It's November 9th, Woody's 70th birthday, and we have here the 70th episode of Pol and Pop! And, of course, it is yet another politics episode, once again with Woody.

We recorded this one in Clarksville on Thursday 11/7, after a special in-person trivia game with our other trivia group. There was no need to put a whole bunch of notes together this one, because there was only one topic: the election. What happened, where are we going from here, our thoughts about it, our feelings about it, you name it.

Full disclosure: I took a more relaxed approach to editing this one, since I wanted to get through it all and get it published rather quickly. So, there were some long pauses in it. However, after finishing the edit, the length put me about 3 minutes over on my available time for the current month. So I went through it again (mainly the whole first hours' worth), and chopped out a ton of quiet time. I didn't have time to review all that again before putting it up, so, if something doesn't feel quite right with the editing at some point, that's what happened. (Yeah, it's probably completely fine and unnoticeable. But, you know-- just in case.)

Woody and I sat down on Halloween night for one last podcast recording before Election Day. With only 5 days to go, so much had already happened and so many people had already voted that the pieces were mostly falling into place. We discussed the closing arguments and went into our general commentary about the candidates and the status of the race at this point. And we made our predictions about how the swing states, key Senate races, Senate and House overall, and Presidency are going to go.

As I put this up, we have three days to go. And the polls are tightening up even more. As of the afternoon of November 2nd, Nate Silver's model has the odds at 51.1% Trump, 48.5% Harris, and 538's model has them at 50.4% Trump, 49.4% Harris.

Well, no October Surprise or Black Swan event has happened yet (as of 10/21), but the Kamala Harris appearance on Fox News was big enough to be well worth Woody and I discussing nonetheless. Also, I for one have been doing a _ton_ of research on all sorts of things about the election since last time. (Everything from hard science to vibes to... astrology?!! Yeah, because, heck, why not, right?) So I wanted to aggregate and share lots of the stuff that I've learned and heard.

I do realize that we're rather heavy on the Politics and rather light on the Pop Culture at the moment... but that has to be expected when we're this close to the Presidential election. I certainly expect to balance it out more again after all this excitement ends.

After catching the Vice-Presidential debate on Tuesday 10/1, Woody and I got our initial impressions together, then also incorporated more of what we heard about it afterwards before recording this on Thursday. After going through that, we continued on with some further thoughts about the election and how things are progressing now.

We're past Labor Day in our election year here now, and I was just visiting my brother Dave in Jacksonville Beach. So I figured I'd take the opportunity to get his perspective on the situation, from outside the DC area in a red, but almost swing state.

Woody and I watched the first (and possibly only) debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday night, September 10th. These are our own reactions from just afterwards, before hearing the general media consensus.

In this episode, John and I discuss the MCU's only cinematic release for this calendar year, Deadpool and Wolverine! And we also discuss where it looks like things are heading in the MCU next.

Note that this is a full spoilercast, and there are definitely some key surprises in the movie that are much better if you don't know about them going in. So, if you're not one of the people who used one of the (at the moment) $1.262 billion worth of tickets sold, then maybe hold off on listening to this until you can catch the movie yourself, either in theaters or when it comes to Disney+ sometime soon.

This flashback episode includes part of the seventh episode of the Spaghetti Sass podcast, from January 2022 (with a quick new introduction). The centerpiece of that episode involved some thoughts on Kamala Harris and impressions of her at that time. Obviously, since she's become the Democratic Nominee for the 2024 election, she's become much more significant in the political landscape. So I figured this would be a good opportunity to go into "where we were then" before recording and posting a new episode involving "where we are now."