Biden for president

I couldn’t force myself to watch all of last night’s debate. I watched the beginning for about 20 minutes, and then another 20 minutes near the one-hour point. My conclusion is that they said the same thing they said during their convention acceptance speeches. Nothing new. I though McCain looked stiff and sounded scared, and Obama was a broken record. He has some good ideas, but I’m getting tired of hearing them. The campaign has been going on far too long. We Canadians like to point at our political process: an complete election campaign in five weeks. The US one needs to be longer because there’s more populated territory to cover, but certainly two years is too long.

Of the four major candidates, Biden is the one who is most engaging. He’s been in public office long enough that he can be relaxed, a skill McCain seems to have failed to acquire. I genuinely enjoyed watching him during last week’s debate. Sure, he can go off on a tangent and get mangled up from time to time, but for the most part he seems to be thinking on his feet, deciding what to say according to the current situation rather than just parroting his previous statements. I’m not sure that alone makes him presidential, but it makes him seem more presidential.

Continuing in the theme of “greatest hits,” Boston Legal went back after the second amendment this week. As much as I get a kick out of the characters, I think the show’s reaching its last legs. Like the presidential candidates, they’re just parroting themselves. I hope they go out with a big bang.

I picked up the revealing statement no N.C.I.S. last night the moment it was uttered. You know what I mean, the statement someone makes that contains information they can’t possibly know thereby exposing themselves. Still, I like what the writers did with the story after that. At first it seems like another person is going to cover for the guilty party, but instead it turns out they are culpable as well. Nice touch. And, as silly as it was, Abby’s secondary case into the mystery of the vanishing muffin was funny, too—and all the clues were there when the culprit was unmasked. Admissions of previous hunger, for example.

I think I discovered a missing generation in my family tree! Yesterday I followed some new leads that extended the Vincent line by two generations, but I turned up something that I thought at the time contradicted what I already knew. Turns out instead that the genealogy records I was using yesterday skip a generation, linking a woman to her grandfather instead of to who I have as her father. There is a lot of confusion in that family, because all the patriarchs have the same first name, and they had children young so their birth dates are only about 20 years apart. I have to go back to my primary sources now to confirm what I believe to be the case. I think I’ll make someone’s day if it’s true, because the missing generation links to some fairly famous people.