PMSimon.com

Um, happy new year. I just spent a few hours trying to fix a Movable Type upgrade. It works, sort of, but not really. So while I continue to waste my last vacation hours fixing this, well, excuse me.

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I know. The page looks like a mess. That's the result of upgrading to Movable Type 4, which is, once you fix the myriad problems that crop up upon installation, quite a nice piece of blogging software but which creates all sorts of formatting trouble. In adding as a standard feature the StyleCatcher module that lets you click and choose new designs, they ensured that if you had a working template from an earlier version of the software, you'd spend the rest of your life trying to figure out why it isn't formatting the way the little thumbnail looks. And you'll be grateful to be able to figure out how to recover to something like this, a slightly mutated, off-looking version of what you had before the "upgrade."

It's my own fault for using MT instead of Word Press or TypePad or something else. But I did want to try out the software and its features, so... bear with me, okay? Thanks.

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Decisions, decisions in 1974:

And NBC had "Little House on the Prarie" on at the same time! And cable was mostly 12 channels with no original content back then.

I imagine people read a lot more in the evenings back then.

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My apologies -- I am having one hell of a hard time completing "The Letter" this week. Two total rewrites, several stabs at a new central paragraph, and it's even further from right than I want it to be. If I can't get it redone in the morning, I'm going to scrap it for a week.

Tune in tomorrow to see what I decide. (Cliffhanger!)

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This week's long-delayed All Access newsletter looks to the future with a marked lack of bile, for now, at least:

The new year brings with it the obligation of every writer and every talk show host to do resolutions and predictions for the coming twelve months. I don't do resolutions. Resolutions have a tendency to be self-delusion, promises waiting to be broken: just check the crowds at the health clubs this week, then check back a month from now and see how many of the newbies are still there. Predictions aren't my favorite thing, either, because they're kind of pointless -- who cares that you guessed correctly about something where you had a 50-50 chance of being right? Predict tonight's Mega Millions numbers and I'll be impressed.

One more prediction: In 2008, I will manage to work a sarcastic or disgusted comment about my favorite sports teams into every edition of "The Letter." It's a safer bet than picking the Phillies to repeat as NL East champs. (See? Total lock) Happy New Year to all of you.

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From a TV Guide in 1981:

Yes, it's "the thrill of bowling without rolling a bowling ball." Who needs all that physical exertion? Just pick up a card and you're bowling, sort of. None of that complicated Wii simulation stuff, no electricity, no anything! "It has all the excitement of competing on the bowling lanes," it says, which doesn't say much about the excitement of competing on the bowling lanes.

What I'd love to have witnessed is when the people who came up with this pitched it to would-be financial backers. "See, you just pick a card from THIS stack... and then one from THIS stack... and, see, there it is, a spare! Isn't this fun? Can't you see yourself and a bunch of friends playing this?"

No, not really.

And by 1981, video games were already everywhere -- everyone had an Atari 2600 (but me, actually), or Intellivision, or played in arcades. Imagine giving THIS to Junior instead of an Atari. Or breaking out the "Bowl-a-Deck" at a swingin' party with the neighbors. Granted, it saved you from a trip to the skeezy bowling alley and a date with used shoes, but, still, this wasn't ever gonna work.

(Yes, I looked to see if it's still available. I haven't found any trace of it anywhere. And now I'm kinda curious to play it. But not THAT curious)

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The political call for "change" isn't new, of course. (The ad's for a 1962 TV special about the 1932 candidate for change) But it's getting a little annoying how some candidates are using the term and not telling you WHAT change they're looking to effect. It seems like Obama's steering a bandwagon loaded with people who can't really tell you what he stands for, or people who LIKE the prospect of higher taxes and an undefined foreign policy. But that's also the case with Huckabee, who has all the evangelicals in thrall despite being the kind of big-guvmint guy conservatives usually can't stand, and Ron Paul, who has some positively scary ideas about which one hopes his Facebookian followers simply don't know or understand.

I don't know who I'm going to support yet. Each party has candidates who'll lose me -- I can't imagine voting to put a used-car-salesman trial lawyer like Edwards or a cultural/social troglodyte like Huckabee into the White House -- but none are really impressing me yet, either. Ideally, I'd find someone who's strong on foreign policy -- tough, but not blindly going into things we're ill equipped to handle -- and conservative on spending, yet liberal on social issues. Ideally, we'd be able to travel from L.A. to New York and back in seconds. For free. First class. But none of that's happening, and I have a month before the California primary. I'm not feeling confident that I'll have someone in mind by then.

