Category: Uncategorized

Here’s how quickly one of the campaigns has adapted to the Internet: the Obama campaign has released an app for the iPhone that not only delivers campaign information to your phone but also organizes your contact list by battleground state. Seeing a small margin in the latest polls out of New Hampshire? The app will remind you who you know in that state.

I’m not sure that this app will have any more impact than, say, the Call Your Bubbe movement among young Jewish voters, but it’s definitely a sign of how the Obama campaign is trying to pioneer new get-out-the-vote methods this fall.

Then there’s this, also from the Obama camp: here in Missouri, they’ve started phone banking the deaf. The explanation at that link definitely clears the previous sentence up.

I’m running on the treadmill at the Mizzou rec tonight, moving at a fairly high speed, when something momentous occurred: Middle Tennessee State completed a hail mary touchdown pass on the final play of the game to beat Florida Atlantic, 14-13.

And I, so shocked by this sudden development, nearly fell off the treadmill.

Had the game involved two slightly more notable teams or, you know, not been played on a Tuesday night, I might have completely lost control and ended up with a face full of rapidly rotating belt.

Before heading off to Rosh Hashanah services tonight, I was sitting around, deciding whether or not I really wanted to attend services and weighing one question in my mind: with so many problems in the world these days, why should I even believe in God?

Then I remembered one pretty good reason, and headed off to services.

Shana tova, everyone.

A quick plug for my weekly radio show, airing from noon to 2 p.m. (Central time) every Monday in Columbia, Mo., at KCOU 88.1 FM. It’s also available online via webcast at this link.

Newspapers are on the clock. 18 months and counting until advertisers start pulling out. Never been a better time to be graduating from a school of journalism.

I was reading a profile of Paul Feig today when I came across this line:

Feig’s voice-mail message says, “Please leave your name and number and I’ll, um, y’know, call you back.”

Reading it, I realized: that message is about to go extinct.

With cell phones now, I don’t need callers to leave their number. I’ll have a missed call from them when I go to check my voice mail. Soon enough, as more people move away from landlines, the “leave your name and number” message will be as dead as, well…. an actual machine that you keep in your office to record messages.

Walking around campus here in Columbia yesterday, I spotted a rare sight: a Kansas City Chiefs jersey. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Missourians are proud of their teams, and most years, garb from the Chiefs or the St. Louis Cardinals is everywhere on campus.

But with the Chiefs and the St. Louis Rams rating as two of the worst teams in the NFL this year, fans are a bit more reserved about showing their affection. In the month since I’ve returned to Mizzou, I’d yet to see a single Chiefs or Rams jersey on campus. Such is the state of football here in this state (unless, of course, you’re talking about the football played at the state university.)

The Nats lost their 100th game tonight, but here’s my thought: with the debate going head-to-head with the game, and Nats’ TV ratings already at unthinkably low levels, is there a chance that tonight’s game set a new record for the lowest rated baseball game in a local market? Who exactly in the D.C. area would have been watching?

In 5th grade, John Chapman nearly won the Wood Acres Elementary School election after promising to add Coca Cola, Diet Coke and Sprite to the drinking fountains. Jeff Luse won the student government presidency instead when he promised to bring Cal Ripken to school. Cal, it should be noted, never made that visit.

This Spring, I watched as Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy argued for 10 minutes in a Presidential debate over a chart that showed some sort of correlation between potatoes and prices in Spain. The chart, however, was unlabeled, so it was unclear whether it was showing the change in potato prices in relation to time or something else, like the number of goals scored by Fernando Torres on Wednesdays during a full moon. So the two men yelled at each other over this chart, without anyone being sure exactly whether or not prices were going up or down, or even when these prices had changed. The debate was hailed the next day as a major step forward for Spain’s still-growing democracy, but I’m still waiting to see Zapatero’s first measures on the potato problem in his country.

Tonight’s debate reminds me again that while debates really can be a positive step forward for democracy, it’s almost impossible to keep up with all of the facts/less-than-facts referenced in such a format. It’s tough to judge these things until these guys take a closer look at what was said tonight.

Of course, I wouldn’t expect the networks to wait quite so long to make their call on who won.

John McCain isn’t wearing a flag pin during the first debate. Will commentators question his commitment to America tomorrow?