Here's a fucking scandal: Voting machines in Miami are attributing votes to the wrong candidate.

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

If that's what it's like in early voting, just wait for election day.

I have long thought that, pace Dworkin/MacKinnon/Canadian law, it's just as plausible that pornography prevents rape as it is that pornography causes rape. (Seriously, ask Kate Lewis Wright: I remember making this argument to her c. 1989.) Now it turns out that there is empirical data to support this view. Once again, I am right.

LA Times reporter Patrick McDonnell covered Baghdad from 2003 to 2005. Then he was away for a year. This month, he went back and filed this horrifying piece on what life there is like now. You should read it.

A city in which it was long taboo to ask, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics. Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds....

Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.

Breaking News: Some gossip sites have less than unimpeachable journalistic standards

So last week, I sent in the following tip to Wonkette:

anyone there know if john negroponte has had a problem with booze? saw him picking up a 6-pack of o'douls last nite at the liquor store on calvert street.

They reproduced it as:

John Negroponte must have a problem with booze, cause I saw him picking up a 6-pack of O’douls last night [10/25] at the liquor store on Calvert street.

Call me Andy Rooney or whatever, but this seems to me to change the meaning enough to be not really okay.

Last year, Rupert Murdoch spent half a billion dollars to buy MySpace. Now, according to the WaPo, MySpace is totally over. Ha ha! What a chump you are, Rupe! If you can't trust the Washington Post to bring you all the latest information about what the kids are doing these days, who can you trust?

Bonus fact about usage times, the average amount of time a user spends on a given site:

Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.

Fun and addictive web game: how long can you keep both balls in the air? My record is 35.2 seconds. Nice physics plus when it gives you your score it insults you in French.

Chump Sucker of the Week: Wired copy chief Tony Long

The latest on the comics-have-cultural-cachet front: the backlash! Wired copy chief Tony Long is mad because Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has been nominated for a National Book Award:

If you've ever tried writing a real novel, you'll know where I'm coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award, the American equivalent of France's Prix Goncourt or Britain's Booker Prize, is exceedingly difficult.... Sorry, but no comic book, regardless of how cleverly executed, belongs in that class.

Rather than respond myself (although as someone who has tried to write a "real novel" I am apparently qualified to speak on this issue, unlike most of you), I will paraphrase Zadie Smith, who has also tried writing a real novel, with more success, I would wager, than either myself or Wired copy chief Tony Long. I happened to see Smith field a question about graphic novels at a talk in New York earlier this month. She said, essentially, that the comics form is a different but not lesser form than prose, that she especially admired the work of Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, and that she is in awe of the amount of work that producing comics requires. She cited some figure about how long it takes Ware to draw a page -- I think it was something like two or three weeks.

You are now welcome to decide who to trust on the difficulties of prose novels versus comics: Zadie Smith or Wired copy chief Tony Long. More interesting questions, like "Is degree-of-difficulty really the standard we should use to assess works of art?" and "Should there perhaps be a separate awards category for comics, since they are after all formally different from prose?" will not be addressed at this juncture.

[Link via Bookslut]

Rare, long, fascinating profile of Garry "Doonesbury" Trudeau from the Washington Post -- well worth reading. Topics covered include: Trudeau researching the strip by talking to injured Iraq War veterans; rumors that Trudeau does not draw the strip himself; Trudeau's wife Jane Pauley's mental breakdown.

Jon Ronson interviews British TV host Noel Edmonds:

"I wrote to the cosmos that I would like to meet a woman who'll make me laugh and make me happy," Noel tells me. "I wrote that I'd like a relationship that's not too heavy, with an attractive lady, and I'd like her to walk into my life by the end of September 2005. And she did!"

There is a short silence.

"She wasn't the person who sold her story to the Sunday People back in July, was she?" I ask.

There's another silence.

"Yes," says Noel.

Marjan Simmons, The Sunday People, August 2006: "He was a very tender and lovely kisser. When I woke up with him the following morning, I felt completely at ease and his first words were, 'Cup of tea, darling?' He was a very giving man in all aspects and satisfied me in every way. Noel had his own special song for us. It was You're Beautiful by James Blunt. But once he was back at the top he didn't need me any more. I felt he just discarded me. He was a hypocrite who used me to make himself feel more positive about himself."

"So that turned out to be not so good," I say. "Maybe if you'd written down, 'I want to meet somebody by the end of September and I don't want her selling her story to the Sunday People...'"

"No, you can't do that," Noel interrupts, "because that is a negative. The cosmos will accept only positive orders. The word I probably missed out was 'trustworthy'."

