Two of my favorite authors on the planet were in D.C. this weekend: Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman. They were both featured writers at the “National Book Festival”:http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/ on the Mall, and Stephenson also had a reading at the Olsson’s bookstore up the street from where I live.

Unfortunately I only had time to hit the book-signing line for Neil G. He signed _American Gods_ and the Midsummer Night’s Dream issue of _Sandman_ for me, and _Wolves in the Walls_ for Ella. He even drew a sketch of a wolf on _Wolves_, which he promised to make not so scary since Ella’s only ten months old. I was surprised at his accent, which is silly since I know perfectly well that he’s British. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t sound all that British on “his blog”:http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp. Or maybe he cranks up the ol’ Albion twang when he’s signing stuff.

Neal S. read and answered questions at Olsson’s and just did Q&A on the Mall. He behaved exactly as I imagined he would — a little reserved, but direct and articulate, and very smart. He didn’t start a sentence until he knew exactly where it was going to end up. “Not surprisingly”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000123.html, I asked him a “what do you think of the Pynchon comparisons” question, which for the most part he artfully dodged, though he did say he considered T.P. to be “one of the greats.” I’m only a little ways into _The System of the World_ right now, and there’s a very good chance that when I get to the end I’m going to go right back and read the whole Baroque Cycle over again. When I had him sign the Cycle books at the bookstore, I asked him to write the Liebniz quote, “Whatever acts cannot be destroyed,” in parts across all three books. He seemed quite pleased by that idea, but today when I asked him to write “ignoti et quasi occulti” on _Cryptonomicon_, he seemed more taken aback. He did write it, but followed it with a dash roughly crossed by an exclamation mark. I have no idea what that means, though now I know what I’ll put in the “draw our secret symbol” box of my Societas Eruditorum membership application.

If absolutely none of that made any sense to you, you’ve got some reading to do.

Bush was way better this time around. He faltered less often, he was clearly much more at home in the town hall style format, and he pulled off more slam-dunk responses, including an excellent closing statement. He often came closer to a Cheney-style presentation, that is to say, though he was speaking either total falsehoods or completely dodging a question, he did it with a measure of confidence and authority. But, as in the first debate, he was on the defensive nearly all the time. While he managed to shed some of the facial tics that plagued him then, his voice sounded downright whiny on a number of occasions.

And he got beaten, very soundly, because John Kerry was on fire. He was confident, direct, and managed to leap into each question forcefully and end them on a solid point as well. Both of them had their share of question-dodging and forcing things around to what they wanted to talk about instead of what had been asked—and Kerry seemed guilty of this a little more than Bush—but despite his diversions he managed to get back to the point when it really counted. He was the picture of composure, even more than in the first debate, and so, by contrast, left Bush in the dust. Because Bush improved so much from the last time, his supporters may think they have grounds to call this a better result, but they’d be deluding themselves.

And while I thought Bush improved overall, I couldn’t help but jot down some jaw-dropping gaffes of his. (I’ll freely admit partisan bias in not jotting down gaffes of Kerry’s, but I didn’t note any comparable ones.) On a question about the inevitability of the draft, Bush kicked off with “there’s rumors on the Internets …” Yes, that’s a plural. Not all that significant on substance, but’s fodder for the late night talk shows. On the same question, talking about the armed forces: “we need to be lighter and quicker and more facile …” I suppose it’s possible he was using the word’s second definition in American Heritage, “working, acting, or speaking with effortless ease and fluency,” but that’s certainly not how it struck me at first, and you can color me skeptical that he didn’t mean to say “agile” or something else.[1] Also on the draft question, the moderator tried to move on rather than allowing thirty-second rebuttals, but Bush rather brusquely brushed over him and started talking. That’ll probably impress some people, but it came off to me as a bit rude.

It was painful to see Kerry mess up what could have been a slam dunk, when Bush was asked about Kerry’s choice of a trial lawyer as a running mate. I was watching with my friend Matt, who said “All he has to say is that he has no problem with a lawyer who sues doctors that are genuinely guilty of malpractice.” His actual response was longer and more meandering. All in all, Kerry filled the clock every time when a brevity might have often served him better. No better example of that (and I’m jumping ahead in my notes here) is Bush’s totally incoherent response to a question about who he’d name to the Supreme Court. While he was figuring out what to say he tried to make light, and came up with:

1. “I’m not telling”
2. ”… plus I want them [judges who might be nominated] all voting for me!”

