Tonight’s the first Romney-Obama debate, and I’ll be watching.

My prediction: Unless Mitt Romney falls on his face so hard that he shatters every bone in his physiognomy — or unless Clint Eastwood wanders onto the stage — the press is going to anoint this as a win for him. Why? Because they want the game to go on. Look at all the coverage of polls; to focus on polls is to focus on the horse race, and not on the real need for political impact. Today I read a front page story in the Wall Street Journal about how Obama and Romney are pretty much tied. How many people in this poll are likely to vote? 832. That’s right, 1000 people were polled, and 832 of them are likely voters. 832 people who were almost assuredly influenced by the very fact that they were being surveyed, as essentially proved by Heisenberg.

One thing I’ll be looking for is how well Mitt Romney does with on-the-job training. Sure, Obama is now experienced at being President. But Mitt Romney is far more experienced at running for President — he’s been running for President for six years. (And, seemingly, getting worse at it.)

This is amusing. Wrong, but amusing.

On Saturday, I took my family to the Los Angeles County Fair, which contains four thousand acres of smoked turkey leg booths, plus some rides and animal exhibits. We saw the cows, the goats, the chickens, the horses, and the little carnival fish you can win if somehow — somehow! — you’re able to tip over three heavily weighted “milk bottles” with a carefully imbalanced softball.

But what I really wanted to see were the pigs.

I like pigs. I admire their optimism and their team spirit: They’re always rooting for something. I like to watch them, and pet them, and also eat them. In theory at least, I like a pet that you can eat when it’s outlived its ability to greet you cheerily at the door, and pigs fit the bill. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine in Omaha adopted a baby pig and let me hold it at a party, and when it fell asleep in my arms, I was in hog heaven. I’d like to have a pig like that, but so far this idea hasn’t gained any traction with my wife. But if I can’t have the pig (for now), at least I can go admire them at the county fair.

So it was that I read this particular story with great interest, about a 70-year-old Oregon farmer who somehow got eaten by his hogs. This is not the natural order of things, at least not since we overtook nature about 100 years ago. (And the natural order before that was to be avoided at all costs.) Apparently, all that was found of him were his dentures. As for the rest: R.I.P. — Rest In Pigs.

Here’s Apple’s apology letter (analyzed) — and some advice from CEO Tim Cook about what to do because Maps sucks so bad. (I.e., “use other stuff instead.”)

Thanks to Sandy Kurtz for letting me know about this.

It’s Batman.

As a zombie.

A big tip of the hat to the genius who came up with this.

Last night we had a major family emergency that meant I had to run out with my 10-year-old at 8 p.m. on a Sunday: He and his sister had had a mishap with the Xbox, scratching the disk for “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and rendering it inoperable. Thankfully, we located a Game Stop that was open that late, and sanity was restored.

On the way home, we were listening to music in my car. One song in particular caught Dietrich’s attention. (Yes, my son’s name is Dietrich, as people keep inanely asking me, “Your son’s name is Dietrich?”)

“Who’s this?” he said.

“Sonic Youth,” I said. “Why?”

“This is the most awful song I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, your mother would agree with you. But your sister and I like it.”

“It’s awful. What’s wrong with it?”

“The guitars are purposely tuned ‘wrong,'” I explained helpfully.

“Yeah, but what about her voice? She sounds terrible.”

Hm. One person’s “terrible” is another person’s effect. Just last week I had forced one of the designers at my company to purposely “misdesign” a client’s ad so it would get more attention. In this way, I like to think I have some distant kinship with Picasso, who applied those “rules” of his art before he broke them. But none of this made any impression on my son, or, at least, not any positive impression.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want this to end!” Again, it was almost as though he were channeling his mother, who has been known to casually reach over and turn a dial, any dial, to remove the offending noise.

So now I think when I get home I will share this news with Dietrich: His new favorite band, Sonic Youth, has just recovered some stolen guitars. Guitars that were stolen 13 years ago. So now they can make even more of this discordant, irritating, off-key music.

That is, if the band hasn’t broken up, as it apparently has, in the wake of the divorce between bassist and “singer” Kim Gordon and guitarist and singer Thurston Moore. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s a whole back catalog I can introduce the kid to. And wait ’til we get to Captain Beefheart!

I get asked this sometimes. Here’s the answer:

Sometimes 46 minutes.

