If you’re familiar with Tom Hanks’s movie That Thing You Do, you’ll recognize this song. Thanks to Young Kim for posting it to his Facebook page for me to find.

Due to an upcoming community bike ride, I was exposed today to mapmyrun.com. I’m having some trouble with the interface on first attempt, but I thought you runners or bikers (particularly those who travel, like Doug and Megan) might be interested in taking it for a more detailed spin. It’s built using the Google Maps API, so much of it works like you expect it to. There are just some things particular to mapping a run that seem a little clumsy or counter-intuitive to me. Anyhow, it seems to have a bunch of converts and people are posting good runs for others to use, so it’s got to be fairly usable. After all, most of the people using it are probably recently oxygen-deprived, so it must just be me.

Anyhow, go take it for a spin — it’s not the most interesting use of the Google Maps framework I’ve seen, but it’s certainly a good idea.

Last night Lizzie and I blew off the debate and went to see Burn After Reading. Very funny movie, and we ate at Chipotle beforehand. We came home rage-free and went to bed.

Tonight, we watched the debate online. I won’t go into too much detail (because I always do and it makes people bored and glassy), but one point that struck me was that McCain seems ready to send 4000 more American soldiers to their deaths to defend and justify the deaths of the first 4000.

I’m not blindingly impressed by Obama, and really, it was a very good debate for both. But all the specific things I have problems with about McCain (and there are many — email me if you want to get barked at about them), I’m hard pressed to come up with a more visceral reason to vote for him than that the Republican Party doesn’t get to have my White House for a while. In hockey terms (which apparently go over well with the Republican hockey mom contigent), four years in the box for roughing. That being the case, Obama has my enthusiastic vote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txfqWzGMgmY

I’m not sure what she said, but I’m pretty sure it was a frantic attempt to bring a good-if-simple question (from Katie Couric, oddly enough) back to the three talking points about which she has scripted responses. THIS is the most popular person in the race? Good God, I have never had less faith in the American public (at least the chowderheads who answer the polling calls).

P.S. Hey, Doug, how do you embed YouTube video in your blog entries? If I pick up their code, it borks the CSS for the whole page.

Ooh, wait wait wait, I posted too soon. This one’s good, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vh6WDmb-Rc&feature=user

I’ve never been a Yankees fan. Between them and the Mets I suppose I’d pick the Yankees, but it would be hard. I am a Red Sox fan and (most deeply, by an order of magnitude) a Cubs fan.

Tonight, though, is the last game at Yankee Stadium. To put the history of Yankee Stadium in perspective, Babe Ruth hit a home run in the first game played there. Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Don Mattingly, Reggie Jackson, Thurmon Munson, Bucky Dent, Billy Martin, Ron Guidry, Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and so on. Those are just the ones I can think of. There are many others, but the point is that that’s really holy ground if you love baseball.

Additionally, according to the coverage tonight, Joe Louis won a couple fights there and three Popes said Mass there. Pele played there with the New York Cosmos in the 70s (I vaguely remember that, too). Makes you want to go there and lie on your back in the outfield or something and just soak that in.

The Yanks are up 5-3 over the Orioles right now, and I hope they win. I don’t like the current team (nor, frankly, have I liked any incarnation of the Yankees in the thirty-three-or-so years I’ve been a baseball fan), but I hope they give that beautiful piece of historical acreage a big, classy goodbye.

This is cool. I saw a Columbia sportswear ad tonight featuring Dan Heaton, a freestyle and offroad unicyclist. Check it out.

We just watched Once (the indy film with Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) — it’s very sweet. It’s like a 90-minute music video for acoustic folks. I will say no more — just rent it or something. I’m now stuck in my office at midnight, directly under our bedroom where Lizzie is trying to fall asleep, wishing I could play my guitar or my violin.

Now there’s a Billy Joel special on PBS. The botoxed women in their gowns and scarves asking for dollars between songs aside, it’s good too. I need to soundproof the garage or something.

The McCain/Palin campaign has again revised its description of Sarah Palin’s only trip outside of North America. This time, more importantly than the last clarification, it turns out that she HASN’T been to Iraq after all.

Look, I don’t care about the first one — whether she spent an hour or a week in Ireland makes no difference to me as it pertains to her foreign policy experience. And honestly, whether she spent time on this side of the Iraq border or that side doesn’t particularly bother me either, given the breadth and depth of how deeply unqualified to take over the presidency she seems to be. We’re talking about very small distinctions. What bothers me is the lying and its underlying message that they need to fabricate a global view for this woman out of one-hour layovers in Ireland. Not simply because the lying is bad, though it is. What irks me is that by doing all this lying and retracting (notice how they retract this on a Saturday during Hurricane Ike coverage), they are indicating that they think it’s bad news that Sarah Palin, for all intents and purposes, hasn’t been anywhere. If they think it’s important, why is she the VP candidate? And if they don’t, why aren’t they saying so?

I just wonder who turned them down. Given the layers and layers of nonsense that keeps coming out about Sarah Palin, she was either a) vetted by a team of nearsighted, crack-smoking lemurs (a great, heartwarming advancement in the uphill battle for the rights of chemically-dependent tail-swinging primates), or b) a late-in-the-count audible after a couple of other options dried up. Seriously, no one thing about Palin has been a slam dunk as far as I’m concerned. But friend, she’s a flippin’ ocean of highly questionable raindrops.

This was funny for a while, but it’s getting hard to watch. More to the point, it’s harder still to understand why ANYONE is on the fence about this race. This election is a choice between an ice cream cone and a sock in the nose. And I don’t mean to cast one candidate as ice cream, either (though I think we all know how I feel about it). All character assignments aside, these guys really are simply that different. How anyone, right or left, black or white, tall or short, or whatever else can look at the Obama/McCain choice and go, “jeez, I JUST don’t know … it’s SO hard to decide …” is baffling to me.

All I can figure is that people shut down in the face of details. Two guys, both senators, both wear suits, both have divisive running mates, both are visibly humanoid with two arms and two legs apiece … they clearly must be exactly the same. And now that we have the choice of making history with either a woman or a black man elected to high office, even the people who just like to make waves are stumped.

Sometimes I think there should be a simple test — maybe five basic civics questions — before you’re allowed to vote. I’ll even give you a 60% pass — get three out of five and you get to vote. Get fewer than three, you’re not informed enough to weigh in on MY life, rights, children, and so on. But man, if you want to see the disinterested come out in droves and vote like never before, all you have to do is try to take away their right to vote with a dart. You’ll see record turnout then. God Bless America.

CNN’s headline tickled me this morning. Ike’s going to maybe kill some of us a bit! Ike will certainly maybe be bad! Run for your lives!

I know, I know, a hurricane is nothing to laugh at. But the headline just seemed so, well, uncertainly sure.

CNN/Money is reporting that the budget deficit is forecast to hit $407 billion, up $246 billion in just one year. I was about to post something about the deficit approaching a half a trillion dollars, but then I realized an alarming fact. $407 billion is still NINETY THREE BILLION DOLLARS away from a half a trillion dollars. The scale of this is amazing.

Stimulus checks, an underfunded just war, an overfunded unjust war, education and corporate initiatives that aren’t cutting it … at least we’re getting what we pay for.

Where’s the f—— Tylenol?