January 2004 Archives

I keep going back and forth on the prospects for the new Air America Radio liberal talk network. Today, I think it'll fail. Why? Here's a quote about Lizz Winstead's plans for her show and the network from the Orlando Weekly:

Ms. Winstead will oversee and edit a stable of 10 writers, most of whom have worked with her before. A handful came from "The Daily Show," others from "Court TV," where Winstead developed "Snap Judgment," a satire of the legal system. Others come from network TV or from the Oxygen network, where Winstead developed "O2B," a spoof of women's talk shows that was pulled after one season in spite of good reviews. "I have basically hired people who are funnier than me and smarter than me, and who understand me," she says.

If you need 10 writers to do a daily radio show, you're finished. I've done talk radio for a living in major markets for a career, and you know how many writers I worked with? None. Zero. The best talk shows on the radio have no writers, just the host and maybe a producer kicking around ideas. A few have writers- Howard Stern has a few, Bill Handel has producers write stuff- but 10 writers for a midday talk show?

"It won't be completely scripted," Winstead says.

Radio's not TV. Most talk radio's not scripted. That nobody at this network seems to realize this is astonishing.

This should be interesting. That's not necessarily a good thing.

The work avalanche is in full effect, and it's day two of the deluge. Actually, I welcome the flood- more work, more money- but there are not enough hours in the day, you know. Turns out there's a limit on my ability to do things- I can do about three things at once in a vaguely competent manner, but pushing it further is unwise, not because I can't do it but because my mind melts down. I'm in the process of analyzing every show on a couple of big radio stations, all at once, plus doing a research project, plus writing some comedy material, plus my usual columns and news items, plus breathing and eating and sleeping. Ah, hell, they don't pay me to eat and sleep and breathe- skip 'em.

The other part of the equation is that I'm neither being attentive to what's happening in the news nor what's happening around me. I mean, I'm writing my usual news stuff over at AllAccess.com, and it's (I hope) as relevant as it should be, but I'm forgetting it as soon as it's typed. And I'm not experiencing the usual daily aggravations that translate to observations for this thing- today, my total outside-the-house experience included a) walking out to get the papers off the driveway, b) running, c) driving to the post office, getting the mail, driving to Taco Bell, eating a taco in the car, driving to the cleaners, picking up the dry cleaning, driving home, and d) walking to the backyard grill to cook dinner.

There's no entertainment value in any of that.

So I'm in my own world for now, a world that isn't all that fascinating, a world of work and more work. I'm going to try and be a little more, you know, interesting tomorrow. Right now, I'm just coming up for air.

Lotta work today, lotta work coming up. My mind's a little occupied right now, and not even by Vicodin or tooth pain. That is to say, sorry for the lack of new material today. Hey, you gotta at least love the price.

I didn't want to hear the recording of the call from the flight attendant on Flight 11, because I never like to hear that stuff. All those 911 calls you hear on the news, the anguish and panic in the voice of the people who call- it's haunting, and I don't like to be haunted. This time, though, the tape came without warning. I had KABC on in the car, and the story popped up in ABC News before I had a chance to react. And there it was, direct from 9/11, a calm Betty Ong calling a reservations clerk and saying "somebody's stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there's mace that we can't breathe. I don't know. I think we are getting hijacked."

Calm and clear in the face of certain doom. Hearing it was about as painful and sad as possible, and it made me angry all over again. And in my anger, I remembered again what was done to us on that day, what was done to everyone, what's been forgotten in the ensuing 26 months.

We can argue over what to do about what happened on 9/11, and that's exactly what the candidates are doing. Great. That's America- we're free to bicker and second-guess and object, and that's what makes this country what it is. But in that discussion, I sense that we aren't remembering what really happened to us. We're talking in the abstract again, detached, as if the attack happened to someone else, somewhere else, hurting nobody we knew. Some would call that the right thing to do, a way of retaining perspective and balance, as if there's some other side we need to consider.

There is no other side. The attack was murder. It was evil. No excuse.

Someone, a while back- maybe it was Lileks- pointed this out first, so I claim no points for originality, and I've even said this before, but we need to be angry about this. We need to remember the punch in the gut, the knee to the balls, the horror, the wrenching horror of watching innocent people burn to death or jump from 100 stories up. We need to remember because in forgetting, we're giving aid and comfort to the people who celebrated that event, who want us either dead or subjected to their beliefs.

We need to hear that tape.

I was walking into the post office when I noticed something that keeps happening there, a pet peeve of mine: each of the handicapped spaces were occupied by cars without handicapped plates or placards. When I came back out, one of those cars- a brand-new BMW with a gate sticker for the ultra-affluent gated community at the top of the hill- was occupied by its owner, a woman who can only be described as a WASP matron, upper fifties at least, too heavily made up, dripping with jewelry. And as I passed by and behind her car to get to mine, she backed up... right into me. She didn't hit me, but she was trying. I know this because she was screaming at me to get the hell out of the way- after all, she's FAR too wealthy and important to be made to wait for a mere pedestrian. And as I dodged that harridan, I saw that the other illegal-parker was a fat guy in shorts who had just decided that he didn't want to have to walk more than a few feet to drop off his letters.

Here's my proposal- any car without handicapped plates or placards parked in a handicapped spot should be fair game for vandalism. You see a car illegally parked there, you get to key it, or break the windows, or spray-paint your tag on the hood. Better yet, how about ENCOURAGING vandalism against those cars? Every handicapped spot should be equipped with sledgehammers, buckets of paint, cans of Krylon... I can see this having the salutory effect of not only dissuading idiots like the Rolling Hills BMW Matron from parking there, but it can be used as a release of violent tendencies for those so inclined. Gangs could take out their fury on Lazy Fat Guy in SUV instead of innocent victims. You want to take a handicapped spot from someone who really needs it? Eat a mouthful of Sherwin-Williams.

