It’s not a pretty picture.

This makes for a better lesson than any episode of “Davey and Goliath.”

Why are Democrats who are actually running for election worse representatives of their viewpoints than, well, an animated dog?

I say it all the time: The attack ads of 2010 don’t hold a candle to those of 1800. Here’s proof.

Here’s the list — and yes, I have flown most of these in the past year. The list isn’t long enough, and the sniping isn’t nearly enough vicious.

NPR is offering streaming of a number of new releases. Regular readers of this blog will understand why I’ve selected the one I have.

Here’s the place to hear the entirety of Brian Eno’s new disk, “Small Craft on a Milk Sea.” (So far it sounds like outtakes from the soundtrack to Myst. And yes, I bought the soundtrack to Myst forever ago.) Fair warning: This particular small craft will be available to you only until November 2nd, when the disk goes on sale (and free streaming thus ends).

IFC is running “Trail of the Screaming Forehead,” a camp spoof of 1950’s low-budget horror films that  (my honorary Uncle) Rich Roesberg swears is deserving of your time, and of a plug on this blog. It’s on this Friday, so you and I can be the judge of that.

Surprisingly, Best Buy had the CD, and in two versions. (“Deluxe” and the other one. “Normal”? “Pedestrian”?)  I just bought one (and bought just one).

I got an email today from Bryan Ferry that his new CD “Olympia” had just been released and that I should go buy it. Which I wanted to do, right away. I’m happy downloading most CDs that I want, but I wanted an actual physical copy of this one, to go with the actual physical record-label copies I have of all his other CDs both as a solo artist and with Roxy Music. I figured I’d stop on my way home and pick it up. And that’s when I realized that Burbank, with a population of 108,000 people, probably no longer has a record store where I could buy this.

Yes, we have several stores selling used CDs (and LPs). And yes, we have a small music store that sells hip-hop and urban music. But Music Plus and the Virgin Megastore  went out of business, and The Wherehouse has devolved into a store that carries mostly used CDs and only a smattering of new releases. Best Buy carries some CDs, as do Target and KMart, but I’m not betting they’ll have this. Which means I would have to go to Amoeba Records in Hollywood to get this.

It seems odd in an era of more choices and more convenience to suddenly be faced with fewer and less. I guess I’ll wait a week before going to Amoeba, because then I can get Brian Eno’s new disk, which comes out November 1st, as well.

Eight false things the public “knows” prior to election day.

Whatever you think of President Obama’s policies, there’s no arguing the degree of technological change he and his administration have embraced. His campaign was the first to embrace social media on a large scale and win with it. Howard Dean’s campaign was first to do Meet-Ups and micro-donation campaigns. Building upon that, Obama’s campaign added Twitter, Facebook, text messaging and more. Given that increasingly this is how people communicate, I’m glad that the person at the top recognizes it. (And I remember Bush the First’s stunned appreciation of a supermarket scanner that seemed to magically code in his prices! That faux pas showed how out of touch he was.)

I just finished reading a New York Times magazine profile of Obama that began with his signing a piece of legislation with eight different pens, so that there were as many as possible to distribute to supporters. The photo above, from Tech Crunch, shows a man named Sylvester Cann IV asking the president to sign his iPad at a campaign event for Washington Senator Patty Murray. Which he did. Which makes me wonder what gifts future supporters will get, because the pen is going the way of the buggy whip. Two weeks ago on “Fringe,” part of the plot line was the obsolescence in the show’s alternate universe of pens. How did the agents know they’d found the right place to find the culprit? They discovered people using pens. As we do with LPs, some day we will be explaining to young people just what a pen was, and how it was used.