My Dishwasher Senses How Dirty The Dishes Are. My Dryer Figures Out How Dry Clothes Need To Be. So Why Don't Microphones Shut Off Automatically?

I happened to turn past CNN yesterday morning--"happened", because I still don't know where 787 of my 823 channels are--just in time to see the warm-up for live coverage of Al Gore's brief remarks, and I was soon kicking myself for waiting for the actual stupidity to begin before I thought of recording it.

But then, wonders of technology, of the sort that lets Steve Johnson insist that Teevee Is Better Than Ever!--the DVR actually records backwards, so I get to share this with you verbatim.

I don't know who played Ken or Barbie, as they were never identified during what I taped. But she was inexplicably attired in one the the girls' jumpers of my youth, a fact which might have cheered me considerably under different circumstances.

What happened is this: we were waiting for the Vice-President and Nobel recipient (or "Gore", as Barbie repeatedly referred to him) to appear. Meanwhile, they ran a canned report, which included a statement that he would be donating his share of the monetary prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection. Then we returned to the one in the jumper, who was faced with filing the time--oh, she was prepared, as we'll see, but that doesn't make the extemporizing any less witless--and told us that "Gore's gonna be donating part of that prize money"--it's interesting how often sloppy construction serves the underlying stupidity--before she was asked to read "some of the comments" about the Prize.

Now, I'm not sure if it was the fact that those comments, back-to-back, were from Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, or if the graphics cards, rather than her face, filling the screen had something to do with it, but there was the unmistakable smell of seething in the air while she read (so much so that I had to double check to make sure Daryn Kagan was still dead). When she finished, Ken obligingly lifted the pressure valve:

KEN: Hmmmm. But there's also been criticism, too. I mean, there are folks who are saying, you know, um, ah, there are much larger issues. What about Mother Teresa and that kind of stuff. So, yeah...


BARBIE: Well, critics are also coming out, in fact there's a judge, uh, Sir Michael John Burton, a judge of the High Court in Queen's Bench Division there has come out with nine points were he says that some of the things that were brought up in An Inconvenient Truth were just absolutely not true, uh, and so, yeah, you're right, there's been a lot of criticism.

Here:

[sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic]

Just put 'em in wherever you please. Stand on a chair and drop them to the floor. Invite your friends over and play Pin The [sic] On The Anchor. You cannot miss.

In a better time and place, one ruled by the better instincts and higher longings of Humankind, you would be forgiven for imagining I made up what followed. Here and now, though, you know better. Ken, the suit who wondered if kidnapping lepers for Christ wasn't somehow, um, ah, you know, more larger, and Barbie, who jotted down the name of a British jurist from a convenient and utterly irrelevant WaPo story without bothering to read it, were next tasked with handling the toss on Breaking Anna Nicole news. To my great disappointment, Ken did segue to it with "Boy, if they gave out a Nobel Prize for knockers..."