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Sometimes, I find stuff on the shelf I didn't know I had. Check this out from November 2, 1969:

This was the last year for the old NFL and AFL structure, and before the NFL standardized game programs. The game was at Yankee Stadium, and the Eagles won 23-20 before 62,292 fans. The winning score was a fourth quarter 24 yard touchdown pass from Norm Snead (!) to Ben Hawkins, the second Snead-to-Hawkins TD pass of the game. Three Sam Baker field goals comprised the rest of the Eagles' scoring. The Giants got a Junior Coffey one yard touchdown run, DB Scott Eaton picked off a Snead pass for a 23 yard touchdown, and Pete Gogolak (!!) kicked a pair of field goals. Weirdly, that year, the Eagles and Giants, about 90 miles apart, played in different divisions, with the Eagles landing in last place in the Capitol Division, their 4-9-1 record even trailing the New Orleans Saints (5-9). The Giants weren't much better, landing in second place in a weak division despite a 6-8 record and trailing Cleveland, which finished 10-3-1. The Vikings won the league, and, of course, got creamed in the Super Bowl by Kansas City.

If you were in the stands that day, you were probably grossed out by this ad in the program:

Was that supposed to sell medicated powder? A hairy old fat guy with "Go Giants" tattooed on his forearm? The ad didn't, as you'd be forgiven for assuming, destroy Ammens Powder's business. In fact, they're still around.

Look! A Hollywood star!

He was a rookie at the time but a first-round draft choice and highly touted, and was a starter right from the beginning. His true fame came much later, of course. Nothing you can do in football can possibly top "Hunter."

Here's the roster page:

If you were a football fan of the age, the names bring back a lot of memories. The Eagles: Snead, Leroy Keyes, Tom Woodeshick, Tim Rossovich (the glass eater), Irv Cross, Chuck Hughes (who dropped dead on the field two years later while playing for Detroit), Bill Bradley (a rookie then, an All-Pro later... and busy at the moment). The Giants: Tarkenton, Tucker Frederickson, Ernie Koy, Doug Van Horn.

And you didn't want to miss the halftime entertainment:

The Wagner College Seahawk Marching Band! Now, that's entertainment!

By the way, if you want to share in the magic, someone's selling a copy of this thing for fifty bucks right here. It's not me; my copy's cover separated from the rest of it and split off. But the memories are fully intact.

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From a New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys program, Shea Stadium (I bet you don't remember they played at Shea the year before Giants Stadium opened), October 12, 1975:

One of the everlasting shames of radio is that radio personalities will do whatever they are told. This is a perfect example. Ted Brown and Gene Klavan were legends of New York radio, yet when the boss said, guys, get in these kiddie cars, grin broadly, and look like idiots for the camera, they had to say yes. And here they are.

Radio marketing is often the worst in the media, cringeworthy and demeaning to the DJs. It was that way back in 1975, and when I see Rick Dees wagging a "comically" padded ass at the camera on his Movin 93.9 commercials, I know that it hasn't changed.

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What happens when I'm tired and don't have time or energy to write or even scan something?

That's right, YouTube. And here's a clip of the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers in action, the same clip that's on the DVD set of Sixers history:

Wilt and co. at Convention Hall -- somehow, Samuel Dalembert at Wachovia Center doesn't have the same feel to it.

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This week's All Access newsletter is a quick one about what talk radio hosts do that your big-time celebrity geniuses can't (and if the "dotted lines" don't show up as, um, dotted, well, use your imagination):

They were talking about the writers' strike on a show to which I was listening the other day, and one of the hosts was appalled at the content of Jay Leno's did-he-write-it-himself monologue. Make an effort, she said -- all you have to come up with is six minutes of material.

Next week: Angry ranting, because you want it and because all this Hello Kitty hearts and flowers positive stuff is making ME a little queasy.

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I know that I've sucked at doing Friday posts, because I tend to be worn out from the week. This week's no exception. I had an especially stressful day today for reasons I can't disclose; just accept it and move on. Right now, all I want to do is shut this computer down, go into the other room, and sit there with Fran and watch something mindless on TV, so I'm going to exercise my prerogative to do exactly that.

