Overall a very good debate, and much more substantial than we'd been lead to expect. Some thoughts:

Full transcript here; feel free to discuss in the comments.

President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry face-off tomorrow in a prime-time debate that may determine the outcome of the hotly-contested 2004 election.

This will be the only presidential debate of the campaign, but the vice-presidential candidates will meet on October 5. According to the agreement, Dick Cheney and John Edwards will each be allowed to make one "your mama's so fat" joke at the other's expense, and then the two will make light chit-chat over a catered dinner.

The typical American zombie would find slim-pickings, brains-wise, behind the scenes of the typical American zombie movie. With the possible exception of the "underdog practices and practices and practices and eventually goes on to win the big championship" sports movie, no other category of film seems to have to have so little variation between individual entries. The undead are always slow, the heroines are always buxom, the protagonists always get picked off one by one. Not that I'm complaining -- I like buxom heroines -- but after seeing 28 days Later, the British "reinvention of the genre," my interest in the typical American zombie movie pretty much evaporated. I mean, how sad is it when you can reinvent a whole genre just by realizing that zombies that run are scarier than zombies that mosey?

I therefore passed on the Dawn Of The Dead remake, and didn't even consider going to see Resident Evil: Apocalypse. But when I heard that another Brit had "reinvented the genre" yet again, my interest was piqued. So I once again headed to the theater to see what new bottle they could pour this old wine into, and once again I loved the results.

Director and screenwriter Edgar Wright describes Shaun of The Dead as a "Zom Rom Com" -- that's "zombie romantic comedy" to the uninitiated. The premise is so commonplace that it hardly bears repeating: a virus is sweeping through the country, killing citizens and animating their mindless corpses. The undead stagger about the city in search of victims to eat or infect, and, within days, the bulk of the population has been converted, with small bands of survivors desperately trying to fend off the zombie hordes.

How can you cram a "romantic comedy" into such a bleak storyline, you might ask. As it turns out, it's not as difficult as you might imagine -- Wright certainly makes it look easy, at any rate. In essence, he just took the standard "guy strives to get his girl back" romance, plunked it into the middle of the standard "living dead are taking over the world" universe, and let the comedy take care of itself.

In fact, what's impressive about Shaun is how little it deviates from the conventional romantic comedy or conventional zombie movie -- if you were to divorce the plotlines you'd be left with two very mediocre films. What makes the movie shine is the skill with which Wright blends the disparate elements. He also has a knack for taking very routine "horror movie" scenes and changing their focus just enough to point out their absurdities, eliciting belly-laughs from moments that otherwise have otherwise produced winces (or yawns). And it doesn't hurt that his sense of comedic timing is grand.

Which isn't to say that Shaun isn't scary -- there are actually quite a few startling moments in there. In fact, there's a enough of each of the components -- zombies, romance, comedy -- to satiate the viewer's desire for each without letting any single motif overwhelm the rest. Shaun Of The Dead ain't the best film I've seen all year, but it's cquite possibly the most enjoyable.

Events featuring
"Veggie Party Platters" are
Not, in fact, parties.

September Tapes: "The most disingenuous film of the year. A sham. Pathetic. Embarrassing. The people behind this movie should be ashamed of themselves." -- Jonathan Curiel, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

The Forgotten: "Julianne Moore delivers a performance that has all the emotional commitment of a bored kid playing with a light switch." -- Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES (thanks, Jack)

Resident Evil: Apocalypse: "The undead astumble around in the dark, sometimes even in blurry slo-mo, making the many packs of them about as terrifying as the mobs waiting for Matt and Katie outside the Today studio." -- Gregory Kirschling, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

The Cookout: "There might have been a decent comedy here if someone had remembered to insert some humor." -- Luke Thompson, DALLAS OBSERVER

National Lampoon's Gold Diggers: "So stupefyingly hideous that after watching it, you'll need to bathe in 10 gallons of disinfectant, get a full-body scrub and shampoo with vinegar to remove the scummy residue that remains." -- Jen Chaney, WASHINGTON POST

The radio gameshow Just a Minute has been running on the BBC for over 35 years. The premise is simplicity incarnate: guests must speak on a given subject for 60 seconds straight. The trick is that they must do so without "hesitation, repetition or deviation." A buzzer sounds if a player stammers, stalls, starts reiterating or resorts to filler, and another contestant gets a crack at the topic.

