"Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit..."

"... resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities," reports the BBC. This is news, right?

Paul Ryan's sparring partner, playing Joe Biden at the debate practice sessions, revealed.

Ted Olson!

Perfect. Ryan should be honed to a sharp edge.

Now, who's playing Ryan for Biden? Chris Van Hollen. Here's Van Hollen's DNC speech in case you have trouble picturing that.

Classical Revolution Madison.

It was very windy here in Madison, Wisconsin, as I was walking home after teaching Conlaw2 today. So I cut through the Institute for Discovery, to make one block an indoor block. I heard music, music too loud to be plausibly piped in, and then I came upon this classical music performance. The flyer says it's "Classical Revolution Madison." What's the revolution? Other than that it's lefty Madison? According to their Facebook page: "Classical Revolution Madison Cooperative performs in cafes, bars and other non-traditional venues connecting classical music with today's public." Long live the beautiful revolutions.

"Ann, I'll be blunt."

Emails David Axelrod.

They are trying to buy this election, and we're the only ones who are standing in their way. Don't wait any longer to take ownership of this campaign.

I.e., send them money. Because they want to outbid the others who are trying to buy the election.

How do you live without your stomach?

I was wondering, after reading about this poor young woman who had her stomach removed to save her life after she drank a cocktail that contained liquid nitrogen:

"This girl is the victim of an irresponsible alcohol industry that's now competing on gimmicks. People should not be playing chemistry in public houses. This is a very, very cold substance and it is similar to subjecting your oesophagus and stomach to frost bite."...

[L]iquid nitrogen - which vapourises at -196C - has been increasingly used in recent years in the preparation of drinks. It is used to chill glasses and is a crowd-pleaser thanks to the dramatic-looking water vapour it releases at room temperature.

I found this article "Life without my stomach" about a women who, at the age of 27, opted to have her stomach removed because she had the gene for a form of stomach cancer that would kill her if she waited for it actually to develop, which was 90% likely, given the gene. So, then, how do you eat?

Pew: Romney 49%, Obama 45%.

Among likely voters. Last month, Romney trailed by 8 points. That means Romney has picked up 12 points!

People even like Romney more!

Coming out of the debate, Mitt Romney’s personal image has improved. His favorable rating has hit 50% among registered voters for the first time in Pew Research Center surveys and has risen five points since September. At the same time, Obama’s personal favorability rating has fallen from 55% to 49%.

And women are evenly divided:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Romney picked up 18 points with women!

ADDED: Over at Nate Silver's blog at the NYT, commenters are begging him to update his latest post, which is from last night and has the reassuring title "National Polls Show Signs of Settling." His readers need absorbing this news:

Where are you Nat? Reassure about the Pew poll...

Silver's all about processing/massaging the data, and he does seem to minister to the sensitivities of NYT readers.

UPDATE: Shortly after midnight, Silver answered the call for help. (I'll do a new post about it.)

At the Verbena Café...

... you can be your usual divine self.

***

"Café," here at the Althouse blog, signifies an open thread in the comments. Write about what you like. And if you happen to have any shopping you need to do, entering Amazon through this link will — at no extra cost to you — send me: 1. some money, and 2. the message that you appreciate what this blog gives to you. (That link is always at the top of the page, under the blog's title: click "Shop Amazon.")

Romney's foreign policy speech at VMI: "The Mantle of Leadership."

Text here. Excerpt:

I want to be very clear:  The blame for the murder of our people in Libya, and the attacks on our embassies in so many other countries, lies solely with those who carried them out—no one else.  But it is the responsibility of our President to use America’s great power to shape history—not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.  Unfortunately, that is exactly where we find ourselves in the Middle East under President Obama....

I know the President hopes for a safer, freer, and a more prosperous Middle East allied with the United States. I share this hope.  But hope is not a strategy.  We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.

"Supersonic Skydive's 5 Biggest Risks: Boiling Blood, Deadly Spins & Worse."

Could this guy please not do this?

The highest risk during descent is a flat spin, where Baumgartner would lose control of his free fall and begin to spin laterally, his head and feet rotating around his center.

A flat spin draws blood into the jumper's head and feet. At a speed exceeding 600 miles (970 kilometers) an hour, a flat spin could spin a jumper at 180 to 250 rotations a minute, creating a situation of extreme negative G's....

Then pressure builds up, "blood and spinal fluid are forced outward, and their main escape routes are through the ocular cavities."

The flat-spin risk can be mediated with... a stabilization parachute to prevent further increase in rotation, deployed on command, or automatically if -3.5 G's are achieved.

In 1960 Kittinger's stabilization parachute was designed to deploy automatically shortly after he jumped, to prevent a flat spin. But Baumgartner has his eyes on a new speed record....