Oh, and Green Bay (home and Favre), New England (can't see them losing), Indianapolis (Chargers have injuries and it's a Colts home game), and Giants (Cowboys have been beatable in the latter stages of the season). Let's see how wrong I can be.

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I realized I hadn't posted anything today only after shutting down the computer. Now, I do have a couple of alternatives -- there's the Treo, of course, but that's a pain in the ass, but there's also the iPod Touch, for which I now have a convenient Movable Type plug-in that makes posting oh-so-easy, and that is what I am presently using. It works great -- simple interface, just the essentials.

But what it doesn't provide is content, or motivation to come up with material or, most critically for me right now, a good reason to write instead of watching football and doing crosswords. (I could be motivated by cash, but you aren't paying me) And that's why we'll take another day to post nothing of consequence.

I may be lazy, but at least I'm honest.

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One of the most frustrating things I've encountered in recent days is the way Movable Type 4 has pretty much screwed up this site. I've never been entirely happy with the design, and the archive pages have always been borked, but at least stuff aligned properly. MT4 is supposed to make changing styles easy, but I have yet to get it to work. I've tried just about everything, and I've tried tweaking templates and changing the main index file to a default template and I've swapped out styles-site.css a zillion times, and nothing's working.

There HAS to be a better solution that won't take days of work. There HAS to be. But I have yet to find a template that works, and I end up back at the old gray one with ugly type. I know, the calendar doesn't align the same in IE as in Safari,.and nothing aligns properly in Safari (and it keeps looking different on the iPhone and iPod Touch). It's getting to me.

If you know how to make an existing blog with links and other stuff look presentable in MT4, I'm all ears. I'm tired of trying to get this to work. There HAS to be a way.

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I saw Pope John Paul II peeing on a tree by the side of Route 17 last night. It was a dream. I think.

I don't remember my dreams terribly often. I just go to sleep, sleep, wake up, fall back asleep, get awakened by Ella the World's Most Famous Cat, fall back asleep, get awakened by Ella again, go feed her, try to fall back asleep, and give up at about 3:30 am. Last night, though, the dream was vivid and unforgettable.

In the dream, I was driving on what appeared to be Route 17 South in the Mahwah, New Jersey area. Where the old Ford plant was in real life (I haven't been there since roughly 1985), woods and a stream appeared in the dream, off on the opposite shoulder. I was driving and suddenly a policeman appeared in the road and signaled traffic to stop, which we did. A tractor-trailer was in the lane to my left, so I crept forward -- nobody was in front of us -- to get a better look.

And that's when I saw the late Pope. He was at a distance, and he was facing a tree. He was wearing his red pope robe and little pope yarmulke and looking down while doing something I could not see. I tried to get a better look but it then struck me that he might be using the tree for a call of nature, and I recoiled.

(Very Shaky) Artist's (Quick-Sketch) Conception:

Meanwhile, the Pope finished whatever he was doing and began to walk north on the path, suddenly teeming with Secret Service-ish agents. It occurred to me that I should take a picture while the Pope stopped and bent down to pat a woodland creature on the head, but I had no camera. I did, however, have a Treo in my pocket, so I grabbed it and fumbled with it and the Pope kept walking and when I raised the phone and pointed the camera lens at the Pope... he disappeared behind the truck and

THUMP

What? Something's hitting the

THUMP

Wait a minute, this isn't

THUMP

I'm in bed. In California. In 2008. And there's an animal thumping against the window from the outside, looking directly into my now-open eyes. It's past midnight.

The end.

All right, dream experts: what the hell does THAT mean?

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LARadio.com runs an "x Years Ago Today" section in each day's news, and I saw in an e-mail forwarded to me that I was mentioned in today's. I didn't see it, but from the other names listed near mine, I imagine that it was at about this time nine years ago or so that the news got out of my departure from a particular radio station. I don't think about it much, but occasionally, it does come up in conversation. My exit from that station was not as amicable as I would have preferred, although I quit rather than got fired. The details aren't worth rehashing, and that's kind of the point.

