Nora Ephron2010-02-09T07:50:23-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=nora-ephronCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nora EphronGood old fashioned elbow grease.Top 10 Thanksgiving Recipes You're Cooking This Year That You Didn't Cook Last Yeartag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3678942009-11-25T14:48:45-05:002009-11-26T03:12:59-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/Third Annual Huffington Post Tell Us What You're Cooking for Thanksgiving This Year that You Didn't Cook Last Year Contest -- and here they are.
I myself am inspired by the sweet potato pudding recipe and just might have to try it.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone and thanks for all the great entries.
]]>The Third Annual Huffington Post "Tell Us What You're Cooking For Thanksgiving This Year That You Didn't Cook Last Year"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3538982009-11-19T10:35:56-05:002009-11-20T12:23:14-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
What we're looking for is not the thing you cook year in and year out, but the recipe you're trying this year for the first time in order to give yourself the illusion that your Thanksgiving dinner this year is slightly different from your Thanksgiving dinner last year. This, in turn, is meant to make you believe that you are capable of change. Underlying all this is the implicit understanding that Thanksgiving should not be meddled with too much, and that even a small alteration in the basics can cause problems with children. Once we went to a Thanksgiving at my sister's house, and the stuffing had porcini mushrooms in it, and my eight-year-old had a meltdown and I was in complete sympathy.
This year we're going to cook our turkey the high temperature way, the easiest way to cook a turkey there is: salt & pepper the turkey, cook in a 450 oven, and drain occasionally. No brining, no basting. I swear, it works. It's a miracle. And it takes only 2 1/2 hours to cook a 14-16 pound bird. I mentioned this method last year, but I see from reading the newspapers that there are lots of food writers who still insist that you brine a turkey and baste it forever. I don't get it. The high-temperature method of cooking turkey is the food equivalent of an epidural, and why anyone would go on having a long painful experience when a short painless one is available mystifies me.
This year, for a change, we're adding some sausage to our traditional stuffing recipe -- we use Pepperidge farm herbed stuffing in the cellophane bag with blue trim, celery, onion, twice as much butter as is called for on the package, stock, and a pound of crumbled hot breakfast sausage we plan to buy from Flying Pigs Farm at the Union Square Market.
Anyway, send in your recipe. Then we'll select and post our ten favorites Thanksgiving week. (And please be sure to type out fractions--1/2 cup, for example--because symbols won't display correctly.) Then we'll select and post our ten favorites Thanksgiving week.
]]>In Defense of Ryan O'Nealtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2534222009-08-06T18:56:00-04:002009-09-06T05:12:02-04:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/Vanity Fair, that he recently failed to recognize his own daughter Tatum at a funeral and accidentally made a pass at her.
Everyone is very judgmental about this, but I just want to say that I sympathize.
A couple of years ago, I was standing in a mall in Las Vegas when I saw a very pleasant-looking woman coming towards me, smiling, her arms outstretched, and I thought, who is this woman? Where do I know her from? Then she spoke and I realized it was my sister Amy.
You might think, well how was she to know her sister would be in Las Vegas, but I'm sorry to report that not only did I know, but she was the person I was meeting in the mall.
It was not entirely my fault that I didn't know my own sister. Amy has a variety of hairstyles and you never know which one of them she will show up in. Also, she was wearing a new pair of glasses. But for the most part, I was to blame: I'm getting worse at recognizing people. My hard drive is full. And it's more and more difficult to keep track. People you haven't seen in years go gray, or gain weight, or have facelifts, or take up hats to cover their bald spots, or put an excessive number of highlights into their hair, and then they expect you to recognize them.
As it happens, Ryan O'Neal had not seen his daughter Tatum in years. He thought she was a Swedish person. I completely understand. The truth is that had I been gay, I might have accidentally made a pass at my own sister in a mall in Las Vegas. So who's to judge? Not me.
]]>The Play's The Thing, But It's Not The Only Thingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2184632009-06-22T00:00:01-04:002009-07-22T05:12:01-04:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
There are many other things that give me that feeling - the 14th Street Greenmarket, the frozen custard at the Shake Shack, the air-conditioning on the subways, the red-tailed hawks, the Chrysler Building, to name a few - but it all seems to crystallize on those nights in the Delacorte Theater.
