A few months ago, Damien "Lincoln" Ober launched a campaign to run as a Libertarian against D.C. Shadow Senator Paul Strauss. Ober, a film-maker, bartender and writer, saw the effort as a science-fiction art project. Which may have been why he took the challenge so seriously.

With the help of friends and D.C. Libertarians, he got his name on the ballot. Now he's in negotiations with Strauss to hold a debate. Strauss seems willing to cooperate. In August, he told the City Paper he would participate in a battle of words with Ober if the whippersnapper got himself on the ballot. Updates can be found here.

Some poor kid in Kentucky wrote a story about zombies taking over a high school. Then his grandparents found the manuscript, realized the boy was probably planning to blow up his school and turned him in to police. Now he's sitting in jail facing felony charges.

NYU economist goes off on Nick Denton. Nouriel Roubini may have predicted the recent economic crash, but his rant, though spirited, makes little sense. He calls Denton an anti-semite with a "Nazi mind and and a McCarthist Bigot."

Hee hee. Joe the Plumbre.

Dog poo supports McCain.

Prince William County busy pumping up a mini bubble with a home-buying spree. Real estate's still booming in Brrooklyn, too.

The Prince of Petworth finds a new business, a cooking school called CulinAerie. Spelling is no longer cool.

Hey Virginians: go vote! In Arlington County, you qualify for absentee voting if you have as little as a coffee date in D.C. on November 4. According to the guide you can vote early, by mail or in person, till November 1 if:

"you have any kind of personal business - it doesn't matter what it is and you don't have to tell us - that takes you out of the county on Election Day, or you will be on vacation."

Or if you're pregnant or sick or plan to be in jail or overseas.

Or, if you like standing in line and watching for voter intimidation, have fun.

David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary is a prim website that covers the elites with respect, no mucking up the party reports with tawdry gossip or controversy. The site is tame. I read it for the classifieds. Recently, among the "Situations Wanted" ads, where you can find nannies from the Philippines and vocal coaches who know how to whack an accent, I stumbled across the ad for a "professional muse." Dewey Thompson has inspired writers, musicians and "couturiers." And for the small fee of $10,000 a week, he can inspire you! A taste:

I am not a butler, maid, chauffeur, or Gigolo. I am a personal "Life Coach" and will be treated in a professional manor. Our relationship will be close, but boundaries will be outlined before employment. Children and Pet Friendly. My requirements for employment: $10,000 USD per week plus travel expenses, and lodging. I take sunday afternoon off. Non Disclosure Agreement - No problem.

I emailed Thompson with a few questions and got a response this afternoon. Thompson says he uses "Jung / Myers Briggs psychology" to discover what motivates his clients. Then he helps them set goals and make an "action plan." He writes, "I motivate you to be a better person through etiquette, personal relationship development, skill and behavior modification and tact."

Thompson offered an example of his success as a professional muse. His client was a prominent socialite who lived in a beautiful mansion with the love of her life. She had everything she wanted. When her daughter was diagnosed with autism, everything began to fall apart. Her husband couldn't handle the stress and "fled his maternal obligations." She was soon diagnosed with Crohn's disease and became "so ill that all she could do was to lie in bed and await death."

Thompson writes:" My client’s life had basically shattered and she didn’t possess the coping skills she needed to fight for life. Within 6 months of my life coaching, she landed a stable job, received surgery for the Crones disease, has a small lovely decorated apartment, and went on her first blind date in over seven years"

I have this itching feeling that Thompson isn't telling the whole story. Do people really hire $10,000-a-week personal cheerleaders? And if they do, do they find them on the NYSD classifieds page? I would love to hear some testimonials.

I'm not sure I buy the thesis of today's Post story on how the post Gen-X generation is doing good instead of making money. They don't have any comparative stats to prove their claim, other than the number of new business school programs in "social entrepreneurship," which proves only that someone is profiting from this supposed trend. Plus, I just don't believe that compared to every other generation of young Americans, we are more interested in dedicating our lives to righteousness. What about all our parents and grandparents who dropped out to protest against war and for civil rights?

