An updating of “Steamboat Willie.”

Thanks to Isabel Storey for making me aware of this. (She always knows what’s going on.)

Here’s my wife’s advice to the Obama-Biden campaign prior to this evening’s vice-presidential debate:

“All I can say is, I hope to God Joe Biden keeps his mouth shut.”

Can’t do better than that.

It’s been years since I wrote a comic strip, but I think it’s time to take one up again. It would feature my precocious and sometimes menacing six-year-old boy Dietrich, who alternates between being charming and funny and acting like Dick Cheney, except less pleasantly. His foil would be his older but outgunned 10-year-old sister Emma.

A sample strip could be drawn directly from this dialogue which ensued on Sunday night after he refused to help his sister clean up the kitchen, but still wanted access to her Xbox game “Marvel Ultimate Alliance.”

HER:   Uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? “No.”

HIM (matter-of-factly):     Emma, trust me. I can make your life much more miserable. So you don’t want to say that.

HER:     Why should I let you play a really cool fun game when all the apology I get is I’m sorry? I don’t get any help or anything? No. You’re going to have to do something for me.

HIM:      Like what, pee in your pants?

I remind you, he’s six.

Hm. People seem… skeptical… about the $700 billion bailout — so skeptical that Congress actually voted against an appropriation. (That made for a truly red-letter day.)

Hey. Congress. Why so skeptical?

Could it have anything to do with this?

This morning my 6-year-old son saw me sealing a Netflix envelope and asked me what movie I was returning.

“Scenes from a Marriage,” I said. (The Ingmar Bergman movie.)

He perked up. “Can I watch that with you?”

“Why?” I said. “It’s just a movie about two married people talking.”

Now he turned away. “That’s boring. I thought there was shooting and killing.”

The cover of this month’s Inc. magazine features four young entrepreneurs behind the headline “Cool, Determined, Under 30:  Meet the brains behind America’s smartest new companies.” (No link because the current issue isn’t on their website yet.) One of the entrepreneurs, labeled “The Trendsetter,” is Una Kim, who “didn’t like girly sneakers. So she did something about it.” The story inside gives us further background on Kim — BA, MBA — and the line of shoes available from her firm, Keep Company.

What the story fails to note about the shoes, and what I learned only from the entrepreneur’s website, is that they’re laughably ugly.

The last time I saw shoes this ugly they were in my closet in 1984 and were made from an ill-fitting black petrochemical compound that wrapped around each foot like a hotdog roll, with thick black laces replacing the mustard stream. My girlfriend said they looked like Polish bowling shoes. Hilarious, yes — but at least they weren’t $95 a pair.

Una Kim’s shoes are certainly different — and serve as yet another reminder that “different” does not always equal “better.” I could come up with a new taste for coffee by pouring battery acid into it, but that wouldn’t be better. (And it might not even be that different, given the remarkable taste similarity to Starbucks house roast). The best way Una Kim could improve these shoes would be to put bells on the tips. And then take them back in time five hundred years.

I guess chocolate comes from the snowmen in Pittsburgh.

Harry Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Put another way, dogs are so loyal that they’re even loyal to politicians. So you must have a truly loathsome character if your dog leaves you for another human.

John McCain has truculently agreed to make himself available for tonight’s debate. (I guess that economic crisis that required all of his attention has now been resolved.) I’m saddened by this. I was looking forward not only to the spectacle of Barack Obama debating an empty chair (good practice for a re-election debate against Sarah Palin), but also to the clever uses of that footage all over the internet.

I wonder if this means McCain is also resuming his campaign. If he’d like to shelve it until December, I suspect that would be fine with many of us.