Anything can happen at Shakespeare in the Park. Herons land on stage. Planes fly over. This year, I read in the papers, a raccoon wandered onstage. Sometimes the actors forget their lines, and sometimes they break up laughing; it doesn't make any difference. The sheer exuberance of the cast - and, as I said, the fact that the show is absolutely free - makes the audience absolutely giddy. And it's such a completely obvious and satisfying metaphor for New York, or at least our idealized version of it -- as the cultural capital of the world that anyone can come to and be welcome in.
Every play at Shakespeare in the Park benefits from an entirely unconnected and thrillingly-suspenseful subplot - the question of whether it will rain before the evening ends. Two years ago, we saw a Romeo and Juliet that stopped short before the lovers died, and no one cared. Last year, at Hair, the heavens exploded at the exact moment the audience rose to cheer at the end of the play. Only the least hardy were daunted: most of the audience joined the cast onstage and danced with the players, soaking wet.
Shakespeare in the Park: go to Publictheater.org for showtimes. And bring your umbrella.
]]>Addicted to Lovetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2015442009-05-11T11:25:25-04:002009-06-11T05:12:01-04:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
As long as you go on saying it.
Dick Cheney won't go away. It's hard to adjust to life out of the spotlight, and apparently he can't. "If I don't speak out, then where do we find ourselves?" he says. This guy is not going to lick his wounds and slink off to his kennel, no way. It's just like the old days: George Bush was busy relaxing, so somebody had to do the job.
Cheney is speaking up to remind us:
what things were like after 9/11
that waterboarding works
that the Republican Party is not really in trouble
He's here, he says, lest we forget.
To which I say, amen.
In some fabulous way, Cheney's ubiquity is an ongoing reminder of the eight years he was the key man in the administration; given the short attention span of most Americans, we must salute him for sticking around. He's a living memorial to the Bush years. He gives new meaning to the words "Never Again."
Sunday on Face the Nation, he did his thing: he feinted, he evaded, he alluded, he lied. He insisted there was proof that waterboarding worked in those famous files he can't quite produce. He said he would be glad to say this to Congress, although not necessarily under oath. He was asked if George Bush knew what Cheney knew about the decision to authorize torture, and he answered, "Um, I certainly, um, yeah, I have every reason to believe he knew, uh, he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. This was a presidential-level decision and the decision went to the President and he signed off on it."
Would he choose Rush Limbaugh or Colin Powell be the face of the Republican Party? Rush Limbaugh, he said. After all, Powell had endorsed Obama.
Classic Cheney. He is becoming practically Nixonian in his inability to be anything but his own charming self.
At the top of the show Sunday, Cheney made clear that he was on the show because he'd been asked, and added, "It's nice to know you're still loved." He was no doubt making what passes in his circle for a joke; but as we know, there are no jokes. Cheney wants to be loved. That's okay with me. You gotta love the guy.]]>Stop the Musictag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1889612009-04-20T11:26:36-04:002009-05-21T05:12:01-04:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/written something this morning that begins by saying that Susan Boyle's moment in history may have been totally fabricated but it doesn't matter because something true came from something false. I have no idea what the piece goes on to say, because I'm afraid to read it. Because the worst thing about Susan Boyle -- and there are several, but I'm going to deal with only one -- is that she sings that horrible song. That song is worse than all of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it's worse than "It's A Small World After All." That song from Les Miserables that Susan Boyle sings is the all-time most horrible song ever in history, and the reason is simple: it sticks in your brain and never stops playing. Even if you watched Susan Boyle only once, dry-eyed, it sticks for days and days. And just when you think it's gone, you see the title in print, and it starts playing again.
Many years ago, when I was young, I had a boyfriend whose father had a symphony in his head. It wasn't Beethoven's Fifth, or anything worth listening to -- it was a completely original symphony. My boyfriend's father was not a composer; the symphony existed only in his head, and every time he lay down to try to sleep, the symphony began to play. He had to buy a special pillow that played the sound of the ocean in order to get the symphony to disappear.
I was fascinated by this, so fascinated that it's something I remember (as opposed to all the things I have forgotten). I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be tormented by the sound of music, but now I know: it's what happens when you get older, only in my case, it's not a symphony, it's just a series of bad songs. And they play and play and play. All day long. They play in rhythm as I walk down the street, and they float in and out of my brain as I work. Sometimes I dream them. In fact, I would say that on many occasions I dreamed a dream of them if I weren't so afraid of saying those unspeakable words. I have my very own soundtrack that plays to my very own life, only instead of consisting of songs I love, it's composed of the songs that stick in my brain. It's a form of hell, and that's the truth.
