For two long, ridiculous years, I had covered this campaign — if by “covered” you mean “wrote stupid jokes about these terrible people, every day, for a Web site.” Now was not the time to give up and watch history on a cheap wall monitor over a concession booth. As somebody important introduced the nominee, I politely muscled through the crowd and squeezed into a spot on a high upper deck. Everybody was standing and waving their complimentary American flags and “Change” signs, so I couldn’t see much beyond a dot of humanity way down there behind a tiny lectern, on a little round stage ringed with mouse-size American flags.

Nobody else up here could see much, either. We all alternated between glancing down at the field, peering across the stadium to a distant video display and turning around to stare at the monstrous jumbo screen right behind us. I mostly watched the big screen and the people watching it. It was weird, turning our backs on the real Obama so we could see him better, but it seemed important to see every pixel. We had all come so far for this communal experience: standing together, facing backward in the cheap seats, looking at a monster moving picture of the Democratic nominee that wasn’t quite synced up with his deep and serious voice.

Critics of political conventions say that reporters should stay home, that there’s nothing you can’t see better at home on the couch. They were wrong, at least on this night in Denver, where watching the screen with 79,999 other people was the whole point.

KEN LAYNE (blogger, Wonkette)

ROCKET MAN

I saw a clip on the Internet of that Swiss dude, Yves Rossy, who made himself a jet pack and then flew it around like some kind of European awesome guy! If you haven’t seen it, just imagine if Iron Man and a Stealth bomber had a baby and decided to raise it in Switzerland to be a bald dude. The jet pack, much like the video phone, has always been on my childhood list of things I’ve been waiting for. And now, they’re both here. The future has arrived! Which raises the question: How long till I can get a decent robot? I don’t want any of those big white clunkers I’ve seen rolling around. I want a robot that I can really use. One that can entertain guests with political trivia and lend me money for late-night cab rides. Get it together, robot makers.

I’ve also been enjoying “The Wire” on DVD. ANDY SAMBERG (writer and performer, “Saturday Night Live”)

LION HEART

Christian the Lion was a little lion cub that two young guys saw on sale at Harrods in London in 1969, back when department stores sold these kinds of things. They took him back to their flat, where he got into their sock drawers and played with balls of string. They befriended a vicar who let them use a local churchyard as a playground for the cub, and at the beginning of the video (which someone pulled out of an old British documentary and posted on YouTube last summer) there’s Super 8 footage of them frolicking about. Then text appears on the screen explaining that once Christian got too big, the boys had to take him to Africa to be with his own kind. A year later they decided to go visit him, even though they were warned that Christian had become a full-grown lion with a pride of his own and wouldn’t remember them and would perhaps attack them if they went. They went anyway, these two tall, floppy-haired guys whom I admit I am seriously crushed out on, and the next thing you see is this grainy footage of them standing in the African sand, calling Christian’s name silently, because there’s no sound. Oh, and I’m sorry, did I forget to mention that Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is playing in the background, and that as you see Christian appear and are still unsure what’s going to happen (my friend Heather was convinced she was going to witness the two boys’ deaths; she couldn’t understand why else I was freaking out so much when I made her watch it) you hear Whitney sing, “I wish you joy and happiness, but above all this, I wish you lo-uh-ove,” and then Christian is running toward the boys, leaping onto his hind legs (“Watch out!” Heather screamed at this part) and the music is all, “And I will alll-ways love you,” and you see that Christian not only remembers them but that he loves them, dearly, desperately, he is hugging them with his enormous lion paws? And one of the guys, who looks a lot like a young Roger Daltrey, actually, has this huge smile on his face and you can see him choke back a sob. It’s just the most solid reason I’ve seen yet for why the Internet should exist. By the way, the video isn’t nearly as effective without the Whitney Houston song. I’ve tried watching it both ways and, really, you need the song in order to experience the full-blown effect.

STARLEE KINE (radio producer and author)

LOST DOG

I rarely watch the local news. It’s too parody-ready; its best hope is that some part of it will end up on YouTube. Local news covers what’s actually nearby, but these days technology makes everything feel nearby, whether it really is or not. The notion of proximity is distorted — everything exists now in the same sphere: nowhere. Recently the local television news in Portland, Ore., showed a picture of a yellow Labrador retriever mix named Molly being hugged by a young boy. Dogs don’t really like to be hugged but will often tolerate it from people they know. The boy’s arms were tight around Molly’s thin neck. I bet she wriggled away right after the photo was taken and got a drink of water. The photo was faded, the happiness in it all used up. Then they showed a video of Molly’s backyard, and we saw the area where her owners buried Molly alive after trying unsuccessfully to “euthanize” her with a hammer. The grave was sandy, unsteady, the kind you might, as a kid, put an action figure in to hide it from a grabby sibling. Her owners buried her to her neck but kept Molly’s head above ground. Were they worried she wouldn’t have enough air? Neighbors heard the dog crying and called the police. Molly was taken to the Humane Society where, mercifully, she was put to sleep. Next they interviewed Molly’s owners, a father and daughter. The daughter wore a gold cross around her neck. The man was almost 80. His hair looked like a Q-Tip, the generic kind that has a little less fluff on top. He was wearing striped overalls, and I wished I could turn the volume off and pretend this was a story about trains. He claimed he thought the dog was dead when he left for dinner. Was he going out to eat? Did he have an appetite? The newscaster voice-over said Molly had been in bad shape; she was 13 years old and losing hair and she was defecating in the house. The father and daughter feared that if they took Molly into a veterinarian’s office to be put down, they might be accused of animal abuse. That, they tell us, is when the father took matters into his own hands. Local news reminds us that what we search for in the distance, to gawk at or shrink away from, is also right outside our door. Molly’s story made me want to tear myself away from the screen and unearth all that is being kept hidden close to home.