Maybe, on the other hand, I'm being too harsh. I mean, maybe they ARE handicapped. They have a malfunctioning conscience. Imagine going through life with that affliction.

I'm enjoying the latest round of spam e-mails I've been getting.

No, really, I get roughly five hundred spams a day among my various accounts, much of it the usual viagra come-ons, plus some farm animal action, if, as Joe Bob Briggs would day, you know what I mean and I think you do. But the latest batch is different. In fact, I don't know what's in 'em- I think they're really just sent out to confirm your address is valid so someone can sell it on a list- but they feature names and subject lines that appear to be randomly generated.

For example, "Lois Jaramillo" writes on the subject "Gunky associate." "Alvin Putnam" waxes profound in an e-mail with the subject "algerta brockish." Maxwell Rogers insists "assume nomadic churn," while Valeria Faulk speaks of "luxuriant flung." "Stephen Irwin" urges us to "freethink cinematic." "Marquis Hull" suggests that we "adminish imprecision ditty," while other notes come from "Plutocrats L. Vexes," "Pierce Kenya," "Revved U. Wedding," "Repletion J. Cliburn," "Reallocates C. Flotation," and "Refulgence H. Corduroy," not to mention "Seedless J. Grouping," "Slap K. Orchestral," and "Elephant J. Tomcats," who I think was in my law school class.

Really, it's far more amusing to get an e-mail from Mr. Flotation and Sir Tomcats than from anyone I actually KNOW. It's great when the names almost but not quite approach a reasonable facsimile of a real name: "Repletion J. Cliburn" has 2/3 of a real name, but you know there's no "Seedless J. Grouping." (Where have you gone, "Algonquin J. Calhoun"? And why do most fictional names have the middle initial "J"?)

These days, a lot of my REAL e-mail is bad news: "you have a new e-bill," "you haven't updated my listing," "Dodgers 2004 season tickets on sale now." I'm enjoying the spam more without even having to open them. Maybe someone should invent a spam filter that keeps your LEGITIMATE messages out of your inbox. I'd be interested. If you have one, drop me a line- you should be able to find my address anywhere. Just look for Plutocrats L. Vexes.

They yanked the wisdom teeth out of my head yesterday, all four of them. I'm alive. I count that as a positive.

Procedure- they knocked me out, yanked away, woke me up, packed me with gauze and Vicodin and sent me on my way. It's been a blur since then, so much so that, at this very moment, Fran's got a DVD of "Uptown Girls" running and I'm too dazed to object. (Besides, last I checked, the Sixers were getting pummeled by Cleveland, and I didn't really want to see more of that, even under sedation).

Pain? More like discomfort- my mouth's not used to having gaps back there. And I can't eat anything more challenging than mac 'n' cheese, not yet, anyway, but I'm recovering fairly quickly. But right now, I'm going to play the poor recovering surgery subject for all it's worth. Why, I'm too weak and exhausted to work- bring me another Jell-O, please.

No sooner did I write about the passing of Ray Rayner and the entire local kiddie show host genre than Captain Kangaroo dies.

I watched the Captain, although I was never much of a fan. I liked Tom Terrific- simple figures, plain black-on-white, frenetic action, Manfred the Wonder Dog- but the rest was too little-kid-like even for a little kid like me. I outgrew the Captain fast, and, besides, I always sensed that he wasn't really a nice, grandfatherly figure but just a bitter actor in a stupid outfit. Later, when he would make pronouncements that the rest of children's television was rubbish (insinuating that all of it should be more like the boring, simple Captain), I felt vindicated. But millions of kids were watching over the thirty years he was on the air, which means he had to be doing something right.

The Captain- Bob Keeshan- was 76, which means, once again, he was a LOT younger than I imagined he was back in the day. He would have been in his mid- to late-30s when I was watching. Shows you what things look like from a kid's perspective- adults my age now look positively ancient to a little kid. Maybe we are.

Check out TV Party's Captain page here.

Ray Rayner died Wednesday. I didn't grow up watching him on TV. I only ever saw him in clips, on one of those Chicago TV retrospectives. If you didn't grow up in the 60's or 70's within reach of WGN-TV, you probably have no idea who he was. Actually, I thought his schtick was kinda lame, myself- really little-kid-oriented humor, with puppets, no less. But if you grew up in Chicago, you knew who he was, knew who Cuddly Dudley and Chelveston were, watched Ray Rayner and Garfield Goose and maybe Gigglesnort Hotel if you got the exotic UHF dial.

That's how it used to be, back when different cities had their own personalities. Oh, some still do, for sure, but the media are beating those differences out of them. TV in Chicago's now little different from TV in San Francisco, or Houston, or Boston or Buffalo or San Diego or anywhere else. There's no room for local stuff anymore- the networks rule most of the day, syndication most of the rest, and local news is pretty much the same everywhere, same blow-dried multi-ethnic airhead anchors, same sweeps-weeks "investigative reports," same sets, same logos.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There's no reason, for example, someone in, say, Tulsa should suffer with a bad late-night show if they can get Letterman or Leno or Kimmel or Conan. You wouldn't want a local "ER" or "Friends"- the original's what you want. Fine, that's great, but what used to add a local touch to the day, the kiddie shows and the movie hosts and the local chat shows... gone, mostly gone, done in by economics and, in the kiddie shows' case, law. And that's why CBS2 in Los Angeles is just like CBS2 in New York or CBS2 in Chicago or CBS3 in Philadelphia, devoid of local flavor, just slick and networky all day long.

