DVD. The deal: you get five DVDs for 50 cents apiece, and by doing so you agree to buy 12 more at full price.

I didn’t bother much with the details. I was going to cancel it anyway. “The DVDs will come,” I said to myself, “You will not open the box. You will send them back. End of the affair.”

But I opened the box, and the affair continues. And since I was planning on sending them back, I didn’t choose DVDs I actually wanted to own, I just took the pre-selected ones.

So this Saturday I watched “You Got Served,” one of the worst movies about urban hip-hop dancing I have ever seen (and I’ve seen many). The whole time I was thinking “You’ve Been Served. You’ve Been Served.”

All this and still no iPod in sight. Because completing the DVD offer wasn’t the only requirement. I also have to get five friends to do it.

It has quickly become clear that getting five friends to be as stupid as I was isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most people have more sense.

And that’s where you come in. You could really help me out here. Would you like to be a part of a borderline legitimate pyramid scheme? No really, it works, you just need to do something you don’t want to do, and then trick five friends into doing the same. Heck, they don’t even have to be friends. Trick anybody, I don’t care.

Here, use this link.

Tell ‘em Bobana sent you.

I have always hated baseball. The standing around. The body-part scratching. The throwing and catching. Goofy socks.

There are so many ways to ridicule the game of baseball that it’s difficult to choose where to start. Difficult, but not impossible.

As a kid whose parents were from South America, I grew up with the notion that soccer (or fútbol, as we called it) was a far superior game. This was despite the fact that neither my parents nor my relatives in Argentina cared about soccer any more than they cared about bais-bol. My grandparents believed, and still believe, that it’s a sport for thugs and low-lifes. My mom worried about head injuries and tackling. Also drugs (Maradonna, cocaine, etc.).

And still, I made a point of treating the national pastime with contempt. I decried it as a non-sport. It required no physical fitness, I said, like golf or chess. It was the most poorly designed of the sports, in my mind, because the rules were strange and arbitrary.

So when the time came in gym class or on the playground to play what was, in the late 80s and early 90s, still The Nation’s Pastime, it was with glum satisfaction that I joined in the game. On one hand, I had to participate in the Sport That Crushed All Other Sports (like soccer). On the other hand, I could criticize to my heart’s delight, from the best vantage point: right field.

This happened throughout my childhood. Late summer nights spent watching wispy dead dandelions under the bright outfield lights. I even played on the rec-center team in a misguided attempt at cultural assimilation.

In the short term, at least, it didn’t work. I never fit in with the boys who collected baseball cards not because everyone else did, but because it was a fact of life, like breathing. These were kids who really did play catch with their dads in the back yard after dinner. My dad and I played multiplication tables.

But over time, baseball made a mark on me in a subtle, nearly undetectable way, like a painting on a sun-facing wall. I remember running up the stairs the night the Twins won the 1991 World Series. We’d just moved into our house.

I remember getting my first fitted ‘Minnesota’ hat, now trapped in a grave of dust behind a dresser in my little brother’s room.

And I remember the sun going down over a slow freight train out behind right field. The red coat of infield gravel on my shoes and my gloved hand raised above my head to draw the gnats away from me.

There I stood; for all anyone knew I was waiting for a fly ball.

Somewhere between then and now I learned to love baseball. Not for the game itself, which still bores me to tears most of the time, but for the way it burrowed into my memory. Uninvited, unwelcome and out of place, baseball made a place for itself in my life.

It is the end of summer. It is the Twins and the Braves. It the bright crack of a high fly ball, sailing into the summer sky.

Up, out, and into right field.

Why the pope is smarter than everyone.

Um…duh.

A new search engine called Clusty based on Vivisimo. It clusters results based on similarity between documents. So if you were searching for Bruno Bornsztein (and, let’s face it, I know some of you are), you’d see all the results from this site clustered together, and you wouldn’t have to spend hours going through all the stuff about that French mathematician (who haunts my dreams).

Here are some crazy drawings. And here are some crazy illustrations (note: illustrations != photograpshs).

But then, there’s no shortage of photographs. Especially from World War I.

Ahh…history. Where does it comes from? Newspapers? Magazines? Universities? No, everyone knows history comes from Jeopardy. So, what’s making history there days?

