Nicholas Brown: Conventioneering: Thursday, August 28

by Nicholas Brown [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

I have updated Wednesday's blog to include the events of last night. You can see it here.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

12:02 pm MST - Denver is the mile-high city, which is easy to forget until you try to run in it. I gave myself a brisk reminder of the altitude this morning with a half-hour detox run to prepare my body for the abuse I intend to put it through this evening at Invesco and the parties thereafter.

One detail of last night that has been under-noted: the second song as Bill Clinton was leaving the stage was 'addicted to love.' Hilarious.

My sister is online hypothesizing about a purchase of the 'pulse smart pen,' a device that records ambient sound and labels it according to what you are writing. We live in quite a world. Before this next president's term is out there is every possibility that I will be writing posts like these directly from my cell phone, which will automatically hyperlink the text for both content and advertisers depending on the location of the reader. I might say 'I am hungry' and some smart phone user would click the word 'hungry' and receive an ad for the Bennigan's (or whatever will take it's place once they finish filing for bankruptcy) half a block away.

And that's just media. The pace of industry and the fury with which the world economy consumes industry's output make change an inevitability these next few years. I am even willing to say that 'change we can believe in' is pretty much a foregone conclusion. I come from a long line of pessimists, so I am not yet convinced that it will be change for the better. It is my general assumption that the world is slowly but inevitably rotting. But if I am wrong and we can prevent New York from sinking or someday help overturn the Burmese military junta or just generally have a positive impact on all of the horrible things that seem to be happening everywhere... well, that's the whole 'hope' thing. And it does seem pretty damn audacious. I think most of us are waiting to be swept up in Obama's candidacy and tonight seems like as good a time as any to get that started.

But I have wandered a long way from any point. There's not much to do right now but wait.