I think we've lost something there. When I was a kid (here we go again), you could watch the local kiddie shows and hear the host mention YOUR town and YOUR school and maybe YOUR name- maybe you'd WIN something!- and he'd make jokes about the mayor or the local team and everyone you knew would be watching and you'd all want to get tickets to be ON the show and maybe win at the Snake Cans game or take home a Ladmo Bag or whatever the local show did in your town.

Back then, New York had a lot of local shows- Sandy Becker was the best, Warner Bros. cartoons and truly demented solo sketches in which he played dork Norton Nork or crazed, pith-helmeted Hambone, then he'd be there in his "real" suit-and-tie and make sardonic jokes about the station and crew that weren't for kids to understand (but we did). Chuck McCann was always doing Laurel and Hardy schtick (he was a great Hardy) and Little Orphan Annie, in a ridiculous costume with the white eyes. Soupy Sales had his puppets at the door and the Philo Kvetch and his dog Oregano sketches that sprinkled Borscht Belt Yiddishisms throughout the mayhem. Carol Corbett hosted the Gumby show on channel 11, and she was OK, as was Officer Joe Bolton with the Stooges shorts (and sometimes a rapidly aging Moe would show up!), but Captain Jack McCarthy, the Popeye host, was a little creepy to me, and I was not pleased when he was chosen to host coverage of my home town's parade for their Little League World Champions. Philly had people like Wee Willie Webber (he wasn't wee) and Captain Philadelphia (who I see at Dodger Stadium these days in the guise of his alter ego, mild-mannered sportscaster Stu Nahan) and the ultra-genial Captain Noah and the disturbingly twee Gene London, who, to my dismay, came in best at our house (we got Channel 10 much better in early morning or late at night). You had your own- Rex Trailer, perhaps, or Skipper Chuck or Sheriff John or Wallace and Ladmo or any number of other legends.

These guys- they were mostly guys, with the odd Pixanne or Hobo Kelly thrown in for variety- were in your town, made appearances at your shopping centers and state fairs, cracked jokes about things you recognized. Maybe you even knew someone who knew someone who knew one of them, saw him shopping at Gimbels or something. But they were there, and so were you, and the morning talk host and the weatherman and the horror movie host. Community.

Now, most markets have local news people and sportscasters and that's all. And who really wants to be in a community with them? They'll move on to the next biggest market soon enough, anyway, and the next guy'll come in and you won't be able to tell them apart. Sandy Becker's dead, and so are Ladmo and Ghoulardi and Dr. Shock and Seymour and Bob McAllister and lots of others. Wonderama's gone, killed by changing tastes, and the other kiddie shows were killed when the law made them stop plugging Sunbeam Bread and Bosco and Nandy Candy and by changing tastes- we didn't know there WAS such a thing as attention deficit disorder back then, but a kid today watching a kid's show sketch from 1966 would be as bored as they apparently are by Looney Tunes and the Flintstones (now relegated to Boomerang while anime and the Firly Oddparents rule elsewhere). But you watch Nickelodeon in Los Angeles and it's the same as in Philadelphia and Detroit and wherever else you might be- no local color, no local jokes, no local kids mentioned, and you'll never run into the stars of whatever the latest live-action Nick variety show is at the mall. Every town has the same TV, just like it has the same Wal-Marts, the same McDonald's, the same Starbucks.

And there's a place for all that- I like knowing I can go anywhere and find reliable food and reliable shopping and reliable lodging and reliable, familiar everything if I want it. But turn on the TV and they don't have the Al Alberts Showcase on channel 6 in Philly anymore with all the little baton twirlers and ballet school kids. Skipper Chuck's an avuncular retiree. And now Ray Rayner's gone, and, soon, nobody will be around from back then, nobody will be able to explain what those shows were like. They were funny, sometimes, and stupid, a lot. Some were innovative, some weren't. Some were sophisticated, most were baggy pants and seltzer comedy. But all were local, and as the FCC prepares to have another public meeting on localism next week, it would be nice if someone would tell them what things were like when local TV was really local TV. Maybe we're too far gone for all that, but I look at the reaction in Chicago- huge obits, columns of reminiscing by countless Chicago natives- I think that maybe we could use a little of that cornball low-budget stuff today. Couldn't hurt.

Meanwhile, if you want to check out more fun stuff about the kiddie show hosts of days gone by, check out TV Party. And L.A. Local Legends. And the Wallace and Ladmo Fan Club. Speaking of which, there IS the matter of Wallace and Ladmo reruns suddenly popping up on TV in Phoenix (AZ-TV, Saturday nights)...

A special present for myself arrived on the doorstep today, a big box filled with one of the Great Wonders of the World...

...Stuckey's Pecan Log Rolls.

We don't get Stuckey's out here (not any closer than somewhere near Tucson, I think), and we don't get that candy in any decent form. Oh, sure, there's a Russell Stover version, but it has fudge in it- fudge! No!- instead of that white nougat with the little cherry flecks. Stuckey's is the real thing, though not quite as good as the ones I remember from boardwalk candy stores back when Asbury Park hadn't yet fallen victim to the riots and decay and fires. They use chopped pecans- the Jersey ones used wholes and halves- but the rest is just right.

Better than just right this time- the nougat could not be more fluffy, fresher, tastier. Atkins? Screw that, it's Stuckey time.