It's hard to even fathom how much better the Presidential Debates would be if they adopted this format.

For starters, the ban on repetition would pretty much obviate 90% of what Bush would otherwise say. Just imagine if he was limited to using each of his talking points one time only:

Moderator: The next topic is taxes. Mr. President?

Bush: In my first term, I had a choice: do I forget the lessons of September 11th and take the word of a madman, or do I give massive tax breaks to the wealthy? Faced with that choice, I will give tax --

Bzzzzzzzzt!

Moderator: I'm sorry, but you've used the 'forget the lessons of September 11th slash take the word of a madman' line seven times in the last 40 minutes. Would you like to try again?

Bush: Uh, "Stay the course?"

Bzzzzzzzzt!

Best of all, every answer would be no longer than a minute, and the whole debate could be shoehorned into half an hour . Some might argue that 60 seconds isn't nearly enough time for a presidential candidate to fully explicate his position on complex issues, but let's be honest: if you strip all the unnecessary verbiage and prepackaged catchphrases away from a seven minute debate answer, you're pretty much looking at a 13 second reply; add a requirement that they have to keep talking for 47 seconds more, without hesitation, and who knows? Maybe we'd actually learn something.

That's why I think "Just a Minute" would be the perfect gameshow format for the debates. Either that or the show where the participants have to eat scorpions and centipedes.

Do they still make Pee-Chees?: Last night I told this story to a group of friends:

When I was in elementary school I didn't really listen to music, but I knew that liking all the cool bands was essential to popularity. So I used to secretly copy the band names other kids had written on their Pee-Chees onto my own.

One day I somehow wound up talking to this girl I liked, and at some point she zeroed in on one of the band names I had on my Pee-Chee. "Oh, do you like INXS?" she asked. Unfortunately, I had no idea who she was talking about, because she pronounced the band name correctly, as "In Excess." So I tried to bluff. "Yeah, In Excess is okay," I said, but then tapped the "INXS" on my Pee Chee and added, "But the band I really like is Inks."

Here's the thing: mention "Pee-Chee" to people of my generation who grew up in Seattle, and they immediately know what you're referring to: those goldenrod folders with all the sports figures on them. In fact, at my school, we said "Pee-Chee" to mean any folder, in the same way that people say "Q-tip" or "Kleenex." The Pee-Chee brand was so popular that it was even able to stave off encroachment of the cooler-than-cool "Trapper Keeper" for a while.

Anyhow, that got me to wondering if kids today still use Pee-Chees. And the answer appeared to be "no." "The folders are no longer made today," according to this article.

But I had a hunch this wasn't true -- after all, I imagine the entire Washington State education system would implode in a abscence of Pee-Chees. So I did some actual non-sitting-on-my-ass-using-Google research: I went to my local drug store and perused the stationary aisle. And sure enough, there were the Pee-Chee folders I remember from my childhood, shelved with all the other "essential school supplies."

Incidentally, I took a very informal poll, and it seems that everyone who grew up on the West Coast knew what a "Pee-Chee" was, while those who grew up elsewhere did not. So although my friends were snickering at my usage of "Pee-Chee," in truth I should have been laughing at them, because their unfamiliarity with the term was outing them as a bunch of non-natives, Pacific Northwest poseurs.

Why do bottles of carbonated drinks explode after you've shaken them: This is one of these things I've always taken as a given, without ever reflecting on it: you shake a Sprite, it blows all over your kitchen when you open the can. But only recently, after I had a two-liter bottle of Talking Rain go all a-bomb on me after it had rolled around in my trunk on the way home from the store, did it ever occur to me to wonder why. Obviously the contents are under pressure, but does agitating them somehow increase the pressure? I though the only way to could increase the pressure of something was to reduce its volume or raise its temperature.

According to Ask Science Theatre, the pressure in the bottle does not increase when you shake it, but is still to blame for the phenomonon. In an unshaken bottle, soda occupies the bottom nine-tenths of the container, with a pocket of gas siting on top; this gas escapes with a pfffffft when you open the bottle, leaving the soda undisturbed. When you shake up the bottle, though, some of that carbon dioxide is mixed into the liquid and forms tiny bubbles. The gas still wants to escape when you open the bottle, though, but now has to muscle its way up through the soda toward the spout. In doing so, it pushes the liquid upwards, causing it to gush out of the bottle. The more you shake the bottle, the more thoroughly the carbon dioxide mixes with the soda, the greater the subsequent explosion.