When I left that station, I had plenty of reason to be angry, and plenty of reason to want revenge. I was feeling like I got a raw deal, and I was heading into uncertainty with rent to pay and no clear idea what I was going to be able to do for a living if I couldn't find another radio job in this market. But I decided not to say anything nasty or angry. I put my stuff in a box, walked out the door, stopped by the corporate office the next day to pick up my final check, and that was it. Dark thoughts? Sure. But I didn't see the point of blowing up, because it wasn't going to help me. I'd feel good for a moment, and then the burned bridges would be all I'd have left.

I'm glad that's how I did it. Here's the thing: some of the good things that have happened in my career and in life came from some of the same people who'd done me wrong at other times. I don't think it was because they'd had a change of heart or wanted to make amends; I think it was because the bad stuff was, as they always say, strictly business, not personal. Sometimes, things just don't work out. Sometimes, they do. But overreacting to the former can prevent the latter from every happening.

Obvious? Yeah, but it's amazing how some people don't learn that lesson. I'm thankful that nine years ago, in that "exit" that showed up on the web again today, I decided not to be a martyr and not to go down in flames and take everyone else with me. Life's too short, and cliches get repeated for a good reason.

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I'm in a weird position right now in that one of my chief competitors in the radio trade business did something that I can't comment on without seeming to be crassly taking advantage of the situation. I suppose, though, that I can talk about the victim of the brouhaha, so here goes:

I may not have ended up in the talk radio business without Bob Grant. I'll say up front that I don't know Bob other than exchanging e-mails today, and I've never worked with him. I also haven't always agreed with him, and I'm not going to try and defend some of the controversial comments you've seen (plucked cleanly out of context, of course) over the years. But if I can trace my interest in talk radio back to its roots, it would go back to the 1970's, to WMCA in New York, and particularly to Bob Grant.

I didn't start listening to the talk on WMCA all by myself. I listened to the station when it was a top 40 station, even though the signal where we lived was iffy, and when it went all-talk (it previously did talk at night), I bailed to WABC or, when the wind blew right, WFIL or 99X. But I would often accompany my dad to his night job, where he ran the gym at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center, and in the car we'd listen to WMCA, and after a while I started listening to the station on my own, too. I remember John Sterling -- yes, THAT John Sterling -- as a flaming liberal and Leon Lewis and Alex Bennett and Long John Nebel, but the one that we'd never miss was Bob Grant, who was unlike anything else on the radio. Other talk radio was generally polite -- Brad Crandall and Bill Corsair talking patiently to UFO observers and conspiracy theorists, for example -- but Grant was a fire-breathing dragon, and we loved it. We never got the radio versions of the Joe Pyne or Alan Burke shows, Grant's progenitors, but Grant was different, anyway. He wasn't from New York but he SOUNDED like he was, or should be, and he ripped into New York's powerful with a fury and fearlessness that we hadn't heard before. Oh, and most importantly, he was funny. He'd rip into Mayor Lindsay or Mayor Beame and you could practically hear the wink and the grin, and when some hapless liberal would call in to challenge him, we'd wait for the punch line, "Get off my phone!"

My dad loved Bob Grant. Dad was a lifelong Democrat and a union guy (he even formed a union and was its first President), but Bob Grant was Da Man to him. And I think that it was my exposure to Bob Grant at a young age, my exposure to talk radio as entertainment, that made it inevitable that I'd wind up working in it. Between Grant and Howard Stern (who was definitely influenced by Grant, no question about it), there was practically no way I could avoid landing in talk radio.

Bob's still on the air now with a show on WABC, so the eulogies will have to wait. But what happened to him today has a lot of people undestandably upset, and if there's a good side to today's incident, it's that people are getting a chance to let him know how they feel about him, how he IS talk radio in New York.

And that's a better award than some piece of glass they would have handed him in March.

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This week's All Access newsletter contains handy advice on how to talk about what you have to talk about even if you don't really want to talk about it:

Okay, so we're deep into the election thing by now, and you have to talk about it. There's no escape. And, thus, you're now on the air talking about the election and sounding like, oh, every other host talking about the election. That's fine to some extent, because when something big happens, like the candidates slinging mud at each other, or, I don't know, Edwards accidentally sues himself or something, people do want to hear about it and call in about it. If you talk politics, as the cliche goes, this is your Super Bowl.

