How many mistakes can one make in one day?

I fear I made a big one. I have let my impulsive fingers click click click (one used to say dial but now one just clicks) in a wanton and reckless disregard of the human spirit.

Here’s what happened.
Charter sent all these wonderful brochures about expanded cable. Not interested!-- I thought. This is how much I do not watch TV: when I turned it on the day of the first debate and it wasn’t working I screamed at Charter to get it together and fix it! They came the next day and said the cable had been disconnected in the back yard for, it looks like, months.

That says something about my commitment up to now to TV viewing.

But there were the brochures, and friends were watching Comedy Central and I was getting pretty tired late at night and so I called.

You should never do these things on an impulse. Sleep on it – is my sage advice. But no. I called. Another debate is coming up, neighbors are coming over – I want expanded cable! (Besides, it’s virtually cost-free! Special deal this, special package that…And, I was feeling wealthy because I just learned yesterday that AirFrance and Northwestern merged their frequent flyer programs and so that has just zapped me into the stratosphere of mile abundance. Wealth is wealth.)

Today, the Charter young man came out and now I have a box. The box is magic, he tells me. It will let me watch movies on demand. It will give me 77 channels and then some. It will sing, it will play, it will entertain me. He left. I am looking at the box. I don’t want to watch television! I tossed the remote aside and went up to blog instead.

Old habits die hard. I should have slept on it.

Twenty-seventh street pre-election diary*

I do believe we are on 27th 

In truth, I am suspended between days and between debates. It is night and I still have three papers to reread. There is no “next day.” I am on the same day as yesterday. Twenty-seven is looking awfully like twenty-eight. I am even wearing the same pair of jeans and I have yet to close the curtains for the night. Or is it morning?

Similarily, I am suspended between debates. Tomorrow's, yesterday's (no, make that day before yesterday's), they are almost running into each other. Almost.

I read this morning about one (of many) misstep made by Cheney during the debate. You have to read this. Maybe it’s that I am in a no-sleep stupor, but I find the following completely hilarious (possibly because I think it is the kind of thing that would happen to me). The Wash Post reports:

After Democratic nominee John Edwards raised some nasty allegations about Halliburton Corp., the company Cheney once ran, Cheney angrily responded to the "false" charges. "If you go, for example, to FactCheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton," he said.

But when people followed Cheney's instructions, they wound up at a site sponsored by administration antagonist George Soros. "Why we must not re-elect President Bush," the site blared. "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values."

Evidently, Cheney meant to say FactCheck.org a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Instead, he directed the nation's attention to a Web site that refers people to sellers of dictionaries and encyclopedias -- at least at first. The company behind the site, Cayman Islands-based Name Administration Inc., which also owns sites such as Lipbalm.com and Antarctica.com, was quickly overwhelmed.

"Suddenly they had 48,000 hits in an hour, then 100 hits a second," said John Berryhill, a lawyer for the company. "They had a technical problem on their hands."

To avoid crashing, and to exact revenge on Cheney for causing it such grief, Name Administration decided to forward traffic to GeorgeSoros.com -- a site that could handle the traffic, was not soliciting funds and clearly wasn't tied to Bush. "And you got to admit it was kind of cute," Berryhill said.

Soros's Web site issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with the redirection of traffic.

The irony is that once you did reach the proper site, the one Cheney intended to have you go to, you read that (in their words): "in fact, Edwards was mostly right."

(*see “forty-second street pre-election diary” post, September 22, for explanation of post)