It's Like A Faustian Bargain, But Without The Faust!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - General Electric Co unit NBC Universal has reached an agreement with TiVo Inc to become the first major broadcaster with the right to use the digital recorder company's research and interactive advertising products, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

The agreement will give the TV concern's networks such as NBC, Telemundo and Bravo -- as well as its NBC owned-and-operated TV stations -- access to TiVo's ratings data, the Journal said.

The deal will be announced as early as Tuesday, the Journal added.

NBC Universal is also planning to use the deal to sell advertisers TiVo products such as interactive tags, which enable a company's name to be seen even if a viewer is zapping through an ad, the Journal said.

YOU probably won't believe this, but back in the Dark Days of Analog computers were sometimes viewed as potential instruments of evil (!), waiting to run Amok; even the poor unassuming bar code was thought of as a precursor to government-sponsored anal probing and mass extermination camps, and people laughed at Soylent Green. Well, I did, anyway, but then I was high, plus I was only there in the first place because some high school friend of my sister's had suggested that if I took her to see it at the drive-in in my (used) Audi LS she'd let me drive her (almost pristine) Volvo, if you know what I mean, and then she wouldn't.

In fairness, people took concepts like "dehumanization" and "invasion of privacy" and "Nazi death camp" a lot more seriously in those days, and almost no one had seen Star Trek and its window into our technotopian future. The idea of a personal computer wasn't even on the radar. Hell, radar hadn't actually been on the radar all that long, now that I think about it. We hadn't yet experienced the joys of efficient, hydroponically-grown tomatoes, let alone realizing how much greater genetically-engineered varieties would bounce. We fed our cattle grain, if you can imagine, and not, well, less-successful cattle.

I'm not sure when this all changed, but I do know that to the extent Bill Gates is responsible we need to re-think our position on schoolyard bullying. I imagine we can also blame Christmas, which introduced Pong and Atari into American living rooms like undetected carbon monoxide, leaving our citizenry too groggy to realize that in a few short years every meal, opera, family gathering, retail shopping trip, theatre opening, bris, or spectator sporting event would occur under a thick blanket of ringing telephones and the loud recitation of one end of the witless conversations they presage. (All of this leaves out my personal complaint about the sort mindless commercial nostalgia for this stuff which posits it as some simpler, purer time, the sort of thing which might cause a professional scribe to quote someone renting hall space to a bunch of chiptone enthusiasts to the effect that "this is their Woodstock". And don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for these or any other artists, and nothing worse than benign neglect for their audience; it's the sort of people who say, "This is their Woodstock," I'd like to see eliminated, or at least driven mad by one side of a telephone conversation while they wait in the checkout line.)

Where the hell was I? Oh, so as of January 1 your TIVO will be spying on you not just for its own amusement, but in the service of the General Electric Corporation (NYSE: GE), a move which is not only being applauded in certain circles but lauded as bold and innovative. Thanks to this sort of modern innovation you don't even need to read the teevee listings anymore. If you did anyway, you'd find that over on the actual NBC tonight you can watch The Bionic Woman as updated for the Late Naughts (she's still a crime-busting techno-feminist with nice hair, but now she's considering Opting Out). Or, if you'd rather catch what market research convinced NBC to do with Bravo ("The Arts Network"), tune in for six prime-time hours of Project Runway. Bodes well, huh? Compared to that a little non-consensual anal probing while someone taps out Freut euch des Lebens on a rejiggered Merlin doesn't sound so bad. Maybe NBC could save a little bold and innovative thinking for the Product.

Happy Birthday

Johnny Allen Hendrix
November 27, 1942--September 18, 1970

Understanding Alien Cultures

"She liked sex. She was like those girls in high school who amazed you because they actually liked sex.”

--Danny Fields on Linda Stein.

No.

