Let's not try and make the debates hip

So the debates are definitely on for tonight. An odd thing I noticed is that NPR has suggested a debate drinking game. I don’t think I’ll play it. I can’t think of a beverage this would be suitable for:

Take on drink:

• Every time Barack Obama says, "Now look..."
• Every time John McCain says, "My friends..."
• When a commentator refers to someone as a "maverick"
• Every time you hear the phrase "the American dream"
• Whenever you hear the words "hope" or "ownership society" or "fellow Americans"

Take two drinks:

• When one of the candidates uses the word "change" or "reformer"
• Every time either candidate says the word "economy"
• Every time either candidate says "middle class"

Egads! This isn’t far removed from just saying take a drink whenever you see someone wearing a suit.

The stinger is they end the bit with “Above all, drink responsibly.” I don’t think it would be responsible of me to even try and attempt this with water.

Events with wheelchairs and swords....you betcha.

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head since we got back from the UK… Did anyone catch the Paralympics? I bet the answer is “no”. No one that I’ve asked since I’ve got back has said yes. Most people didn’t even know what I was talking about.

The 2008 Paralympic games took place in Beijing from September 6th through the 17th. The BBC dedicated an hour of prime time coverage to the games each night, giving the athletes the full Olympic-style treatment. It was awesome. I think that’s bears repeating, the Paralympic games are awesome.

I think if you enjoy watching the Olympics (and admittedly I’m only meh on them), then you need to watch the Paralympics. The Paralympics delivers in a big way that the Olympics is unable to compete with. Do you watch the Olympics for palpable atmosphere of competition? The Paralympics has got you covered – the athletes are using the exact same pools and venues as the Olympians and have been training just as long and hard as the Olympians. They’re there to win.

Do you watch the Olympics to bask in the glory of what the human form is capable of? If you think watching a “normal” athlete do something faster or more efficient than you is awesome, then you’ll be absolutely gob-smacked by what a trained athlete missing bits can do.

Do you watch the Olympics for the display of sportsmanship? The heart shown at the Paralympics will crush you. No seriously, your throat will start to constrict and you’ll be teary eyed. There are no aloof professional participants to jack things up, the participants aren’t going to get multimillion dollar sponsorships, and they probably won’t be able to create a career out of winning big. Take away all the fame (compared to the Olympics) and you’re just left with people trying to play really hard for the sake of sports (and to prove what is possible).

God forbid you watch the Olympics for the predictable stories of a poor underdog who has overcome so many obstacles to compete. If you do, don’t watch the Paralympics – I don’t think you’ll be able to handle it. Needless to say, some of those athletes know what it means to overcome a few inconvenient obstacles.

I think it’s a shame that the US supported our Paralympians in such a poor and asymmetrical manner compared to our Olympians. The US Paralympic team came in third (if you care about medal counts). It’s sad that people weren’t tuned in cheering the wheelchair rugby (affectingly known as “murderball”) to their gold metal.

Lastly, as if any of the above listed reasons are not enough, by broadcasting the Paralympians during prime time, in their moment of glory, the BBC also manages to share people with disabilities with the general public and dispel some of the differentness and/or awkwardness of their condition. At first some viewers might find the sight of incomplete appendages a tad shocking, but by the end of the event I bet they’re rooting for a favorite athlete - having transcended what makes them different and connected what makes us cheer for athletes in the first place.

[Note: On the off chance the Paralympic games get confused with the Special Olympics. The Paralympics are for athletes with physical, mental, and sensorial disabilities. This includes athletes with mobility disabilities, amputations, blindness, and cerebral palsy. The Special Olympics are restricted to people with intellectual disabilities.]

Dawn, your cellphone is glowing blue!

Since we’ve gotten home I haven’t really seen the neighbors adjacent to us on one side. I notice items and trinkets occasionally shift around their property from time to time. I had assumed that we were simply keeping different schedules and kept missing one another.

On our way back from a walk last night I noticed something alarming about their yard. At first glance I thought the tree was not chocked full of antlers. A second inspection proved me wrong. I fear that our neighbor’s house may have been overrun by goblins!

Blogging from Scotland

Dawn and I will attempt to post updates during our trip. Those will be sequestered on their own little blog.

Check it out and see if we've been able to find internet access on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Please stop saying nonsense

I actually tried to sit down and watch a little bit of the DNC convention last night. OK, that’s not quite true. There wasn’t an active attempt on my part to watch it. More accurately, by the time I had a chance to sit down and watch TV last night the DNC convention just so happened to be on the channel that the TV was tuned to. So I decided to stop a minute and see what it was about.

My take away: lunacy, pure and absolute lunacy. I don’t think I’ll watch any more of it and I find this a little bit troubling. I can’t stand to watch the actual event, so I’ll most likely rely on a 3rd party to watch and report on it for me. Who knows what sort of accidental or intentional bias I’ll pick up from the 3rd party? If I’m at the least bit interested shouldn’t I be willing to watch the actual event and judge for myself? Hell no. I don’t think possible to be moderate and enjoy watching a convention, DNC or otherwise.

The problem with any convention is it’s a room full of the most devout and fanatical members of a party. By definition it pretty much represents an extreme political viewpoint. Anything that can make a crowd like that hoot and holler will likely be insane partisan blather.

