I believe it was some famous guy whose name eludes me (Thomas Jefferson? Mark Twain? Karl Marx?) who said, “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” I think I’ve never appreciated that as much as I do now, having just recorded my summary of the second presidential debate. See, for my previous two debate raps, I’ve spent hours (in the first debate, way too many hours) reading the debates and writing up rhymed summaries for myself to rap later.

This time, I wanted to take less time. So after watching a brief clip of the debate to hear the candidate’s voices (conclusion: I don’t care), I brought up the debate transcript, turned on a looped backbeat, and began freestyling. I had gotten maybe a quarter of the way down the page when I realized: “Crap, I’m already ten minutes into this!”

Since the whole thing was freestyled and recorded real-time with no pre-writing, you actually get to hear my realization on the podcast. Anyway, the whole thing clocks in at nearly 23 minutes, which is a lot longer than the previous debate raps, a little longer than I’d like, but still not nearly as long as watching the debate itself. More importantly, it took me much less time to do, so I’m likely to freestyle a summary for the final debate next week (unless I get a lot of people emailing to say “the first two were much better, please pre-write the last one!”)

Anyway, enough written blather. Time for rhyming verbal blather!

http://risingpun.podomatic.com/

…fry, fry again.

I’ve always had an unhealthy love of fried food. I am perhaps best known for my signature dish, the fried burrito, which I learned from an old highschool friend of mine. But in general, I’ve always believed that frying anything makes it tastier. My column this past weekend examines why that might be the case. But now that we have a deep fryer, it’s tricky to only use it occasionally. Especially since every time we use it, we end up with delicious food. Most recently, we made vegetable tempura* and fried calamari, which was unsurprisingly delicious.**

Anyway, I remember always arguing with people that frying any food would make it better. When I was young, people would offer ice cream as a counter-example. But having gone out for dinner recently where fried ice cream was on the menu, I must say to those people: Time to find a new counter-example.

* An amusing meal because it lets you eat plates of deep fried food while thinking to yourself “This is probably healthy.”

** Or in the case of the calamari, squidelicious.

I summarized last night’s debate in rap form. So if you want to know what Palin and Biden said, but can’t be bothered to sit through two hours of blather to find out, why not listen to my rapping executive summary? It can be found here.

Also, if you’d like to read an article about a lecture you just missed on Japanese culture and Art, look no further.

I don’t know if you saw this story, but a huge study showed that it’s not just women who make less money than men, but men who believe in gender equality make less money than men who don’t. I wrote a column about this because I was very surprised.

I can’t help but be curious as to what other belief sets are associated with higher earnings. Do racists earn more money? Does a belief in Scientology suggest you’ll have a higher income? (If your name is L. Ron Hubbard, yes!) What about people who enjoy Velveeta? With infinite correlated data points, there are probably a whole lot of really fascinating statistics just waiting to be discovered.

I stayed up waaaaaaaaaaay too late (still now) to write a song that summarizes last night’s presidential debate. The text is here.

So, my column last Friday was about current health scares relating to contaminated food. One of these was the big powdered milk scandal in China. And then I realized that the other day, I was wearing a “Got Milk?” shirt. And a very very wrong idea occurred to me, which is something along the lines of a “Got Powdered Milk?” shirt with a little stick figure baby with X’s for eyes lying at the bottom.

Nope, much as I may dislike some politicians, I’ll never be able to run for office.

…are writing and eating. Often at once. This is why I’m thrilled to have finally gotten into doing restaurant reviews. A few weeks ago I reviewed an Italian restaurant, and yesterday they ran my article on the local greasy spoon.  Writing down the price range for Jack’s in comparison to most other places I reviewed was just plain entertaining.

Speaking of my life as a gourmet, tonight I had a seafood casserole with lobster, crab, scallops, shrimp, garlic, cilantro, white wine, and parmesan. It was, frankly, pretty damn tasty. And the best part is, I didn’t have to go to a restaurant to get it.

The problem with unreasonable people (aside from the fact that they are sufficiently unreasonable that such is the main adjective you use to describe them) is that you can’t complain to them that they are being unreasonable, or they will simply get stubbornly huffy and continue being unreasonable while calling you an unreasonable complainer. This is as true in real life as it is in politics.

Writing about writing. Although I suppose this blog post is now meta-meta-writing. And every time I mention it, I add another meta. I never met a meta I didn’t like.

Anyway, yesterday’s column was about J.K. Rowling and her lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. And I just finished next week’s column, which was supposed to be entirely unrelated to writing, but I ended up dropping in a footnote about a famous author… I bet you know who.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of time is based entirely on relative lengths of time experienced now and time already experienced previously. Because waiting ten minutes used to seem like a year, but these days years are going by in a matter of minutes, and I have it on good authority that it just gets worse. Bad authority?

Man, Rodney Dangerfield was crazy, but he had a certain charm about him.

Anyway, it’s around the time of the year when people who aren’t me have to go back to school. To them, in the words of Dave Barry, I would like to say: “Neener, neener.”

If you miss the pointless exams of school, don’t fret. I wrote a fun little Back to School Quiz that you can take.

A little while back, a friend of mine pointed me to a pretty neat Diablo 2 mod, and I started playing again. Now, one of the things about Diablo 2 that makes it so addictive is that your character levels up and gets to pick a set of skills to increase. (This is similar to Blizzard’s other big hit, World of Warcraft.) My problem is, rather than focus on one skill that becomes powerful, my natural instinct is to put one point into everything because I want to try it out. Then later in the game, I realize I don’t have enough points to raise any one skillset high enough to rule the world, because I’ve tried a bit of everything. But in those early levels, with all the potential skills spread out in front of me, I envision all the different paths I could take, becoming a master of one or the other. Inevitably, I dabble here and there and don’t focus enough on one thing because everything seems so fun.

Life is like that.

Well, it’s September. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. The months start to speed by, and I’m sure the year will be over before I know it. The Olympics are already over, although you can relive all the highlights in my most recent column. And I’m back from attending yet another wedding, for what will in all probability be my last time in a tuxedo. Tuxedos are bizarre, and wearing one with any frequency seems more trouble than it’s worth. Honestly, I don’t know how penguins do it.*

Still, catching up with old friends is always delightful. Whether it’s playing board games, or hearing interesting anecdotes (one of my lawyer friends had an objection sustained against him for “being sarcastic”), or just hanging out, weddings provide one of the few reliable reunions that gather many of my friends from all over the country.

Speaking of country, my article about Country Joe McDonald was published last week, so feel free to read it if that sort of thing interests you. Right now, I think what interests me is lunch.

*please do not take this as an invitation to send me videos of penguins mating.