His eyes... which might burst.

"Madonna had the outfit ready to go. She was really proud of it and said it was her 'Terror Bride' costume."

"She had paraded around in it and said she was going to wear it in her next music video. At first when people started telling her it was madness she just brushed it off. But when they mentioned that her actions could put her life at risk she decided to ditch it from her video and certainly won't be wearing it on stage.''

(Via Instapundit.)

"The Romney revival lasted, what, 12 hours?"

Mickey Kaus has a sharp eye:

Before the debate, Mark Halperin said the press corps was itching to write the Romney comeback story. It turns out what they were really itching to write was the Obama-comeback-from-the-Romney-comeback story. You know, something like “How Obama reset his campaign.” … Glenn Thrush of Politico has, in fact, already written it:  There’s  already a “newnarrative.” A “whipsaw transformation.” Obama “was radically different Thursday—not just calm but buoyant, loose, focused.” He gripped the podium with a fresh intensity! “That’s what he does when he’s really into it,” a “top” Obama adviser revealed.  …

(Internal links omitted.)

Real-world bags that look like comic-book drawings.

I think these are really cool. Click on the video at the bottom to see how striking the effect is.

And they have them on Amazon: here, here, here. I bought one!

E.J. Dionne asks "Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?"

He purports to delve into the debate:

However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.

However you analyze it? Well, I don't even have to check the debate transcript to remember a striking use of the word "moral." Let me get the exact quote from the transcript. Jim Lehrer had just asked "what are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?" And Mitt Romney said:

Good. I'm glad you raised that, and it's a -- it's a critical issue. I think it's not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

But Dionne would like you to think of the debate is just a big indecipherable mush. And then the whole rest of his column is about — can you guess? — Nuns on the Bus! Because who's better than nuns "to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences?" I'd say Mitt Romney was better, in his utterly clear statement quoted above, which is in no way "technocratic mush" or "insufferable wonkery," Mr. Dionne. But... hey! Look! Nuns! Nunnnnzzzz!

"Bombshell: Obama.com Owned by Bundler in Shanghai with Business Ties to Chinese Government."

"In an explosive report set to send shockwaves through official Washington, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) released a 108-page GAI investigation into the threat of foreign and fraudulent Internet campaign donations in U.S. federal elections...."

The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors [to] enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.

 ADDED: "By the way, Obama’s incredible $181 million take in September was especially notable because only 2% of it was reportable...."

"Corn stalks sticking out of truck lead to drunken driving arrest."

"The stalks were acquired when Elliott drove off a highway into a cornfield and then back onto the highway, seen by a driver who claimed Elliott almost hit his vehicle, police said."

In other Wisconsin farms-and-bad-driving news: "Police said texting while driving led to the death of a 2012 World Dairy Expo prize-winning Jersey cow on Saturday night."

"A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame..."

Wrote Sinclair Lewis at Kindle Locations 3099-3100 in "Elmer Gantry," which I downloaded yesterday, after David Axelrod, on "Face the Nation," said that poor Obama "was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance" from Romney.

Skimming the book, I happened to see "the icy mitt," and thought it was funny — Sinclair Lewis's humorous reference to a perfunctory handshake (put in the mouth of his Gantry character).

Elmer disposed of Cecil Aylston: "To hell with him! There's a fellow we'll get rid of! A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame that's probably saved already, that you, by golly, couldn't unsave with a carload of gin! That'll do you, my young friend!..." 

Yeah, I know: Doesn't sound the least bit like Romney. But, as I say, it amused me to run across The Icy Mitt. And that piqued my curiosity. Did "mitt" appear elsewhere in the book? This is the careless, intuitive way I have of looking for bloggable material. But Kindle, come on! I do a search for "mitt" in the Kindle app, and I get 74 matches, because Kindle won't look for "mitt" as a separate word, only as a set of 4 letters, so I get every "admitted," "permitted," "omitted, and "committee." It's sometimes interesting to discover the way a word is present within a word. It can give you ideas for jokes in the "putting the X in Y" form — putting the mitt in omitted — but it really undermines the value of having searchable text.

Elmer stopped pumping, glared, rubbed his mittened hands on his thighs, and spoke steadily:

"I've been waiting for this! I'm impulsive  — sure; I make bad mistakes — every red-blooded man does. But what about you? I don't know how far you've gone with your hellish doubts, but I've been listening to the hedging way you answer questions in Sunday School, and I know you're beginning to wabble. Pretty soon you'll be an out-and-out liberal. God! Plotting to weaken the Christian religion, to steal away from weak groping souls their only hope of salvation! The worst murderer that ever lived isn't a criminal like you!" 

Kindle Locations 2449-2460.