Update: A couple of readers are callin' bullshit on this explanation. I did a little more research and came across this page which provides three answers to the question, all of which are different from the one cited above and, exasperatingly, subtly different from each other as well.

But Richard Shaffstall sent what I find to be the most believable of all the theories. "Soda is carbonated; it has dissolved gasses in the liquid. The bubbles in the liquid that get put there by shaking allow the dissolved carbonation to separate from the liquid [by virtue of being "nucleation sites"] and become a gas. Gasses take up more space then liquids, so suddenly, explosively, the soda/gas mixture takes up more room then the container can hold and boom ...

"This is the same explanation for how gunpowder works. Burning the gunpowder causes gasses to form. The gasses take up more space then the gunpowder un-burnt takes up, pressure goes up, and if it doesn't have anyplace to go (as in a bullet cartridge) it builds up until the container cannot hold it and boom."

What was Encyclopedia Brown's first name: Considering the sheer number of Encyclopedia Brown books I read as I kid, you'd think I'd know this off the top of my head. But when I tried to remember Encyclopedia's real name the other day, all I could come up with was "Leroy Brown" -- and I knew I was just confusing the pint-sized sleuth with Jim Croce's classic song Bad Bad Leroy Brown. So I plugged "encyclopedia brown" into Google to see if I could find out.

Ironically, it was "Wikipedia," the 21st century's answer to the Encyclopedia that had my answer, and I'll be pickled if I didn't have it right the first time. "Leroy 'Encyclopedia' Brown lives in the fictional Idaville, Florida, where his father is chief of police. Whenever a case arises (often one that is stumping his father), Encyclopedia Brown swings into action, assisted in his investigations by his friend (and "muscle") Sally Kimball."

Wow, crazy. And check out the dates. The first Encyclopedia Brown book ("Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective") was published in 1963, with "America's Sherlock in sneakers" aged about 10 or so; "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," meanwhile, was released in 1974. So, conceivably, they could be about the same person. At some point in Encyclopedia's teens, Bugs Meany might have convinced him to join The Tigers, and after that it would have he abandoned his career of do-gooding for the rough-and-tumble life on the streets. Maybe by the age of 21 he was six foot four, had moved to the 'ole south side Chicago, carried a .32 gun in his pocket for fun, and was called "Treetop Lover" by all those downtown ladies.

It's certainly possible. I mean, look at what happen to those kid actors from "Diff'rent Strokes."

Was Encyclopedia Brown the basis for Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown"? For the answer, turn to page 113.

Language is a funny thing. Take the words "crone" and "cone," for example. It’s only the absence of an "r" that prevents us from eating ice cream off withered old women.

I think outlets in Canada are 220 volts, and therefore won't work with your 110 volt American electrical devices. So when you move up there after the Presidential election, can I have your Gamecube?

I found this on the ground in a parking lot:

I'm taking this week off from the yeti, but will continue to post at Tricks of the Trade.

1. This morning on the bus there was a man who looked exactly like Saddam Hussein. And not the groomed-and-besuited just-a-regular-guy Saddam we've seen in recent courtroom footage, either -- I'm talkin' the bearded-and-bedraggled just-pulled-out-of-a-spider-hole Saddam.

Rides my bus

Eventually every seat was filled except the one next to Saddam. As more people boarded the bus we craned their necks to see who was going to draw the short straw, and were horrified to see that it was the kind of charming elderly lady that puts you in the mind of gingersnaps. A couple of the men shifted in their seats as if they were going to offer her their spot and take the bullet. But in the end nobody did.

No matter. Without falter she marched down the aisle, smiled at Saddam, and settled into the seat next to him. In response, Saddam did that bus-riding courtesy thing where you kind of hop in your seat to indicate that you are scrunching over in an effort to make more room for your neighbor.

I think we were all a little ashamed of our prejudice, and started thinking that maybe Saddam Hussein was an okay guy. But we were still glad we weren't sitting next to him.

2. Later, walking in downtown Seattle from the bus stop to my office, I saw a man drop a folder full of papers. The sheets were caught by the wind and scattered in every direction, but everyone around him immediately stopped walking and lunged for whichever document was closest. Within seconds the passersby had collected all the papers and returned them to the man.

Seeing this, I was filled with boundless optimism about the essential goodness of the human soul.

But then I got to work and started surfing the Internet, and quickly returned to normal.