Join me in my self-detructive ways. Order some by clicking here. It's seasonal- they don't ship in hot weather months- so get to it, and enjoy the taste of a million long, hot, uncomfortable drives down I-95 or out I-40. Them's fine eats.

I just got stabbed by the cat.

It was a cold-blooded, deliberate act. She stuck me in the love handle, right through my short, and it drew blood.

Okay, she didn't intend to hurt me, at least as far as I can tell. She wanted to play fetch. That, I can tell from the worn little sponge rubber ball next to her when she did the deed. Normally, though, she taps me on the arm, taps gently to get my attention while I'm trying to bat out another column before deadline. This time, she just took one claw, one sharpened stiletto of a claw, and merely inserted it into my side.

It DID get my attention. I'll give her that.

The result was hardly emergency-room material- a sharp pain, some words Congress is presently trying to ban from TV, the perp scampering away, a dot of blood on my skin. I'll survive, and the brief pain is preparation for that dental work coming later this week. But you'd better believe that I'll be sleeping with one eye open tonight. Can't trust that Ella.

Let's stipulate right off the bat that nonviolence is, all things being equal, preferable to violence. We cool with that? Sure. Nobody relaly wants to live in Quentin Tarantino's world, right?

But then there's Coretta Scott King, who gave an admirable, stirring speech on the day honoring her husband. She said a lot of good things, but she also said this:

"Peaceful ends can only be reached through peaceful means."

And that's not true, because all things are NOT equal.

When those opposing you hate you and would perfer to see you dead, "peaceful means" mean you're going to lose. I'm not going to cite 1938-39 anymore. You know what happened.

I'll say it again. Sometimes, you gotta fight.

But I guess the rest of her speech was OK.

And, well, yeah.

It wasn't just that McNabb was hurt- he was ineffective before they crunched his guts. It wasn't the defense, either- they did a reasonable job of keeping the scoring down. It was the amazing spectacle of receivers- indeed, most of the offense- who failed to show up for the biggest game of their careers.

Every day, people wake up, scrub themselves into presentability, drag themselves to work, and do their jobs to the best of their ability. You do it, I do it, it's just what you do when you have even the slightest iota of pride in yourself and what you do. And all you needed to see was Todd Pinkston making excuse after excuse for running the wrong route, turning his head away while the ball headed right into his chest, and you realized that these guys chose this day to lose concentration, do less than their best, slack off, and you realize that some people, when it comes down to it, just don't care enough to get their jobs done. They care, yes, but not enough. Given three consecutive shots at the prize, they couldn't quite bother to do what they needed to do to win.

Andy Reid's on TV right now, making excuses, saying how his guys felt right until the very end that they were still in the game, ignoring how they screwed up opportunity after opportunity, avoiding criticism, remaining in defeat as in victory the master of talking soft and saying nothing. He also hasn't ever addressed the key issue- they've managed the salary cap well, saving all sorts of money, but they can't see their way to spend money on receivers, on strengthening the offensive line, on getting someone who can stop the run. They have lots of money in the bank. They have plenty of time to count it now, because they won't be working next week.

I just wrote a long piece about Wal-Mart and the condescension of the elite media class, but you won't be reading it. Why?

I'd written it before.

I got pretty much to the end before I realized that I was repeating myself. The new piece wasn't a ripoff of the older column (a fisking of Steve Lopez' Costco experience), but the conclusions were pretty much the same- store serves a noble purpose, elitists don't get it. The numbers were different but the total was the same.

That's an occupational hazard of writing- soon enough, your experiences repeat themselves, your observations repeat themselves, you repeat yourself. It doesn't make the thoughts less valid, but this isn't a newspaper column, where, if you're like the guy who's the "star columnist" in our local daily, you repeat yourself over and over and over and because nobody actually saves all the columns for future reference, nobody'll be the wiser when you kinda tweak that column from a couple of years ago about your Scottish relatives, just as they may not notice that every third column is filled with reader e-mails (hey, why NOT let your readers write your column for you?). No, this is an archive, and if you read something and you think "hey, that sounds familiar," you can just do a quick search on the site and presto, evidence. So I can't get away with that.

Nor do I want to, and nor do most people who write these things, whether they're pure blogs or, like this, sort of rolling columns. This is a new medium, or, more correctly, a new form for an existing medium, and the challenge of being new and original and coherent on a daily (or, for some, several-times-daily) basis is well beyond what the columnists for print papers do. There's no deadline, sure, and usually no editor, but that just makes it harder- you have to hammer something decent out RIGHT NOW, right when the news is still hot, knowing that whatever you say will be right there on the record immediately, no further rethinking, no editing, and it's immediately time for the next column- no every-other-day deadline. Newspaper columnists whine about three-a-week schedules. Poor babies.

But this isn't being done at gunpoint. It's voluntary, and I like doing it. It's just that there's the constant knowledge that what you write not only CAN be compared to what you've written already, it WILL be. And that's why I highlighted all of my brilliant observations (including a deft invocation of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel) and hit "Delete." And that's why you won't have to read it.

Win-win.

There are days when you come to work all fired up, wired like you'd pounded down the Costco-sized case of Red Bull in one shot. You can't be stopped. You get everything done, keep going, fly through the day.

And then there are days when you just... show... up. You show up, go through the motions, stagger across the finish line, collapse.

This week was the latter. And now, I'm going to go away. After taking a beating from the dentist and from life for a few days, I think I've earned it.

I'm in the dentist's chair right now, part one of what will be a weeks-long ordeal. Today, crown replacement. It took three novocaine shots to quell the pain.