PAUL Davies, in a Times Op-Ed Saturday (via PZ):

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

Sure you could. Science doesn't "proceed" from any "assumption" about order. Order is a by-product of the assumption that if anything can be thought of as knowable it has to be demonstrated and duplicable. So far as I know, Science does not impugn other forms of knowledge, it simply classifies them as non-scientific. The discoveries of Thelonious Monk or Marcel Duchamp are no less valid for not being science (or, to put it in terms most math majors could accept, M. C. Escher).

We might excuse Davies on grounds of being a physicist, and thus (however inexcusably) lacking in insight into the less orderly sciences, but even if he weren't being given space in the Times to pull the old "Science is Faith, too" gag there's that troubling "meaningless" to deal with. How does "meaning" follow from Order and Rationality? Hasn't this been the fundamentalist argument since they woke up and realized 19th century science (and theology) had obliterated the inerrant Bible nonsense once and for all--that scientific materialism reduced life to meaningless random motion? And now it's on trial for the assumption of meaning? Kindly pick a side.

And speaking of meaningless jumbles, this proceeded by one day Hanna Rosin's Times Magazine tree-killer on how some Christian colleges have had to hire actual geologists an' stuff, and how this marks a sea-change in what used to be called, three or four euphemisms ago, Creation Science, which has now decided to add actual science to its belief system provided it agrees to stay out in the yard. Now if only they could get those pesky Young Earthers to shut up and hand over all that Discovery Institute money. (No, really; these poor souls now find themselves facing lecture halls full of kids who believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs, instead of eager young learners aware of the reality of the vast geological scale God created so smart-assed atheists would burn for all Eternity. And the even bigger nutcases get all the book deals.)

Really, the piece is not worth the time it took you to read that description, let alone me to write it, and if you're at all curious I recommend finding the print version, since the redolence of post-'04 advice to Democrats to begin kowtowing to "Values" voters is highly evocative of that bygone era.

The amazing coincidence of the two pieces being published on the same weekend may suggest to the more skeptical among the scientific-minded that some of that right-wing publishing money is finding its way outside the inner circle, which reminds me of the two-week Osmond assault on local "entertainment" news and its curiously robust supply of ammunition.

I am, in fact, a veteran of the entire national campaign of the Osmond sect, as my father was an Andy Williams fan and his low-key-to-the-point-of-coma "variety" program was regular viewing in our corner of early-60s suburbia, when that bucktoothed gaggle of talentless religious flakes was presented as a sort of barbershop version of the Andrews Sisters, minus both the Rum and the Coca-Cola™, and probably the Mafia boyfriends. Then my sister was just young and musically retarded enough to buy, and listen to--just the other side of my bedroom wall--stereophonic Osmond cult discs. This was in the day when Donny was programmed as Michael Jackson without the talent and Marie an ingenue "country" "singer". (Sis didn't listen to the excrescence that was "Little" Jimmy Osmond--in reality a dwarfish Catskills veteran hired and fitted with a dental prosthesis--or I'd still be in Cell Block D.)

And, okay, so they never really went all the way away in the interim, for some reason (Bobby Sherman must be pissed), but they were barely an undeserved bubble breaking the surface of the celebrity Olympic-sized pool of cess when suddenly, starting a couple weeks ago, the hopeless passenger of my Poor Wife's evening local news rides is bombarded with every mathematical permutation of rodent dentition in the state of Utah. Marie faints dead away from the exertion of haphazardly executing some two-minute dance routine, resulting in a five-day wall-to-wall. Then her father--whose name, visage, personality, show-biz function, or alternate claim to fame I don't ever recall ever having seen or heard before--died, and there was three days of funeral coverage (JFK must be pissed), and just when that had blessedly begun to subside somebody ran a feature on one of the original Osmond brothers who has overcome MS or shingles or something inspiring. And then--I may have the chronology inside out, as if that would matter--there was something about one or two or five of Marie's brood being sentenced to rehab. (This was reiterated to me at the dinner table celebration of my sister's eldest's fifteenth birthday yesterday, to which I replied that when the sample size was thirty-six the odds of at least two being in rehab on any given day were at most even money, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one set of conjoined twins, a biological female being raised as a male, and two instances of Tay-Sachs disease into the bargain.) And, on the nights when local Directors of News felt this Western dessert dinner theatre version of the Icelandic Sagas was beginning to flag, middle-aged Donny would magically appear exhaling his wintergreen breath-saver and unscented Ban roll-on personality. Assuming, that is, that Mormons are permitted wintergreen.

