Monday, October 11, 2004

And, Speaking of Doonesbury...

Garry Trudeau, its maker, is a guest on The Charlie Rose Show this evening. If it's already run in your area, you might check for a rerun tomorrow on your local PBS station.

• Posted at 9:24 PM · LINK

Doonesbury Floods

All this week, Doonesbury is pointing its readers towards webpages on which prominent Conservatives endorse John Kerry. Today's link (to this article by John Eisenhower, son of Guess Who) created so much interest that it crashed the site of the Manchester Union Leader newspaper...though it seems to be accessible at the moment. Here's an article about the surge in their web traffic.

• Posted at 8:04 PM · LINK

Watching TeeVee

Just caught two episodes of Win Ben Stein's Money, a series that was done a few years ago for Comedy Central but which is now rerunning on Game Show Network. I forgot how much I enjoyed the show, especially the first three years when Jimmy Kimmel was the co-host. Mr. Stein was put on this planet to disprove the belief that Conservatives are never funny. His game show worked, in part because it was cleverly formulated and written but also because it was so real. Ben really liked the contestants but really wanted to beat them. Ben was really amused by about 80% of what Kimmel said and really mortified by the rest. The part about winning "Ben Stein's money" was a little fake inasmuch as it implied that he put up $5000 of his own money each day and kept whatever the contestants didn't get. (You had to read the fine print to understand that it didn't work quite like that.) But the show managed to be funny and a legitimate game show at the same time, and I can't think of many programs that have achieved both at the same time. It's back in reruns and I've taken a Season Pass on Ye Olde TiVo. You might want to give it a peek.

• Posted at 6:48 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

As you may have heard, The Lone Star Iconoclast, which is George Bush's "hometown newspaper" in Crawford, Texas has endorsed John Kerry. Here is a link to that endorsement...and here's a link to a follow-up article on the anger that the endorsement has generated. (Thanks to Al Feldstein, comic book legend and longtime editor of Mad Magazine, for calling this one to my attention.)

• Posted at 5:52 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

One of my favorite political bloggers, Kevin Drum, lists every known lie or distortion from the Bush-Kerry dust-up and scores them on falsity, importance, etc. Forget the scoring and just read down the columns.

• Posted at 4:34 PM · LINK