Then he segued into qualities of judges he wouldn’t pick, and in reaching for an example, he comes up with . . . the Dred Scott case. That’s right, in order to identify a specific bad judicial decision to indicate the sort of judges he wouldn’t pick, he had to go back to slavery.

Questions that neither candidate was able to answer directly, in large part because there is no good answer that Americans want to hear (both paraphrased): “If UN sanctions won’t work against Iran, what will you do about it?” “How can the U.S. be competitive in a global market when our quality of life demands such greater pay than other nations?”

Kerry nailed Bush on the reimportation of drugs question and the deficit question. When Kerry was asked if he’d raise taxes on those making under $200k, he took the asker’s bait and looked at the camera and said “no.” Then, as part of his response, he opined that the only three people who made that much in the room were him, the President, and Charlie, the moderator. Whether true or not, it got him a laugh from the audience, which Bush disastrously tried to talk over by whining (and it did sound particularly like a whine this time) “It’s not credible!”

Bush did very well with trotting out specifics when asked about environmental accomplishments, though he had a little gaffe in bragging about the creation of “three million wetlands.” Kerry very nearly botched the response by going back to a previous question and trying to distance himself from the word “liberal,” but eventually came around and hit back as good as he gave. Kerry missed a golden opportunity to absolutely destroy Bush on standing by the Patriot Act wholesale—all he had to do was recite a litany of cases of unjust imprisonment and other violations incited by an overzealous Attorney General. He did come up with one example, and came out on top in the exchange, but it could have been better.

The penultimate question was on using tax dollars for abortion, and while Kerry’s answer—that he couldn’t legislate for everyone on the basis of his personal faith—was good, Bush was at his plainspoken best in his response and got the upper edge. For a second I thought that if he could rally on the last question as well he’d be able to create a much better overall impression. But then he lost it in the 30-second responses. Kerry laid out a scenario for why he opposed the partial-birth abortion bill—a 16-year old raped by her father shouldn’t be required to get her father’s permission to get an abortion—and ended with “It’s never quite as simple as the President wants you to believe.” Bush came back with “He voted no! It’s that simple!” which carried no weight in the face of what Kerry had just said. Then the President said, and I am not making this up, “You can run but you can’t hide! It’s reality!”

Then, for the coup de grace, Bush completely buckled when asked to name three specific choices he made incorrectly during his Administration. He mumbled adrift for a while before coming up with a line about being right with respect to the big choices. He said, “When they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they really mean.”

And the more I think about it, the more I think that this is what will ultimately lose Bush the election. Let’s assume that the people in that audience are more or less what they said they were: undecided voters. (It was clear from the questions that many of them were very much decided on specific issues, like abortion, but they could still have been genuinely on the fence overall.) A woman asks Bush to identify some of his mistakes, and instead of looking her in the eye, he tries to tell her about “they” mean. I don’t remember the exact context of the question—if the “they” meant “when people ask about mistakes they really want to know about the big ones” or if they referred to the people (liberals, the media, etc.) trying to discredit him, but it doesn’t really matter, because either way he was discrediting the individual in front of him, presuming either to tell her what she really wanted to know, or assume she’d been hoodwinked by “them.” He cannot conceive that this woman from Missouri is perfectly self-composed and intelligent and undeceived and yet can’t decide yet whether to vote for him. (Off of substance and back to style briefly, Kerry did a great job of mentioning questioners by name and even referring back to audience members from several questions earlier.)

In response Kerry took the expected road of hammering on the Iraq mistakes again, which worked all right, but I wish he had—even though the question didn’t call for it—simply and briefly stated three mistakes he felt he had made in the last four years. They wouldn’t have to be whoppers, just simple, truthful admissions of small mistakes, without flim-flammery. He could have sewn up the election right then and there.

As it is, I’m more confident than I’ve ever been that he has sewn it up. He clearly scored another win in this debate, and as the last one has shown in the polls, these things do matter. There’s still a long stretch of weeks until November, but Bush has his work cut out for him—he will need to pull Osama out of a hat, or miraculously nail the third and final debate.

Thus ends my spin-insulated thoughts. I’m going to be really pissed now if everybody’s talking on the news about a draw . . .

¹ Complete sidenote here: “facile” seemed completely off because to my ears it carries a slightly negative connotation. That’s in the fourth definition, “readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth,” but in common usage it seems like that one should be bumped up from fourth place a couple notches.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, but was reminded by reading several others who said it: they were good questions. Yay Missouri, and yay Charlie what’s-his-name for picking them.

