Pun Salad

• Quoted in its entirety, Jesse Walker's condensed version of Obama's acceptance speech:

  Government cannot solve all our problems. Just the ones involving energy, education, work, the weather, cities, the countryside, sick children, sick mothers, joblessness, hopelessness, and frightening foreigners who do not live in Iraq. Now if you'll all look under your seats, every one of you is going home with a new car!

• Freudian Slip Department:

  "Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama. That makes two of us," [Bill Clinton] told delegates, who waived American flags. "Barack Obama will lead us away from division and fear of the last eight years back to unity and hope."

  I bet. (Emphasis added, of course. Via Cato@Liberty.)

• Dave Barry files his last report from the Democratic National Convention:

  I was on the convention floor Wednesday for the historic roll-call vote that nominated Obama. The roll call is one of the most entertaining parts of any convention, because it's when the state-delegation chairpersons, before casting their votes, name the various things that their states are proud of, as in:

  ``Madam Secretary, the great state of [name of some state that no normal person would ever call ``great''], where the wind blows horizontally and water goes down the drain counter-clockwise; birthplace of the inventor of a key chemical component of Cool Ranch Doritos; home of the world's largest organically grown rutabaga . . . ''

  I am not exaggerating by much. One highlight of Wednesday's roll call was when John Knutson, chairperson of the Maine Democratic Party, said -- and I am not making this quote up -- ``The sun comes up in Maine first in the nation. And we feel very honored to be . . . to have that as our singular . . . whatever. Privilege.''

  Maine: The Whatever State.

• The US Chamber of Commerce had an actually-funny anti-Jeanne Shaheen ad on TV last night. A refreshing change from the usual anti-advertising, which tends to run to grainy unflattering photographs and ominous-sounding voice-overs. There's a story at NPR about the Chamber's efforts, with a link to a video of the ad. (Video not embeddable here, as near as I can tell. NPR: Windows-centric commies.)

  NPR has this story as part of its "Secret Money Project", although the funding for this particular ad has to be one of the worst-kept secrets I've seen lately.

• The Granite Geek, David Brooks, argues that "somebody with scientific training" would be a "ground-breaking presidential candidate."

  I've left a comment there about Herbert Hoover, Stanford geology major. (Hoover also worked as a mining engineer, ground-breaking in a more literal sense.)

The DVD box—you can read it right over there—claims that this is "the scariest movie of the year", but it's not really that scary. It's creepy enough, though.

But it is topical, telling us what's in store should we dare start drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, and it's not pretty. A small group of oil company employees are tasked with initial exploration; unfortunately, the main things they discover are (a) unusually warm weather, and (b) their activities have apparently unleashed demon-spawn from hell. Or maybe hallucinatory gases. And, as is the norm for such movies, people start dying in unusual but low-budget fashion.

So, as one IMDB commenter put it: it's the kind of horror movie Al Gore would make. Ron Perlman plays a tough oilman. And there always has to be someone we hope survives to the end of the movie; here, that's Connie Britton, the perky Nikki from Spin City.