The part that kills me is they act like there is this big lever. If you pull it one direction it helps the constituents. If you push it the other it hurts the constituents. Naturally their party only wants to selflessly pull the lever to help the constituents, and the other party selfishly wants to push it for their own gain at the expense of the constituents. Really, who (besides Dawn) would even think about founding a party on the “hurt constituents” model?

Am I too jaded and skeptical or does what pass for public discourse really just boil down to unreasonably deifying one party so they can get into power while demonizing the other. The reality is neither party is going to make too many changes to upset the status quo. Either candidate will accomplish both good and bad resulting from combination of happenstance and deliberate governance (I suspect that happenstance plays a larger role than governance).

I find listening to all the campaign promises during an election season to be profoundly depressing. Does anyone really believe any of them will come to pass? If history teaches us anything - very few administrations accomplish what they promise…partly because it’s impossible to deliver all that they promised and partly because they have to work with a bunch of people who need to see them fail in order to get their own turn in power. Yet there are those who keep the hope alive that their candidate will pull the big help constituents lever. How do the faithful do it election after election? Are they like goldfish with short memories, or is hope just a better option than resignation?

The Modern Gatherer

I wrote about how I read about the new Domino pizza tracker a while ago (I dare you to construct a more clumsy sentence!) Well since then I’ve had two opportunities to try the system out. Here are my observations.

Observation 1: The idea of being able to order and track a pizza with absolutely zero human interaction is a good one. If for no other reason than I had stopped eating Domino pizza a couple of years ago… and now I’ve eaten it twice… perhaps I’ll even order it some more. I never had anything against their pizza, in fact I feel very ambivalent about it. Dawn doesn’t care for it too much and evidently the hassle of having to order it was enough to discourage us from consuming it. Things have changed now that I don’t have to talk to anyone. That little extra bit of convenience has put Dominos back on our “what do you want to eat tonight?” rotation. (Sadly it replaced the Thai food being their delivery guy had a heart attack and now refuses to deliver food. I miss Thai delivery dearly.) The fact that you can now pay for a pizza with a credit card like any other online transaction doesn’t hurt either. Much like Domino drivers, I also hardly carry any cash.

Observation 2: Whenever something can be customized (like a pizza) it is always better to allow people to play around with their order on a computer instead of having to place it with a human. I learned this the first time I had a hot dog from Dawn’s hometown favorite convenience store. Hot dog. Convenience store…I know it doesn’t sound promising. But the magical store had touch screen kiosks that let you pick all the toppings and options for their hotdogs which resulted in you creating some truly abominable hotdogs. They were fantastic…but not something I would have spent time trying to communicate to another human. The end result was a product I was happier with, which is kind of the point of customization in the first place. Online pizza ordering allows me to order a feast pizza and remove three items and then add four other items without feeling like a schmuck for making the order complicated.

Observation 3: To quote comedian Lewis Black: “It takes away hope.” I learned this the hard way the first time we used pizza tracking. Dawn was hungry before I ordered the pizza. Without a tracker I would have placed the order and we would have waited. I could have consoled the growling Dawn with platitudes such as “I’m sure it will be here any minute.” Not with a pizza tracker I can’t. Instead Dawn is clawing at the walls, howling with hunger, and I’m saying “it’s not even in the oven yet” or “it’s in the box but it’s just sitting there.” Eventually we see that Devon has our pizza and is on his way but Dawn is threatening to slash his tip with every moment’s delay. Sometime knowing exactly where your dinner is a dangerous thing.

Overall conclusion for online pizza ordering and tracking: Introvert Recommended.

Now if they could only come up with some sort of pizza delivery robot…

We’re stuck with NBC

In the run up to the Olympics I kept hearing how horrible it was that the Chinese government censored internet usage and people in China couldn’t just go out on the internet and get their news from whatever source they wanted. I heard more than one story about how the Chinese government was making exceptions for foreign reporters sent to cover the Olympics. Much ado was made out how awful censorship is.

Thus far Dawn and I have not been particularly thrilled with NBC Olympic coverage. Well that’s not entirely true… The coverage of the actual events, the few that I bothered to watch, seemed to be fine. I could moan and groan that all swimming events looks the same and wouldn’t it be nice to swap one or two of those out for some fencing or judo…but what would be the point. The summer Olympics are about running, swimming, volleyball and gymnastics and it doesn’t matter what I like. Fair enough. However, the color commentary offered by NBC has been pretty awful at times. (You can reference Dawn’s blog for examples.) I thought to myself that the Olympics might be more pleasant if we could get rid of the asinine NBC anchors and replace them with someone else, anyone else. So I tried to pull up BBC Olympic coverage over the internet. I quickly learned two things.

Thing 1:
You can’t pull up BBC Olympic coverage over the internet unless you live in the UK. My short and half-assed research attempt to figure out why seems to indicate that news outlets had to promise to just provide content to people in their region so as to not step on the toes of other regions who have bought the rights to broadcast the Olympics. Evidently government censorship of news is very very bad thing, but corporate censorship by the news is a good and necessary thing. Essentially we are a captive audience for our corporate news overlords and must accept whatever coverage they deem appropriate. We shall not venture to find other (less dumb) sourced of coverage.

Thing 2:
BBC Olympic coverage looks way cooler than ours. They have an animated monkey. An animated monkey. We have nary an animated simian. The one video you can watch (from outside the UK) on the BBC sports site is the commercial for BBC Olympic coverage which is in fact a two minutes animated cartoon set to music, appropriately, by the Gorillaz. How cool is that.