Beam Me Up, Wolf!

We’re all a little bleary-eyed around here since we’ve been up late two nights in a row. Monday night was the Steelers victory over the Redskins, and then last night we were up watching the election returns.

Little Smoot has been rooting for John McCain, so it was a disappointing night for her. She sat there clutching her “Country First” campaign sign she got at the rally last week, and she grumbled every time they changed another state to blue on the big map on CNN. She still hasn't washed her hands after shaking hands with McCain last week. Granted, she probably would have forgotten to wash her hands for that period of time anyway, but still.

At one point she looked at me and gave me her own expert analogy, which I thought was pretty good coming from a 10-year-old. She explained, “It’s like John McCain and Barack Obama are in an actual race, and McCain keeps stopping to tie his shoes.” Being as sympathetic to her as possible, I told her, “No, it’s more like he bent over to tie his shoes, but he fell down a cliff and into a river, and the river is sweeping him backwards.” She didn’t seem to appreciate my analysis.

Speaking of analysis, did you watch CNN’s coverage last night? I am not sure whether to be in awe of their gadgets, or simply be frightened. At least twice during the night, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper interviewed correspondents via hologram. Seriously. Wolf and Anderson were in New York, but they had some magical, Star Trek-like thing where they’d beam correspondents in from Chicago or wherever, and it would look like the other person was standing with them in the studio.

Granted, the hologram people had a weird blue-ish glow around them and it looked like they had mild disorders of the central nervous system, but I’m sure the technology is still in its infancy. Plus there’s just something weird about the idea of being “beamed by Wolf.” I dunno.

I’m not sure how many other cool gadgets they had because I spent a lot of time channel surfing. Thanks to DirecTV, we have a single channel where we can literally watch eight channels of coverage simultaneously! Could life get any better? I think not.