Everything about Session 9 feels wrong. Every moment feels a little off and every exchange of meaningless work banter is loaded with a little more tension than you'd expect. Every shot of an abandoned room or a tree seems to be concealing or foreshadowing. It's like watching "Friends" without the laugh track: it makes you want to claw your eyes out. READ MORE

If there’s anything that could save Harry Reid from getting ousted by Sharron Angle on Tuesday, it would be his campaign’s ability to run a competitive ground game: tight coordination of precinct canvassing, disciplined phone banking, targeted literature distribution, quality control over hundreds of volunteers and—above all—clean, up-to-date voter lists.

Based on what I saw yesterday at Democratic Party headquarters in Las Vegas, it’s not happening for Harry Reid. READ MORE

Horror movies are so powerful because of the many different ways artists can spin the archetypes. They aim for the most visceral and basic of reactions, but how they go about getting these responses can be fascinating even when the movie is terrible. Such a pity then that zombies and horror have been assaulted by petty gate-keepers of imagined rules, pounding on their leather back copies of What Zombies Should Do, their mouths frothing at the idea someone has defiled the blessed system and their trousers troubled at the idea of a Zombie Tsar who vets all films for their level of adherence to lore. Horror movies are about fear and repulsion, basic concepts twisted and rethought to be hilarious, terrifying or even both. They don't deserve to be reduced to debates on WWE message boards about wrestlers breaking Kayfabe. READ MORE

“I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s fifth husband,” McCain told the crowd last night. “I know what to do but I don’t know how to make it impressive.” This was met with the half-groan, half-clap that you most often hear from a studio audience when a late-night host goes blue. But McCain really was on fire last night! The last time I'd seen him in the flesh was at a last-minute rally, right here in Nevada, the night before he lost the election to Barack Obama. That night he was wooden, humorless and so clearly exhausted that his face had lost its usual malarial tint and was instead a ghostly white.

Last night, it was unclear if Senator McCain’s appearance was the closer of tonight’s rally or if he was perhaps a pitying after-thought of the Angle campaign. McCain took the stage of the Mardi Gras ballroom at the Orleans Hotel following Jon Voight (yes, father of Angelina), Michael Reagan (yes, son of Ronald) and surprise guest Sharron Angle. And at least the wisecrack defused some of the tension that McCain had carried in with him. READ MORE

I spent yesterday at Sharron Angle for Senate Campaign Headquarters, in a strip mall in northern Las Vegas. The phonebank volunteers were targeting likely Angle supporters in rural parts of the state to take advantage of early voting, which ended last night. Most of my fellow volunteers (I was, I believe, the only fake volunteer) were over fifty—with the exception of Summer and Jordan, two bubbly seventeen-year-olds who both had family in the military—and white and not originally from Nevada. By coincidence, the three women in my adjoining cubby were from all from Pennsylvania, having moved to Nevada after their children were grown. The ladies, with their various shades of silver hair, would take a few minutes between phonecalls to gab, mostly about Social Security: how much they were getting, where it was all going and the general future of the entitlement program.

“I told my daughter not to even dream of relying on it! It will be all spent—on bridges, or planting trees, or whatever!—by the time it’s her turn,” one of the ladies, Loretta, said, as the others nodded in solemn agreement. READ MORE

We investigated lady-related scifi visions of the future that may or may not work out.

We checked in with "Boardwalk Empire" at its halfway point.

We looked, with great yearning, toward what would come after this bloody horrid election.

We followed a spectacular contestant in the Apollo's famous amateur competition.

We got a smartass baby sister to go along with our joke- and poop-obsessed younger brother.

Of course the award for most-commented-upon post of the week goes to a conversation about political candidate Christine O'Donnell.

Hey! So let's meet back here on Monday to count how many children we've each stolen on Sunday night and how much sanity you've accumulated by your big march on Washington. (For those staying home, pro tip: pretty much everyone reports that you shouldn't miss "Walking Dead" on Sunday night, if you're into TV about zombies, which, you are.)

