7800 Genehackman Blvd.

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — I had never heard of this Twin Cities suburb before this trip, but it turns out that Bloomington is the fourth-largest city in Minnesota. And it's home to Mall of America.

My hotel is on Normandale Blvd.

Normandale. Normandale.

Oh, right. Norman Dale, head coach of the Hickory basketball team in the film Hoosiers.

Civil war

FRANKLIN COUNTY, Iowa — These tiles above the bathroom at a rest stop off I-35 commemorate what most of us call the "Civil War."

Liberal media

FRANKLIN COUNTY, Iowa — Note the lead headline in today's Des Moines Register.

The view from a mile high at Mile High

DENVER — I'm not going to lie. It was a bit hard to see, what with the flag waving and being in back of the stage and all. But I saw enough. And as you can see from the bottom photo, occasionally Barack turned around to give me a view of something other than his back.

It was totally worth waiting in a 6-mile-long line.

Much more on this night later.

Again with the glasses

DENVER — A guy selling "Obama in a Bottle" was weird enough. But the Obama he put in a bottle is the same picture of him carrying glasses. Why does the common cardboard cutout of Obama have him carrying glasses?

Face the music

DENVER — If TV newscasters don't find political conventions newsworthy, fine. Then they shouldn't cover them. But why do they show up, dedicate hours of airtime... only to talk over the convention speakers themselves? As this picture shows, the CNN crew chats away while the convention takes place. At Pepsi, they rarely turned around to face the convention stage. Ever.

Invesco was different, but we'll get to that later.

John King

DENVER — It wasn't enough to party with Anderson Cooper the other night. I had to dine at the CNN Grill and find more cable news stars to chat up. John King fit the bill. Nice meeting you, John. It's interesting that you converted to Judaism before marrying Dana Bash. Now get back to your Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall.

Logos

DENVER — It took a few visits to the Pepsi Center before I realized the similarities between the soft drink giant's logo and Barack Obama's logo. How appropriate.

Super Bowl

DENVER — New Zealand has the Super Loo. But Denver has the Super Bowl!

Hillary

DENVER — Hillary, seen above casting some sort of spell on the front-row delegates, delivered a good speech tonight. That is, as far as I could tell. I was sitting in the very last row.

Here's what it looked like for me, without the zoom:

Big Tent

DENVER — The official Blogger Alley inside the Pepsi Center is a peaceful room for Internet reporters to follow the convention and file their stories. The unofficial Big Tent, picture above, does not require an official DNC credential. And it's hopping.

MSNBC on Segways

DENVER — I'm not the only one zooming around Denver on Segways. MSNBC has Segway street teams trying to round up a crowd around its stage.

But while MSNBC spent its money on Segways, CNN clearly spent its money on location — its stage is inside the security perimeter, meaning only people with DNC credentials can gather in front of the cameras.

Google to the rescue

DENVER — The good people at Google know how stressful it can be for Democrats to party at open-bar events into the wee hours with their well-connected friends. Here at the Big Tent (which has fantastic WiFi, by the way — unlike the official Blogger Alley), they are giving out free smoothies and massages.

I might stay here awhile.

Old Chub

DENVER — It's a great slogan. But using it on any old thing cheapens the message, right?

I'm a sucker for fake mountains

DENVER — Hello from the Pepsi Center, which is starting to fill up, despite the fact that the opening gavel isn't for another four hours. This may be a green convention, but it feels like about 60 degrees inside the arena, which is about 30 degrees less than the temperature outside.

Blogging on a basketball court

DENVER — I don't want to get into a whole thing here, but the Pepsi Center has no WiFi. Not even here in Blogger Alley. (They do provide hard-wire ethernet cables, but still.)

Pro-Obama taxis

DENVER — See the Obama bumper sticker? The cabbies here know where their bread is buttered. At least this week.

I should come to Denver more often

DENVER — The last time I was in this city, President Bush created the largest conservation area on the planet, Hawaii's Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Bush used the 1906 Antiquities Act to set aside 140,000 square miles as off limits to commercial fishing and energy development.

