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I'd be talking about the highly entertaining overtime parade in the NCAAs and maybe even something more substantive except for the knife stabbing me in the forehead.

It's allergy season. I've got 'em. It's bad.

The rains over the last couple of months have resulted in a heavy spring bloom- there are wildflowers and weeds everywhere, and normally desert-brown hillsides are covered in green and yellow. All of that tends to make its way up my nostrils and into my sinuses, and that's why, at the moment, I'm in agony. The only stuff that works against it is Benadryl, and that zonks me out, so I hate to have to use it. Besides, it only offers temporary "relief" (dull pain instead of eye-crossingly sharp pain).

Oh, well, at least it's beautiful. In fact, I look forward to seeing the wildflowers in bloom at Joshua Tree. I'll have to wear a surgical mask, of course, but I'm sure it'll be worth the trouble.

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If you have small children, it is never too early to indoctrinate them into the wonderful world of heavy metal.

Go here and bang your head to America's Premier Heavy Metal Children's Band, Black Rattle. They rock the cradle hard.

(They're a best-selling author/comedian, a comic who created a network cartoon, and an indie rocker, among others. This kind of things should be encouraged)

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A problem with becoming a celebrity, not that I'd know what that's like, is that anyone you've ever known feels free to blab about you to anyone who'll listen. Worst: your exes. Example: "The O.C."'s Adam "Seth Cohen" Brody's ex-girlfriend does the "It's Your Ex-Girlfriend" feature, in which the ex gets to embarrass the guy like this:

For my birthday, Adam bought me a gold chain with our first initials on it. But instead of a heart between the letters, it had an ampersand, so it read ‘A&E.’ That’s not romance, that’s a TV network.

So he went out, got you a gold chain, and you can't even appreciate it without taking a shot at him. But, OK, you're still hurting. And then:

When we dated, he still had bunk beds.

And:

When I was with Adam, we never did much. We’d hang out with the same people in the same parking lot every day. I want a man with a plan.

Which is this girl's way of dealing with the scoreboard. She's bitter, she wants to think he's a loser, when he's a prime-time network TV star with his picture in all the celebrity magazines and tabloids. She wants "a man with a plan." Sounds like hanging out "with the same people in the same parking lot every day" might have been the way to go.

See? This is why I'm avoiding becoming a celebrity. That and lack of talent.

(Hat tip: Defamer)

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For the first time, extensive archival research has turned up photos from the early, early days of television broadcasting. The photos, thought to be lost, are the only artifacts remaining from a fascinating era of the medium, before videotape and digital technology, when everything was live and dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Here is the headquarters of one of America's earliest TV networks, the Bedrock Television Corporation.

A closer look shows one of the nascent network's early stars, Wilma Flintstone, along with an unidentified companion, at the building's entrance. Note the reference to radio; BTC owned radio stations before a federal anti-trust suit forced the divestiture of the radio properties to J. Montague Gypsum shortly after this photo was taken.

This photo shows an unidentified network executive discussing plans for a new series with a sponsor (left). Such meetings were commonplace in that period, with programming usually controlled by sponsors, a situation that persisted well into the 1960s.

The practice included live jingles and commercials; in this example, Rockenschpeel Fine Foods (later merged into Kraft) was the sponsor of "The Happy Housewife," an early series with Wilma Flintstone.

Ms. Flintstone was the Rachael Ray of her day, offering quick recipes to satisfy "hungry husbands." The series, alas, lasted only a short while before losing the Rockenschpeel sponsorship and being cancelled. Ms. Flintstone later starred in the live TV drama "The Frogmouth," opposite husband Fred; little is known of her later work, although Fred Flintstone, billed as "Barney V.I. Flintstone," appeared in an episode of "Hawaiian Spy" opposite Larry Lava, and in the title role of the feature film "The Monster From the Tar Pits."

The quality of television in that era was, to put it gently, variable. Here, a disgruntled viewer demonstrates his opinion of a particularly disappointing program.

The same man is shown in another undated photo indicating that obesity has been a problem that has always been with us.

And for test card fans, here's the BTC Test Pattern. This example does not include the network logo, of which no examples remain.