If anything is new it's the fact that kids these days are trying to make a buck off their altruism.  That's probably not new either. The Whole Earth Catalog made money before it failed. And the Free People's Store in 1970s Philly, where the hippie proprietors had a free bin for people who couldn't afford their cheap tie-dyed t-shirts, morphed into a $700 million retail giant, Urban Outfitters, which now makes big donations to conservative causes.

Someone just forwarded this ad for a Gin and Juice night at Smith Point, sponsored by LNS of course. I'm not sure exactly which design elements make the image so offensive. Perhaps it's the randomly chosen photos of shirtless rappers? I have to wonder if the organizers just don't realize that ironic/nostalgic references to Snoop lyrics come across as racist when the people making said references are best known for their trembling fear of Ethiopians. Or maybe it's so meta I can't even understand.

D.C. is a crap town for public records. Especially police reports. I moved here from Seattle, where I could go down to the station and peruse stacks of reports. The Stranger, where I worked, based a weekly column off the documents, which were all written out with long, descriptive narratives. In D.C., there ain't no way a reporter could just page through the reports. I asked my first day here and I think the clerk nearly climbed over the counter to slap me. Some reporters listen to the scanner all night and follow cruisers to crime scenes, but it's highly unlikely you'll get the good blotter fodder (you need the back story, which you don't get behind police tape) unless you just get lucky and the police decide to issue a press release. Or unless you're Jason Cherkis.

So, like many reporters, I've turned to the various neighborhood and police district list-serves. They send out brief arrest summaries, which range from vague to vaguely specific. The Fifth District is pretty bad:

Homicide Knife, Cutting Instrument

SHIFT: DAY 10/10/2008 0700 0707

1700 B/O 3RD ST NW, Street/Highway/Road 501 08144117

The Third District is better:

C-1 REPORTS THAT S-1 THRU S-3 APPROACHED HER BY THE LISTED LOCATION. S-1 STATED "THAT'S AN UGLY DOG, I SHOULD BEAT YOUR DOG." S-1 THEN STATED "GIVE ME ALL THE MONEY IN YOUR POCKET." C-1 RAN AWAY FROM THE SUSPECTS. SUSPECTS FLED IN AN UNKNOWN DIRECTION.

Pretty good stuff. But still not enough info to go find more info, and of course the police would explain that as protecting the privacy rights of the victims. (Although I bet most of the victims wouldn't mind talking to a reporter about how the police handled their situation -- another reason why the reports should be made available, if not necessarily widely disseminated.)

Anyway, I've noticed something interesting in the discussions on these list serves that gives me a little hope. Residents have been lambasting the police for not putting enough info in the online summaries. So when a guy from Cleveland Park sent a message to the list about getting robbed by two men in an SUV while he biked home one night, and mentioned that police had told him there had been a string of similar incidents, someone else emailed asking for more info. That got a response from the district commander--who basically said there had been other robberies--who in turn got criticized by another resident for not alerting the community sooner. This is the same district commander who has never returned my phone calls.

I haven't noticed much push back from local media to get better access to public documents. Maybe in this case the people will do our job for us.

In the category of dudes with day-jobs who write books, the scary travelogue/ history of vampires/Gothic New England/haunted houses seems to be the genre of choice. So when I got the new paper back edition of Eric Nuzum’s treatise on vampires, The Dead Travel Fast, I expected little more than an entertaining gift book. I made this assumption (a bad habit of mine) even though I already knew Nuzum was an intelligent and curious guy. And he had invited me to his birthday party. Also in attendance were: an Elvis impersonator from Potomac and the ashes of Nuzum’s cat. It takes a kind of mischievous fortitude to celebrate a shitty year (death of cat) by serenading your friends with a man in sequins.

