CHARLOTTE, N.C.— Bill Clinton's interminable speech last night here at the Time Warner Cable Arena certainly had the room going (though there was a noticeable lag in energy from minutes 457 through 588). It was probably a little tougher to take for anyone who had in hand a printed copy—small type, two columns, two pages, front-and-back—provided to the press by eager young DNC assistants. Thumbing through at what I thought was the speech's crescendo, I quickly realized that he was less than a third of the way through, and started wondering whether or not our parking lot closed at midnight.

The first night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte had many highlights. There was the "political" tribute to Ted Kennedy that shifted midway into an ethering of Romney; Ted Strickland's VERY LOUD SPEECH; a keynote speech by San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, who, according to Tucker Carlson's clown paper, is insufficiently Latino; and a Sasha-pleasing speech by Michelle Obama; plus, of course, the live blog in which John Cook was chastised for not lifting a toilet seat. All of that translated into a ratings victory for the Democrats, as night one of the DNC drew 26.2 million viewers compared to the RNC's first night audience of 22.3 million.

Most of the time when a person offers unsolicited parenting advice, it's annoying and frustrating, and you walk away none the wiser.

When asked if she was nervous about leading the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democratic National Convention's Wednesday night proceedings, 16-year-old Olympic gold medalist Gabrielle Douglas told Politico

Amanda Bynes can't seem to stop being suspected of hit-and-run accidents.

Taylor Swift, a sweet country girl who first got the idea to become a Kennedy after watching a Lana Del Rey music video, has found out the hard way that you do not insert yourself into the Kennedy family.

Michelle Obama stutters. She does not have a stutter. She stutters on purpose. "I-I-I, I've seen it in our men and women in uniform." "Fr-from the young person with so much promise." "And-and, even as a kid..."

Vice presidential candidate and fastest man on Earth Paul Ryan has just had his Secret Service code name revealed by Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine. It's Bowhunter.

This is filmmaker Michael Cimino, who is in the midst of a revival of Heaven's Gate, which he directed 32 years ago. He is 73 years old. That photograph was taken yesterday at the Venice Film Festival. Here's a gallery of his face getting more and more horrible as time, and surgery after surgery, take their gruesome toll.

Doddering Reaganite WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan is an authority, of sorts, on the browner peoples of America. She once saw a Mexican. It naturally falls to Peggy, then, to get to la corazon of the Republican convention speech of New Mexico governor Susana Martinez. (Or "Susan," as Peggy calls her, for assimilationist purposes.)

Ann Curry may have freaked out the Today show crew by wanting to talk about knives constantly and holding her birthday party in a graveyard and distracting Al Roker from the weather every morning by asking him, stonefaced, "Do you ever wonder what it feels like to die?"—but at least she wasn't a huge giant, stomping all over the place, being big in everyone's way all the time, oh BROTHER.

At 20-years-old, Sky Ferreira has been rebooted more times than a superhero. She's been dance pop, she's worked with Ryan Tedder, she's done an neo-alternachick thing, she's had her debut album delayed and delayed. It still hasn't arrived — "Everything Is Embarrassing" is supposed to be on her second EP, Ghost, (after last year's As If!), which is set for an October release. Nothing about it screams commercial smash, which is both reassuring (she seems committed to the art of pop) and somewhat confusing given how invested Capitol seems to be in making her a star. Whatever. Max Read and I were talking earlier today about whom exactly this song is for. All I could muster was people who are into chillwave who also like a Britney song (probably "Toxic") and maybe once contemplated buying a Stevie B 12".

Serious method actor Shia LaBeouf is really into realism these days.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's private secretary has just released the itinerary for the couple's upcoming eight-day, endless nights, Magical Mystery Tour of the Asian Pacific.

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has a devastating story gutting one of Mitt Romney's origin myths as a "Turnaround Guy." Romney has always taken credit for rescuing Bain & Co., the consulting firm where he got his start (as distinct from Bain Capital, the private equity operation he later co-founded) from the clutches of bankruptcy by dint of fearless resolve, hard work, and common sense. The truth: He raided its coffers for executive bonuses even as it owed millions to the federal government, and used the resulting lack of cash as leverage to screw over the company's creditors.

Ann Romney's speech to the Republican National Convention last night featured an awkward and transparent pander to female voters, whose troubles the quarter-billionaire dressage enthusiast said she had "heard stories of." It culminated with a memorable, and failed, attempt to ape human affect with the line, "I love you, women!", and was premised on the increasingly anachronistic notion that women run their households while men golf or slurp beer on the couch. This may have been true in Ann Romney's home. It is, regrettably, not true in mine.

Ryan Gosling has been given the green light to turn a screenplay he wrote into a major motion picture, and he's tapped Christina Hendricks to star in it.

When the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce wrapped up quickly, quietly, and without much fuss, the Internet, unexpectedly starved for blood, became weak and irritable.

Someone attending the Republican National Convention allegedly threw peanuts a black camerawoman for CNN and said, "This is how we feed animals," according to Talking Points Memo. The nut thrower was then escorted from the convention.

The Jewish community in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad is less than enthused about a clothing store named "Hitler" that recently opened in the posh neighborhood of Vastrapur.