(All photos from the video available here)

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We bought a couch. Sofa and loveseat. How... adult.

This is not the first couch we've bought- the first was shortly after our relationship turned from acquaintance to friendship to something more, and Fran put her foot down about my choice of decor, which at the time consisted of cinder-block shelving, a TV on a cart, a mattress on the floor, and patio furniture (purchased for less than $2. per piece at the Acme) in the living room. The couch we bought, a gray L-shaped job, followed us through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and all the way to California, where it sits presently in our living room, ripped in the corners from wear and cat scratching, frame cracked and bent, awaiting the long march to the curb and oblivion. It's been a good 17 years or so, old couch. Thanks for the memories.

The new one's bigger, and plusher, and the kind of couch you can sink into and not want to get up, ever. It will make a good companion for a big plasma TV, which is in the plan; if I bring the notebook with wireless broadband over there, I might end up making the couch my permanent residence. There is one small problem, however, and her name is Ella the World's Most Famous Cat, who has made the old couch her very own, marked with incessant scratching. Her morning regimen is to wake me up, walk alongside me as I head to the kitchen to feed her, stop at the couch, reach up, and streeeettttch and scratch and rip and tear at the corner of the couch before trotting back under my feet waiting for her Fancy Feast.

This can't continue with the new couch, for obvious reasons. The plan is to use double-sided tape to deter her scratching; we don't want to use no-cat spray because we don't want her not to sit on the couch, we just don't want her to scratch it up. The double-sided tape ruse worked on the sofa in another room, so we can only hope it'll work again with the new one. Any suggestions that don't involve declawing or gluing Soft Claws to her nails are welcome, but the sticky stuff is in the lead.

But whatever we do, by Friday, it's new couch time. It's one of those major purchases- geez, these things don 't come cheap, do they?- that makes me wander around in shock for days and weeks and all the way until I've paid the credit card bill, but we're adults and it has to be done. Patio furniture doesn't cut it indoors anymore. Or so I'm told. If not for Fran, I'd probably still be shopping for living room suites in the supermarket "seasonal" aisle.

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When the Terri Schiavo news came across the wire, I was working and I had WGST Atlanta on, listening to the Regular Guys, which is the kind of show you want to hear when stuff like this happens- since the story's anticlimactic, you want to hear opinionated, irreverent hosts kick the story around a little. So the news comes down, and what does WGST do?

News bulletin. OK.

Then ABC News. She's dead. Again. OK.

More ABC News. Breathless reports of absolutely nothing happening outside the hospice. No family reaction. Still dead.

More ABC News. More inactivity. A recap of the facts as everyone knows them except for people being held in windowless cells with no outside communication for the last several months.

More ABC News. Breaking news... er, no, actually, more of the same.

If I wanted this, I wouldn't have put the Regular Guys on in the first place.

Sometimes, I don't understand the way radio people think. Maybe the station is obligated to carry the whole "special report," but when I was programming, I would have bailed right after the initial bulletin and let the hosts talk. You hire hosts for their ability to draw people in with talk about what's going on, and then, when something happens, you run a network report involving reporters saying that there's nothing immediately happening on the scene.

But what do I know? I don't program stations anymore.

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Mitch Hedberg died.

Geez. He was on Stern, what, two weeks ago? Damn. I mean, you kinda knew his lifestyle could catch up with him (the Pioneer Press obit says the family's been told it was a heart attack, but you can assume away), but it's still a shock when it happens. Terri Schiavo outlived Mitch Hedberg by about a day. Wow.

Funny thing about standups- I will bet you that for every comic who's sad and depressed about this loss, there's some craven comic thinking that there's goign to be some open club dates and a pending HBO special ripe for the taking. That's the way some standup comics think.

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The sofa came today, in good shape, on time, no problems. I suppose I DO love it at Levitz. (Hey, they had a perfectly sized, perfect color couch available for delivery in two days at a fair price- so it ain't fancy and the salespeople descend on you like locusts or Ford dealers, the deal was still good and the sofa works for us) It was a gorgeous day but the winds were bringing the allergens in, and I ended up sinking into the new couch and flipping on the TV, and remembered that I'd recorded the new HBO documentary on the Villanova-Georgetown NCAA championship game of 1995, so I put that on.