In my experience, an obsession with Jeopardy is often accompanied by another disturbing addiction: books. If someone you know meets these criteria, you should seriously consider getting help; you may have a book addict on your hands.

Of course, there are worse things to be addicted to. Here’s an exerpt from a book of photos about spring break:

I get down there and that’s what it’s like: girls flashing you for beads or whatever. If a girl doesn’t like the taste of beer, they do a beer bong, and they drink the whole beer in two or three seconds. They know there’s not going to be any consequences, nobody’s going to find out about it. They’re more likely to cheat on their boyfriends, or just hook up with whoever. You don’t even see them the next day.

What ever happened to college being about, y’know, learning and stuff? It seems like for a growing number of people college is just an older, stupider version of high school.

Well, as long as the other great institution of higher learning doesn’t descend to that level, I think we’ll be alright. ‘Cause really, I don’t think anyone wants to see Alex Trebec “do a beer bong”.

Good morning, blank page of the word processor. You strike deep fear in my heart. I raised myself from a gentle, swaying sleep to meet you at this early hour, in this remote place. So let’s talk about something.

Penguins?

They have them at the Como Zoo. Like most people, I find them very endearing. They have a way of appearing cute and grumpy at the same time. Like Donald Rumsfeld.

Though not related to the long-extinct Great Auk, they took their title from that bird’s common name. Or maybe it was willed to them. I don’t know.

Ornithologically, this has been an exciting week. Please, remind me to type that sentence again sometime.

Monday while walking around Como Lake (not to be confused with Lake Como) we spied, high in a sprawling oak, a Haliaeetus leucocephalus.

Cephalus = head. Leuco = white (like leukemia, the shortage of white blood cells).

Haliaeetus = a funny word to say out loud. Try it.

Really it means sea eagle. Which is strange, since Lake Como is not only not a sea, but also not a very big lake. You have wonder about these eagles, sometimes.

I couldn’t stop looking at it, though. It wasn’t far away, and you could easily see the features on its face. A friendly looking eagle, as eagles go. I stopped on the path right below it and looked straight up, hoping other walkers would notice and ask me what was so interesting, but no one cared. Then I started saying, in a really loud voice, things like, “Wow, what a cool eagle!” and “Man, that is just a huge bald eagle.” But still no one noticed, and my girlfriend started walking off without me.

“You were just trying to get attention,” she said.

“Wha!? Nooooo. I just think it’s cool that we spotted a bald eagle right here in the middle of the city.”

“Not we,” she said. “I. I spotted it.”

Did you know that possession of just one bald eagle feather is a felony in this country? It carries a fine of up to $10,000 and/or jail time. You can, however, collect eagles or eagle body parts if you have a permit. You can even order a whole eagle from the National Eagle Repository in Denver, CO. You’ll have to wait “about 3 and one half years for a whole Bird order to be filled”. Currently there are 5,000 people in line ahead of you; I’d suggest you try to budge.

Also, you’ll need to present a certification of tribal enrollment from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or Tribal Enrollment Office. But really, how hard can it be to get one of those?

Well, the time goes by. I feel like we’ve been talking for hours, not minutes. I also feel like this format, where I talk to my computer and it listens quietly, shows great promise. Except that I’m not really talking, I’m writing, and the computer’s not really listening, because it’s distracted. It’s probably playing computer games on … itself.

Or looking up strange facts about birds.

I am having trouble eating food. Good food, bad food. Healthy food, junk food. Any kind of food.

I’m afraid it will pickle my liver. I am afraid it will clog my intestines. I am afraid it will super-size me.

Is there a name for this?

In the feature-length documentary/practical joke “Super Size Me”, independent filmmaker Morgan Spurlock sets out to find out why Americans are so fat, and to see if he can make himself similarly fat in a short period of time. He succeeds, partly, on both counts.

For the entire month of February , 2003, Spurlock, a New York native, turned McDonald’s across the country into his personal grocery stores. If it didn’t come from a hut with a “billions served” sign, he didn’t eat it. Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The experiment was inspired by a lawsuit filed in 2002 against McDonald’s on behalf of Ashley Pelman, then 14, Jazlyn Bradley, then 19, and several other teenagers. The suit alleged that “as [a] result” of eating Happy Meals, McMuffins and Big Macs over the years, the teens had “become obese [and] developed diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure” and other problems. The teen’s lawyers claimed in federal court that McDonald’s didn’t give adequate warning that its meals were unhealthy, and that the companies’ marketing techniques targeted children and pushed consumers to order ever-larger sizes.