Sometimes a couple of weeks.

Sometimes a few months.

Sometimes four and a half years — as in the case of the play I just finished. Started it in 2008, and then oddly today I had the feeling that I could finish it. No, I don’t know why. Hadn’t even looked at it in years. But I cracked it open and looked at it and, yes, finished it.

(Which means there’s still hope for the play I started in 1990….)

On Monday, I woke up feeling somehow a little out of sorts, the way that we sometimes do and can’t explain. Maybe it was just too much Maker’s Mark the night before (but it had seemed so right at the time!) or maybe it was the recognition that there was nothing on my schedule that day (almost unheard of), but finally, in the middle of the afternoon, I decided to go see a movie. “Robot & Frank,” to be precise, of which I would recommend the first 80% — up to the point when the police stake out Frank’s house — after which I suggest you leave.

And that’s what I wish I had done, because the movie, wonderful up to that point, falls off a cliff after that, and because I suspect that that’s about when something was happening to my car in the parking lot at the Burbank Town Center. Because when I returned to my car and got in and went to back out and looked into the passenger-side mirror to ensure there was no one behind me, I found myself staring into a black empty space where my mirror had once been. The mirror was gone. I got out of the car and walked around and looked at this emptiness, and then walked to the front of the car — no idea why — and then back to the mirror, and then all around the car, somehow disbelieving that this had happened. I mean, this was Burbank. It’s not like I was parked in Eagle Rock (where my Toyota Celica was smashed into with a football-sized piece of cement in 1990 in a failed attempt at car theft). And this parking spot was near IKEA. I mean, if you can’t trust that your car is safe when it’s entrusted to IKEA, where can it be safe?

Long and short on the car: It’s a BMW, so I knew this mirror — just the glass and its little electrical cable, not the whole assembly — wouldn’t be cheap, and I was right. Replacing it cost me $438. The deductible on my auto insurance? $500. So now seeing “Robot & Frank” cost me not 10 bucks, but almost five hundred bucks. I liked the movie, but not that much.

Then my wife called. I assumed she was on her way to work, but no. “Are you on your way home? There’s an incident here and I can’t leave.” “Incident.” I figured our kids were arguing. No. I got home to find that my gardeners of 15 years, two brothers, had decided to have a drunken backyard brawl on my property in front of my children. They were drinking beer while mowing the lawn and trimming trees, then they hung around and drank some more, then they started belting each other and rolling around in the mud. I didn’t get to see any of this, but my 10-year-old son did. He reported that Juan seemed to get the worse of it because “he had more blood all over him.” My wife said she didn’t call the police because the one brother had already had drinking-related issues — which made me think that a wake-up call from the authorities was precisely what he needed — but I needn’t have worried about that, because two blueshirts in a squad car showed up anyway because two neighborhood teens had called them. I think this way: that when kids call the police, the fight must look pretty serious. It must not have seemed serious to the police, though, who were very cavalier about it but who quizzed my neighbor no fewer than six times about whether or not he was one of the combatants. When I told these cops that these men had been my gardeners for 15 years and now I was firing them, one of them said, “That’s a shame. Maybe you can work something out,” evidently confusing my locale with that of Mayberry RFD. “They were rolling around drunk in the mud having a fistfight in front of my kids,” I said. “This isn’t a Hemingway novel.”

So I got my car back today, mirror freshly replaced, and I’ve been collecting referrals for gardeners on Facebook. Someone asked why my kids don’t just “mow the lawn” — someone in Brooklyn, NY, with no sense of the scale of the job. My kids have a fair number of chores (many more than their friends, they tell me), but I’d rather have the avocado tree, lemon tree, orange tree, sugar cane, grapes, fig tree, tangerine tree, and even the trees without edible products, plus the lawn, tended by professionals. I’d just rather these professionals not roll around among these plants while drunk and beating each other.

In paper format, anyway.

Take a look at the slide below; it tells the story.

And yes, I’m still reading from paper. And I will miss the paper books too. And I suspect that moving from paper to screen will mean a further decline in reading. And remember the NEA study from about eight years ago that found that the number one factor behind whether children were readers or not was the presence of books in their house? The presence of screens translates into the further presence of video and games, not “books,” such as they’ll be. So I’m concerned about this.

But here’s the disturbing photo, and here’s the story about it.