I understand that it will be weeks before Susan Boyle gets up to sing again in front of that show, but there's no question in my mind what she will sing in the next round: that song from Titanic. And in the next round, that song from The Bodyguard. I daren't even say their names or they will start playing.
]]>My New Play: Like the Vagina Monologues but Without the Vaginastag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1622262009-01-29T12:13:24-05:002009-03-01T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/ If you would like to come see it, go to www.LoveLossthebenefit.com for tickets, or call Telecharge at 212-239-6200. The show starts at 8. Tickets are $50 (for a great cause).
Click on the image below for full-size poster:
]]>It Ought To Be A Wordtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1586322009-01-16T17:34:06-05:002009-02-16T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
George Bush came into his presidency with a huge wave of goodwill. Not from me, but from the others. An amazing number of people who should have known better thought of him as a charming guy whose intellectual limitations would somehow be as benign as Ronald Reagan's, whose promise of a fairly passive presidency would be as survivable as Dwight Eisenhower's. So he couldn't seem to get a sentence out straight, so what? And as for his religious rigidity, that was simply his way of dealing with an alcohol problem without the sloppy conventions of AA.
He was misunderestimated in every way. It was hard to imagine that this feckless leader could do so much damage. But even as the worst emerged, he was given the benefit of the doubt because of the ongoing mysteries of his administration -- mysteries that have remained unsolved in spite of the skills of hundreds of gifted journalists who have attempted to uncover them:
Who exactly was running the country these last eight years?
What did the President know, if anything, and when did he know it, if ever?
Was he capable in any way of even one sleepless night, much less the ongoing insomnia that any sentient person would suffer after so many wrong decisions and pointless deaths?
Did he mispronounce the word "nuclear" 1) on purpose, in order to make himself seem folksy 2) because he actually thought he was pronouncing it correctly or 3) just to piss us off?
The exit appearances that Bush has made in recent weeks will be something future presidents will refer to as often as Lincoln's Second Inaugural, although for different reasons. Here's what he said:
We did the best we could under the circumstances.
It's not easy being President.
It wasn't completely my fault.
Everyone makes mistakes.
I kept America safe, except for this one time.
After that one time I worked really really hard almost every day and had to read a lot of stuff about foreign countries.
This is Bush's legacy -- a stunning series of alibis. This is what he will crawl off to Texas with, hoping that it will fool a publisher into giving him a substantial book advance and contributors into giving him money for a library full of pilfered papers.
On Monday, we will have to get used to a different thing entirely, a president who's in the loop, who reads history, who speaks decent English. He will rob of us of something -- of the burning anger that has sustained us the last eight years, and that will take some adjusting to. But we're up for it; after all these years in the dark, we're ready for a little overestimation. Which is, unlike misunderestimation, an actual word. But come to think of it, misunderestimation ought to be a word. I certainly know what it means.
]]>The Second Annual Huffington Post "Tell Us What You're Cooking For Thanksgiving This Year That You Didn't Cook Last Year"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1454672008-11-21T13:08:19-05:002009-11-13T17:26:02-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/Update: The results are in! We've selected our second annual Top 10 Thanksgiving Recipes By Huffington Post Commenters. But, please, keep the recipes coming.
Welcome to the second annual HuffPost recipe exchange - based, as always, on our profound belief that Thanksgiving dinner - your Thanksgiving dinner - is a lot like ours: you've got things you make year in and year out, things that remind you of your mother (like the scalloped oysters that no one but you eats), things that remind you of your friends (like the green jello mold recipe I got from Rita), and the things that came to you through outside written material (like the way we cook our turkey now, courtesy of the Gourmet Magazine November 2005 issue: we salt and pepper it, stick it unstuffed into the oven at 450 and drain it every so often; no brining, no basting; it's absolutely remarkable; trust me). (And by the way, it takes only 2 1/2 hours to cook a 14-16 pound bird to a divine dark crispiness.)
And then there are the things you make for the very first time in order to prove that you're neither your mother nor a hopeless prisoner of your own hidebound traditions and your grown children's irrational demands for sweet potatoes with marshmallows. We want to know about those things, the things you're making this year that you've never made before. Of course, you can send us an old recipe instead, we don't care. We just want you to send a Thanksgiving recipe. Then we'll select and post our ten favorites next week. (And please be sure to type out fractions--1/2 cup, for example--because symbols won't display correctly.)
