UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Two nights after having spent the entire night awake in the Children’s Hospital ER with a sick daughter, my sleep routine is completely off. So last night I was awake in bed watching TV until nearly 2 AM. After The Colbert Report ended, and deciding as usual that I was not interested in leaving it on Comedy Central to watch South Park (why, exactly, is that show still on?), I flipped over to MSNBC to see if Countdown or Rachel Maddow was being replayed. Well, no, it was Hardball, but I decided to just leave it on and wait.

First observation: Wow. An hour is a really long time. Although I found moments entertaining, and perhaps a few nanoseconds informative, I developed a newfound understanding for Einstein’s simple explanation of relativity:

Put your hand on a stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

He couldn’t anticipate the third corollary: Sit with Chris Matthews for an hour, and, like Meat Loaf, you’ll be praying for the end of time.

The end of time did arrive eventually, and Keith Olbermann appeared. It was, perhaps, not his best show, but I can’t recall how many times I’ve actually watched an entire episode of Countdown. Usually I just see clips on YouTube. I was glad to see that he (and all three hosts, to be sure) wasn’t going to let John McCain’s Joe the Plumber debacle in Defiance, Ohio (can’t make this stuff up) slip by. Rachel Maddow actually did the best filling in the details of the McCain rally there, though. Nowhere else all day long did I hear the fact that I personally found most interesting (and revealing) about the event: of the 6000 people in attendance, 4000 consisted of the entire student body of the Defiance public school system. The schools were closed for the day, and the students were bussed to the rally. Attendance, apparently, was required.

But the most regrettably memorable moment of the long 180 minutes I spent with MSNBC in the wee-est of wee hours last night, the moment that made me most wish I could be asleep right now, occurred not during one of the programs, but during a commercial break on the Rachel Maddow Show. I saw this:

The first two computers you see in the commercial are Macs. But I knew something was amiss when I saw the woman’s iBook (yes, I can see in a freeze-frame at 0:10 that it’s definitely an iBook, despite having the brand masked over) displaying a BSOD. If it were a MacBook, that would at least be possible — however unlikely, and I will acknowledge that’s at least in part because Macs don’t run versions of Windows before XP SP2, and how often does that BSOD?

Then we see at 0:42 an on-screen notice: “FinallyFast.com is for PC Computers Only.” Well, yeah.

An awkward moment for John McCain.

Most newspaper websites are cluttered but utilitarian at best. Many, like my local paper, have undergone elaborate and expensive redesigns in recent years but still suck ass, if for no other reason than that they can’t really get the interface right and so are interminably tweaking it, not to mention that they allow their advertisers to shit all over the page layout with intrusive Flash overlays that jump out unexpectedly and cover what you’re reading if you let your mouse hand drift across the wrong spot on the page.

I’ve noticed in general that the British media seems to have more design sense, in that they actually seem to care about making things usable — in other words, facilitating the dissemination of information — as opposed to first and foremost making a buck, no matter how crass the means.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a newspaper website, though, and said, “Wow, that’s really good design!” but that all changed today when I saw the new site for the Guardian.

Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no advertising whatsoever on the home page. At least that’s a start. The layout is clean and well-organized, and doesn’t feel crowded or overwhelming, even though there are four columns and approximately 85 gazillion links on the page. Something else that helps: color coded sections. There’s risk in using a lot of different colors in a design. The page could easily end up looking like My Little Pony barfed all over it. But the nine different thematic colors are represented solely by colored type in the navigation bar at the top (no colored rectangles or obnoxious 3-D tabs) and by thin horizontal bands identifying the beginning of each section’s home page real estate.

True, on my 1280×800 display, the home page scrolls to the height of seven screens. A bit much, but the aforementioned organization keeps things manageable.

Ultimately, the designers have somehow managed to find the optimal midpoint between bland, utilitarian black-and-white monotony and retina-scorching, brain melting sensory overload. And in the land of newspaper websites, the space between the two is surprisingly small.

It’s no wonder that they won Website of the Year in the British Press Awards. Kudos!

Sorry, I spoiled the punchline. Of course, so did MSNBC’s headline. It was just too awesome. Gotta love Olbermann.

Tonight a 30-minute paid program, i.e. infomercial, will air on 3 major networks plus some Spanish-language networks and cable channels, paid for by the Obama campaign. I don’t know the content of the program yet, but I assume I’ll be watching it.

I’ve been reading some comments on news stories anticipating the “television event.” Many supporters rooting him on, the usual right-wing tirades, and a few legitimate arguments from McCain supporters challenging the idea that this was a prudent use of money as we’re plunging into a global economic crisis.

Legitimate, but misguided, I think. Sure, it would be great if the $5-7 million (my estimate) he’s spending on this could be used for more urgent matters, but it’s wrong to criticize Obama for using this money in this manner at this time. It’s campaign money, donated by supporters, with the objective and expressed intent that the money be used in the campaign to get Obama elected president. In other words, he has to spend this money, and he has to spend it on his presidential bid. It’s not like he can just say, “OK, we’ve been given more money than we need. Let’s just put the surplus into paying down the national debt” or something similar (and equally futile). The money was not given to him for that purpose, and aside from disappointing and/or angering the donors, I’m pretty sure any other use of the money would be illegal. I don’t really know what happens after an election if a campaign has a surplus of funds, but it would be foolish for a campaign not to spend money it has during the campaign season, if it finds a suitable use for the money.

Which brings me back to the matter of wasting campaign money. Sure, the mailers and robocalls and emails SLP and I received over the last month from the McCain campaign were a drop in the bucket compared to 30 minutes of national prime-time airtime, but the latter is also a drop in the bucket compared to the $700 billion bank bailout, or the $10 trillion (or whatever incomprehensible number it is now) national debt. My point is, Obama’s money isn’t being wasted on a nationally televised program that gives the country a chance to see who he is and why they should (or should not, but really they should) vote for him. The money the McCain campaign spent trying to woo members of my household was absolutely wasted and even the most minimal amount of research could have verified for the campaign that our address had no business appearing on their mailing list.

As far as tonight’s programming goes, I don’t know if it’s ultimately a plus for the Obama campaign or not. It could backfire. But I don’t think it will. Any naysayer who isn’t just vehemently, fundamentally opposed to Barack Obama could be persuaded, I think, if they just give him a chance and listen to what he has to say.

If you happen to be online during the telecast, be sure to check out the live blog on SIDEDOWN.