Uh oh, here comes the drill again.

Excuse me.

OW OW OW OW OWWWWW

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, in his campaign to get everyone on earth to have a reason to disagree with him, came out today at the National Press Club in favor of ratcheting up indecency fines for broadcasters "tenfold," and he's also throwing his weight behind efforts to ban even the incidental, non-sexual, slip-of-the-tongue use of the word "f-ck." His rationale is that all of this dirty stuff is, well, you know...

No, actually, I DON'T know.

I've told you this before- I'm not the kind of person who uses a lot of obscene words. (Look at the edit above for confirmation) I KNOW them all, I just don't use them, because, well, something in me won't let me. I think I have a preset limit, like a gift card or a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. Can't do it. And I do tend to think that people who can't go more than three or four words without dropping f-bombs or s-bombs are not as bright as those who don't. You don't NEED to say those words all the time. But there ARE times where they just say what you're trying to say in the most efficient, effective manner, just like Yiddish is sometimes the best way to say something even if you don't understand the language- it just SOUNDS right. And there are times when it's involuntary.

Oh, yes, it is. Try hitting your thumb with a hammer.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

(bang)

See? Involuntary.

But the bluenoses in Congress, and now Powell, along with established prudes Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, want to take severe punitive action against swearing on TV and radio. This is because it can have a horrible, deleterious effect on children which is... which is... which is IT'S OBVIOUS AND IF YOU DON'T SEE IT YOU'RE A PERVERT.

But I don't see it.

I knew what the F-word was by the time I was, oh, I'd say 7 years old, and I knew what it meant shortly thereafter. I remember a kid announcing it to us when we were hanging on the monkey bars at Lafayette School. The s-word was never a mystery. The a-word- also never incomprehensible. I knew all the words. Here I am, an adult, still knowing them all plus words I'll bet most people don't know and practices that have to be illegal in most states, but I don't say the words much, can't bring myself to write them, and don't practice anything I'd be embarrassed to admit. (The trapeze and closet-full-of-latex-and-leather are for decorative purposes only) So how did those words hurt me? They didn't.

But don't try to tell the schmucks (Yiddish!) on Capitol Hill that, nor is it anything more than a waste of time to tell the FCC anything of the sort. They're going to make saying rude words a crime. Oh, THEY all use those words, I guarantee it, but YOU can't. Kids, you see.

Too many bad laws and policies come from claims that they're "protecting the children." This would be a bad law, and the children, in this case, don't need protecting. I'll bet your kids know every swear word there is, and I'll bet that they didn't learn them from Bono or Nicole Richie. They learn 'em from their peers, who learn them from older kids, because it's a legacy passed down from generation to generation. They're only words. Let them be.

Pumping gas at the Costco, I leaned against the car and idly looked towards the Sam's Club next door. (Yes, they're next to each other. No, I don't know the logic behind it) There were a couple of stray palm trees, and the sand-colored wall glistened in the sun. And that's when I realized- it's about 75 degrees, the sun's beating down...

... in January.

It's January.

It's not gloating. I spent the greater portion of my life thus far freezing in January. But today, the decision to move southwest seemed so... you know... right.

Ask me again when the next quake hits.

Okay, I gave it another shot. I watched "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I wanted to love it. I really, really wanted to love it.

I didn't love it.

It's still not the case that I don't "get it." I do. Larry David, the character, is supposed to be an unlikeable, sad jerk whose embarrassment and discomfort is supposed to be funny. He's supposed to be irrational and self-destructive, George Costanza in Hollywood. Yes, I get it.

Still not funny.

This season's opener involved Larry's karaoke performance somehow making Mel Brooks think he can take over the lead in "The Producers" on Broadway, with subplots involving Larry's wife's years-ago promise to let him have sex with one "other woman," run-ins with a guy in a wheelchair, a head injury, and fights with a doctor and a lesbian couple. This could be the setup for great hilarity, and I think there might be something terribly wrong with me for being the only person of my acquaintance (other than my wife) who doesn't find the result within a mile of amusing.

I'm not averse to the humor of embarrassment. David's own work on "Seinfeld," pushing his doppelganger George to the brink of self-immolation time and again, was hilarious. "The Honeymooners" depended on Ralph's humiliation, the utter futility of his existence, his inability to realize it until slapped down again. There's been nothing funnier on TV in the past decade than the completely oblivious David Brent on "The Office," doomed to pay for being the world's biggest un-self-aware asshole, shot down at every turn, failing miserably at almost everything. But on "Curb," Larry's just... unpleasant. Not funny- there's nothing funny about an extended screaming jag directed at a guy in a wheelchair crossing the street in front of his car, nothing funny about taking poorly-veiled verbal shots at a doctor because the doctor told him not to use the office phone, nothing funny about Larry refusing to shake Ben Stiller's hand after Stiller sneezed into it. The bits want you to stare at them like a roadside accident scene, but they're more like flat tires.

So I just can't, as a former boss of mine once used to tell her stand-up comic charges, find "the funny" in this show. I still think it may mean there's something wrong with me. Virtually everyone I know seems to be sold on the genius of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I can't see it.

Maybe it's funnier in high definition. I'm not giving up yet.