Josh Marshall thinks it was a draw, but thinks that a draw favors Kerry overall. It’s only a draw if you grant Bush way-lowered expectations, which is apparently what a fair number of people are doing.

It is without a doubt easier for bloggers than for professional journalists to stick their necks out by writing about and making judgments on the debate before hearing the spin or getting an impression of what other people think. Bloggers, all in all, aren’t risking near as much. But that doesn’t mean that more professional journalists shouldn’t be doing it too.

Sopping up shallow impressions from too many places to name, it seems that both sides have their partisans calling victory and others calling it a draw. But again, the only way I see a draw is if you grant Bush points for improvement and not Kerry. If the first debate had never happened and this was the first debate, the Kerry win would be a no-brainer—“Bush seemed agitated and confrontational, he talked over the moderator, he had no good responses on Iraq, he whined.” It only looks good by comparison to how he did before.

UPDATE: Why are we bothering reading anything else on the debates when we have good ol’ Fafnir?

As I mentioned a couple days ago, earlier this year I went through the process of getting my background checked for security clearance, though I ultimately didn’t take the job in question. Along the way, a number of my friends from various stages in my life were interviewed, and of course they all let me know how the interviews went when they were over. Of all the amusing stories that came as a result of that, this one is the funniest. (Apologies to those involved if there are minor inaccuracies; this one’s been retold a lot, and has no doubt drifted in the telling.)

So. Somebody called my friend M for a phone interview. I’ve known M since I moved to D.C.; we’ve been in the same gaming group for most of that time, meeting to play a roleplaying game (usually Amber) on a near-weekly basis. A portion of their conversation went something like this:

G-man: So, how do you know Nathan?
M: We’re in the same gaming group.
G: (quizzically) “Gaming group?”
M: Uh, yeah, we play roleplaying games …
G: (even more quizically) “Role playing games?”
M: (wondering how on earth to explain this) Well, there’s this game called “Amber,” and it’s based on the novels of Roger Zelazny …
G: Could you spell that?

… and so on. A couple weeks later, my friend N, who lives in Grand Rapids, had two people come to interview him about me in his office. It’s likely that these guys were retired government workers, probably FBI—that’s who they usually get to do out-of-state interviews. Apparently, a note about “roleplaying games” had made it into my file. N and I used to play a lot of different RPGs together, most recently the Star Wars RPG during high school.

G1: Are you aware of these “role playing games” that Nathan is involved in?
N: Sure. We used to play RPGs in high school.
G2: (scribbles furiously in his notebook)
G1: (in all seriousness) Do any of these games advocate the violent overthrow of the government?
N: (thinks about it for a second) Well, yeah. I mean, we used to play Star Wars, which I guess counts.
G1: Please explain.
N: Uh, OK. See, there’s the Empire, and it’s ruled by the Emperor, who serves the Dark Side, and then the good guys are the Rebellion …

Yes, it’s true. My dear friend N had to explain Star Wars as part of my background check. Your tax dollars at work!

Both Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer are hosts on the Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS. Both they and the show are highly respected, and yet, I can rarely bring myself to watch it (or listen to it on the radio) any more. The reason is that it devolves all too often into talking head situations where they put on two people on opposite sides of an issue and let them shout it out, without striving for deeper analysis. More generally, they fall into the all-too-common trap of giving equal time to both sides in a debate (usually Dems vs. GOP) and considering that to be “balanced.” This is a weak way to go under the best of circumstances, and it’s completely useless during the campaign season, when both sides are spinning out of control. What we need is a media that will ask tough questions and cut through the crap. What we need is a media that will let us know when one side or the other is just out-and-out _lying_, which happens under all Administrations, but has been especially widespread with this one.

Anyway, given all that, I can see why both sides figured the Newshour folks would be good moderators for the debates. They’ve got the journalistic pedigree, but they also have a solid rep for letting each side have its say and not getting in the way with a bothersome insistence on finding “the truth.” And while Lehrer asked hard, searching questions that got beyond this mold, Ifill’s questions last night reflected that very shallow sense of fairness represented on the Newshour — she often framed confrontational questions, phrased the way that the other side would want them phrased.