Frankly, it seems like the minimum required for good democracy that such patent absurdities as the public fluffing of the Umpteenth Reincarnation of Creationism be accompanied by some boilerplate explaining just how much money had changed hands. And, in the case of the Osmonds, the exhumation of Howard Hughes in light of modern advancements in DNA testing. Because their revival has got to be costing somebody billions.

TV Guide™ Roundup

And We Do Mean Return: It's either the writers' strike, or global warming recently thawed a group of TV Guide™ correspondents trapped in the ice since that ill-advised Pat Boone Live At Glacier National Park special . Either way, the golden era of letters to TV Guide™ as a window on the political zeitgeist of the North American shut-in circa 1967 appears headed for a comeback. Sharon Murguia, of Victorville, CA, writes to express her appreciation for shows like Friday Night Lights, "where parents try to teach their children to make good and right choices". Her fellow Golden Stater Mark Reyes, of Playa Del Rey, thinks the writers of Ugly Betty need to look up the definitions for "heart," "character," and "entertainment." Massapequa, NY's Herb Stark satirically adds that, given this season's barrage of mindless TV shows and graphically violent movies, he was surprised to hear the writers were on strike, since he thought they already were!

We're left to wonder whether anyone wrote in to demand the network news organizations get off the President's back already, but plenty of other Americans are engaged in traditional pursuits. Heartlander Gena Fisher, of Kidder, MO, says TV Guide™ rules! and adds "Four words: Robert Sean Leonard interview". Both Glasgow, KY's Michael Emberton, and Fort Lewis, WA's Brianna Donovan pledge fealty to The Office's Jim and Pam, despite a recent Jeer. And Maria Maxwell, of Wading River, NY, is disappointed that TV Guide™ spoiled the upcoming Sex and the City movie. They didn't do that sort of thing in the old days. Make over-praised teevee link sausages into movies, we mean.

Cheers: Danny Glover, charm and gravitas; Brian Williams, SNL; Elizabeth Banks, funny childbirth.

Jeers: Rules of Engagement, stranding Heather Locklear in a thankless, laughless role; AMC, running Mad Men reruns out of sequence.

Reader Jeer of the Week: Roy Herstein of San Fran notes Cold Case's anachronistic casting of 70-somethings Ralph Waite and Len Lesser as thirty-somethings in 1938.

That's a thirty!!

Happy Birthday

Andrew Goodman
November 23, 1943--June 21, 1964

I Blame Reagan

David Brooks, "The Segmented Society." November 20

MAYBE I'm mistaken--there was that long period before the Wall came down when I read Brooks only on Sunday--but it seems as though every time the man hangs some wingnut wash out in public he's back within 72 hours with one of these Why Can't We All Just Get Along routines. I can't quite decide if it's calculated or just the natural defense mechanism of the AV Club nerd.

The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.

But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.

Dave, I'm just spitballin' here, but y'know, maybe the reason nobody today has that sort of longevity is that they'd have to be that old. Dr. Dre's pushing 25 years in the business, and Chuck D thirty. George Clinton's got a stage somewhere. But they're disqualified because they don't bring in the coveted 50-58 white concertgoer demographic?

Back in the Days of USENET I would frequently be forced to remark on how every argument eventually turned into an epistemology lecture. Today it seems every issue requires an explanation that the history of a thing does not begin at the point you become aware of it, and it is not appreciably broadened by bits of its history acquired contemporaneously. There's no substitute for doing some of the actual digging yourself.

