Toasty Two Hats: Guardian and BBC’s coverage of VP debate.

I assume I’m not the only person who feels like they’re sucking on a lemon when they hear Palin speak. I’ve heard the car-crash analogy before too, but I have issues with this because at least – if unfortunate enough to be watching a car crash – it has a finite end: the actual crash. Watching Palin is only like watching a car crash if, somehow, the cars transcend space-time and continually crash into each other, indefinitely.

Now I’m no big fan of sucking lemons; indeed there were plenty of other things I would rather have been doing last Friday morning, such as sleeping. So when the Palin/Biden debate was aired at the dreadfully convenient time of 2am (and yes, I do think Americans should get over a 5pm broadcast), I didn’t watch it.

Instead, I followed Oliver Burkeman’s excellent liveblogging of the debate on the Guardian website. This was a great improvement on watching the actual event as firstly, it involved absolutely no lemons at all (quite a feat with Palin involved), secondly, it told me when to drink (I’m sure you can guess, but it started to get messy after a few of Palin’s “maverick”s and “Joe Sixpack”s – I still am unsure as to what the latter even means), and thirdly, was actually really good coverage.

For some reason that I can’t put my finger on, I kept thinking it was written by a woman, but this is by the bye. Hats off to Burkeman for his heroic rescue of a potentially very bitter early morning listening to Palin answering questions by not answering questions.

Also, another hats off to the BBC website’s coverage of the very same event (I am apparently wearing two hats… toasty). Although I was a bit hesitant to put quite as much weight on their “experts” as they did, (Robert Shrum, Huffington Post; Michelle Malkin, etc etc), a definite highlight was the BBC’s “Fact Checker” – something I always mean to do, but never do do, which the BBC did for me and for which I am very grateful. Ch-ch-check it out.