Even if we bottlefeed our child until he's 20, I'll never get used to writing "nipples" on my shopping list.

Much as "alternative" music has become the mainstream, "quirky" movies are now so common that they have become a genre unto themselves. That's fine by me, as many of my favorite flicks are those by the quirkmeisters: Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch and the like. But for every Spike Jonze there's a dozen filmmakers who woo guys like me by shoehorning a dozen non-sequiturs into a mundane storyline and then showcasing them all in the commercials. When watching trailers, I am chary of any film that wears its zany on its sleeve.

So despite the fact that the preview made Garden State look like exactly the kind of film I enjoy, I was fairly certain that it was all an elaborate trap. Surprise! Garden State is exactly the kind of film I enjoy.

All the capsule reviews describe the film like so: Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) has been on antidepressants since childhood, but goes cold turkey while home for his mother's funeral and visiting with his childhood friends. This makes Garden State sound very high-concept: man stops taking his meds, wacky hijinx ensue! Fortunately, the film is considerably more low-concept than the one-liner would have you believe -- while hijinx do ensue and there's no shortage of wacky, everything is muted by Braff's deadpan and almost somnambulistic performance.

And much of the film is devoted to character studies, albeit of oddball and somewhat superficial characters. The most important character quickly becomes Sam (Natalie Portman), whom Andrew meets while having his leg humped by a companion dog in the waiting room of a neurologist. (It's that kind of movie.) There's no great chemistry between the two, but they are both so idiosyncratic that it seems clear that each is the only person who could possibly stand the other for long periods of time. Throw in a couple of Andrew's kooky high school friends (one is a gravedigger, another lucked into a bajillion dollars), give the whole kit and caboodle a slightly hallucinogenic feel, and you have a film that can be described by the word "comedy" preceded by any of "ensemble," "romantic," "screwball" or "stoner."

Shortly after the film began, The Queen leaned over to me and whispered, of Zach Braff, "This guy is really funny -- he's on that TV show I like, Scrubs." My first thought was "even if he's fabulous, how does a guy on a b-list sitcom wind up as the star of a major motion picture opposite Natalie Portman?" The answer, I discovered afterwards by looking up Garden State on IMDB, is that the guy on the b-list sitcom writes and directs said movie himself. Much as I enjoyed Garden State I don't think it was perfect -- I'd give it three-and-a-half stars out of four -- but as directorial debut it's about as impressive as they come.

(One last comment. I'm not one to rave about a movie's music, since I generally consider the whole CD-to-motion-picture tie-in aspect to be little more than a cynical marketing scheme, but the soundtrack for Garden State can only be described as "crazy great": Zero 7, The Shins, Thievery Corporation, and a Postal Service cover that almost improves upon the original. By the time they got around to playing Frou Frou I was convinced that the person who had assembled the music for the film was, in fact, me. )

Note: The comments for this post got deleted. Sorry, all.

Two stories on the morning's wire: Clinton Absence Spells Either Boost or Bust for Kerry and Cheney May Help or Hinder Bush's Chances.

Wow, that's some hardhitting investigative journalism, right there. Who's writing this stuff, Two-Face? Typically to find this kind of detailed analysis about how Thing X could possibly affect Thing Y in one of two ways, you'd have to get stuck making chit-chat with a coworker in the elevator. I don't know why they don't just run one big Bush Or Kerry May Win Presidency article and wrap up their election reporting a few weeks early.

A few months ago, several pundits rapped the White House for its "Ask Bush" sessions, where "independent" citizens would recite the Republican talking points and have it entered into the record without rebuke from the President. This exchange in particular was singled out for scrutiny:

Q On behalf of Vietnam veterans -- and I served six tours over there -- we do support the President. I only have one concern, and that's on the Purple Heart, and that is, is that there are over 200,000 Vietnam vets that died from Agent Orange and were never -- no Purple Heart has ever been awarded to a Vietnam veteran because of Agent Orange because it's never been changed in the regulations. Yet, we've got a candidate for President out here with two self-inflicted scratches, and I take that as an insult.

[Applause]

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Six tours? Whew. That's a lot of tours.

Let's see, who've we got here? You got a question?