I was being interviewed on the radio while the Eagles were apparently frittering away their chance to make it to the NFC Championship. I was chatting away about talk radio on WWZZ/Washington's "Girl Talk" (stop laughing- I was the token male guest, dammit!), and about half of my brain was engaged in lively conversation and the other half was watching the Packers kick a go-ahead field goal and screaming "MISS IT MISS IT MISS IT AAAAAAAAAAUGH damn." But then, after I finished the interview, a miracle- a 4th and 26 right-up-the-middle pass to Freddie Mitchell who BARELY got the first down, then several near-disaster passes and an almost-sack that ended up with an Akers field goal, then, in OT, Brett Favre's worst decision ever, a blind bomb that appeared aimed at nobody in white that got intercepted and led to another Akers field goal, this time to win it.

This team is not all that good, actually, but they have what's way more important than being good. They find ways to win even when they suck. They dodge bullets, manage to get past their QB being sacked EIGHT TIMES, lull the opposition into mistakes, shake off embarrassing miscues, survive. And that's all you need to do in the NFL- survive.

Two more, guys, just two more. Keep dodging.

These are the headlines on the KCBS-TV website's list of "Entertainment" stories right now:

MTV To Air Second Season Of 'Newlyweds'

Jury Selection Begins In Blake Murder Trial

Hospital Replaces George Harrison's Doctor

Move To Silence Jacko's Lawyer

Joey Buttafuoco Pleads Innocent

Four out of five entertainment headlines involve court cases, but the last one's the most disturbing- at what moment did Joey Buttafuoco become an entertainment figure? And can we get a recount?

Really, it's nice to see that murder, malpractice, child molestation, and adultery are now, officially, considered by news organizations as properly categorized with Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. If they go ahead and move "Mona Lisa Smile" or Paris Hilton to the crime blotter, it'll all make sense.

The infamous All Access interview of myself is still there, but it's moved from the main "10 Questions With..." page. If you want to read all about me, plus get the disturbing bonus of seeing a picture of the artist (described by writer/singer/talk show host/basketball maven Johnny Angel thusly: "You look like an Irish gangsta"), go to AllAccess.com, click on the 10 Questions With... picture for News-Talk-Sports (presently AURN's Bev Smith), log in, scroll down to the bottom of her interview, click on the Archives link, and go to the bottom of the list to click on my name. (The site's been retooled, so I can't link directly to it...)

It's a lot of work, but am I not worth it?

(Don't answer that.)

My friend Joe HDTV told me he was worried about me. "You keep going like that, you're gonna burn yourself out."

"Like what?"

"I mean, you get worked up over those artists. They're just artists."

"Yeah, I know. I'm burned out already. But that's what I get paid for."

"Whatever. You gotta watch that."

He's right, of course. I've alluded to- no, actually, I've spent way too much ink on how fried my brain has been lately. It was a busy week, I have more coming up, and that dental nightmare is looming large as well. So I'm gonna take Joe's advice, shut the computer off, and go into the living room to watch something really stupid.

It's the least I owe myself.

The L.A. Times previewed an exhibit of anti-war art this morning. The show's called "Yo! What Happened to Peace?", a question that's fairly easy to answer- 9/11.

But the artists don't want to hear that. Here's the curator, a former Sony art director:

"What we're hoping to do is give a voice to the arts community," Carr says. "It's a very intelligent critique of what's going on, addressing issues like the weapons of self-destruction, obviously a fabrication. It's not just a band of idealists who aren't really connected with reality."

Yes, it's very intelligent, and there are no "weapons of self-destruction."

And then there's this:

Illustrator Yuri Shimojo was driving through Kenya when the war in Iraq began. "I look out the window and see people with no water, no food, no school to learn," she says. "Then I get to the hotel and see the war on BBC. It was like a fantasy game. What I thought about was greed and so much money being spent to kill people."

It's notable that her rage wasn't touched off by 9/11. 3,000 lives taken, 3,000 innocent people murdered, and that's not enough to move her.

Her poster was inspired by a black-and-white photograph of airplanes dropping bombs. Shimojo turned the planes into birds. Instead of dropping bombs, they were dropping what birds drop ... on a tank.

Ha ha. Geddit? Yes, "a very intelligent critique of what's going on," indeed. Great art often involves bird feces.

Colver's piece shows a sculpture he made from an old wooden movie marquee box, rounded on top. Beneath the words "now showing" is an old American flag. Beneath the words, "coming soon" is a swastika contained by iron bars.

Is it just me, or is the left completely unable to understand exactly what Nazism was all about? The trivialization of the Holocaust by tagging anyone they don't like with the "worse than Hitler" appellation is getting more than tiresome, it's offensive. And stupid, especially since there ARE people with Nazi-like tendencies out there, like the guy America happens to have overthrown. Funny how they're not concerned with people who actually ARE ethnic-cleansing, violent, murderous dictators.

Stuff like this has to be taken in perspective- it's preaching to the converted, people with set-in-stone ideas amusing each other. It happens on the right, too- "Mallard Fillmore," anyone?- and it's sort of pathetic. Among the artists featured in this exhibit is a guy named Robbie Conal, with whose work I'm very familiar. Conal's M.O. is to draw close-up portraits of his enemies- the President, Rumsfeld, Rice, the usual suspects- and add what can charitably be called a skin condition, and then post the results all over town and on a back page of the L.A. Weekly, where his "art" is celebrated as insightful, brilliant, revolutionary.

It's stupid. Really stupid. You draw a portrait- a poorly-drawn portrait- of someone you hate, and sketch zits all over him. Super genius. But if it makes the L.A. Weekly's readers happy, if it validates their world view ("gee, I hate Condoleeza Rice, and here's a picture with eczema all over her face- yeah, that's telling HER!"), good for them. But it takes the Weekly, and the Times, to mistake it for intelligence. There may very well be an intelligent, reasoned case to be made against the war. This stuff ain't it.