One more thing -- by now, we've all heard about the Bob Grant thing. I've already written about it, and him, on my blog (pmsimon.com), but, here, I'll just say that when I was a kid, my dad and I would listen to Bob Grant in the car on the way to Dad's night job all the time. It didn't matter what the politics were or whether he'd say something with which we disagreed -- we listened, and laughed, and got totally hooked on talk radio. I don't have a Lifetime Achievement Award to give, but if I did, Bob Grant would get one.

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Every other commercial on TV in Los Angeles right now is a spot about some of our ballot measures. (Okay, KDOC has mostly commercials for beauty and trucking schools, but we're talking the network stations here) Some of them are about the phony term limits referendum -- only California politicians can come up with a proposal that reads like tougher term limits but turns out in the fine print to actually LENGTHEN the terms of the hacks already in Sacramento. Many of them, though, are about the deals between Indian tribes and the state increasing the amount the Indian casinos kick back to the state in exchange for looser restrictions on gaming. There are a lot of pro commercials, and some anti as well, and those spots include dark insinuations of impending ruin. Among the arguments against the referenda is that the big tribes -- the four that are getting the new deals -- really want to turn their casinos into Las Vegas-style casinos, they say, with more slots than any of the Vegas casinos. You don't want them to build Las Vegas right there in your town, do you?

Um, well, yes, actually, I'd be fine with that. In fact, if they dropped Mandalay Bay and the Venetian right there on the 110 freeway where the blimp tether is, that'd be great. If you don't gamble and don't like resorts, well, fine, you wouldn't have to go there. But a Bellagio on the 405? Damn, that would be cool. We wouldn't have to make the 5 hour trek up the 15 to Vegas. No more slog in traffic, no more pit stops at the Mad Greek in Baker... wait, I like the stop at the Mad Greek, which has one of your larger collections of autographed head shots of "celebrities" of whom you've never heard. Anyway, even if you fly, the long airport waits, the bumpy flight, the interminable queue for a cab at McCarran Airport... I could live without that. You're warning me that if I vote yes on those ballot measures, we'll get massive Vegas-style resorts right here in the L.A. area? Replacing those skeezy, cheesy card and slot casinos we have now? Then by all means, I'll vote yes.

Some warning.

The Vegas guys have nothing to worry about, of course. Nothing will ever replace Vegas. There's no place like Vegas, where guys -- really, we're talking about guys here -- have one-stop shopping for every vice imaginable. Even if the Palms and MGM Grand and all the others replaced San Manuel and Soboba and Pala and all those places, it still wouldn't be like the Seven Deadly Sins Supermarket on the Strip. But if they still want to head off the threat of competition at the Cajon Pass, they'll have to make a better argument than that.

Although if they were ever to allow sports gambling here....

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Today was Date Day for Fran and me, a day to get the hell out of the house and spend a gorgeous Southern California afternoon... in a movie theater. We decided to head up to the Arclight in Hollywood to see the new Woody Allen movie, "Cassandra's Dream," which turned out to be "Match Point" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" all over again. Stop here if you don't want the movie spoiled... Spoiler alert... What? Nobody intends to see this movie? Well, then, here's the deal: someone gets murdered, one of the murderers can't live with the guilt while another can, bad things happen, the end. Interestingly, this is the first of these Woody Allen murder movies in which the murderer pays -- remember that in the other two, the murderer gets away with it. In this one, they WOULD have gotten away with it had Colin Farrell kept it together.

You know, one might assume that Woody is trying to tell us something when he makes three movies with the same basic plotline. Is everyone he knows accounted for? Just wondering.

I've seen reviews lauding Colin Farrell's acting in this one, but I wasn't as impressed -- the guy mugged so shamelessly that "overacting" doesn't do it justice. Colin's worried? Cue deeply furrowed brow and over-the-top expression. Colin's upset? Time for head in hands and shaking. His overreactions were comical; some people in the audience actually laughed at his histrionics. (And isn't it odd that a pair of lower-middle-class London brothers are played by an Irish guy and a Scottish guy who don't look remotely related?)

Really, I don't know why we still dutifully go see every movie Woody Allen makes. The returns started diminishing years and years ago, and every time the critics say he's back in top form, he... isn't. I guess it may be that we hope that one of these times he WILL snap back, but I've resigned myself to the probability that this is as good as he gets from here on out.

