Starry, starry early morning here on California’s northern coast with the skies all a-twinkle and the moon formed fingernail white.
And in the breeze, a whiff of skunk, which may be the animal form, or more likely the start of harvest season, although I haven’t yet had any people doing trim work come into the liquor store I manage — when they do, the aroma of mary-jane can be most-wonderous.

Anyway and meanwhile, and a downer: According to a Pew Research Center survey released Monday afternoon, 49 percent of likely voters say they back Romney, with 45 percent supporting President Barack Obama.

Not to worry, like everything else, it ain’t over until the fat lady stops bogartin’ that doobie.

(Illustration found here).

Along with the poll-oxed, a lot of InterWeb people have become hysterical over the matter, but over at Balloon Juice they just be cool: If Obama does in fact read Sullivan’s blog every day, he must be sitting in the Oval Office, shaking his head and thinking, “Chill the fuck out, white boy.”

On top of that, Biden will kick ass Thursday night.

In this age of the far future — as opposed to the 1960s, I guess — the modern Tweeter world is a-flutter about the 2012 presidential election.
Since I don’t Tweet, or even understand how the mechanism Twitter operates, I can’t fully comprehend the following, but it’s interesting.
President Obama and Mitt Romney’s campaigns can apparently be summed up in three words…

Describing the Obama campaign in three words on Tuesday on the micro-blogging site were these offerings: “Karl Freakin Marx”; “Dumb, Dumb, Dumb”; “Attacking Romney’s Success”; “Making America Canada”; “Dead People Voting”; and “Blame the Altitude” — the latter a reference to Al Gore’s speculation that Obama’s mediocre debate showing might, just might, have been caused by the altitude in Denver.
A small fraction of the tweetage for the president was positive, such as: “Four. More. Years” and “You Lose Romney.”
The #RomneyCampaignIn3Words hashtag also didn’t appear to be designed to draw out high praise for the Republican presidential nominee.
That tag came with these offerings: “President of 1%”;” “Screw Sesame Street”; “Trust, don’t verify”; “An Empty Suit”; “Flip Flopping Phony”; and “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers” — apparently not even on three-word Twitter memes.
Romney got a few nice mentions on Twitter too, such as: “Delivering More Jobs” and “America is Exceptional.”
The latest Twitter fusillade demonstrates how the social media reward the fast and furious, not necessarily the precise.

And this guy gets a second chance — during Sunday’s Bank of America Chicago Marathon, a 47-year-old suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and collapsed, but within a block of a medical tent, and most-importantly, within sight of a medical school student and a doctor.
Via the Chicago Tribune:

The two marathon volunteers rushed to his side and saw that he was unresponsive, Chiampas said. (Dr. George Chiampas, the marathon’s medical director).
One of them began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the man, while the other went back to the tent for a defibrillator.
The volunteers shocked the man once to restart his heart.
When he still wasn’t breathing on his own, they shocked him a second time, Chiampas said.
He became responsive after the second shock.
“They saw that he started breathing on his own. He opened his eyes and became more responsive,” Chiampas said.
“He probably didn’t realize that he actually passed away.”
…
Chiampas on Monday visited the man, who said he was grateful for the help of the marathon’s medical volunteers.
“I can’t speculate to how he’s feeling,” he said.
But “I think he’s extremely appreciative.
I could tell you that.”

Can the ability to stay afloat save a romance, bring on marriage, children and grand-children?
One fictional couple’s future weighted on staying afloat in way-freezing water.
From Slate:

If you Google the phrase “they both could have fit,” you’ll find photos and comment threads devoted to the argument that, at the end of the movie Titanic, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) both could have fit on the bit of flotsam that saved Rose’s life as Jack looked lovingly on, eventually freezing to death.
One particularly popular photo series even implies that the two could have fit comfortably enough on there to, say, play some pinochle while awaiting rescue.
Silly as it may seem to debate the ultimate plausibility of a work of fiction, this little Internet parlor game managed to get James Cameron’s attention.
“It’s not a question of room, it’s a question of buoyancy,” the director has argued.
“Jack puts Rose on the raft, then he gets on the raft—he’s not an idiot, he doesn’t want to die—and then the raft sinks.
So it’s clear that there’s really only enough buoyancy available for one person.”
Now the show Mythbusters has gone ahead and tested this proposition.
Their conclusion: Jack and Rose could have survived.
Cameron defers graciously to their conclusion, merely insisting that the script called for Jack to die, so maybe he and his production crew should have designed the plank to be a little smaller.
But once he watches the video above, I think he’ll reconsider even that amount of deference.
In order to keep them both safely afloat, the Mythbusters guys had to tie Rose’s life preserver around the bottom of the makeshift raft.
Even then, they were still partially submerged, meaning that they would have remained vulnerable to the freezing cold water that finally claimed Jack.
They may be right to deem it “plausible” that Jack and Rose could have survived, but really, the movie is vindicated by this test: Jack and Rose were doomed.

WTF!
And because Jack died, we had WWI, the rise of Hitler and WWII, and eventually bell-bottom pants.
Oh, the misery.