Live-blogging the Obama-McCain debate (pre-game)

Again, as with the Super Bowl, we’re starting the pre-game show hours early, passing along factoids and various elements surrounding the debate you may find useful.

12:16 p.m. NPR is going to try to use Twitter tonight for “dial testing.” They’re also going to “fact check” on the VoxPolitics blog. Their idea is for those of you using Twitter to score an answer and add the hashtag #dialtest to your message. Then you could follow the results here. Why it won’t work: As near as I can tell Twitter users are predominantly Democrats. I actually have no idea if this theory is true, and it is only anecdotal. But Twitter’s Election 2008 section doesn’t come across as entirely balanced. But it’s still a cool idea.

12:41 pm. Here are your Bingo possibilities for tonight. If you’ve got a bunch of Obama supporters, and you’ve each got laptops, you can use this online game. There are four Obama cards here, but they’re mostly geared to the primaries. A more recent board is here. McCaniacs can find boards here. Andy Carvin’s stump-speech bingo is also suitable.

1:49 p.m. – It’ll be interesting to see if the two candidates will be direct with the allegatons they’re raising in their ads right now. Or whether they’ll try to come off as genial gents and just let their surrogates handle the shiv.

3:24 p.m. – By way of NewsHour, here’s a way to waste some time while waiting for the debate. Google map’s Journey of Life for John McCain. It’s sort of a “6 Degrees of John McCain.” St. Paul, you’re on there, of course. Lenox, Mass., however is not. It’s where I met McCain in the late ’70s. He was still in the Navy and was speaking about his time as a POW.