Anyway. As soon as I brought the book home, my boyfriend ganked it, which of course made me want to read it. And it was very good. Nuzum possesses a rare willingness to endure awful things for the pleasure and enlightenment of the reader. So, in order to understand what it was like to be a vampire, he drank his own blood. He also watched every vampire movie he could find, 605 of them, including Rape of the Vampire, which has no rape.

I recently talked to Nuzum about his next book, Bring Me to Heaven: A ghost story about friendship, the search for truth, the downside of recreational drug use, guilt, punishment, a little girl in a blue dress, finding and losing true love, and one irrational fear. The book centers around the story of how Nuzum lost his mind during his freshman year of college. A lot of factors were at play: drug use, depression, social isolation. He also lost touch with reality, giving way to a delusion that haunted him for many years to come. Living in his parents' attic, he became convinced that the ghost of a little girl (the Little Girl in the Blue Dress) was hiding in the next room, waiting to kill him. His fear and paranoia spun out of control, resulting in lost friendships, suicide attempts and hospitalization.

What’s interesting is Nuzum’s refusal to blame any person or trauma for his breakdown. Drugs and a pinch of mental illness may have pushed his unhinging along, but mostly, he walked himself over the edge. He says it all started with a fanciful childhood explanation for a thudding noise upstairs. Instead of forgetting the goof as he grew older, he slowly talked himself into believing it was true.

Nuzum got his shit together eventually, and went on to have a successful career in radio (he’s now an acquisitions executive at NPR). But he never got over that pesky fear of ghosts. So, he’s trying to get to the bottom of the phobia by visiting haunted places and writing about his experiences. His trips so far include stops in a town run by spiritualists in New York, a haunted hotel room in D.C. and the creepy Clinton Road in Newark, New Jersey. He has plans to visit an Ohio penitentiary, Rose Hall in Jamaica and even that attic in his hometown.

Nuzum is almost totally sick of talking about vampires. He’ll indulge the curious once more, on October 30 at the Barnes and Noble in Georgetown.

China to the rescue? Maybe.  Just consider the amount of household debt as a percentage of GDP between China, 13 percent,  and the United States, 100 percent.

Just in time for a recession: $14-a-bottle designer water.

District Heights home-builders collect $1 million from buyers, then never build the homes.

Slate takes a look at a Chinese village that's taking advantage of the potential uses of human poop--as fuel and fertilizer. They call it "night soil."

Ta-Nehisi Coates recommends the documentary on the Weather Underground.

Fair or unfair? Coates and Sullivan disagree on this charming video of some backwoods Americans talking about Obama. What are they sitting on? Giant hobby horse llama?

One of the problems faced by journalists contemplating the dismal future of our occupation is our general lack of qualification. Despite our skill at assessing the job performance of politicians, architects and socialites, we tend to find ourselves lacking in demonstrable job skills. We don't know supply chain from matrix management. Not that I've been perusing the options, but I tend to stumble across openings for careers more frightening than the dark side, aka, PR.  Like this one, from First Class Referrals.

Update: Ok! I guess I've been coddled by the alt industry. Potentially NSFW. I guess. But come on. It's craigslist.

Factcheck.org has a nice rundown of all the facts the candidates got wrong in the debate last night. McCain's creative interpretations of his "tax cuts" and health care plans are old hat. But what's this about eBay? McCain said 1.3 million Americans make their living off the online marketplace. Wrong. The number, according to Factcheck, is more like 724,000, and only "some" of those folks rely on the site for their primary income. What really bugs me though, is the idea that all those people are somehow leading the way for a brighter future. Sure, they're making a living, but many of them are doing it selling stolen goods.

The New York Times reported on recent testimony before a House subcommittee on a bill that would force eBay to crack down on e-fencers. A loss prevention expert from the National Retail Federation told legislators that eBay was like crack for vulnerable, would-be thieves (not his analogy).