Q: My name is Trevor Wallenstein and I'm from Gerbil Junction, Iowa. John Kerry is a serial flip-flopper who married an heiress for her money, volunteered for Vietnam so he could fake some injuries and collect a few dubious medals in anticipation of a future presidential campaign, and only shows backbone when it comes to raising taxes. Do you like ice cream?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first let me begin by saying that, in my opinion, Iowa is the best State in the union, in a first place tie with all the other swing states. But to answer your question: yes, I love ice cream, all flavors. Except, heh, except for French vanilla, of course.

[Laughter, applause]

Okay, who's next?

Q: Mr. President, the overwhelmingly liberal media has implied that you might not be the sharpest picket in the fence. So let me ask you this: if two trains are on the same track 150 miles apart and traveling toward each other, with the first train travelling 60 miles per hour and the second train travelling 90 miles per hour, and a fly moving 120 miles per hour buzzes back and forth between the trains until they collide, how far will the fly travel in total?

THE PRESIDENT: Uh, well now. I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it.

[Laughter]

But off the top of my head, I'd say -- let's see, 60 miles per hour and 90 miles per hour, with distance as rate multiplied by time ... carry the one -- I'd reckon that fly travels 120 miles in total.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. That's exactly right.

[Applause, cheers]

THE PRESIDENT: How about you.

Q: Mr. President, the people of America want a decisive leader who can decisively make decisive decisions and then decisively stick to their guns, regardless of the [air quotes] polls or [air quotes] facts. In light of that, I wanted to ask --

THE PRESIDENT: No.

Q: -- how you plan, uh, what?

THE PRESIDENT: No. Whatever you are going to ask, my answer is 'no.'

Q: Well, I was just going to ask how you plan --

THE PRESIDENT: No! And that's final!

[Applause, cheers]

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, you there, the man in black.

Q: While your staggering intelligence and steely resolve are essential qualities for a leader, a commander-in-chief must also make thoughtful, well-reasoned decisions when faced with complex issues. To test you on this attribute, I have prepared these two goblets of wine, one of which contains deadly iocane powder. Can you tell me which one contains the poison?

THE PRESIDENT: Really, it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me. And iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

Q: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.

THE PRESIDENT: IT HAS WORKED! YOU'VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE POISON IS!

[Applause, cheers]

THE PRESIDENT: Last question.

Q: Much of this campaign has been focused on events that took place over 30 years ago, so it seems only fair to ask: what was your guiding philosophy as a young man in the late 60s?

THE PRESIDENT: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."

One guy speaking to another in the locker room:

"I saw my doctor last month and he put me on Lipitor. And I was, like, 'Lipitor? I'm only 34!' But he said I was getting too heavy. So I decided to turn over a new leaf. I've been exercising for the last three weeks and it's been fucking awesome!! Pardon my French."

The Bush Administration has long maintained that Democrats are bitter haters, too consumed with anger to think straight. And now they have their proof, in the form of Zell Miller.

It's been something of an odd week here in yetilandia. That Tricks Of The Trade article I had in the Morning News went Internet Supernova, occupying the #1 spot on both Blogdex and Daypop for most of the week and receiving mention on usatoday.com, Metafilter, Boing Boing, Waxy and Kottke. All this for an article that I told my Morning News editor that I'd happily to scrap if he, like me, thought that "no one else would really be interested in this."

The strangest moment came while listening to the nationally broadcast NPR program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and hearing Dr. Ruth Westheimer get quizzed on the article I wrote. (Yes, this really happened, and you can hear it on their website.) Surrealismwise, that's gonna be a hard one to top.

Anyway, since then I've been trying to figure out what to do with the hundreds of great Trade Tricks I received that didn't get used in the article. Just compiling them into a single, massive text file somewhere was an option, but I didn't think that would really do them justice. Plus, I haven't really had the time to edit, sort and format 300 entries in the last few days. But tackling one entry a day -- ah, now that's a project I can handle. So, I'll be posting the remaining submissions over at tradetricks.org, in handy blog-format.

Also, several people wrote to suggest that I turn the who kit 'n' caboodle into small book, and I think I might take a stab at that. So I'm now asking for more Tricks of the Trade. If you have one that you'd like to contribute, head on over here. Even better, get your spouse or partner to send one in -- a lot of my visitors have similar profession, but I figure if I can get entries from folks who are one step removed from my readership, I should wind up with a huge cross-section of occupations.

Finally, foremost, and again, thanks to everyone who responded to my original call for Trade Tricks -- I really appreciate it. (Also, if you submitted something for the article but object to my using it on the new website or in this we'll-see-if-it-actually-happens book, please let me know.)