I don't want a new "Producers." The old one was good enough.

I don't want No Doubt's "It's My Life" when I can still get the nearly identical Talk Talk version. I didn't want a new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a new "Behind Blue Eyes," a remade "Coupling" cast with zombies. I may be alone in this, but I just don't want remakes.

Really. Look at "The Producers"- I loved the movie, enjoyed the musical, but do we need a movie of the musical? Is it necessary to diminish the memory of Zero Mostel by immortalizing the performance of Zero Lite, Nathan Lane? Is it really an improvement to see Matthew Broderick instead of Gene Wilder? No? So why do it?

Money. I know. But it sucks when you get an inferior version of a classic, and that inferior version supplants the original. I have no doubt that whether it's good or not, the new "Producers" will become the only one you'll see from then on out. The original will get relegated to the bargain bin, then gone, found only in collectors' catalogs, remembered only by old farts like me. And as the audience changes and new viewers replace old, there won't even be much recognition that there WAS an original.

This, of course, is how it always works. For all a 17 year old kid knows, Fred Durst wrote "Behind Blue Eyes," and the 'Saw was brand new in 2003. The remake IS the original for them. And they won't pay for the old ones- they're old!- but repackage it with Gwen Stefani in the role of Mark Hollis, and they'll buy it. It works, meaning that if you see Tobey Maguire as Rhett Butler or Pink as Holly Golightly, you ought not to be surprised.

Which leaves me in the sad old purist geek category. I'm the guy who always insists on the original, and I'm in a shrinking, sort of embarrassing group. But don't laugh. It's people like me who are the last line of defense against Ben Affleck as Don Corleone. You've been warned.

Exactly how does Dick Gregory going on a hunger strike prove Michael Jackson is innocent?

This kind of logic leap baffles me, but, then, hunger strikes do that as a matter of course. OK, now, explain this to me again- you go without food and I'm supposed to feel... what? How does your not eating affect me? You may die? Hey, that's your choice. Suit yourself.

Hunger strikes don't work as publicity tools, either. Take this one- so Dick Gregory's not eating to prove his friend Jacko's innocent. OK, I'm aware of the stunt, so is that effective publicity? Consider the result:

1. I still don't know whether Jacko's guilty.
2. The hunger strike didn't change my opinion.
3. After hearing of this stunt, I believe that Dick Gregory appears to be a delusional weirdo.
4. After hearing of this stunt, I believe that Michael Jackson appears to be a delusional weirdo.

If that's the net effect of a hunger strike, Dick Gregory might as well have taken a different angle on this- how about going on a 40 day eating binge for Jacko? 40 days of pizza and Krispy Kremes? Same effect, but at least you get to enjoy it. I like it. I may just try it, too. I think I'm going to go protest something right now. With fries.

My sister Joan's writing a blog/journal that's just getting started. Check her progress by clicking here. I'm to blame for the name.

I visited the dentist today to find out why the left side of my mouth hurts. I found out.

Oh, boy, did I find out.

Let's see... wisdom teeth need to be yanked, and bone grafts have to go in. A crown needs replacing. Several fillings- I lost count- cracked and need to be replaced. There's infection, early periodontal disease, all sorts of stuff. Imagine if I DIDN'T floss and brush.

The dentist said it wasn't anything I could have avoided; a lot of it, he explained, was just the luck of genetics, the way my teeth grew in and the various spaces they have that no amount of flossing and brushing would have kept clean enough (even a hygenist, he said, would have missed much of it). As he said this, I could sense his thoughts: "hmm, that's another vacation home, and, ooh, that'll get me one of those Porsche SUVs. Thank you, Lord."

Yeah, this is gonna cost me, and it would be worse had I NOT sprung for the dental HMO, which will at least cover a lot of it. We're still looking at a lot of money and way, way too much pain in the offing, and it hasn't even started yet. Maybe it has- I distinctly felt a twinge in my heart when I heard the words "IF we can save some of the teeth" come out of his mouth.

And you wonder why people avoid going to the dentist.

Expect to read more about my impending doom as the drills and tooth-extraction contraptions and gum-cleaning gizmos come ever closer. In the meantime, I have to wait to hear what the insurance company is gonna cover and what my costs will be. If you hear a loud moan tomorrow afternoon, you'll know I got the news.

At the end of a pretty bad day, this:

Tug McGraw, the zany relief pitcher who coined the phrase "You Gotta Believe" with the New York Mets and later closed out the Philadelphia Phillies' only World Series championship, died tonight. He was 59.

Damn.

It's perhaps no consolation to him or his family, but he'll live as long as those of us who are old enough and who were and are Phillies fans remember Willie Wilson at the plate and Tug throwing and then both hands thrust into the air as the entire city erupted in joy and relief.

And we do remember. Thanks, man.

So it turns out that the reason our DVD player- short of two years since we bought it- went bad is because of a part that costs less than a buck and can be replaced with a soldering iron. Fine, although it's a pain in the ass and we went out and bought a new one anyway. Here's the problem:

The company that makes the player KNOWS of this problem. It's COMMON. It happens ALL THE TIME. And they do NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Here's what happened- we dropped in a DVD and the sound suddenly went from normal to nonexistent. Turning up the TV volume all the way resulted in a whisper. After trying every possible menu option and tweak, and refitting the cables, and checking the switches, I went on the Net and discovered that putting the make and "no sound" in a Google search turned up a ton of entries that all said the same thing- it's a "known bug," it happens all the time, pop open the machine, find the C928 capacitor and pull it off the board, see if that works, and if it doesn't, pull the other two capacitors next to it off, too, and replace them all with a soldering iron.