When little Steven Van Zandt (b. 1950) and I were lads it was possible to pick up a considerable chuck of the history of Rock and Roll from listening to it on the radio--it was but a decade old, after all--where hourly Golden Oldies slots introduced you to Bill Haley and Elvis and Chuck and Little Richard and Jerry Lee. We heard doo-wop. We heard the Everly Brothers. We heard the officially sanctioned history of mostly black music as packaged for and sold to young white audiences. We didn't hear Louis Jordan, Chicago blues, Roy Brown or Wynonie Harris, or, for that matter, any of the gospel, jump, country, mountain, barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, swing, stride, or various folk musics that were present at the conception. Those required digging and diligence.

The 70s were the end of that musical integration, not its heyday, as a little diligence would have informed Brooks. National programming fragmented audiences. Black artists disappeared from rock stations once the Album Oriented Rock format descended (in fairness, it's tough to work in many artists of whatever color if you're dedicated to playing "Stairway to Heaven" three times an hour). In 1967 Stax died with Otis Redding, shortly after Motown self-destructed by losing Holland-Dozier-Holland. It was the lush soul of Gamble & Huff and Gladys Knight that crossed-over in the early 70s, but by then they had a home in urban radio, and why not?; they were not exactly a programming match for The Doobie Brothers. The soundtracks to Shaft and Superfly reached rock audiences, but between then and Disco white kids heard "Sweet Home Alabama," not "Living in America".

It's the Balkanization of the audience, not the music, Mr. Brooks. In the early 1970s I listened to the Stones, The Who, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Leon Russell, King Crimson, Van Morrison, Richard Thompson, Pink Floyd, Randy Newman, Nick Drake, Sly Stone, Dave Edmunds, Santana, Little Feat, Dr. John, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks--all subsumed by the rubric "Rock and Roll". How many genres is that today, without counting James Brown or Miles Davis or Hugh Masekela, or Muddy and Wolf and Sonny Boy, whom you sought out in the other sections of the record store?

People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.

Your honor, the prosecution rests; if Time sussed it out by 1982 I think we can safely date the actual occurrence to 1973 at the latest.

Is this important? Well, for one thing, I think it's curious that Mr. Road To Damascus At A Milton Friedman Lecture discounts the role of the market:

Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.

Now, without questioning the validity of market research which tells the four guys who own radio stations in this country that people want to hear the same six songs over and over again, and that their attention spans are so short that any variation will send them screaming for the dial, and without pointing out that it is the relaxation of restrictions on ownership that permits them this sort of unlimited power, we will simply ask where the notion comes from? Why should those Prisoner of Science marketeers want to slice consumers into ever more narrow specimens?

I guess I'm just unclear on the theology. The Market is an all-powerful, scythe-wielding arbiter wholly at the mercy of what people tell market researchers? And Free Will, tapdancing angels, and Adam and Eve's navels come into it where, again?

If you haven't heard me say it before, believe me: I revere pop radio of the mid-1960s, when The Beatles were followed by Aretha was followed by Dylan was followed by Jackie Wilson. But like the man sez, when times are gone they're not old, they're dead. Top 40 radio didn't disappear due to new technologies; it disappeared due to new trends in separating the consumer from his currency. And in a market where the subject/object is literally or metaphorically fifteen years old, with a fifteen-year-old's discernment, attention span, and disposable income, we're now nearly three generations removed from that happy time when white audiences began to accept black music on its own terms. If anything stops The Market from trying to re-integrate pop music, beyond the marketeers themselves, it's that they've trained the consumer to expect a high level of familiarity and a zero-tolerance for anything "foreign".

