Nor Dread Nor Hope Attend a Dying Animal

If you were wondering where the LiveBlog was for the Third & Final Presidential Debate, I say, I say, keep wondering! It's not like we liveblog everything. Once the new software is up & running, we'll be able to liveblog the sunrises, the neigh-at-hand jousting tourney, & the first ever International Itwaslost.org Simultaneously Binger Plum Wine Drink-up-offer Ass-orama. I went out to the El Cerrito Speakeasy Cinema (a second-run movie theater with couches, beer & pizza) to watch a twenty-foot tall McCain roll his eyes & blink a lot at a thirty-foot-tall Obama. (DID YOU KNOW, at 5'7", John McCain would be the shortest President since William McKinley. Now we all know what happened to him--: assassinated at a Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York; had an over-compensatingly huge mountain named after him, which of course eventually reverted to the proper native name, Denali. Such is why any God-fearing American should be categorically against short Presidents.) Here is a photograph of Senator McCain's graceful exit from the stage:


A search for more good whale jokes was unfruitful, so I am putting out another call for jokes, about any large sea-mammal is permitted. Are there any dugong jokes? Please, no dumb old-man puns. (Example: What do you use to weigh a whale? A whale-weigh-station. I don't even fucking get it. What's a whale-weigh-station?)

Here is a short essay by Andrew Sullivan about the virtues of blogging:

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.

Or take the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus, the publisher of and main writer for Die Fackel, who delighted in constantly twitting authority with slashing aphorisms and rapid-fire bursts of invective. Kraus had something rare in his day: the financial wherewithal to self-publish. It gave him a fearlessness that is now available to anyone who can afford a computer and an Internet connection.

I don't know why the 21st Century in general is so against definitive treatises, but it seems to me he shouldn't have made his point by referencing a bunch of twaddle. A simple Star Trek analogy would have done the trick. Good night, true ideologues! I've got to re-read Jonathan Livingston Seagull five times before bed & finish off this handle of Aguardiente.