By way of apology for being the most snooze-inducing person on your Friends list for the last couple of weeks, I'm going to mention something different before I start - the new Audio Preview feature on Youtube.

It's not that remarkable in itself - it just gives you a shaky Stephen Hawking-like readout of the first couple of hundred characters of your comment before you post it - but what's really interesting is that XKCD stopped just short of suggesting this very feature a couple of weeks ago. I'd be prepared to call it a coincidence rather than life imitating a webcomic, but what really makes it suspicious is the patent uselessness of the feature - I can think of no other reason for an audio preview of a comment that will be displayed as text other than it being an attempt to display just how much of a moron you are before you post something rather than afterwards when you inflict it upon the world. So it's all quite strange. Will it work? No.

We watched the second of three debates a couple of nights ago, and despite McCain's earlier promise to take his heels off, throw the gloves down, put his nose to the wall and wield a double-edged sword in the shape of a boomerang at him, he didn't really press about any of Obama's questionable ties to people who were a bit dodgy throughout, instead going through the same insistence that he might have a plan about some things having done something or other in the last 94 years of being in the senate. Unsurprisingly the polls afterwards seem to indicate that people generally like Obama more once again, which is nice.

Both sides threw out the rules fairly quickly, as they were meant to have a minute each to answer each question, and kept running well over their allotted time, despite Tom Brokaw increasingly wearily asking them to pay attention to the time indicator lights around the stage, stopping just short of saying "If you don't start sticking to the rules I'm keeping you both in at lunchtime". I feel that Obama made a mistake by choosing to largely ignore one question and instead respond to an accusation made that he would raise taxes (while it's fairly obvious that he won't, for the vast majority of people), leaving McCain to leap up and declare "I'll answer the question". By this point he was looking like he was enjoying the chance to say that far too much, almost like some sort of seedy enthusiastic stage magician ("Elect me and watch the country disappear!").

It was nice at the end when the two of them shook hands at the end and got right in the way of the moderator autocue, then had to dive off to the sides simultaneously so that the debate could be concluded - I'm sure we'll see that on one of Denis Norden's programmes at the end of the year, provided he is still alive. Not that it matters that much - someone could just prop him up with a clipboard and make him push his glasses up his nose a couple of times a minute and nobody would really be able to tell the difference.

So nobody really answered or affected anything throughout the ninety minutes, and Obama is still on top. It does strike me, though, that even if he does get in, we will most likely still be facing an enormous financial crisis and his declaration of "The government needs change" may have rather a different meaning from the one that he'd intended.