And what of it, anyway? The Fascists made the runners train on time, The Market provides these warm-bath spaces for people to soak and be soaked in. Why should young urban audiences be listening to some California mope singing about his shirt? Why should blue-collar white teenagers be listening to Sufjan Stevens? Why shouldn't jazz fans feel superior to all of the above? I believe I've found one man's answer:

But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.

Plus, how come it's okay to have Black History Month, but they won't let you have White History Month?

Apart from the fact that I'm willing to pay good money for every working white musician you can name who doesn't earn a living to some degree "appropriating African-American styles", I think we glimpse the real problem here: popular music now longer kowtows to a white middle-class sensibility. If only They would let us rap! Then it'd be something The Whole Family could enjoy!

Shoe a mite snug when They switch it to the other foot, Mr. Brooks?

Look, I not only admire Fats Domino, I still listen to him. This position is no longer supported, even in elevators. Big whoop. There never was an arts-loving public. I have no idea why my pubescent nieces would, or should, want to listen to him; good luck changing that by making him a school subject. Let them discover him on their own, if the time comes. Let 'em treat music as something that goes on in the background if they'd rather. And let David Brooks accept the results of that Free Market he worships so long as "higher earnings estimates" is at the top of his personal chart, even when somebody other than The Man gets him some.

My Xmas Shopping Is Complete--And Before Black Friday!

Hillary Clinton Nutcrackers for everybody!

They're Not Booing, They're Saying...Oh, Wait, They Are Booing.

Lou Cannon, "Reagan's Southern Stumble." Times November 18

LIKE some back-of-the-dust-jacket circle blurb, Cannon shows up in Sunday's Op-Ed pages to restate the position David Brooks ascribed to him, either because 1) Brooks is feeling some heat for that ill-advised November 9 column; 2) Bob Herbert joined in last week, necessitating some faux-balance in the flesh; or 3) Cannon thought using eight times as many words as Brooks spent on him would tip the balance.

POLITICAL mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.

Again, nobody says this, or if they do the answer is a single-sentence brush-off. (It takes a whole paragraph or two to deal with people who claim Reagan won by stealing Carter's debate book or horse-trading with the hostage-holding Ayatollah, but that's another story.) What is claimed is that the modern "conservative" Republican party--the one Reagan's victory cemented in place-has been making such appeals for forty-five years, that it is a sizable, and often unspoken part of its electoral prowess, and that his first public act as Candidate Reagan--that trip to Klanland where he told the assembled crowd that Rinse-O™ with Extra Bluing Crystals got his sheets their whitest--serves as a fine metaphor for the whole enterprise. Small wonder both Brooks nor Cannon feel compelled to inflate the claims made about the incident, seeing as how the facts are undeniable and undeniably not on their side.

And again: going into Mississippi in 1980 and declaring for States' Rights was not "speaking in code," any more than saying "I'm pro-life" at that Values Voters Bash is.

He had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too powerful.

And in those two decades not one person ever imagined he was talking about the Commerce Clause.

In the wake of Neshoba, Mr. Reagan’s critics pounced. President Carter’s campaign operatives portrayed Mr. Reagan as a divisive racist.

Well, he had been talking like that for twenty years, Lou...I'm really somewhat at a loss, though, to explain why opponents portraying Reagan as racially divisive redeems his comment. And if he'd issued a retraction, a clarification, or an apology in response we wouldn't be having this conversation now, would we?

The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support.

Okay, if I understand this line of reasoning correctly, people who claim Reagan won the 1980 elections due to a racist appeal are wrong because 1) the appeal backfired; 2) it wasn't racist; and 3) what th' fuck are you talking about?

Any fair-minded look at Mr. Reagan’s biography and record demonstrates that he was not a bigot. In 1931, when Mr. Reagan was on the Eureka College football team, two black players were refused admission to a hotel in Elmhurst, Ill., where the team was playing. Mr. Reagan took them with him to Dixon, Ill., to spend the night at his parents’ home. He and one of the players, William Franklin Burghardt, remained friends and correspondents until Mr. Burghardt died in 1981.