Here are some of Lehrer’s questions:

— As president, what would you do, specifically, in addition to or differently to increase the homeland security of the United States than what President Bush is doing?
— Speaking of Vietnam, you spoke to Congress in 1971, after you came back from Vietnam, and you said, quote, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” . . . Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?
— Can you give us specifics, in terms of a scenario, time lines, et cetera, for ending major U.S. military involvement in Iraq?
— Does the Iraq experience make it more likely or less likely that you would take the United States into another preemptive military action?
— Senator Kerry, you mentioned Darfur, the Darfur region of Sudan. Fifty thousand people have already died in that area. More than a million are homeless. And it’s been labeled an act of ongoing genocide. Yet neither one of you or anyone else connected with your campaigns or your administration that I can find has discussed the possibility of sending in troops . . . Why not?

Only rarely were the candidates able to rise to the level of these questions. More often they responded broadly to the topic but were short on the specific detail Lehrer was asking for.

Here are some of Ifill’s:

— Part of what you have said and Senator Kerry has said that you are going to do in order to get us out of the problems in Iraq is to internationalize the effort . . . Yet French and German officials have both said they have no intention even if John Kerry is elected of sending any troops into Iraq for any peacekeeping effort. Does that make your effort or your plan to internationalize this effort seem kind of naive?
— This one is for you, Mr. Vice President. President Bush has derided in John Kerry for putting a trial lawyer on the ticket. You yourself have said that lawsuits are partly to blame for higher medical costs. Are you willing to say that John Edwards, sitting here, has been part of the problem?
— Do you feel personally attacked when Vice President Cheney talks about liability reform and tort reform and the president talks about having a trial lawyer on the ticket?
— Flip-flopping has become a recurring theme in this campaign, you may have noticed . . . Senator Kerry changed his mind about whether to vote to authorize the president to go to war. President Bush changed his mind about whether a homeland security department was a good idea or a 9/11 Commission was a good idea . . . What’s wrong with a little flip-flop every now and then?

That first one is a good example of something she did often — ask a good question but end it with an inexplicable bit of baiting. Those middle two were the worst — first actually _fishing_ for Cheney to attack his opponent, and then, in essence, asking Edwards to say how he “feels” about it. The flip-flop question wasn’t as bad as I remembered, in that Ifill wasn’t just targetting Kerry with it. And at root there’s an OK question here: “Isn’t it all right for policymakers to change their minds when confronted by new information?” or something to that effect. But instead of asking that, she invokes the sound bite language of a shallow campaign ploy.

On Friday we’re out of Newshour land; the debate will be hosted by Charles Gibson of Good Morning America, of whom I know nuthin’. We’ll see how it goes.

Like most people, I had high hopes for the vice presidential debate. Instead of the incoherent Bush and the ponderous Kerry, we’d have Edwards’ lawyerly agility stacking up against Cheney’s gravitas. By that high standard, it was a pretty lousy debate. It was expected that both candidates would function largely as surrogates for their running mates, but the extent to which that was the case—to which talking points from last week were simply repeated, often verbatim—was disappointing.

Gwen Ifill was a mediocre moderator, and some of her questions were downright awful. They often played directly not to substantive issues, but to spin created by the respective campaigns. She asked a “global test” question and even a “flip-flop” question. That last one had me really incensed—I mean, even if you’re set on asking a question about Kerry’s record, could you at least avoid using the terminology carefully crafted by the RNC? I realize that Republicans have harnessed the power of language way more effectively than Democrats, but just because they succeeded in getting the flip-flop meme out there and making it stick doesn’t make it true.

Her worst question was the one where she asked them to explain their differences from each other without mentioning the names of Bush or Kerry. It was a silly little qualification to add, but what made it really bad was that it came right on the heels of another question where they had basically already done that. Consequently their answers were all over the map, though in that case one could hardly blame them.

That’s less true for many of the other answers they provided, which often ranged far and were only tangentially related to the questions. They both did it, but Edwards was more guilty of it than Cheney—and often, when he diverted like that, Edwards did it not to make some incisive new argument but to trot out the old talking points again. I don’t know, maybe in some coldly calculating electoral strategy the endless repetition pays off, but it sure made for an annoying debate.

Cheney was a cool cat. He stuck to his guns—on Iraq, on the Al Qaeda connection, on the Medicare bill, on all sorts of things where he is utterly, obviously wrong. But he has that authoritative manner that just makes it seem to make sense. That bullheadedness has gotten us into all sorts of trouble, but Cheney’s going to ride his ship into the ground. Anyone who’s inclined to believe what he has to say already will no doubt find it comforting.