This year, in keeping with the tenor of the times, I am making a recipe I got from the Internet, or, to be more exact, from the monthly email newsletter I get from the great Seattle chef Tom Douglas. It's for dip. I have been looking for a good dip recipe my entire life, and this is it -- Tom Douglas' mother's crab dip. It's not just easy and delicious, but it's loaded with crab, so it gives you the illusion that because it contains protein, it's good for you. In a large bowl mix 3 TB tomato paste with 1 TB honey. Then whisk in 3/4 cup mayonnaise, 2 TB chopped chives, 1 TB lemon juice, 1 seeded and minced sweet red cherry pepper (from a jar of sweet cherry peppers in vinegar), 2 TB lemon zest, 1 TB prepared horseradish and a dash of Tabasco. Then fold in 3/4 pound crabmeat and one chopped-up hard-boiled egg. Add salt and pepper and a little lemon to taste. Serve with really good potato chips.
Happy Thanksgiving. We have a lot to be thankful for this year.
]]>Exhaletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1412732008-11-05T01:51:39-05:002008-12-05T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
It was difficult for the candidates who ran for office and for the operatives who masterminded the campaigns and for the journalists who reported on them, but it was also difficult for those of us who simply watched, night after night, clutching our remote controls, surfing the web, staying up till two in the morning manipulating the electoral college scenarios. We were hooked on Hardball and fell in love with Rachel Maddow. On Sundays we TiVo'd the political shows and spent most of the day watching them. Sometimes we even watched Fox -- that's how desperate and crazy we became. We were exhausted and exhilarated and we desperately believed that this was the most important election of all time and we would die of grief if Barack Obama didn't win, and to make sure he did win we held our breath.
We held our breath through the conventional wisdom:
Hillary was a done deal. Barack Obama would have to raise his energy level or else. The country would never elect someone so professorial. The Bradley effect was alive and well. Obama was Michael Dukakis all over again. The Reverend Wright was a catastrophic mistake. Michelle Obama was too angry. There would be an October surprise. Israel would bomb Iran. Osama bin Laden would make a videotape. There would be a dirty bomb in a suitcase. Those women from PUMA might matter. The vice-presidential candidate never makes a difference. Obama should have picked Hillary instead. A pitbull in lipstick. Lipstick on a pig. Obama should never have gone to Berlin. Obama should never have gone on vacation to Hawaii. Twemty-seven per cent of the American people thought he was a Muslim. The Republicans would rig the voting machines in Ohio. Everything depended on Pennsylvania. America would never elect a black president.
By the end of the summer we were drained, we were spent, we were maxed out. Then the economy crashed. At that point it was over, but we didn't know it: we continued to hold our breaths through the debates. But the country had made up its mind and the debates didn't matter at all.
Tonight, at eleven o'clock, the endless election ended. It was divine. It was amazing. It was (depending on what commentator you were watching) either "an" historic event, or "a" historic event. And we can breathe again.
]]>Thinking About Billtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1409262008-11-04T11:14:03-05:002008-12-05T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
I think about Bill Kristol far too much. I almost never used to. Before he began writing his Monday column in the New York Times, I rarely saw him on television. Whenever I did, I was mostly mesmerized by his uncanny resemblance to Bob Woodward (whom he no longer resembles) and his incredibly self-satisfied, smug, smirky demeanor. It was my theory that his need to please the Republican White House -- a need that seemed to trump his alleged intellect and even the factual evidence on hand -- must stem from some unresolved issues with his father, the famous Irving Kristol, one of the first neo-conservatives. But I didn't dwell on it, because I saw so little of him. And in any case, I truly couldn't stand him. I just couldn't stand him.
I don't enjoy being in this position. I much prefer to be perversely fond of people others find problematic. I am crazy about Pat Buchanan, for example, and I have fantasies of following him around for a day in order to find out what it's like to never ever be off the air. I am utterly entranced by Keith Olbermann, and I watch his show in much the same way others go to hockey games. Don't get me started on Chris Matthews: I am practically in love with the guy. But it seemed impossible to find a way to like Bill: he was just too irritating.
And then, unaccountably, amazingly, astonishingly, he was hired by the New York Times to write a once-a-week column. You cannot imagine the thrill of horror that passed through New York on hearing the news. The Times already had a conservative columnist (of whom I was already perversely fond), and one conservative columnist was quite enough, thank you. Then Kristol's column began. I read it religiously every Monday. And slowly but surely, I became infatuated with him. How could I not? The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.
