Watch Keith Olbermann channel his inner Murrow.

If YouTube has to take down the video, Crooks & Liars has it, too.

At a Drinking Liberally a few weeks ago, a staffer for Patty Weiss practically salivated at the thought of facing wingnut-conservative Randy Graf in the general election. “Please let him win,” she said. “It would make my job so much easier!”

I’m not so sure, though. I have a theory.

These midterm elections have already seen a lot of incumbents thrown out, but the driving force behind it isn’t anti-corruption or anti-Republican — it’s anti-incumbent and anti-Bush. Naturally, those sentiments favor Democrats, since Bush is a Republican and his party holds all three branches of government.

But I’m not sure Democrats realize that you can be Republican and run against Bush. Which is what Graf is doing, especially on this year’s gay marriage wedge issue, immigration.

Tucson Weekly just released the first independent poll of AZ-08′s primaries, and it shows Giffords and Graf with sizable leads. Giffords is a centrist, DLC, Lieberman-type candidate with state-level experience and (therefore) the support of local and national Democrats. The Republican Party apparatus threw its support behind the moderate Steve Huffman, and they’re apparently in despair at the possibility of a Graf primary win. Even Robert “Douchebag of Liberty” Novak is calling my district a “likely” Dem pickup.

But if voter anger is directed at incumbents, wouldn’t they choose an outsider, insurgent candidate like Graf over an insider, party-supported candidate like Giffords? Especially if they let anti-Mexican hysteria take over their senses?

I aired my doubts at the last DL, where my amateur political consultancy was largely rejected. Michael Bryan of azcongresswatch.com agreed with the common wisdom that Graf is too extreme for what is supposedly a moderate district. Tucson kept sending gay, pro-choice Republican Jim Kolbe back to the House every year, after all.

Still, I don’t know. The common wisdom may not apply in a year when incumbents have been losing primaries to insurgents like never before.

Since it looks like Graf will be the Republican candidate, I suppose we’ll find out. I certainly hope it’s that easy.

Incidentally, allow me to make my second endorsement: Patty Weiss. James is going with Jeff Latas, who’s a good choice on issues and background, but lacks money, polish, and name recognition. Weiss has the last two from years as a local newscaster, which makes her a good stop-Giffords choice. As a bonus, she has a strong anti-war stance and lacks Giffords’ centrist/corporatist tendencies. And as another outsider candidate, I think she has a better chance of beating Graf.

Luann took me up to Mt. Lemmon today for a picnic and a hike. It went about as well as can be expected, given my nervous, adversarial relationship with Nature. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it was a typically brilliant, cloudless day at 8000 ft… so now I’m sitting here, exhausted and sore, with lobster-red arms and neck, smelling faintly of aloe vera lotion.

I even brought sunscreen with me, then completely forgot to apply it. Does that make me smarter or dumber than if I’d left it behind in the first place?

DAMN YOU, SUN! You win this round… again.

The one with the waggily comments?

…or about 0.08% of the value of Neil Gaiman’s blog. Which sounds about right.

Actually, that still seems high… but the number is apparently based on what AOL overpaid for a blogging company, so it’s all in jest anyway.

(Crossposted from The A-Button Forum.)

Trace Memory turned out to be a neat little 5-hour adventure with enough story and gameplay innovations to be worth the $20.

The story is… pretty much non-existent: a young teen travels to an island to meet a father she thought was dead. Soon after arriving, her guardian disappears, too, so she explores an old mansion to find him. Along the way, she meets a ghost named D, and together they solve some Myst-style puzzles in order to recover pieces of her father’s and D’s past.

After a tutorial-style chapter 1, the puzzles settle into a pretty satisfying difficulty level — I only checked a walkthrough a couple of times. Where the puzzles excel is in their use of the physical nature of the DS itself. The stylus is put to plenty of use, sure, but one of the puzzles is solved by closing your DS then re-opening it. The idea didn’t even occur to me as a POSSIBILITY until I read the walkthrough.

In between chapters, you are given a quiz on the last chapter’s events, which fits nicely into the broader theme of recovering memory.

I wish the script contained words longer than one syllable, since clicking on an object to receive a message like “The plates are old” isn’t all that satisfying, but that seems par for the course for DS games. My only real complaints are with the ending:

1) You lose your ability to save during the entire last chapter. That isn’t a big deal since it’s not terribly challenging. But it’s a looooong series of conversations, so make sure you won’t be interrupted before you start chapter 6. (When you first load the game, you’ll notice there’s already a save from the end of chapter 5. That’s why.)

2) It’s possible to finish the game and NOT solve the subplot/mystery of D’s past. That’s what happened to me. I’m still not sure what I missed, and even at a mere five hours in length, I’m unmotivated to replay it while slavishly following the walkthrough.

Weird Al most certainly does not want you to click here to download “Don’t Download This Song,” a track from his upcoming album Straight Outta Lynwood.

No. Because downloading music is WRONG. Next you’ll be robbing liquor stores and running over schoolkids with your car.

The suprising amounts of rain we’ve had in Tucson over the last few weeks has played havoc with the locals, who have to deal with flooded roads and suddenly-leaky roofs. I’m loving it, though. It’s like I brought a bit of Seattle with me.

As an unexpected side effect, I looked out the windows at work today and saw the usually-brown, rocky mountainsides covered with… green. The sandy landfill across the wash was similarly covered with new sprouts of green. In the nearly six total years I’ve spent in Tucson, I can never remember that happening.

It’s a weird feeling, like I’m looking at a barren alien world in the early stages of terraforming.

Once again I had the itch to get out of town this weekend, so I drove up to Tempe, AZ with Luann. Yes, my idea of a vacation apparently includes someplace HOTTER than Tucson in August. Luann wanted to make a beery pilgrimage to Four Peaks Brewery, so Tempe it was.

After we checked into the hotel and ate at Ra Sushi around the corner, we took a cab to Four Peaks and then drunk-walked the 1.5 miles back. Actually, with all the bars around the ASU campus, it was more of a bar-hop than a drunk-walk, which made the journey more enjoyable. We also took a detour through Sun Devil Stadium and the surrounding roads, which were closed for construction and full of temptingly abandoned equipment. We didn’t get into too much trouble, though, since a security guard materialized and we chickened out.

The hotel was just off of Mill Avenue, which is sort of the ASU equivalent of Tucson’s 4th Avenue, but more prefabricated and yuppie (like the rest of Phoenix). Which is not to say only prefab yuppies were there — when we returned around 1:30am, a hippie drum circle had formed outside the local Post Office, of all places.

Finally, on the way back the next morning, I made my first-ever trip to

Ikeeeea!
Just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen
Ikeeeea!
Selling furniture for college kids and divorced men
Everyone has a home
But if you don’t have a home you can buy one there!

where I purchased some stackable bookshelves. What a supremely odd place. All the visual overload of the floor of San Diego Comic-Con, but with furniture and meatballs.

And all of the salespeople talked like this. Honest.

Stephen Colbert has my back:

All of these? They’re On Notice. If they’re not careful, someday they’ll be Dead To Me.

(Okay, those of you who aren’t Colbert fans are probably scratching your head in confusion right now. The rest of you can make your own customized board by clicking here.)

This Jonathan Coulton song is, um… uncomfortably familiar. It describes a mindset that I slip into all too easily. At least I’m not the only one.