I was expecting more from Edwards. He was the one in this debate to let slip some pained grimaces in response to what Cheney was saying. He was the one who occasionally misspoke. Occasionally he found his mark, like the brilliant rebuttal where he (finally) brought up Halliburton in the same breath as pointing out that Cheney as SecDef voted for the same defense cuts that he had just criticized Kerry for. But those moments were relatively few and far between.

The lowest point in the debate came up around the “90% of the cost, 90% of the casualties” statistics that Kerry brought up in the last debate. Edwards cited the casualties number as coalition casualties, and Cheney in his rebuttal critiqued it by citing a number that also accounted for Iraqi casualties (presumably those of military and law enforcement, since the Iraqi civilian casualties blow the other numbers out of the water). Edwards came back later on to clarify that the 90% referred to coalition casualties, and Cheney—I still don’t believe this—accused him of belittling the service of Iraqis. He tried to turn a numbers dispute into something else, and even put on a little show of mock outrage. Edwards should have fought back hard against that one, but he botched his response.

There were a lot of other low blows. Cheney responded to Edwards’ Halliburton attacks not with a defense of Halliburton but with attacks on Kerry’s voting record. It was a misstep, not least because it opened up Edwards to respond to that with an attack on Cheney’s voting record, including that he voted against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday. Is this true?! If the charge holds up that’s pretty bad news for Cheney, but the soft charges were flying so fast from both sides I’m inclined to remain skeptical, and wait until the smoke clears.

Edwards’s closing statement: alarmism of the “America’s light is going out” variety. Cheney’s: alarmism of the “Be afraid by very afraid” variety. Neither appealed to me much on substance, but it’s the fearmongering that I can’t forgive.

So who the heck won? Not Edwards, though I think either side’s spin machine has enough fodder to start crowing about a win. I’d give it to Cheney by a margin, but maybe not enough of a margin to break out the “draw” zone. Not enough to be decisive, which puts the spotlight back on the next presidential debate, which I may have to miss, depending on how many people show up for the Neal Stephenson book signing.

Links and post-spinfluence comments to follow.

UPDATE:

Kevin Drum basically agrees with me. Nice to know I must be doing something right. He mentions a couple of Ifill’s other bad questions, and also comes away generally unimpressed by the whole proceeding. His followup thoughts lean a little bit more in Edwards’ favor, and his take has swayed me slightly, though not enough to call it an Edwards win. He rightly points out, though, that Edwards just needed to do OK—stacking up against a sitting VP is no small matter. The thing is, if he could have scored a decisive win, it would have put tremendous pressure on an already-weak Bush for Friday’s debate. That definitely didn’t happen.

Steve Clemons hits the nail on the head:

Cheney’s comments on the costs and casualties in the war were mostly fabricated, but Edwards—despite being armed by truth and youthful vigor—seemed steam-rolled in the end by Cheney’s convictions, rigid certainty, and righteousness.

Josh Marshall is much more upbeat about Edwards’ performance and about the debate in general.

If someone could tell me where to go to find a conservative blog with these guys’ levels of detail, sophistication, and insulation from spin, I’d appreciate it. I don’t doubt that they’re out there, but I haven’t found them yet.

Though I haven’t been mentioning it here, through all this past year I’ve been dancing the long, slow dance of Getting a Government Job Requiring Security Clearance. I applied in May of _last_ year, got interviewed in July, was offered the job in September (pending a background check), and passed that check, at long last, late _this_ summer. Last week, I finally got the call that they were ready for me to start.

For most of that time (since December, anyway), I’ve been filling my time with Ella-care as an at-home dad. And, after a weekend of rather intense discussion and option-weighing, Suanna and I have decided that that’s the state of affairs we want to keep. So I’m not going to take the job, but will instead embrace full-time parenthood for the next few years.

I was all set to explain here that I wasn’t going to be blogging about politics as much, but would instead embrace the (rather prudent) tendency of intelligence professionals to be cagey and mysterious about their political opinions. And I was all set to explain how I wouldn’t be posting as often. But now there’s no need — it’ll continue to be business as usual here at Polytropos.

