The first official televised scrum of the presidential campaign season will take place today. Actually, it will be two scrums.
One more reason to avoid Cleveland...
For reasons that surpasseth human understanding, we have allowed the television network hosting this event to decide how many candidates we can bear to see all at once on a stage. They decided that number was "10," and so all of the candidates who aren't among the top ten in whatever goat entrails Fox News is consulting are being relegated to the kids' table (actually, a separate "debate" held fours hours before the Main Event).
I don't really put much stock in these made-for-television events, but I do wish we as a nation could break the habit of calling them "debates." What will get televised this evening is basically a couple of joint press conferences. The candidates will stand at their lecterns and field questions from a panel of newscasters. The candidates will try to give non-controversial responses and, if the questioners let them get away with it, bits of their "Vote for Me!" shtick as well. So far as I am aware, there will be no interactions between the candidates, no opportunity for any candidate to respond to another candidate's answers, etc. Of course, the candidates may try to manufacture such exchanges, but with so many people on the dais at the same time it will not be easy. And, to be frank, I don't think any of them really wants to do that anyway. After all, the whole point of the exercise is to be seen and heard by voters without committing a "gaffe" (famously defined by Michael Kinsley as "when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say"). And of course, when it is over, the major news media will gleefully tell us that the winner was...
Rosie the Socialist.
As someone who majored in rhetoric and argumentation in college, and who was both a debater and a coach of debaters for more than three decades, it pains me to see these dog and pony shows called "debates." They are no such thing, and calling them debates lends them a veneer of substance they do not deserve...
"Don't sugar-coat it, Shu, tell us how you really feel."
I try to avoid profanity here, for the most part...
Yes, I Really Did
After I sold my 1979 Camaro (which I wrote about here), I decided to give an alternative mode of transportation a try, so I bought one of these...
Of course it was red. Of course it was.
Behold the Yamaha QT50, also known as a "Yamahopper." I thought it would be ideal for the sort of short commuting I needed to do while living in Topeka (I didn't live far from the places I needed to go), but it had a top speed of only about 30mph (the salesman, of course, lied and said it could do 35 "easy"), which led to a great deal of cursing and honking when I ventured out onto a main thoroughfare anywhere in town. I sold it a couple of months later.
What can I say? I was young and stupid (a redundancy, I know)...
In the Great Water Filtering Wars, I have always been firmly in the PUR camp, and look with both disdain and pity on those poor, benighted individuals who settle for Brita.
That said, I wish PUR would stop embarrassing its loyal users by associating us in people's minds with this twit...
Fire your advertising agency, PUR. Do it today.
99 Percent of People On the Internet Are Bucky Katt
From the hilarious Get Fuzzy comic strip by Darby Conley, which you should read every day.
Until Next Time...
Some days I have no better reason for what goes in this space than "Just Because," and today is one of those days. Today's send-off combines two of my favorite things: beautiful women and classical music. This is a performance by the marvelous Eroica Trio of "Le cygne (The Swan)," from The Carnival of the Animals by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. It was recorded in Boston last September. Enjoy...
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