In other words: McDonald’s made them fat. And McDonald’s gave them diabetes, and host of other health problems that are related to obesity.

The burger king’s response was that their food could not be proven as the source of the girls’ obesity (and, in fact, the case was later dismissed on exactly those grounds). Spurlock, amateur scientician that he is, took issue with that claim.

“If it’s that good for me,” he recalls thinking, “I should be able to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for thirty days straight with no side effects. I should be able to live the All American way of life of over-eating and under-exercising and be fine.”

Also he recalls thinking it would make a good movie.

And it did. “Super Size Me” succeeds in being thoroughly interesting, entertaining, and scary while walking the thin line between ridiculousness and reason. That line, and Spurlock’s unwillingness to trample it, is the reason why “Super Size Me” is not the “Bowling for Columbine” of food documentaries.

Spurlock presents the case as he sees it, which is, obviously, that fast food (and the All American Way of Life) is terrible for you. If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you fat and diabetic, as it has done for so many Americans.

This is not a novel concept. People have known, generally, that eating unhealthy food and living an unhealthy lifestyle will, in all likelihood, make you unhealthy. And unless you’re like the weirdo in “Super Size Me” who has eaten nothing but Big Macs for twenty years (with no ill-effects), it’s a matter of simple observation.

And yet, all the surgeon general’s warnings in the world will not communicate the scope of America’s obesity epidemic quite as well as seeing skinny Morgan Spurlock gain 17 pounds in 30 days on his McDiet.

From the very beginning “Super Size Me” questions the role of personal responsibility in the fatness epidemic. At the same time, it poses questions about the fast-food companies’ role (no, it’s just Ronald’s fault) that you might not ask yourself on hearing that three obese girls were suing McDonald’s for having allowed them to nearly kill themselves by overeating.

One of the more serious of those questions: is fast food addicting in the same way cigarettes are? Before you start laughing too hard, let me restate the question: is fast food addictive in the same was heroin is?

Some say yes . Some say no. Some (me) say maybe.

And another question: is marketing something as unhealthy as fast-food to children, if not morally wrong, at least socially harmful? Alcohol, with all its negative social and personal effects, isn’t marketed toward kids. And no one argues that it’s proper to do so, despite the fact that consuming alcohol is a choice people are free to make (or not make).

And obesity and related diseases cause almost three times as many deaths yearly as does alcohol and its related problems.

Here again, the beauty of “Super Size Me” is that it aims more to push fast-food companies from a market standpoint (no one will want to buy your crap) than from a moral one (it’s wrong for you to sell such crap).

Moreover, through a creative story idea, brisk, engaging editing, and an entertaining personality (Spurlock, Gut of Steel), the film manages to have a substantial effect on its audience. And in the end, “Super Size Me” is not a film made for the CEOs of McDonald’s and Burger King; it’s for those restaurants’ customers.

And if those customers can sit through this movie and go out the next day and order up a super-size Big Mac “value” meal, then the McFranchises have nothing to worry about. But I can’t see that happening.

I came out of “Super Size Me” with an irrepressible desire to NOT EAT ANYTHING. That will fade soon, I think, but it’ll be a while before I can look at a large box of fried potato sticks with the same tenderness as I used to.

Now, a large box of fried broccoli sticks? That’s another question. Mmmm…where’s my syringe?

I’m not a religious person, but Martin Sexton makes me want to go to church. His church.

That’s where I was Friday night. At the First National Church of Martin Sexton, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a traveling ministry; on tour across the country, and for one evening it made a brief stop at the Pantages Theater. I was lucky enough to be there.

It’s not just that Martin Sexton is an amazing songwriter, though he is. It’s not just that he plays his guitar like a sculptor molds clay, though he does. And it’s not just that his voice has tamed every note on the musical scale so well they dance like marionettes, though he has.

