I’ve been radio silence for a while, so in a gesture of cyber-pennance, here’s a list of worthy things to check out around los Internets:

Smart Girls at the Party — a newly-launched Web series featuring Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker and Amy Miles doing a smorgasbord of awesome things (the primary being interviewing young girls who are “changing the world by being themselves.” Which sounds like a load of crap until you realize it’s so true).

I’m Just Sayin — an online gabfest doubling as a satire within a satire within a satire within…oh crap, I lost count.

Also, if you’re not yet religiously glued to Hulu.com, consider this your life-changing moment. And here’s even more gifts: They have The Thing on right now. The Buddha of all creature movies, streamed right to your laptop. Who says there’s nothing to be joyous about in the world these days?

And this movie isn’t online (yet) and if you’re not near Tribeca Cinemas you don’t have much of a chance of seeing it right now. But it’s about human trafficking, it has outstanding musical performances, and the issues it brings to light couldn’t be more important. As I’ve said before, in the midst of an economic meltdown, there’s nothing better than a dose of perspective to reignite reality. Plus the Cornel West soliloquy on funk is worth the price of admission alone.

It’s one of those Internet inevitabilities: Hang around the Web long enough, and you’re gonna get hacked by some dude named Alexei in Estonia who’s carrying out his master plan to take over every URL in creation and repurpose them all for Japanese vomit porn. Or maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, apologies for the delay in posting, all hackers have now been exorcised from the site and banished to their respective corners of the Eastern Bloc.

Good thing there wasn’t anything major going on the past few weeks. Maybe Alexei was a McCain supporter.

It’s pretty safe to say that no one will look back on 2008 and say “Jesus, what a boring year that was.” Those of us who make it ’til New Years (bankers, step away from the ledge — your account balance is nothing resembling your worth as a human being) may even look back on this year with fondness — sort of like a calendric form of Stockholm Syndrome. But until then, there’s this little matter of an election (and however many more economic meltdowns the DOW has up its sleeve) that needs to be dealt with.

Not that I have any strong opinions on which way it should all go down, of course. But the way I see things, it comes down to this: If you like all these semi-apocryphal fall-of-modern-civilization drive-old-ladies-to-suicide your-dentist-could-be-Mad-Max-by-next-year calamities we’ve been having on a daily basis, vote one way.

But if you’re fucking sick of society bringing on its own stupidity-soaked demise, and prefer an injection of intelligence, dignity, and sanity into government, vote the other way.

Happy Democracy!

Last presidential debate, last presidential debate liveblog.

Although technically I didn’t actually liveblog the first debate — my computer was down so I just yelled my would-be blog entries into the empty vacuum. Somehow shooting them into cyberspace is far more satisfying.

NOTE: The best part comes around 2/3 of the way in, when a certain political reporter tells me, in not so many words, to partial birth abort myself. Tea, anyone?

In case you missed the fireworks last night (and are at all bothered by this fact), a few colleagues and I liveblogged the debate over at the Huffington Post. Though honestly, all there really is to take away is that if you’re a registered Republican, McCain won, and if you’re anyone else, Obama won.

UPDATE: And for your viewing enjoyment, there’s video from our liveblogging session last night. Luckily I’d already finished stuffing my gullet with cake by the time they turned the camera on.

By no coincidence, it’s much more fun to write about crappy movies than good ones.

Also, for the record, I’m not an atheist — I just wish the people who make a living preaching that God exists could do a little better job of explaining why.

And finally, a comparison that needed to be made.

It’s hard not to pick up on all the little mantras as you go through life–those pedagogic sayings and catchy idioms meant to jog us out of our daily bitchings. They spring forth from Hallmark cards, insurance ads and suburban church message boards, until they’re lodged in the “wish I could unlearn this” portion of the memory, along with the Burger King jingle and the lyrics to any Pussycat Dolls song.

“Live for today”; “Take nothing for granted”; “Appreciate what you have”; “There is nowhere to ‘get’ in life”; “Enjoy the journey”; “Nothing lasts forever.”

The thing is, you never really expect any of them to actually come true.

One of the nice things about getting older is the number of gods in the universe starts to shrink. I used to have boatloads of gods. They mostly consisted of My Elders — not so much the distant ones, like Reagan and Chuck Robb and Larry Hagman — they were too abstract to rule the fine print of day-to-day life. No, it was the immediate Authority Figures, like my grandmother, Mrs. Ivorian (Himmler fronting as a middle-school principal), my professors, and eventually, of course, the Law Firm Partners.

None of these people were people — they were deities, loftier forms of humanity that didn’t live by the same rules that tethered the rest of us. Whatever they said had inherent importance, and came straight from some Valhalla-like place of omnipotence where they all gathered at night to discuss what to do with the universe and drink sloshing tankers of mead. They all knew things, more than a child or teenager — or early twenty-something — could ever hope to know.

As I made the jarring progression from childhood to pseudo-adulthood, I found a fresh batch of gods at each station — junior high, high school, college, grad school, and finally, my shiny new law career. At each step, I questioned their orders, and even thrashed and writhed and bitched up a storm under their iron fists. But they were still gods, possessed of superior wisdom and knowledge, so who was I to disobey?

Then, as I got deeper into my twenties, I started having crises of faith. And finally, somewhere in the 30-ish suburbs, it hit me: Every one of my gods, from the rainmaking partner to the Morrissey-worshiping camp counselor, was just a person, human as they come, as filled-to-overflowing with shit as I was.

Which, at the time, offered plenty of relief — I could finally start living, minus all the deference, inferiority complexes, and eagerness to please. But then there’s the matter of facing the back end — if everyone is full of their own brand of crap, and no one really has the answers, then we’re all in for quite a time in the future that’s hurtling towards us.

Still, it’s nice to know I can finally spot bullshit when I see it.

The funny think about splitting up with someone after many years is that you find yourself totally reconfigured as a person. All the things you thought you knew about yourself–those qualities you’d pasted onto your mental bulletin board as “You” and pulled out whenever some shmuck in a family gathering or job interview asked you to “describe yourself in 5 words or less”–all those things, you realize, are pure and utter bullshit. The “You” you knew is gone, swallowed in the folds of what used to be an “us.” And now you’ve been completely recast, revised into a different character altogether, with no guidance or direction as to who the hell you are.

“Strong” and “confident” you say? “Capable,” “self-assured,” “sensible,” “positive”? Not anymore, buddy. Try “mewling sap” and “borderline nervous wreck,” while tomorrow might be “acidic bitch” with just a touch of “pissed at the world.” Later this week, we might have a guest appearance from “dysphoric joy-eater” and “spontaneous weeper,” and the Sunday matinee will feature three straight hours of staring into space.

Maybe it’s time to take this show on the road. Or just go to bed until it’s time to wake up as “blank slate.”

I’ve been getting plenty of questions about this, most of them along the lines of: “Does this mean you’re plunging down the moral abyss into lurid sex journalism?” Well, no, assuming there is some abyss down which one can plunge in this already free-falling industry.

But if you’re looking for something a bit “higher brow,” may I suggest checking out Reality Base, my new blog over at Discover Magazine. The blog deals with the messy interplay between science and politics, two realms that have little chance of getting along with each other but risk screwing us all if they don’t. If anything, doing a story about happy endings was a welcome break, not to mention a perfect chance to test one of the great truisms of humanity: Write about global warming every day, draw a couple thousand hits; write about orgasms once, crash the servers.

On that note, if you’re a Sirius radio subscriber, I’ll be on the Cosmo Radio channel tonight at 6:30. Want to take a guess at which topic I’ll be discussing? Here’s a hint: Sure as hell ain’t global warming.