In recent months, I have thought about Bill more and more. Every time someone turned over a rock, he crawled out from under it. In Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece on Sarah Palin, for instance, he turned out to be the man who'd discovered Palin, during a cruise of Alaska, and brought the news of her potential stardom back to the New World. And of course he was one of the reasons why we'd gone to war in Iraq. Iraq. Sarah Palin. The man was uncanny. Last week I watched him on Jon Stewart, insisting that McCain might yet pull an upset. "It's not a psychodrama," he said. "It's only an election."
People like me sometimes wonder what it would be like to be involved in mistakes that end up killing people; we wonder about sleepless nights and remorse and guilt. Bill Kristol exists to remind us that these are pathetic liberal fantasies, and that some people are never sorry. Only last week I saw Kristol on television continuing to defend Sarah Palin: she was a bright woman, he was saying, who'd simply been mismanaged by the McCain campaign.
]]>Off the Medstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1351132008-10-16T01:54:26-04:002008-11-15T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
No question the man who turned up last night did a better job than he'd done at the previous two debates. But here's the problem for McCain: he's either last week's guy, who seems to be on medication, or he's this week's guy, who seems to have been abruptly taken off it.
He gave the game away in his first answer when, in talking about the economy, he said that Americans were angry. But Americans aren't angry, they're poleaxed. They're terrified. They're afraid they're going to lose their jobs or their homes or their pensions. They're worried they won't be able to send their kids to college. If John McCain thinks they're angry, it's either because he's projecting, or else he's simply been going to too many of his own rallies.
As he smirked and blinked and raised his eyebrows, I couldn't help wondering what tonight's McCain seemed like to all those conservative pundits who'd been hoping a different McCain would show up. Is this what they meant? Is this the John McCain of Bill Kristol's dreams?
Whichever McCain shows up, some things stay the same. He's a towel-snapper. He can't land a joke. He seems old. (As Martin Short said on Letterman just after the debate, "The only time he doesn't have to pee is when he's peeing.") And he's an absolutely terrible actor. Every time McCain went into his Joe-the-plumber-bit, those undecided voters on CNN were unmoved. They were probably not saying barf, like some of us were, but that's only because they're not allowed to talk amongst themselves during the debate.
At the Time Politics conference this week, New York Times columnist Frank Rich asked, "Was there any way that the Sarah Palin choice might have played out differently?" CBS' Jeff Greenfield gave a wonderful answer. He said the question reminded him of a woman friend who'd said of her divorce, "We would have had a wonderful marriage if he had been a completely different person." Isn't that great? It's practically a Zen koan, not that I know what a Zen koan is. But one of the most remarkable things about Barack Obama is that he's the same person every time he shows up. And as for John McCain, a completely different person showed up tonight, and it didn't seem to matter.
]]>Life in the Shallow Endtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1328502008-10-08T01:07:23-04:002008-11-07T05:12:01-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
I don't mean to be superficial, but let's face it, I am. And there's nothing like a presidential debate to remind me how deeply superficial. It's not that I don't hear what the candidates are saying, but I always begin by noticing what they're wearing, and whose shirt looks better, and of course, whose tie. I spent a great deal of the first debate upset about the way Obama's shirt fit too loosely around his neck, and I had quite a lot of fantasies about how to help him in this area. If I were married to him I assure you he never would have left the house in that shirt.
By the time tonight's debate was minutes old, I had decided that Obama had won. His shirt looked great, and his suit fit beautifully. This seemed important. He sat down in a chair that was basically unsittable and he looked fantastic. He loped around the stage, holding the microphone as if he'd been born with a silver one in his hand. Compare that to McCain: his jacket fit oddly and his way-too-wide tie was poking out of the bottom. He was unhealthy -- overweight and out-of-breath, almost gasping for air every five or six words. And he looked so stumpy and awkward walking around the stage that I couldn't imagine why he'd ever thought a Town Hall format would be good for him.
I feel a little guilty about all these shallow criteria, but not too guilty, because in some horrible way, these debates are really not about substance but trivia. We have been with these guys a long time, and we now know what they're going to say and how they're going to say it. McCain repeats himself way worse than Obama -- "my friends," "earmarks," etc. -- but both of them are guys we've been married to for a long time, and we know their stories. It's true I had no idea that McCain learned everything he knew from a chief petty officer, but that was about the extent of the surprises he had in store for me after all these years together, and in any case, it was clearly bullshit.