Hey, Lou, sometime, have somebody introduce you to an African-American and try that one on him. Whatever his political stripe. I'm sure the two players involved appreciated the gesture, but we aren't talking about his college career, and it ain't exactly sitting in protest at a Whites Only lunch counter while inbred yahoos burn you with cigarettes. This is part of the transparent fradulence of the argument. Reagan did not have to personally espouse racism to appeal to racists for votes; he didn't have to personally support segregation to be a racist. It's a really touching story an' all about how, way back in the 1930s Reagan didn't imagine he'd catch the Black Plague by inviting two African-Americans into his parent's house. But the issue is whether, fifty years later, he and the Republican party he helped reshape consciously appealed to white racism in the wake of Lyndon Johnson ramrodding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, et. seq., and whether Reagan's campaign-kickoff speech in Philadelphia is a fair example of the process.

And the answer is, as the kids say today, Well, duh!

As a sports announcer in Iowa in the 1930s, Mr. Reagan opposed the segregation of Major League Baseball. As an actor in Hollywood he quit a Los Angeles country club because it did not admit Jews.

And joined the Jewish one (by the way, did Hillcrest admit blacks, Mr. Cannon?) And he was a Commie, until he married Mommy. What any of that has to do with the campaigns of '64 or beyond I'm not sure. We doff the bowler to any and all of Reagan's principled stands against discrimination, but we also point out that the remarks of a sportscaster and the acts of a President are not measured on the same efficiency scale. Lots of people in the 1930s and 40s who believed in some notion of equality, or who opposed Jim Crow on principle, so long as they were outside the South, were not exactly crazy about open housing, or their own schools being integrated, or Sweet Susie's black swain turning up for Thanksgiving dinner. We don't know about Reagan. We don't presume to judge. We know he presided over the realization of Nixon's Southern Strategy. We know his Cadillac-drivin' Welfare Queen, fictional except in his telling of it, remains an icon of the operation. We know that's enough.

In fact, maybe now is a good time to cut the shit, huh? I'm a white Northerner born in 1953, exactly twenty years after Lou Cannon. Anybody of my age bracket and climatological repose knows what kind of racism festers just below the surface in non-slave holding, non-segregated white America. It's a little less open and a little less virulent than a generation ago. But it's also true that it's less acceptable in public than it was. All the improvement is due to remarkably brave people who stood up against it and sometimes paid with their lives. And while that was going on--while black churches burned across the South, while Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were being disinterred from their Mississippi mass grave, while Lt. Colonel Lemuel Penn, USA, was shotgunned to death and while his killers awaited their perfunctory acquittal, while the infected gunshot wounds in his stomach--wounds he'd received from Alabama state troopers as he'd tried to stop them beating his 82-year-old grandfather--took a week to kill Jimmy Lee Jackson, while Jonathan Daniels lay dead on the ground in front of Varner's Grocery Store, while his killer awaited his perfunctory acquittal, while Viola Liuzzo was being shipped back to Detroit and John Edgar Hoover was insinuating that she'd been givin' those black bucks more than a ride in her car, just between us, now...Ronald Reagan and the extremist wing of the Republican party, soon to adopt the single-wing set, opposed them. Because of States' Rights, y'know.

Morphemes of Longing and Unattainability in Early Jacobean Theatre and Letters to TV Guide™

This Week: Letters to TV Guide™

"Moonlight's Mick. St. John is everything a vampire should be and more," opines the juicy-monikered Yvonne Grapes of East Peoria, Illinois, who adds a seductive "Bite me, please!" Rowwwll! Peel me a Grapes! (Wait., there's an East Peoria?) But it's the same program's Alex O'Loughlin who hypersanguinates the juicy bits of Houston's Doddie Laborde ("He's sensitive, romantic, vulnerable and really, really good-looking") and Largo, Florida's R. Savoie ("Forget McSteamy, forget McDreamy"). Wooo-ooo! That's some scary stuff, kids! Prison Break engenders a slightly different glandular focus, as Amber L. Kier of Lake Isabella, California, jeers the Jeerers of Dominic Purcell's sweaty scenes, noting that he's under stress, in Panama, in summer, and it's hot. Enough said! says Amber, and we agree. But skeptical Staten Islander Tom DeLuca wants to know why, since the show's brothers were on the lam all last season, their hair never grows? It's the stress, Tom. They understand this on the West Coast.