"When they run out of “legitimate merchandise,” they begin to steal intermittently, many times for the first time in their life, so they can continue selling online... At least one major retailer has reported that 80 percent of thieves interviewed in their eBay theft cases admit that selling stolen property on eBay is their sole source of income. In fact, many of the eBay sellers have used those proceeds to obtain mortgages, new cars and even boats."

Sounds like a great strategy for job creation.

Hot reporting from Noam Scheiber at TNR, who found this high-school-style note scribbled by Palin in 1996. Her scribbles sketch out ideas for her run for mayor, like: "Time for a Change" and "You would be my boss!"

Oh no! What will we do without Lt. Michael Smith? The 27-year MPD veteran is retiring and moving to Florida, perhaps to teach SCUBA diving. He was one of the rare DC cops who would always talk when reporters called, which was awesome on deadline but sometimes made you wonder what was wrong with his head. He's contributed to enough CP stories to suggest we'd become strangely dependent on his reliability. I've called Smith at all hours of the day, rang his cell on weekends, bothered his wife at dinner time, and he always digs up what I need. My experience with Second District Acting Commander Mark Carter is more typical. I've called him a dozen or so times, and never gotten a call back.

Last Friday night, after another day of bad news for the market, 580 undeterred revelers traveled to McLean, Va., to attend the $2,500 a seat YouthAIDS Gala at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. The party is one of Washington's most celebrity-obsessed events, with recent attendees like Bono, Desmond Tutu and Dave Mathews. This year's theme, "The Power of Music,"  paid tribute to three celebrities who opened the way for other service-minded celebrities: MTV CEO Judy McGrath, Annie Lennox (who couldn't attend because of a back injury) and Bob Geldof, the British Musician who raised tens of millions of dollars for AIDS, and resuscitated his foundering rock career, with Live Aid in 1985.

"The Celebrity Solution," as the New York Times recently called it, has become an industry in itself in the decades since Geldof first lambasted television viewers to "just give us the fucking money." There are more than twice as many charities today, all competing for shrinking pots of money, and desperate for ways to put their cause ahead of the rest. There are online databases of celebrities and the charities they represent, and at least one nonprofit dedicated to helping celebrities hook up with the right charity. Some groups, including YouthAIDS, have had to turn away stars calling to offer their services.

YouthAIDS's founder Kate Roberts, a British-born marketer who got her start selling cigarettes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, has fully realized the potential of using other peoples' fame to promote a good cause. Her organization, which serves as the promotional arm of the charity Population Services International, has raised millions of dollars, generated billions of media impressions (they counted) and made Roberts into something of a celebrity herself. But her biggest accomplishment is her relationship with Ashley Judd, YouthAIDS's Global Ambassador and all around oddball.

Judd's has a reputation for her vocabulary--she reportedly learns a  new word a day--and space-cadet tangents. Her keynote address at Friday's gala did not disappoint. Judd explained how traveling with YouthAIDS changed her life (and rocked her soul). She'd made a "sacred commitment" to "speak truth to power...It is my pact with the god of my understanding." Sweet and self-deprecating, the star admitted she had worked late into the night  trying to compose her speech. Sitting in her farmhouse, "with the first autumnal fire crackling," she agonized over how to talk about her most recent travels as YouthAIDS global ambassador. Then inspiration hit. "I couldn't tell you about Rwanda or the DRC," she said. The experience was too awful. She realized she had to begin at the end, with "The Calamity of Coming Home," as she titled the entry in her diary.

It all began at JFK airport, where an attendant took issue with the way Judd handed over her baggage slip, or some such piece of paper. "Are you the Ashley Judd?" the woman sneered. Judd says she was only able to contain her fury by looking for somewhere to go lay her head and sob. The suffering in Africa was still to fresh for her to care about a rude American. Later, walking along the path to her home, Judd says the dogs greeted her one by one  because, "They knew my tender heart couldn't stand to see them all at once."

Read More "YouthAIDS Gala: the Weird World of Ashley Judd" »

Radar Online has news of cuts at Gawker, which include the talented Moe Tkacik. Time to start drinking.