Conclusion: Woody has only one plot left in him, and he's going to make it over and over with only slightly different endings. Another conclusion: the Arclight may be expensive, but it's a great place to see a movie (and the occasional celeb sighting; while killing time before the movie at Amoeba Music next door, we saw someone who happened to be the star of one of the movies mentioned herein...). Thumbs down for Woody, thumbs up as always for the Arclight.

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Um....

Did anyone else notice that Brett Favre stank up the joint in the biggest game of the season? Did the Fox team -- Buck and Aikman -- just not have anything to say about his inability to stop himself from throwing into double and triple coverage? Is he so sacrosanct that any suggestion that he might be, you know, human is off limits? I mean, I respect and like the guy as much as anyone else, but, geez, he was playing as awkwardly and clueless as a nervous rookie and after the game, the analysis didn't even mention him at all, as if he didn't play. There were two things that killed the Packers tonight, their inability to cover Plaxico Burress and Favre playing as poorly as he's capable of playing. The Fox guys talked about Burress playing well, but the other side of the equation didn't draw a mention.

What a disappointment. I feel bad for my friends in Green Bay. And, worse, it's the Giants -- the Hated Giants -- who are going to Glendale. Let's see if they're celebrating two weeks from tonight. There are two NFC teams who could get me to root for the Patriots in the Super Bowl. One of them made it. Great, I have to root for Brady and Belichick. This isn't my favorite NFL season ever.

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I was trying to get my mind to work properly this afternoon and meandered across a couple of favorite time-wasters, one being Mark Evanier's Great L.A. Restaurants That Ain't There No More and another being Not Fooling Anybody, which is a collection of converted fast food restaurants that still look like the joints they replaced. Evanier's site is particularly interesting, because it's a wholly personal and evocative recollection of places and things long gome, and you might have noticed that this is a pastime of mine.

While I was looking at the pictures of Nickodell's and Sambo's and old cafeterias and burger joints, I thought about why this stuff interests me, and I realized that it's not so much about nostalgia. Really, a lot of the things in pop culture and sports and commerce that have disappeared weren't all that good to begin with. I have no illusions that I can't get a burger and fries today at, say, In-N-Out or Carl's Jr. that isn't better than what Goody's and Wetson's and Gino's offered when I was a child. I know that the "comedy" I watched religiously from kiddie show hosts on TV in the sixties wasn't all that hilarious in retrospect. Baseball was, even without the designated hitter and before the onslaught of "multipurpose" stadia and artificial turf, for the most part the same game then as it is now (okay, the pitching was better, but, still, there was plenty of mediocrity back then, too). TV was arguably much worse when we had only at most seven channels.

No, what fascinates me is how much of it is gone. Nobody thought to keep any pictures of, say, Goody's. Nobody thought to keep videotape of local kiddie shows, because, well, the stuff was expensive and they needed to recycle the tapes. Film of some Phillies-Cubs game on a hot late August night in the mid-sixties with both teams effectively out of the National League race? Nobody kept it. At least, not too much of that stuff was kept.

So I'm fascinated when I see a display of cereal boxes from the sixties -- hey, that was in our kitchen cabinets back home when I was a kid! I love to see memories of some long-forgotten restaurants, and love to find out that they still make Tree Tavern frozen pizza, in practically the same box as always -- the old Tree Tavern restaurant in Paterson, NJ is long gone, but it was where we used to go for dinner and from which I can still recall restroom signs that looked like they dated from the 1940's. There don't seem to be too many pictures of the place, nor the old Market Street Spot across the street where we wouild go on Saturday night to pick up the bulldog editions of the Sunday New York Times and Daily News and I would get comic books and Mad magazine.

Well, okay, there's SOME nostalgia. But it's more interesting to me that so much of what life was like when we were younger is just... gone. No pictures, no films, no memorabilia, nothing. Nobody thought pop culture and consumer items were worth preserving. And that's why you see scans of old ads and baseball cards and whatever else I find laying around here. Early on in this blog -- almost five years ago! -- I said that I wanted to put this stuff up on this site so that someone, searching for evidence to support some scrap of memory that somehow popped into consciousness about an obscure TV show or ballplayer or retail chain, would find it when Googling around. Sometimes, I forget why I do that stuff. Today, I remembered.