The big game was, of course, 20 years ago today. 20 years! And seeing my contemporaries- I was a law student at 'Nova back then, and watched the final in a friend's dorm room on campus- depicted as they were then and then as they are now reminded me of one thing: man, am I old. The players were all two or three years behind me, and some of them look positively middle-aged. Am I that old? Yep. Wow.

20 years means that the events of the time, still clear in my memory, now appear through the gauzy haze of the HBO-Stone Canyon documentary style. It's not like watching the videotape I still have of the game, recorded (ona Betamax!) that evening by my dad back in New Jersey (I did not own a VCR yet). In this documentary, the games, shot on videotape, now have a softer look, and they're accompanied by the tones of Liev Schreiber's narration and the kind of music that normally accompanies footage of the recently departed- heart-string-tugging music, music I'd associate with footage of the Melbourne Olympics. The music is especially emptional in the last segment, which deals with Gary McLain's drug expose and more recent reconciliation with his coach and teammates at the big 20th reunion. The producers clearly want you to cry over all the emotion.

But then I remembered it was hardly that kind of event. When it was happening, it was more of a fraternity kegger atmosphere, with the campus overrun by puking, yelling, dancing engineering students. Flaming mattresses flew from sixth-floor dorm windows, people dangled from street lights and tree branches, Lancaster Avenue was wall-to-wall people dotted with cameras from channel 10 and channel 6 and channel 3. The sad, emotional music wouldn't go with that. "Louie Louie," yes. HBO documentary music, no.

And I also learned from the show that Villanova was, apparently, the uncool school. Georgetown was the one everyone was SUPPOSED to root for, unless you were a racist. See, Georgetown represented hip-hop, the underground. All the cool people- Spike Lee, Chuck D.- were Georgetown fans, because Georgetown represented Black America, never mind that Villanova's three stars were all black and Memphis State had Keith Lee and Georgetown was prone to punching and shoving and pushing and blaming it on the other guys (it was just reaction, naturally, even if those instigating actions by the other team appeared to be invisible to the rest of the world). And while I'm sure that some people who didn't like the Hoyas WERE racist, a lot of folks- most folks- who didn't like Georgetown felt that way because they just didn't like all the punching and shoving and pushing and blaming it on the other guys. Or, and this might seem like crazy talk, because, like me, they were fans of another team in the conference. You could admire the Hoyas and think Ewing was great without liking them. That's the way I felt- good team, Ewing was special, Thompson was paranoid, I hoped they'd lose because I wanted Villanova to do better. I guess maybe I should have consulted with Spike Lee first. (Then again, how have his Knicks fared since he started occupying the front row? Have they won any championships? Let me check...)

But it's still fun to remember how low the 'Cats were after that miserable Pitt game where Rollie pulled the starters for the second half, how until the Dayton game showed up on the board that it was very unclear whether they'd even make the field of 64, how they just kept winning and then played the Perfect Basketball Game. The show does an admirable job of condensing the game, but you can't condense the astonishing procession of shots, how Harold Jensen just. Wouldn't. Miss. and how everything Villanova threw up, no matter how off-balance or how well the Hoyas were covering them, went in. And I remembered, when they showed that last two minutes of the first half when the Wildcats spread the floor and the Hoyas let them and ended up with Villanova grabbing a halftime lead, that I was watching on a little black-and-white set with about a dozen others crammed into a tiny dorm room and I said "you know, there's a possibility we can win this game" and half-believing it. And I remembered when the last inbounds pass went to Harold Pressley laying face down on the floor and staring at the screen and thinking "is it over? Was there a foul? Is it a walk?" and then seeing the zeroes on the clock and hearing the sound of screaming and celebrating and horns erupt in the night.

Good show. Nice way to break in the new sofa.

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Let me assure you that there is nothing quite like discovering you're missing one minor but necessary form when trying to complete your tax return.

The good thing is that it can be faxed over on Monday; the bad thing is that it means the exercise is not quite finished. It's like a rain delay in the bottom of the eighth.

And that's why I didn't get to watch the basketball games today.

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