Subjective Footage

I finally got around to watching the presidential debate last night. From the way people were talking about it, I was expecting Obama to come out in a leotard and spend the evening in the foetal position practicing bird calls. Aside from not countering some of Romney's obvious lies, it didn't seem like Obama did that bad to me, but I don't think there's ultimately much meaning in the superficial statistics the two candidates through at each other. The task seems to be how to ball up a bunch of this rhetoric and stuff it into a musket for a loud shot of soundbite without misfiring. Maybe it's my liberal bias, but it seems to me the most memorable line of the evening was Romney saying he wants to go after Big Bird. Though he also had a line about how the president is not "entitled to his own facts" that seems to have gotten traction, despite the fact that Romney delivered one bald faced lie after another and everyone seems to know it. It's like everyone's mainly concerned about the effect on a certain dumb, cow-like theoretical innocent being.

To-day I finished reading "OUR LADY OF THARSIS MONTES", the new story in, I think, September's issue of the Sirenia Digest. It's a good, genuinely science fiction story, reminding me of 2001: A Space Odyssey and even more of Alien and Prometheus, involving a human encounter with all too lively alien relics on Mars, the humans bringing with them the baggage of bureaucracy and general irritability. It's nice reading Sci-Fi by someone who knows a thing or two about science. Caitlin has the knowledge and can be creative with it, introducing an array of items in the story maybe the most fascinating of which is a sort of organic space suit constructed from the DNA of the wearer. There's as usual a nice Lovecraft influence, including what may be a Cthulhu cameo. There were also some things that made wish I could talk Caitlin into watching Twin Peaks all the way through.