No, this short, stocky man is more than the sum of his talents. He showed that Friday, when he commanded an audience almost a thousand for over two hours, standing alone on center stage. Not any good singer/songwriter/guitar player could do that.

Sexton has force. There’s no better way to say it. When he’s on stage, he’s the fount from which all light shines. He is the captain of the ship, and as the audience, you’re not on the ship, you are the ship.

So, where are you going?

Well, let’s start where you started, which is where he started. Candi, a song about a heroin-addicted prostitute. “Like a lost angel, not long for this world,” Sexton sings. “Like a loose cannon, ashamed to explode.”

But that’s exactly what he does. With the night’s first of several breakdowns in which Sexton takes a soaring guitar solo while accompanying himself of rhythm guitar. He’s able to do this because he’s been given a gift; he can make an instrument out of anything.

Singing through a distorted microphone, his voice is indistinguishable from an arena-rock guitar solo. Later, back on the vocal mic, he scats and be-bops until you wonder if there are any more ways to sing “flim-flam beedly-op”. When he feels like dancing (and he often does), his guitar becomes a beat-box, and Sexton shakes and squirms until he’s satisfied.

And of course, when he determines he can’t carry the tune alone, he calls on one more unlikely instrument; the audience. He doesn’t suggest they join him in the song. He directs them to do it, because, well, that’s what he wants to do.

To be honest, it’s not the kind of music I’d listen to a lot on a recording. It’s a little too folky for my tastes. And the albums don’t really stand out. But that gets to the great thing about seeing Martin Sexton play live. You feel like you are on a walk through the forest with a guide who knows every twist and turn.

Sexton doesn’t use a set-list. He decides which song to play next on a whim. He has no backing band, and he improvises profusely. But he always seems to know exactly where he’s going, and where he’s taking the audience.

There are so many opportunities for him to fail. A flubbed pass on the guitar. A note that’s just slightly too high. Choosing a song he hasn’t sung in a while and forgetting the lyrics. Sexton’s performance – with so much improvisation and no one to share the load – is full of chances to do something wrong.

And yet, he does it as calmly as if he were going to the kitchen for a glass of milk before bed. He performs with the ease of a Harlem Globetrotter; look how fun and easy it is to sink half-court behind-the-back shots!

It makes you think, I could do that too…

And you do, sort of.

After Sexton leaves the stage, the audience requires an encore. It’s not debatable.

When Sexton returns, it’s not to center stage, but to one of the side stairs. He sits, inches away from the first row, with a simple spotlight on him. This song, he says, requires the help of his “angels.” He teaches them (us) the parts, not having to repeat himself even once.

And then, this one man – with ragged hair and wet with sweat – leads hundred of people he’s never met in a sort of rolling prayer. Bye, bye, the audience sings, slow and in layers thick with harmony.

Individually, these people cannot sing. I’m sure of it. The slurring drunk guys behind me would, under any other circumstances, butcher anything vaguely related to music. But all together, with Sexton at the helm, somehow it sounds powerfully beautiful.

Can you imagine what it must feel like for him? To sit on those steps every night and bring a moment of awe and beauty to all those strangers? He has a rare ability as a performer to affect people, to take hold of them and steer them through hills and valleys.

So it’s almost entirely appropriate when he finishes the night with a rousing, bouncing rendition of an old spiritual.

“This little light of mine,” Sexton sings. “I’m going to let it shine.”

Within seconds the whole audience is singing it with him. A colossal understatement.

The general mood this morning seems to be that Kerry looked calm and presidential, while Bush was defensive and shifty. But I think most people, if they’re anything like me, don’t really know who won until they start reading it in the blogs and papers and hearing on the news.

Maybe it’s related to social proof; people look to others to figure out what’s right. If you isolated an average, uncommitted debate viewer, I bet they’d have trouble telling you who won. At the very least, whatever their impressions were of who won, they wouldn’t be very strong ones.

For my part, I thought it was pretty much a draw. Kerry seemed nervous at the beginning, Bush seemed calm. But later Bush was repetitive; coming back to the same points over and over again. That’s fine for the campaign trail, but in a debate it comes across as defensive, as if you think every argument from the opposition is an attack that merits the same defense.

