For the next six months, night will be longer than day.
That’s kind of depressing, although not as depressing as it will be when Daylight Savings Time ends. At least it ends later than usual this year.
(Oh, and Happy Mabon to all the pagans out there.)
I wish I could easily type a proper em dash in my blog entries.
I use em dashes all the time — they’re great for breaking up sentences (like this one) — but they don’t come out properly when I type them in WordPress (see?).
Whenever I want to use an em dash, I habitually type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space]. For example: “I like spaghetti[space][hyphen][hyphen][space]well, usually…” The spaces are improper. I don’t know where I got that bad habit.
But WordPress autocorrects two hyphens to something that looks closer to an en dash instead of an em dash. So if I type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space] in WordPress — like here — it doesn’t look right. Imagine how bad it looks without the spaces–such as here–you see? The only way to create an em dash in WordPress is to type three consecutive hyphens—like so. I still habitually type two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence; now I’m supposed to train myself to type three hyphens when writing an em dash in a blog entry, while remembering to use only two hyphens for everything else I write? And if I ever switched to another blog service, I’d have to change all the triple dashes after importing all my old entries.
So I apologize to any typography mavens. Sparky, for instance. Sparky, I’ve always remembered that you wrote this more than three years ago.
I don’t know what to do except continue my old habits. Sorry, everyone.
So the presidential debates are set: the first one is next Thursday night. The second one is on the night of Friday, October 8, when Matt and I will be in Tennessee for Matt’s brother’s wedding. We’ll be staying at Matt’s parents’ house, and Matt has warned me against bringing up politics in front of his parents, so it’s probably not a good idea for all of us to sit down and watch the debate together.
Anyway, the Kerry people got something they wanted: three debates, not just two. Who knows whether the Bush people really wanted only two debates or whether they were just using that as a negotiating point? At any rate, the Republicans also got something they wanted. In the original debate proposal put forth by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the first debate was to focus on domestic policy and the third on foreign policy. The Bush people were able to get that switched around, so the first debate — which, historically, is the most-watched of the debates — will focus on foreign policy.
I think this is actually great for Kerry. Karl Rove’s preferred campaign tactic is to attack a candidate on his perceived strengths, since the public presumably already knows about that candidate’s weaknesses, and that’s what Rove and Bush have been doing to Kerry. Bush’s “strength” (in the public mind, at least) is foreign policy, so the first debate will give Kerry his biggest venue in which to attack Bush on that topic. He’s already started — he pummelled Bush on Iraq yesterday at NYU.
An interesting historical sidenote: apparently, four years ago, most people who watched the first Bush-Gore debate felt that Gore won, while “those who merely read about it reflected the view of many journalists that Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Mr. Gore look hypocritical.” I’m one of those people who thought Gore kicked Bush’s ass in that first debate; I didn’t even realize Gore had excessively sighed — or sighed at all, really — until the media coverage told me so. That’s another reminder that (1) the media loves to tell the public what to think, and (2) the public is incredibly susceptible to being told what to think.
Anyway, the debates are my favorite ritual of the presidential campaign season, so I can’t wait to watch.