Speaking of skeptics, Chris Bennett, of the Athol, Massachusetts, Bennetts, thinks Britney Spears should hire a chauffeur (What? And give up Show Business?), and Beth Harper, who hails from a Lexington in some state or other, wants to know why Jamie, the Bionic Woman, jumped over buildings while holding a mobile phone to her ear, rather than having a receiver as part of her bionic ear bundle. "I do," says Ms Harper. "It's called a Bluetooth." Hey, we'll do the jokes, Beth!

In programming notes, Hindman, Kentucky's Salina Gibson is glad Jerry O'Connell has her laughing every Tuesday night on Carpoolers, even though she still misses Crossing Jordan, and Gardnerville, Nevada's Patricia Johnson writes to thank ABC for bringing back Men in Trees, "one of the few entertaining, nonviolent, nongory shows worth waiting for." We agree with you as far as that goes, Patricia, but we also think that not waiting for entertaining, violent, gory shows has a lot to be said for it as well.

Jill C. Nobles, down Alpharetta, Georgia, way, sends kudos to DWTS' Samantha Harris for her fabulous, three-weeks-post-partum body, but scolds the wardrobe department for putting a nursing mother in a spaghetti-strap gown. It "needs to give the woman a little support," she thinks. Up North we're just a bit more progressive on the idea of possible exposure of a lactating breast or two, Jill C.! And speaking of female empowerment, Bellingham, Washington's David Hirsch wonders how Angie Harmon feels about the ad for Women's Murder Club on the back cover of the October 8 issue. "She's wearing a badge on her backside. Hope her job doesn't involve a lot of sitting." We're with you, David, but we fear Ms Harmon's politics park their apple-y bottom on the other side of the aisle. And it's not the statuesque Ms Harmon but her husband who's spent most of his working hours on his ass. And that's a thirty!

Friday That's Just The Vicodin Blogging

SHIT, pal, lemme tell ya. The Republic ain't doomed because Campbell Brown is helping us select a President. The Republic is doomed because Campbell Brown has a job. Campbell Brown is Diane Sawyer: The Next Generation. She's Mrs. Dan Fucking Senor, fer chrissakes. She was taped jumping up and down and hugging people when Bush (whom she was covering) "won" Florida. Remember when there was a shitstorm because Dan Rather spoke at a union picnic?

I mean, we're a country full of religious lunatics and nobody, nobody objects when the Spawn of Senor percolates a few feet from the potential Next President of the United States. People believe in UFOs, guardian angels, and the effectiveness of waterboarding, but they're content to imagine The Omen is "just a show"?

It's champions week on Jeopardy! and the other night the category was something like "Women's Names in Song Titles" and a) nobody got "Allison", but they got fucking John Glad He's Dead Denver's "Annie's Song", speaking of waterboarding, and b) some joker on the staff made Elvis Costello a lower-valued clue than Mr. Fucking Billion Units Country Ro-oads Whose Idea of the "Country" Was Motherfuckin' Aspen. Right. Thanks for trying to convince me the world is sane. Try harder next time. If you're not gonna try at all, try Slate, which says that Email Is Dead (cause kids these days IM). See how it's done? Now they just leave it to the reader to be the contrarian! Email isn't dying because teens IM. Email is doomed because once those dumbass little fuckers get ahold of this fucked-up planet everything is doomed. The fuckin' Movement "Conservatives" are just the warm up act, the Shecky Greene to their geriatric no-voiced Sinatra. Goldberg's gonna look like an actual public intellectual by the time this thing's over, I'm tellin' ya.