To me, Bush’s strongest argument was that Kerry can’t lead the war in Iraq because he doesn’t believe in it. And Kerry’s defense was poor: “I made a mistake in how I talk about the war in Iraq. But the President made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?”

Well, that’s just Bush’s point. If Kerry believes invading Iraq was a mistake, that’s fine, but it makes you wonder what he’ll do when he takes over command of that mistake.

Lehrer put that question to him: “Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?”

Kerry: “No, and they don’t have to, providing we have the leadership that we put – that I’m offering.”

So, from Kerry we get the following, in close succession: the president made a mistake in invading Iraq, but Americans in Iraq are not dying for a mistake. Uhh…

Kerry was strongest when attacking the President on the execution of the war: “This president just — I don’t know if he sees what’s really happened on there. But it’s getting worse by the day. More soldiers killed in June than before. More in July than June. More in August than July. More in September than in August.”

That line of argument is powerful: consistency is good, but not at the expense of reason. If Bush is so consistent that he can’t acknowledge when he’s made mistakes, that calls into question his ability to lead.

Still, Kerry would prefer not to be the whiny one, always pointing out what’s going wrong. And when he talked about how he’d do better, I wasn’t impressed. This proposed summit of his is a vague and confusing notion; hundreds of roadside bombs a month and he wants a summit? And I’m not in the camp that believes that bringing back our allies (another notion in need of more definition) will suddenly make everything better.

Overall, I think a tie (as I saw it) is a win for Kerry. He showed that, at the very least, he’s not significantly more flawed than the president. And he wasn’t aloof or boring. If we left it there, I don’t think it’d have much effect on the election.

But the debate doesn’t end when the debate ends. The media has to figure out who won. And I think if that pendulum keeps swinging Kerry’s way, it could reinvigorate his campaign.

Nothing but links today, folks, so all you dial-uppers (word?) can bail, if you want (oh, no, I was kidding, stay, really). Here we go:

The Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman is just one in the paper’s formidable stable of columnists. I rarely read him, mainy because his headlines never grab me. He writes about “people and events in the metro area”, and has a reputation for having a somewhat liberal bent.

Yesterday he chimed in on the blogs vs. newspapers topic (which counts as people and events in the metro area because one of the main players in the Rathergate controversy, Powerline Blog, is based in Minneapolis). Excerpt:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square — without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

Uh. What can you say about that? Money quote, from Lileks:

If the Rathergate tale taught us anything, it’s that ordinary people could blow ten-foot holes in the Good Ship CBS simply by comparing their knowledge to the manifest ignorance of the news division’s producers. Because I’ll tell you this about “ordinary” people: they know stuff. Granted, fonts and typewriters aren’t their beat. Fonts and typewriters are their line of work.

But still. That ought to count for something.

And, responding to Coleman’s claim that journalist are more qualified because they “know stuff”:

Coleman, you don’t know quite as much as you may think you do. I bet you don’t know the difference between a resistor and a capacitor. I bet you don’t know what things are holding back development of quantum computing. I bet you don’t know what elements could be used in a dirty nuke. Nick, do you know what makes up a TCP/IP stack? No? Yet journalists write about education like they’re a teacher, about crime like they’re a cop, and about businesses like they’re a CEO.
from The OmbudsGod

So, that’s settled. Moving on:

Here are some old people! From a really interesting report this morning on NPR about “Super-Centenarians”, people over the age of 110. They even have their own YahooGroup (registration required). See, the mainstream media’s not all bad. Just Nick Coleman. (Kidding! Just…kidding.)

And old people aren’t all bad either! Look at this nice lady; Emma Torkelson from right here in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. At the age of 100, she’s going vote for the first time in her life. I knew that MTV Rock The Vote stuff would help get out the young’ins.

Geriatric politics, the name of my next band.

If Emma’s going to vote, it might be especially wise of her (at her particular point on the life cycle) to read up on the candidates’ positions on health care. Cause, y’know, she’s old. So here you go.

And, after all that blog-bashing and columnist-bashing and rocking and rolling the vote, us older folks might be in the mood for a little vacation. How about a road trip? With retro 80s new-wave synth-pop tunes? And a hip convertible? Sure. Let’s take Michel Gondry. (Director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”)

And while we’re at it, let’s stop to have dinner with random people we don’t know.