Now that I'm back in Denver, the Associated Press says Bush is pushing to "make three of the world's most remote and pristine island chains off-limits to commercial fishing and mineral exploration." Bush's proposal would conserve a marine area nearly three times the size of Texas.

Storming Denver by Segway

DENVER — Yes, I should be wearing a helmet. Also, it's illegal to operate motorized vehicles on the sidewalk... so I should be in the street. Once I got the hang of riding a Segway, I zoomed around in the street, obeying all applicable laws of course.

It was fun!

Breaking and turning takes time to learn. And once I did, it was time to get back on my bike, which all of a sudden seemed very complicated to propel.

Meanwhile, the restaurants here, much as I left them a couple years ago, continue to offer their food "smothered" in sauce.

Did you believe the naysayers?

Perhaps you've noticed that I get frustrated by annoying questions from sports reporters. In today's installment, I bring you three questions NBC’s Julie Foudy asked of several members of the U.S. women's soccer team moments after they defeated Brazil to win the Olympic gold medal.

• "After all the adversity this team has been through, losing your leading goal scorer in the very last game, was there ever a moment where you doubted that you would get to this stage?"
• "When you guys lost that first game to Norway, when there were doubters who said this team can’t do it without Abby Wambach and some of the other stars that were missing, what was your response as captain?"
• "When people would say again you know that maybe they don’t have enough, that when there were naysayers, when you showed this collective effort, what was the conversation as this Olympics went on?"

Vision you can believe in

At the Americana political memorabilia store on Pennsylvania Ave. stand cardboard cutouts of Barack Obama and John McCain.

Obama, as you see, is holding glasses.

Wait a minute.

Does Obama wear glasses?

Is he holding them for someone else?

What's going on here? Even if Obama does indeed wear glasses, he clearly doesn't wear them enough to merit documentation on his universal cardboard cutout.

Royale with cheese

Our latest McDonald's update comes from Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News. Over the weekend, Williams blogged about the differences between the hamburger chain in China and the U.S.

Describing the lead-up to his interview with Michael Phelps, Williams wrote:

All he wanted after yesterday’s race was McDonalds. Before our interview, a producer asked him for his order. He initially wanted a cheeseburger, Big Mac and fries. Then I stepped in (having done the research) and told him that the double cheeseburgers here were good, better than in the States. I told him there was no mustard on them, and that the minced onion was kept to a minimum. I could see in his eyes that he realized he was in the company of a fellow aficionado. He changed his order — so excited at the thought of McDonalds for the first time since arriving here in Beijing — and the interview began.

Gypsy Days?

After learning that someone on the Dallas Cowboys attended a place called "Northern State," I looked up the school online.

Featured prominently on the Northern State site is a promo for Gypsy Days 2008, which is a continuation of a university tradition that began in 1916.

Gypsy? As in the Romani people?

Credit where it is due

A couple years ago during the Winter Olympics, I criticized NBC for tape delaying its coverage of the Italy games and being "incapable of showing more than four minutes of any event at a time before cutting in to tell us about yet another event that happened 10 hours earlier."

I wrote:

"Instead, NBC should show the events in full on its various channels (NBC, USA Network, MSNBC, Universal, MSNBC) and let the viewers do the flipping. Then if we want to watch bobsled, we can do that without interruptions of how skiing and figure skating are going."

This year, that's exactly what they've done. It's been great!

Edit: This morning's USA Today reports that negotiations will begin this fall for the TV rights for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. ABC, the newspaper reports, is likely to enter the bidding. With many more channels at its disposal (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic, ESPNU, ABC Family, Disney Channel, Toon Disney and SOAPnet), I hope they win.

It's twice the size of his head

Are you sure that microphone is big enough for you, Bob?

Bush shows his scars

I finally got around to watching the 4x100 freestyle relay. You know, the one in which U.S. anchor Jason Lezak came from behind to beat some mouthy Frenchman by 8/100ths of a second.