Okay, so that's unfair. I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by it. I love kids. And we're already fuckin' doomed anyhow. We've been doomed since Reagan. We've got Captain Queeg on the bridge, only this one never had any marbles, and he isn't even smart enough to realize he steamed through his own tow line, let alone trying to cover it up anymore, and he's just Reagan 2.0. Wait'll we get Reagan Vista. I mean, people talk about what Reagan didn't do, like initiating thermonuclear war, as though this was a positive attribute. He couldn't do it because the public hadn't quite been dumbed down enough. Bush couldn't do it because somebody screwed up and dumbed down the government even faster. It'll all balance out someday. Huh? Well of course I realize Bush didn't have a Soviet Union to nuke. Reagan didn't have one to speak of either, and that never stopped him from pretending he did. You supply the prose poems, I'll supply the Holocaust.

You got another one? Anyway, did you watch Debate #473 last night? Pretty good. I'd rank it with #214, myself. Goddamn it, Hillary Clinton is the best candidate out there. It's not even close. That Huckabee guy might qualify as a promising minor leaguer, and don't get me started on the Quadrennial Let's Elect A Really Insane Guy shit. It's Hillary. She's good. She didn't panic. Just like Bill, she didn't fight fire with fire. She blew the goddam flame out, knocked the fucker over, put a boot to the throat, and said, calmly, "What was that, again?" Bill was swattin' fungoes compared to her. That gender-card crapola from last week just vanished. She swatted Edwards like he was a pouty three-year-old. And Obama, hell, it's "Why Won't You Stop Hitting Yourself?" Krugman:

But Mr. Obama’s Social Security mistake was, in fact, exactly what you’d expect from a candidate who promises to transcend partisanship in an age when that’s neither possible nor desirable.

Damn skippy. I mean, there are worse things than a President light on experience, and there are worse things than a President who fought against the Iraq War as Treasurer of the Chicago Ward-Heelers Society but can't quite bring himself to denounce Smoke and/or Mirrors as a foreign policy tool. But, at least among Democrats, there's nothing worse than a candidate who takes advice from Maureen Dowd.

For cryin' out loud, he tried to compare Clinton to Rudy & Mitt last night. Who the hell is advising this guy? Two-thirds of the Democratic party, and the entire netroots gaggle, is unhappy with the party, fed-up with Congress, and boiling mad about the last seven years, and somehow Barack Obama can't find anyplace to stand because some genius suggested branding him as Mr. Anti-Partisanship amid the fucking wreckage of a government vandalized by the other party's partisans. Lovely parting gifts! Thanks for playing our game!

Say one thing: President Clinton will kick Tim Russert's ass, but she'll probably be too subtle about it. I'd vote for her right now, if I could, for our next Press Secretary. Hell, I'll vote for her if she'll backchannel me and tell me the first thing her Press Secretary will do, on 1/20/09, is to stand up in front of the Press Corpse and read a two-page history of Vandalgate, Pardongate, and Giftgate with particular attention paid, by name, to Mike Allen and Andrea Mitchell, then suggest they all sleep on it and return bright and early tomorrow.

And make Ailes give Bill his own show.

But fer chrissakes, dude, a fucking Centrist Democrat is the best we can manage in a crisis. I mean, I watched the goddam Brian Williams Show last night--the next President should decree they can't call it "News" anymore--and it was just the local news with more helicopters. If you've got nothing to say, at least have a Friends rerun racked up. It's the Reagan Curse. We're a nation of Lucky Lotto players, man. You think trading Babe Ruth was anything compared to electing a bad actor past his sell-by date President? You think I've said "fuck" enough to drop down to "High School Sophomore" yet? Can you get this stuff in quantity?

Th' Fuck?