Well, no October Surprise or Black Swan event has happened yet (as of 10/21), but the Kamala Harris appearance on Fox News was big enough to be well worth Woody and I discussing nonetheless. Also, I for one have been doing a _ton_ of research on all sorts of things about the election since last time. (Everything from hard science to vibes to... astrology?!! Yeah, because, heck, why not, right?) So I wanted to aggregate and share lots of the stuff that I've learned and heard.

I do realize that we're rather heavy on the Politics and rather light on the Pop Culture at the moment... but that has to be expected when we're this close to the Presidential election. I certainly expect to balance it out more again after all this excitement ends.

After catching the Vice-Presidential debate on Tuesday 10/1, Woody and I got our initial impressions together, then also incorporated more of what we heard about it afterwards before recording this on Thursday. After going through that, we continued on with some further thoughts about the election and how things are progressing now.

We're past Labor Day in our election year here now, and I was just visiting my brother Dave in Jacksonville Beach. So I figured I'd take the opportunity to get his perspective on the situation, from outside the DC area in a red, but almost swing state.

Woody and I watched the first (and possibly only) debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday night, September 10th. These are our own reactions from just afterwards, before hearing the general media consensus.

In this episode, John and I discuss the MCU's only cinematic release for this calendar year, Deadpool and Wolverine! And we also discuss where it looks like things are heading in the MCU next.

Note that this is a full spoilercast, and there are definitely some key surprises in the movie that are much better if you don't know about them going in. So, if you're not one of the people who used one of the (at the moment) $1.262 billion worth of tickets sold, then maybe hold off on listening to this until you can catch the movie yourself, either in theaters or when it comes to Disney+ sometime soon.

This flashback episode includes part of the seventh episode of the Spaghetti Sass podcast, from January 2022 (with a quick new introduction). The centerpiece of that episode involved some thoughts on Kamala Harris and impressions of her at that time. Obviously, since she's become the Democratic Nominee for the 2024 election, she's become much more significant in the political landscape. So I figured this would be a good opportunity to go into "where we were then" before recording and posting a new episode involving "where we are now."

Sometimes in politics, events happen and circumstances change so quickly that it's virtually impossible to record, edit, and upload a podcast episode before the whole political world changes.

That said, every podcast episode is a reflection of the point in time at which it is recorded... so it's really just a snapshot anyway.

This episode is meant to create a record, for posterity, of a very specific point in time. It is AFTER: the Biden debate debacle, the Trump assassination attempt, the JD Vance selection, and JD Vance's convention speech. But it is BEFORE: Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump had bad performances with his convention speech and his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, and Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate.

This is part 2, the conclusion.

Sometimes in politics, events happen and circumstances change so quickly that it's virtually impossible to record, edit, and upload a podcast episode before the whole political world changes.

That said, every podcast episode is a reflection of the point in time at which it is recorded... so it's really just a snapshot anyway.

This episode is meant to create a record, for posterity, of a very specific point in time. It is AFTER: the Biden debate debacle, the Trump assassination attempt, the JD Vance selection, and JD Vance's convention speech. But it is BEFORE: we heard about how Trump lost a ton of goodwill with his convention speech, Biden dropped out of the race, and the Democrats selected their replacement nominee.

This is part 1. To be continued...