Here’s the lede from a New York Times piece that shows just how John McCain or Barack Obama would handle the economy.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama released their Senate financial disclosure statements on Friday, revealing that Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt and that Mr. Obama and his wife had put more than $200,000 into college funds for their daughters.

Who knew Obama was such a traditionalist? Saving to buy things: how old school.

McCain, though, really does represent all of us, doesn’t he? And if the street wisdom is true and we get the president we deserve, then I guess he will be unbeatable this fall.

No idea if we get the Planet Green channel at my house (last time I really checked such things, the TV had a top dial that went up to 12, and then U, after which we you had to turn to the bottom dial, which went up to 83).

But if we don’t get Planet Green I guess I’ll see if I can add these episodes to my Netflix cue, because this piece on Slate has me very interested in seeing the new “reality” show starring Ed Begley, Jr. To wit:

If Alter Eco is Planet Green’s Entourage, Living With Ed, which first aired on HGTV, is its Curb Your Enthusiasm. Actor Ed Begley Jr., who boasts of having owned an electric car as early as the 1970s, is the cranky head of household; his wife, Rachelle, is the spouse battered by her own embarrassment. The show would have us believe that a typical morning at the Begley home sees Ed riding a stationary bike for two hours to generate the energy to make toast. Rachelle scoffs at this and then tosses her Los Angeles Times in the garbage can, and then Ed scolds her and heads up to the roof to spend time with his solar panels. Living With Ed is clearly the most phony and least enlightening show yet devised about the home lives of celebrities, and I include Keeping Up With the Kardashians in that count.

I’ve met many a “cranky” environmentalist myself, and would offer all of them this advice: You might do a better job of achieving your mission if you’d come down off your high horse once in a while to meet all of the rest of us, who are equally concerned about the planet as you but don’t have all your time, or money, or desperate need to seem superior.

Here’s my friend and colleague Shelly Lowenkopf on the top 10 political novels.

In the future, this book might show up on a revised list, one that includes fantasy.

I’m very happy with how my one-act play, “About the Deep Woods Killer,” has turned out in the 2008 Moving Arts Premiere One-Act Festival. It’s a tribute to the cast, to everyone involved in the production, and especially to the director, Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Mark really understands the undercurrents in the play and has worked with the actors to express them. If you’ve never had a bad or mediocre production (and I have), you can’t fully understand how invaluable it is to have a director who understands your play and, in Mark’s case, your overall body of work — and who also has the talents to bring that vision to the stage. I’m grateful. Mark and I have been doing theatre together for 15 years; he’s directed my plays before, has acted in my plays, and I’ve directed him several times, as well as producing plays he’s been in. We’re a good match. If I’m lucky we’ll be doing theatre together for another 15 years, and beyond.

In the same festival, I think Terence Anthony’s play “Tangled” is a standout (and is a play I’m going to blog about later today or this weekend, when I have a chance), and I’m quite taken with “Compression of a Casualty,” which marries an Ionesco-esque device with  contemporary CNN coverage of the death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, to great effect and, to my immense thrill, into an indictment of the timid and celebrity-obsessed mainstream media. I’m glad we’re doing that play, and I’m delighted to see the inestimably talented Michael Shutt prove, yet again, that he’s among the most versatile theatre artists I know.

The festival runs three more weeks. Here’s more info, including ticket information.

Slate has a brief but valuable piece on Werner Herzog’s forthcoming documentary, which you can read by clicking here. The film’s called “Encounters at the End of the World” — but it seems to me that that could have been the title of almost all the Herzog films. To wit:

• “Aguirre, Wrath of God” — in which would-be conquistadors run up against the savagery of the undeveloped new world (a nice riposte to the quaint green notion that nature is bucolic and enriching, when those of us who grew up in it know that when it’s not boring it’s deadly)
• “Grizzly Man” — in which an intrepid naturalist deep in the wild finds himself literally consumed by his passion
• “Lessons of Darkness,” which blends CNN footage and Herzog-shot footage of the burning oil wells of Kuwait into a science-fictional vision of the rapacities of humankind and the destructive force of a wounded environment
• “Even Dwarfs Started Small” — which features a group of deranged dwarfs evidently far cut off from civilizing forces convene chaos onto their benighted habitat
• “Fitzcarraldo” — in which a mad visionary is ultimately defeated in his quest by the unrelenting realities of the Amazonian jungle and a treacherously independent river

I could easily go on. The Herzog films that don’t star an extreme exterior location are concerned with an extremely bizarre interior condition; par example: the two films featuring Bruno S., an odd and mentally limited man whose ineffable motivations perfectly match with Herzog’s interests. Bruno is either a very bad actor, an idiot savant who is utterly convincing in his stunted abilities, or simultaneously both; he is also eminently watchable in “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” where he is perfectly cast as a strange man released into polite society with utterly no suitable training for the experience.

According to Slate, here’s the narrative of the new Herzog film, which I await with relish:

It’s a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month “austral summer” of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted—all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn’t involve penguins. What he returned with is a lyrical group portrait of McMurdo’s motley crew of scientists, technicians, and lifelong travelers—men and women whom one local labels “professional dreamers” and whom those of us who live on more populated continents might affectionately call “crackpots.”

You see the recurrent theme: extreme environment is met by crackpot theorists.

For those who care about these things and will be lucky enough to be in Los Angeles next February, Herzog will be speaking (as well as performing a concert of some sort) as part of the UCLA Live spoken word series. Here’s the link. I will be there.

“Hulk: Smash!”

You heard it here first.

On Saturday, the act begins: The act in which Hillary Clinton tries to rise to the occasion and bury all the hurts and indignities of the past 18 months and, like Lyndon Johnson (whom she famously referenced), admit her defeat to someone younger and (seemingly) less experienced who captured the zeitgeist in a way she was unable to.

That will be the external Hillary. Here will be the internal Hillary:

Here she is captured in this photo in a way we’ve seen innumerable times since January when her fate first became apparent. And no matter what you see on Saturday and beyond — a sunny buoyancy and an arm draped around her victorious foe — remember that, inside, this is the true look.

And you know what? I understand. We all should. She’s human. She’s ambitious. She believes she was right, and secretly hopes that he loses in November so that history will vindicate her. Even though I think she’s wrong, and has been wrong, and will be wrong, who among us can’t understand the terrible depths of her anger and humiliation?

Y’all.
Youse.
You-uns.
You guys.
All of you.

These are just some of the regionalisms that Americans use to substitute for the lack of a different plural form of “you” in English. My favorite is the one employed in my mother’s hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania:  “Yins.” Yes, Virginia, there are many thousands of people in the Pittsburgh area who say “yins” when they’re addressing a group of people. My theory is that “yins” is a further contraction of “you-uns.”

Even though in my own speaking voice I use just “you guys” and “all of you,” I love every one of these locutions. For playwrights, they’re useful baubles to adorn characters with. But until yesterday I had forgotten one, and shame on me. Spending the day in Philadelphia, and seeing the Bill Irwin show “The Happiness Lecture” – developed with an ensemble of Philadelphia theatre artists – reacquainted me with one of the best plural-you forms in the country. Here it is, and no, I’m not making this up, and please keep your mind out of the gutter:

Yizz.

Hillary Clinton looks like she knows her flight is coming in for a landing. Bill, meanwhile, is still flying too close to the sun. For further proof, click here. These are not the rantings of someone grounded in fact.