But the point I'm leading up to is that both candidates are good at what debates are now about -- not making a mistake. It's amazing that they spend ninety minutes on a stage discussing the burning issues of our time, and in the end it can boil down to a slip of the tongue, a moment that's perceived as over the line, a factual mistake that can be made into a "gotcha" moment.
McCain came close to making a mistake, and there will be a big deal made over his referring to Obama as "that one" because it was patronizing and revealing. But in the end that moment will seem like yet another misguided attempt at the sort of casual joke McCain fails to make work most of the time. If I were married to him, an unlikely scenario, we would probably have fought in the car on the way home tonight, because I told him a million times not to try to be funny, but he never listens to me.
And if I were married to Obama, another unlikely scenario but a far more attractive one, I would be driving home having a hard time not thinking about the curtains.
]]>The Graph and Itag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1314872008-10-03T00:45:46-04:002008-11-02T05:12:02-05:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
This was the first time I've watched a debate on CNN, and it turns out to have this graph running along the bottom of the screen, a graph that allegedly represents the moment-by-moment feelings of a group of supposedly independent voters in Columbus, Ohio, who sit, with some sort of electronic devices, and register their warmth or cool as the debate goes on.
Well, this is no way to watch a debate. It reminded me of this thing that's happened in New York City, which is that all restaurants with more than fourteen locations have to put on the menu the calorie count of each food item. This is an appalling development. It's hard enough to figure out what you want to order without someone explicitly telling you that you're going to drop dead if you eat it. But more important, I don't believe those calorie counts. Who knows how many calories there are in a grilled cheese sandwich? No one, that's who. But there it is, on the menu, in a grim black and white parenthetical, and it affects you, you can't help it, and as a result you end up not ordering the thing you wanted and instead ordering some stupid bowl of soup that barely gets you through till three in the afternoon.
Well this graph on CNN affected me, it affected me so much that I could barely focus on the debate, I was so busy watching the graph. I knew it was completely unreliable and irrelevant, and yet my heart sank and rose according to it. I sort of heard what the candidates were saying, but mostly I watched the orange (for women) and green (for men) lines rise and fall as each phrase was uttered. When Sarah Palin spoke and the lines went up, I felt irritable. When Joe Biden spoke and the lines went up, I felt happy. Don't get me started on Gwen Ifill.
Every so often Sarah Palin would say things like "darn right" and "bless their hearts" and "you betcha" and I noticed that the people in Columbus were unmoved by Palin's folksy expressions, at least according to the graph; this gave me faith in America. But then I reminded myself that the graph was probably as unreliable as the calorie count that caused me not to order what I really wanted to eat for lunch.
When the debate was over, we were all sad to realize that it had not been the exciting blood bath we were hoping for (I mean, let's admit it) but thrilled to hear that Biden was the winner. So I came home and celebrated: I had a grilled cheese sandwich (530 calories) (not really).
Read more reactions to the Biden-Palin Vice Presidential debate from HuffPost bloggers]]>Ringsidetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1298222008-09-27T00:42:01-04:002008-10-27T05:12:01-04:00Nora Ephronhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/
I was, by the way, the least pessimistic person in the room where we watched the debate, a room full of blue-state pinkos, and our hearts had collectively sunk as we watched Obama miss opportunity after opportunity to score a knockout punch -- as the men in the room tended to put it. (Women are at a decided disadvantage in conversations of this sort: we have no interest whatsoever in the resemblance of presidential candidates to people like Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore.) Because everyone in the room was so depressed and simultaneously full of manly boxing references, I felt guilty even mentioning my concerns about Obama's shirt, which was too loose around his neck, and which was another reason why I thought he had lost the debate -- that, along with his incredibly irritating habit of closing his eyes while standing up.
Anyway, as I say, the impression that McCain had won lasted about a minute, when we began flipping through the stations expecting all our fears to be validated by the dozens of commentators ready to offer their views. To our amazement, the only overlap between our room and the pundits were the boxing references. Obama had won. Even the people who thought McCain had won more rounds than Obama thought Obama had won. McCain had been patronizing. He'd referred to Pakistan as a failed state, which turned out to be untrue. Even Charles Krauthammer thought Obama had done fine. A focus group of undecided voters in Nevada on the Fox Channel (Fox!) had responded more positively to Obama than to McCain.
Could this possibly be true? I don't know. But I decided to do the only thing I could under the circumstances: stop watching the pundits on television for fear it would all change again. They will be on all night discussing the heavyweight championship of the world, but I am going to sleep.