Anyway... after the U.S. won the gold, NBC cut to a crowd shot of President Bush, sporting a nifty scab on his right arm. What happened? Did he take a fall while biking the Olympic mountain bicycling track?

Olympic moneyball

During the Olympics opening ceremony¹ the other day, one of the NBC announcers mentioned Project 119 — a Chinese initiative launched in 2001 to boost its Olympic success by concentrating on medal-rich sports of track & field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoeing/kayaking.

Whereas a world-class basketball or soccer team can win only one medal, a world-class swimmer (as Michael Phelps is proving) could win 8 gold medals. If China can successfully coach up its top-notch athletes² to compete in the Project 119 events, it could lead to many more medals.

China choose the number 119, since it was the total number of gold medals at stake in the medal-rich sports the nation is targeting. Since Project 119's inception, however, the number of gold medals for those same events has increased to 122.

And that makes Project 119 even more brilliant.


¹Why do some people call it the opening ceremonies? It's just one ceremony, right?
²China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, has many such athletes.

IAD-LAX

Back in April, Tucker Carlson had this to say of Barack Obama:

“Obama’s the kind of guy you sit with on a flight from Dulles to LAX and you have a few glasses of red wine. You have a great semi-drunk five hours across the country. But you don’t know anything about the guy. He could be the escaped state mental patient.”

Hey, maybe Carlson is right. Perhaps the nation is filled with voters who can relate to getting semi-drunk on red wine on flights from Dulles to LAX.

We'll see.

Evolve, dammit!

While touring the Galapagos in February, I thought a lot about evolution. Then I returned home to my regular life, in which I think more about annoying news crawls than Darwinism.

But last week, while spending time killing the mosquitoes and sand flies that were harassing me at Beach Plum Island State Park, the topic came back to mind.

Why haven't mosquitoes evolved to have bites that don't bother humans (and the other animals they bite)? Mosquito bites cause irritation and itching, and lead us to kill them when we get the chance. If mosquitoes learned to bite without causing itching, we wouldn't seek them out to kill them. Those mosquitoes would be the ones to live and pass on their genes.

So why hasn't this happened yet?

Things to think about while kayaking

LEWES, Del. — Last year, I was here in the first town in the first state when Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record. I learned about the feat the following day while perusing the TVs in the Sony outlet store, which were re-running the moment on a loop.

I had a feeling that big news would strike again this year while I'm in Lewes. You know, like McCain or Obama (or both) picking vice presidential nominees.

Today, I woke up to learn that the Packers have traded Brett Favre to the New York Jets.

I'm sad, of course. But that's for me to deal with during football season. Now it's time to head back to the beach!

Ambassador now

The newspaper had a story the other day about the new China embassy, located just off Connecticut Ave. in Van Ness.

The 250,000-square-foot building was designed by C.C. Pei and Li Chung Pei, sons of I.M. Pei.¹

But for the actual construction, they flew in hundreds of laborers from China, who took over an entire Days Inn.²

Did you get that? There was an entire Days Inn hotel filled to capacity with workers flown over from China to build the new embassy.

Ironically, Chinese laborers also built the new 10-acre U.S. embassy set to open in Beijing.

I wonder who built the Days Inn.


¹Is Li Chung the only Pei who uses a full first name? How does the rest of his family feel about this?
²It's that Days Inn you pass on New York Ave. in Northeast as you're heading up to the BW parkway.

Two equal heroes of Western Pennsylvania

FINDLAY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Here at the Pittsburgh International Airport, there is a featured display of two American patriots who helped shape the development of the United States we know today: George Washington and... Franco Harris.

George Washington, of course, fired the first shots in the French and Indian War and helped drive away the French from Fort Duquense at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. (Later, of course, Nate McClouth would hit a home run into the Allegheny near that very spot, winning my love for PNC Park.)

Similarly, Franco Harris is a Pittsburgh icon, what with the "immaculate reception" and all.