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No sooner did Heath Ledger die -- the news had pretty much just hit the wires -- than someone raced to his Wikipedia page and updated it with news of his passing. And then someone took the news and made it a little more colorful:

In case you can't read it, it says:

"At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A of 421 Broome Street in SoHo for an appointment with Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Ledger unresponsive with facepaint resembling that of his recent role, The Joker, and a 12" dildo in his rectum. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities. The police said they did not suspect foul play and said they found viagra near his body, and the smell of day old milk."

The "day old milk" is a nice touch. Celebrity drug users, take note: go like this and you'll be a punch line for every snarkmeister with an Internet connection.

Not that you'll care by then. But, still, you don't want this.

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This sign popped up last week in my neighborhood:

I saw it, noted it, and promptly forgot it.

Last night, we were about to run up to Ralphs to pick up some food and supplies, and I was about to go out the door when I turned the living room lights off and noticed Ella the World's Most Famous Cat intently glaring at her reflection in the sliding glass doors. Funny, I thought, she thinks she's looking at another cat. And then I turned another light off and realized that there wasn't a reflection -- she was staring at another cat for real.

I looked closer and the details I'd forgotten about the lost cat popped into my head. Looks black with white undercoat? Check. Spots and stripes? Check. Striped tail?

Holy... it's the lost cat!

All right, I told Fran, here's the plan. You see if you can keep the cat where it is and I'll go run up the block and I'll get the phone numbers. With that, I bolted up the block -- uphill, and when time is of the essence, that's not a good thing -- and scribbled down the numbers and the description. I ran back to find the cat wandering off into the back of the yard.

"Fran! Grab the cat!"

And she did. I didn't try, because I have a strange effect on cats: they run from me as if I was Godzilla, except if I'm asleep, when they feel emboldened to tap me on the shoulder to wake me up, like taunting a sleeping tiger with a stick between the cage bars. Fran exudes that soft, loving mommy aura, so they don't run. But she wasn't going to be able to hold the cat forever, and we weren't going to launch a Grand Experiment and put the new cat loose in the house with Ella around. So I ran to the garage and grabbed the pet carrier, trotted back to the kitchen with it, and opened the top for Fran to drop the lost cat inside.

So Operation Grab-A-Cat worked, we called the number, and soon enough the woman arrived and we learned what had happened: someone had adopted Ramses, then decided she didn't want it and just let the cat out the door. Even Ellen DeGeneres tried to find an alternate home for an adoptee pet, even if it was against the rules. Whoever took Ramses just sent the poor cat out to fend for himself. Some people shouldn't have pets. They also shouldn't have children. Or spouses. Or friends.

But that's our story. We did a Good Deed for the Day. Ramses is safe, and we feel good about it. Go adopt a pet. That is all.

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This week's All Access newsletter deals with the Big Controversy in talk radio, the "talk radio lost in South Carolina" deal where hosts are arguing over dumping on McCain and Huckabee. Naturally, I take the position that everyone is wrong but me:

Several years ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at my college alma mater, with the topic being "Careers in the Media." The panel included me; a friend who's a big-time radio production director; a TV news guy; and two Philadelphia Inquirer big shots. I expected the usual questions you'd hear from people interested in getting into the business -- how do I break in, what should be on my aircheck, that sort of thing. I was surprised to find the students a) directing all of their questions at the newspaper guys, and b) asking nothing but questions about how to change society through journalism. They wanted to know how to influence people towards their causes by working as reporters. The newspaper guys were happy to oblige.

Hey, I just realized that the California primary is in two weeks and I'm still undecided. I'll have to listen to talk radio and vote the way they tell me to vote. That's how it works, right?

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I just got back from an event that ran late -- more on that tomorrow, probably -- but we did see "Atonement" as part of our quest to see a whole lot of movies this month, and it was... pretty damn good. Hate to admit it, because I didn't really want to go see it in the first place, but it was good. It's not a spoiler to describe the plot as how a young girl's lie causes heartache, the acting is uniformly excellent, and there's a tracking shot that's jaw-dropping for its scope as well as its length -- you'll know it when you see it. Of the Best Picture nominees we've seen so far, I'd rank it behind "No Country for Old Men" and ahead of "Juno." Negative: Vanessa Redgrave's in it. Positive: She's good, and in it for just a couple of minutes (literally). We'll see "There Will Be Blood" (aka I Drink Your Milkshake) next. That's it. Time to go to sleep.