As the country heads into Obama fever, John Kerry is thoughtful enough to provide the world with a little reminder of why he's such a total douchebag. George Stephanopoulos asked him if he thought Obama was ready to be president. Kerry reminded viewers that he had tapped Obama to give his breakout speech before the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Then:

I think he's a very interesting and very powerful communicator with a great deal of skill. I wouldn't have picked him if he didn't. And I'm really pleased to see the way in which the country is ratifying my judgment on that.

And when Democrats nominate Obama as their presidential candidate in 2008 and Kerry comes in a distant fifth, this will be a further ratification of his judgment by the American people.

New research: Does watching television in early childhood cause autism? Update: Stephen "Freakonomics" Levitt explains why he thinks the research doesn't hold up.

My shocking tale of abuse

This brought back some memories, and added to my general sense that the level of panic about "paedophilia" (which is obvioulsy the wrong word to apply to hitting on a 16 year old, by the way), child molestation etc. that Foley-gate exposed is really quite absurd. You see, I too was once molested on a rafting trip -- by a pasty, messily-coiffed man named Howard, who was accompanied (on the trip, not on the molestation part) by his adolescent nephew (or "nephew"?). I was 11, and a whole group of us was walking thru this dark cave near the river, when suddenly I felt this arm kind of brush over my (I think bare) chest. I could see Howard standing next to me. I figured it was just an accident or something, but then a little later it happened again. So I yelled "Stop groping me Howard!," really loud, and a couple other people turned around, and Howard kind of slunk away in humiliation. Had someone suggested that the FBI should launch an inquiry I think I would have been a bit confused.

Well Gabe may be attending New York literary festivals and everything, but is he being given impressive-sounding titles on the sports blogs of prominent political magazines? I think not.

Actually, lame self-promotion aside, something weird is going on in the relationship between mass entertainment and indie music. It has long been noted (or at least for like the last year or so) that prime-time TV shows have begun using music from relatively sophisticated and at-least-slightly obscure bands. Gray's Anatomy went with The Postal Service last year, and a friend of mine's sister, who's a NYC-based singer-songwriter, had a song on Six Degrees the other nite. But now it seems to be spreading beyond TV dramas with artistic pretensions, into the heretofore determinedly unartistic world of professional sports programming. In case you didn't follow the link above:

Not only did FOX play Fugazi's "Waiting Room" last nite, they also played the intro to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "My Yellow Country Teeth" before a commercial break. It was, frankly, fantastic.

There's still a ways to go though: FOX also played "Do you really want to hurt me?" during a brief in-game segment on the Mets' injury woes -- after which the announcer felt compelled to add, his voice tinged with poorly concelaed homophobia: "I don't know why we have to listen to Culture Club, or Boy George."

A funny bit of date sabotage at the New Yorker Festival by writer Christian Carmona:

A couple sitting next to us saw people having drinks, so the man commented on how he would treat himself to one. The woman, deciding whether she wanted to splurge and purchase a martini, asked him to get her one as well. I waited in anticipation, truly curious whether he would return mentioning that the event was Open Bar. As expected, he did not. He noted that what she was drinking was called a "Festini," a kind of exotic martini.
"You," she gushed, "are too sweet."
"Anything for mah baby."
I felt obligated to turn to my friend and tell him, a touch below a scream, "I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS EVENT WAS OPEN BAR" to which he screamed, "I KNOW. THESE MARTINIS ARE REALLY GOOD," he turned to face the couple, "CONSIDERING THAT THEY'RE FREE."

Screechy-voiced lead singer Justin Hawkins has quit the Darkness after emerging from rehab. In a sentence that vies for the "least true sentence" award for 2006, the Sun writes: "The extent of his cocaine and booze problem will shock fans."

Green with envy (haha!)

So for the magazine this month I wrote a profile of a Democratic congressman (I'll send it around when it comes out in the next few days). I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. The whole thing basically engendered a feeling in me of "I can do this thing,", with "this thing" meaning writing long-form magazine journalism, and I guess in this case specifically political stories.

But then I read Josh Green's profile of Hillary in The Atlantic. And it's not like I now doubt my ability to do this. It's more like I just am realizing that there's a whole further level of sophistication that it's possible to get to thru this form. And I guess it makes me want to get there, which is good I suppose.

Jacob Weisberg should write more.

Sasha Frere-Jones makes a nice point about Little Feat:

While not mega-platinum, Little Feat were putatively a pop group in the 1970s. Now, you would only hear such drum sounds and flat recording style on an indie record, a fairly knowing one, or an alt country recording. Possibly a good one, though likely not as good as Little Feat.

Other interesting factoids from the New Yorker Festival

New Yorker staffers who, at separate events, made gratuitous references to the Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy": star reporter Malcolm Gladwell and features editor Daniel Zalewski.
How Roger Angell pronounces the last name of the late Donald Barthelme: BARL-mee.
How Zadie Smith pronounces it: BARTH-elm.