Only five more days of media coverage of this damn election!

For me, this election has been going on since September 2007. That's when I arrived in France, where my only English-language TV channel was CNN International, and pretty much all they ever talked about was the election. I can still recite all the commercials for The Campaign Trail with Jonathan Mann. "Who says the American election has to be boring?" "We never go anywhere on The Campaign Trail without packing heat!" "Stakes are high, people are cheering -- someone could get hurt!" "Who's telling the truth and who's making it up? On The Campaign Trail, we call it the Truth-o-Meter!" "Join us next time on The Campaign Trail. We'll do lunch!"

Easily the most annoying commercial on TV right now is the one for Special K chocolate cereal. Has anybody else seen it? The woman is frosting a chocolate cake with her kid, and she's just about to lick the bowl, but then she doesn't because she can have a bowl of this chocolate cereal instead. Ridiculous, right? I mean, the bowl of frosting is in her hand! No woman -- hell, no person -- has the willpower to resist licking a bowl of frosting when it's sitting there in their hand! It's so stupid that I yell at the TV every time I see it.

On that subject, my brother's birthday is tomorrow (he was born on Halloween; it suits him) and Grandma is making him a shrimp dinner and a yellow cake. I walked Sable over to her house after I got off work tonight, and I happened to walk through her door just in time to lick that bowl of yellow cake batter. Yellow cake batter is even better than yellow cake. This is why I could never make one; I'd eat the batter instead of baking it.

Last week Sara found this plastic replica of a human fetus at twelve weeks old that somebody left in her store. She's spent the last several days slowly, literally chewing it to pieces. That's right.