Ah, I see. Simple.

You can still buy these models at the store. The manufacturer KNOWS they fail. They sell 'em anyway, no warning. Oh, and if you don't know about the fix and/or if you're not handy with a soldering iron or comfortable opening and working on electronic equipment, too bad- it's going to cost you more in service fees and parts to fix than a new one will cost.

This isn't just bad business, it's immoral.

But it's bad business indeed. As we plucked another brand off the shelf at the store, another family came up to us looking confused and asking if what we'd chosen was a good buy. "Yeah, it's a fair price and cheaper than most, and it's the price Sears is running as a sale right now," I explained, "but you don't want to buy that one over there," $20. more expensive but with a more well-regarded name. I told them about the sound glitch, only to see their eyes widen.

"That's what happened to US!" Same brand, same problem. And now, neither we nor they will ever buy that company's products again.

It doesn't have to be this way, except that it is the way the entire consumer electronics business transacts its commerce. Shoddy products sold without remorse, clueless salespeople, baiting-and-switching tolerated (I'd say encouraged, but I can't say that for certain), and products made impossible to just open, plug in, and use- what kind of business is that?

Take the whole HDTV thing, for example. Why, oh WHY can't you just go to the store, buy a high-def set, bring it home, plug it in, hook up the cable, and presto, HDTV? Because they DON'T WANT IT THAT WAY. Your new plasma wonder comes without a tuner, so there's a few hundred bucks extra right there. Cable doesn't offer much HDTV- Cox Cable here offers a handful of channels, sans most local channels, at $10./month for the programming plus $10./month rental of the tuner (mandatory)- and satellite doesn't have the bandwidth to deliver local digital channels, which, considering that I live in a spot where ZERO digital channels can be consistently received over the air, means I'm going to spend thousands on a set that won't be able to get more than about 6 or 7 channels of high definition for the foreseeable future.

Why do I have to spend a fortune and jump through hoops to get state-of-the-art TV? Why didn't the FCC foresee this and set standards and hard-and-fast drop-dead dates instead of the "flexible" deadlines we have now? Why can't I count on a DVD player to last more than 2 years, a computer to run trouble-free for more than 3 (don't tell me Apple does, I used to fix Macs for a living and I know better), a printer to run more than a year-and-a-half? Why, when I walked into a certain- I should say CCertain- retailer and asked when they expected to get the new Audiovox Sirius boombox (which they WILL carry and which IS arriving in other stores as we speak) did the salesman say "uh, um, I dunno, a year, maybe, I, uh, what?" and decline to look for it in the store's inventory list?

WHY DON'T THEY WANT TO TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME WHAT I WANT?

Because they, like car mechanics and doctors, have us all where they want us. Most people don't know from capacitors and inventory and plasma and tuners. They're fully at the mercy of the "experts." And the "experts," for their part, are convinced that they can treat us like excrement and we'll take it and hand over our money and thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another? until we go away. They may be right, but all I'm saying is that there's a growing list of consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers that are on my never-patronize-again list, and I can't be alone. I'm an "educated consumer"- I can hook up my own equipment, I can open a piece of electronics and fix it myself, I know about bitrates and resolutions and OTA signals and capacitors and retail inventory better than the salespeople I run into at the place with the red shirts and the place with the blue shirts, and I'm exasperated. People who don't know all that- most people- have to be even more confused. It's time for all of us to tell our tormentors to stop the madness. I'm going to send a letter to the DVD maker, and the boom-boxless retailer, and anyone else who should know how unhappy I am. Am I wasting my time? Yes, if I'm the only one.

Don't let me be the only one. If you've encountered this kind of thing, it's time to tell someone. They won't care about one guy, or 10, but maybe, just maybe, if every unhappy consumer speaks up, things will change.

I can dream, anyway.

Rained all day, hard all morning and then a misty, annoying drizzle all afternoon. Hence, we did nothing again.

Two consecutive days of nothing. 2004 is off to a roaring start. But I could get used to this inaction.

...guesting via the magic of the telephone, on Cam Edwards' morning news show at KTOK Oklahoma City Friday morning (1/2), blathering about liberal talk or some such stuff.

Listen around 8:15 am CT (6:15 am Pacific!)- it's streaming at KTOK.com.

January 1 and we're still here.

That counts for something, I suppose. It strikes me that with all the terror alerts and canceled flights and elite special forces running security at the portapotties on Colorado Boulevard for the parade today, we're still around, still doing whatever it is we do, and no amount of terrorism or rhetoric has managed to derail us.

TV was as inane as ever today. Millions of American men cursed the BCS and celebrated USC's "people's championship." Millions more watched large mechanized gizmos festooned with flowers and grain- decadence! Waste!- rumble around the corner from Orange Grove in front of the Norton Simon Museum the way they do every year. People bought frivolous items at large concrete malls. Hamburgers and pizzas were sold and consumed. A pudgy, gap-toothed Norwegian was anointed "World Idol," kids ran screaming with joy around the neighbors' backyard, a man walked an impossibly furry dog of indeterminate breed up the street, a drowsy writer pulled on a pair of Asics running shoes, plodded a few miles, decided he didn't really have it today, turned back, showered, and reclined on the couch, napping in front of the TV next to his similarly reposed wife.

Morning, and afternoon, and evening in America. Just like it always is, only with more security. They didn't take this away from us. They can't.

Yeah, I suppose it IS a happy new year.