You know what, YES, thank you for asking, I would very much like to buy your $62,000 Hermes-Yamaha motorcycle! That motorcycle 110% makes me not give a fuck about starving children and unemployment and ever-increasing financial inequity and bullshit like books! I would buy the shit out of that and then the newspapers could all die and then I would go buy one more for my exceedingly limber masked accomplice and then we would go out and get some In-n-Out Burgers and adopt every unadoptable FIV kitten in the no-kill shelter system and stuff them all in our sidecars and get on our Hermes bikes and be all VROOM VROOM, riding down the back streets, oh yeah: THE WOLF IS HUNGRY, HE RUNS THE SHOW! Then we'd end up in some parking lot in Berlin where we'd have some truly risque outercourse with other really rich people on top of our motorcycles, like it was some Czech porno time travel exploitation film but we were really living it! You know, like in Xanadu. That's what devotion to a lifestyle brand is all about. You poseurs.

An Autopsy of an Era

That’s how it was then, a knife
through cartilage, a body broken. Animal
and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed.
The collective howl as a general alarm
followed by quiet. READ MORE

In the almost unbearable breadth of its offerings on the subjects of napping puppies, curious baby sloths and farting iguanas, YouTube is something more than a miracle—the vast triviality of all those acres of lush, stunning webshit is too wicked, too beautiful to have originated upstairs. There's a kind of freaky groupthink to the YouTube-memes that boil up, tornado-like, from YouTube's flat and desolate interior, but there's something great about those, too, and compromises are to be expected when you're talking about something that functions as an illustrated psychic septic system for the entire Internet. The comments section—home to the most dead-certain and dread-inducing almost-humans ever to pass judgment on whether or not a 30-second video is or isn't "a gay retard"—is a Category Five barfstorm more or less without exception, of course, and most of what's there to see on the site is astonishingly useless. But when it comes to YouTube's basement, or the part of it right above phone-cammed high school fights and Four Loko chug-vids, you have to turn to the first-person webcam stuff. READ MORE

"I didn't ask Kendrick to leave the race, nor did Kendrick say that he would," is the statement just sent out by Bill Clinton's press office. For those not playing along, he means Kendrick Meek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, who's not winning against an Independent (Charlie Crist) and a Tea Party candidate running as a Republican (Marco Rubio). He does know that this was in the Times today, I assume: "Matt McKenna, Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, said the former president had concluded that Mr. Meek’s candidacy was struggling and was urging him to drop out and endorse Charlie Crist."

I want to be President of the United States. In fact I have already written my acceptance speech. The first thing I’ll be doing is announcing that I am bringing back Prohibition.

After I’ve had my little joke, I’ll let everyone know what I actually plan to do is legalize all drugs, nationalize the brothels and mandate a life-sentence for any captain of industry who is complicit in polluting the planet. Yeah, I’m a one-term kind of guy. But it’s not my time. Not yet.

This year brings us the usual Fall harvest of liars, cheats and whores, plus an over-hyped bumper crop of creationist kooks, gay-bashers, progressive paranoiacs, fear-mongers and reality-stars-in-training. But what we seem to be missing is that rarified strain of political beast: the candidate that was famous before he or she ran for office. READ MORE

Here is everything you need to know about what this day is like.

A man who indecently exposed himself to a woman ended up being bitten by her dog. The victim, aged in her 60s, was walking her pet in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, when she was approached by the flasher. A police spokesman said the man exposed himself and the terrier growled.

Okay, great, right? "Dog Devours Dong." "Terrier Tears Todger." "Canine Chomps Cock." All easy enough, right? Except NO, the dog had to go and bite the guy on the fucking arm. What can I do with that? NOTHING. There's a saying in blogland, "If it don't penis bleed, it don't penis lead." I mean, it's barely even a one-liner this way. What the hell is going on out there? I am so ready for the weekend it is, like this post, not even funny. Grrrr.

I guess it doesn't "get better" for Christine O'Donnell after high school, eh Dan Savage?

Horror movies are rarely beautiful. The gore can be impressive, the atmosphere can be expertly created, the cinematography but the movies are rarely allowed to be beautiful. Dust Devil is beautiful. And not just because they shot it in a desert. It's a great piece of horror, a great western and a great piece of cinematic achievement all at once. Not bad for a demon in a cowboy hat. READ MORE