I never did find out whether the people who ran my background check discovered this blog or not. Not that it would have been at all difficult to find, but Googling someone seems like just the sort of common-sense step that a government-related program wouldn’t have got around to implementing yet. I’ve often been asked by friends whether I thought being critical of Bush on the blog would hurt my chances of getting security clearance. The answer is that it certainly _shouldn’t_, by the rules, though I do know that one friend of mine who they interviewed was asked whether I supported the policies of the current Administration — a question they’re not supposed to ask. Obviously in my case, it didn’t make a difference — or they never found the blog. Pick whichever explanation fits your existing preconceptions about our government.

I do have one highly amusing background check anecdote, which I’ll save for later.

In addition to changing lots of diapers, visiting the zoo way too often, and blogging, I’d like to spend _some_ of my time in the next couple years making money, if possible. Freelance editing is in my bag of tricks, so if anybody has any leads or needs in that department, let me know.

From “The Atlantic”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/primarysources (though the link will only work if you’re a subscriber):

If you feel that the opposite sex isn’t giving you the attention you so richly deserve, maybe you should consider making a change—a name change, that is. According to a preliminary study by an MIT cognitive scientist, the vowel sounds in people’s names may have an impact on how others judge their attractiveness. Specifically, when the men in the study were assigned names with a stressed front vowel (a vowel sound spoken at the front of the mouth), they were rated as more attractive than when they were assigned names with a stressed back vowel. (In other words, good news for Dave, Craig, Ben, Jake, Rick, Steve, Matt; bad news for Lou, Paul, Luke, Tom, Charles, George, John.) In women the effect was reversed, and a stressed back vowel (Laura, Julie, Robin, Susan, Holly) boosted sex appeal, whereas a stressed front vowel (Melanie, Jamie, Jill, Tracy, Ann, Liz, Amy) had the opposite effect—to the author’s disappointment, no doubt.

Here’s the “abstract”:http://www.mit.edu/~perfors/hotornot.pdf for the study (PDF).

Sometimes it’s good to be Nate.

Ed’s back. Woohoo! His blog title (this month, anyway) is “Mellowing My Harsh”:http://www.edheil.com/mmh/. Current entries are chock full of gaming goodness. Excellent.

And I mentioned it when it began, but let me re-call attention to Sara Zuiderveen’s blog, “A Little More Life”:http://www.alittlemorelife.net/weblog/. It’s only a couple weeks old and already filled with great stuff worth reading. Check it out.

As I discovered “last year”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000095.html, my buddy Joe not only knows and loves comics, but has the uncanny (to me, anyway) ability to get cool people talking with him about them as if they’ve known him forever. So it’s a very good thing he was with me to pick up “Mike Mignola”:http://www.lambiek.net/mignola.htm at Union Station and deliver him to this year’s “Small Press Expo”:http://www.spxpo.com/. I’m a big Hellboy fan but I’m terrible at making small talk with strangers that I admire, so I drove the car and played fly-on-the-wall while Joe got Mignola talking about early twentieth-century illustration, a subject that occupied them both nearly the whole ride there. Movie chitchat covered the rest of the trip.

It doesn’t seem like a year ago that I went to “my first SPX”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000073.html, but I didn’t have a ten-month old daughter then, and I do now, which strongly suggests that it has been at least that long. Ella was with me there this year, and while she had a good time and attracted plenty of attention, it did mean that I didn’t get a chance to browse around quite as much as I’d like. (No costume for her this year, though she was very taken with the toddler who was dressed as Spider-Man.) I did pick up a copy of “Owly”:http://www.icomics.com/rev_063004_owly.shtml, which I highly recommend, and which will be waiting in the wings in order to someday bear the honor of being Ella’s First Comic Book. I also spent some time browsing _Stuff and Nonsense_, a book of really cool illustrations and early comics by “A.B. Frost”:http://www.coconino-world.com/sites_auteurs/ab-frost/Menus/mn_frost.htm from the 1880s. For a brief shining moment I thought I had made A Find, but when I showed it to Joe he of course already knew all about it.

I’ll include bloglinks to other SPX chatter here as I come across it.

“Last week”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000544.html I speculated that Liane, hoping to ease her breakup with Will, might have been trying to play matchmaker between him and guest host Sheila Kast. Juicy as such a story might seem, we at Polytropos HQ know better than to wildly _invent_ gossip in the absence of evidence, and this week’s show offers nothing that cries out for detailed analysis or comment. Will and Sheila got along fine, but made it through the whole segment with nary a hint of amorous innuendo or other hidden meaning. Maybe we just weren’t listening closely enough.