The first debate of the 2012 general election season—the one that will fundamentally alter the direction of this race even though both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are terrible debaters who will lose to each other—is upon us. So settle in to your couch, open a beer, review your debate drinking game rules, and let Max Read and I "liveblog"—that's a dead technology from the days before Twitter—the action for you. Let the zingers fly! (No seriously you can watch the ball game and just check in here; we'll keep you updated.)

In 2008 I went to San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair with my then-girlfriend and saw the oddest instance of public nudity I'd ever come across. It was a guy in a mask who was naked from the waist down and sitting motionlessly in a doorway, ostensibly unperturbed by the thousands of people milling around about him. I was confused as to why someone might wear a T-shirt and socks but no pants or underwear, but the man himself didn't seem unsure of a thing. He didn't even move when another, younger man came out of the door he was obstructing, forcing the resident to quietly step over him as if he were the one doing something strange.

If Mitt Romney, who never makes any mistakes, gives a subpar performance at tonight's debate, we'll all know why: he, like Rick Perry before him, was just too tired. According to a report from Buzzfeed, Mitt got almost no sleep Monday night. The cause? A loud train near the candidate's Denver hotel:

Don't blue yourself, but you (yes, you) could have a role on the finally happening fourth season of Arrested Development.

You'll laugh, you'll cry — scratch that, you won't cry.

Saved by the Bell star Lark Voorhies, who popped up in a Yahoo! interview earlier this year with an insane approach to cosmetics, is fighting with her mother about her mental state and they're using People as their battlefield.

NATO convened an emergency meeting today after a Syrian mortar attack that apparently left five Turkish civilians dead. Turkey retaliated with an artillery strike on Syrian military targets, and for a few brief minutes that afternoon we were all, like, "UHHHH."

This morning a tipster forwarded us an email from a future bride laying out some ground rules for her prospective bridesmaids.

Chick-fil-A was quick to issue a statement saying it had no plans to stop supporting organizations that "strengthen families and enrich marriages," contrary to reports that it promised to quit it with the anti-gay donations.

Personal injury lawyers are not very well liked in general, but Kenneth Krause managed to make himself the most hated man in America after he wrote a Wisconsin news anchor to complain that she's far too overweight to set a good example for young viewers, "girls in particular."

The presidential debate will be on all the networks tonight. This explains the sense of dejection you felt on waking this morning and realizing, in some vulnerable corner of your heart, that Detective Olivia Benson won't be getting too close to a case. I'm sorry it had to be this way.

Barack Obama loves Mean Girls. Also, there's a debate. Check back here at 9 p.m. for our live blog.

To anyone who has ever vowed to leave the country if their presidential candidate loses, this year, jetBlue can help you do just that, free of charge.

It's been a while since we've checked in on CBS, television for people who lost the remote, so what's going on over at the Eye Network? Is Colin Powell still singing "Call Me Maybe"? Nope, it's just Charlie Rose yelling at you to get off his lawn dancing.

Today, The New Yorker released a series of never-before-seen photographs of Barack Obama and his friends — including journalist Margot Mifflin — as students at Occidental College. The photos show a passionate, intelligent young man, a participant in activist and artistic communities who surrounded himself with other politically and aesthetically committed young people.

Damien Echols, accused kid-murdering leader of the freed West Memphis 3, is chatting on Deadspin right now .

By now nearly everyone has at least a passing acquaintance with the world's most famous botched fresco retouching, so it's no surprise to see the story come to life in a variety of ways.

Remember the George W. Bush years? They almost seem like a bad dream, don't they? Years of terror, and militarism, and war, and unaccountability, and even, perhaps most repugnant, years of torture of foreign prisoners by we, the Americans, the beacons of freedom. Well, the Bush years have thankfully passed. And now, Americans like torture even more.

Every year in the United States and parts of Europe, the Khristmas season kicks off with the release of the Kardashian family publicity still.

Racking up over 350,000 views in just one day, the music video for "Same Love," the latest single from Seattle-based underground rapper Ben "Macklemore" Haggerty and producer Ryan Lewis, is so popular, its success could very well have a strong positive impact on the outcome of a local initiative to legalize same-sex marriage.