Wednesday, August 30, 2006

More Conan

If you liked the interview with Conan O'Brien I just linked to, you might enjoy the hour he spent last week being quizzed on The Charlie Rose Show. It's online at Google Video and while they usually charge a buck or so to watch one of these, they also have occasional "free" days and one is going on at this very moment. You can watch it here. If it's not free by the time you get to it, either pay the modest charge or check back each day until it's free again.

I should say that I thought Mr. O'Brien did a fine job hosting the Emmy Awards the other night. Lately on his own show, I've grown a bit tired of the catch-phrases and "audience lines" and repeated bits. Emmy night, he had his act perfectly tailored to the event. I'm a little more confident that he'll be able to make The Tonight Show work for him and vice-versa when that sea change occurs.

• Posted at 10:14 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Russell Steele writes to ask, in reference to the clip I linked to here...

Just wanted to make mention of the Tonight Show piece where Carson went to the CPO Sharkey set to razz Don Rickles about breaking his cigarette box. I remember howling at that when I was a child. I had to flinch a couple of times while watching it now due to, no other way to say it, Johnny's racist remarks. By the time he got to the "cotton picking" line, my jaw just dropped. Just curious as to your reaction these many years later.

My reaction is that I still think it's funny — though probably less so than it was then — and I don't think Johnny's remarks were racist. I think they were a parody of the kind of thing Rickles was doing at the time, starting with when he hit Don with his own signature line, calling him "you big dummy," and continuing from there. Rickles's act today is kind of "old hat" so to see someone doing to him what he did to others is also a bit dated.

This gets back to something I was discussing here the other day. If someone utters an offensive remark and no one actually takes personal offense, is it an offensive remark? I say no. Offense is in the eye (or, I guess, ear) of the offended. This is a philosophy of mine that I developed during all the years I dealt with networks and their Standards and Practices departments. There'd be a line in a script that, if you really wanted to, you could interpret as being insulting to, say, the Irish. A quivering Broadcast Standards lady would come in and say, "That's got to go. The Irish Anti-Defamation League will picket the network. Irish Senators will challenge our broadcast licenses. Small Irish children will weep and older Irish women will faint in the streets." And so on.

And then you'd talk the Standards Lady out of cutting the line and it would appear on coast-to-coast television and be seen by millions and there'd be absolutely no protest. No complaints whatsoever. Or you'd get a few postcards from people who weren't Irish but who'd say, "I just know the Irish-Americans will be deeply offended by this." In other words, someone was concerned about it being offensive but no one was actually offended enough to pick up a phone and call the station.

It would amaze me how often this happened...and you have to remember that some people will write in letters of protest and call up in shock and indignation over the damnedest things. If you have some character in a show say, "I don't like asparagus," you may well get a flood of mail and calls from asparagus lovers and asparagus farmers and The National Asparagus Council (I'll bet there is one) and so on. It is stunning when you don't get protests over something...but quite often, you don't — and over things that one might think would bring villagers with burning torches, molten tar and feathers aplenty. If someone who seemed the slightest bit serious about it were to go on TV and say, "Let's kill all the Jews," okay, that's inarguably offensive and I doubt anyone would dispute that. But if it's arguably offensive, it probably isn't; not unless and until the targeted party takes serious offense.

Carson's lines in that bit don't bother me because, well, it's Johnny Carson. Does anyone think the man was a racist? Is there one anecdote anywhere of Johnny Carson mistreating a minority? I consider myself kind of a Carson scholar and I've sure never heard one. In fact, it's actually Johnny Carson imitating Don Rickles so it's even farther removed from Carson's own reality. You can't just take the words literally. It's like the difference between Lenny Bruce saying "nigger" in his act and some prominent White Supremacist saying it in front of a rally. It isn't the same word in the two different contexts and the former probably did not offend anyone personally, at least not if they understood how and why Bruce was saying it.

I'm not saying remarks can't be offensive. I just think that if no one is personally offended — or in the case of a statement heard by millions, almost no one — then the remark is not offensive. Because it didn't offend. If and when it does, we can discuss it then.

• Posted at 8:39 PM · LINK

Conan, Questioned

Wanna read a good interview with Conan O'Brien? It's over at The A.V. Club wing of The Onion and it's in two parts. Here's Part One and here's Part Two.

• Posted at 8:05 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Keith Olbermann tears Donald Rumsfeld a new orifice. If you haven't read Rumsfeld's remarks the other day before the American Legion, go read them first. Then read Olbermann.

UPDATE: Here's another option: Click below to watch a video of Keith Olbermann delivering his remarks. It runs a little under seven minutes.

• Posted at 6:03 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan on...oh, never mind what it's about. Just go read it.

• Posted at 5:55 PM · LINK

Pick Pocket PC

A bunch of you wrote in to ask what kind of Pocket PC I'd purchased. I bought one of these — the Hewlett-Packard iPAQ 2495. So far, I'm pretty happy with it but I'm not looking for a lot in a PDA so I'd probably be happy with about 85% of all the ones manufactured these days. The main thing I need it for is taking my phone book, calendar and "to do" list with me, and having a way to jot down notes and play games.

I picked this one because I've had good luck with H-P products, including my previous PDA which served me well long after it had become an antique. I also wanted something that accepted Compact Flash cards because my digital cameras all use them and I have quite a few here. And of course, it was being featured by Costco and I'm easily hypnotized by Costco. They sell coffins now and I'm thinking of stocking up, just because I love buying things from that place. When I see them selling hand sanitizer in ten barrel lots, it's all I can do to not purchase an eighty year supply.

Why, someone asked, didn't I get one that integrated a cell phone? Two reasons. I think those are a little clumsy to carry around and also, I'm really happy with the "hands free" cell phone hook-up I have in my car. I have a little dashboard cradle and I can just pop my Motorola cell phone into it and drive about, keeping my hands on the wheel, talking (when necessary) on the speakerphone. When I reach my destination, I pop out the cell phone and take it in with me. If I'd switched to a combination cell phone and PDA, none of that would work. I'd have to get the guy out again to install a completely new cradle/holder in my car.

Now then, a query: I use Microsoft Outlook for my contacts, calendar, task list, etc. — everything but e-mail. I want to stay with Outlook since it interfaces so neatly with almost everything but I find its task list clumsy and close to useless. You just list tasks and check them off when they're done. You can't mark something as high priority, can't mark a task as started but not completed, can't even (easily) connect a date or time to a task.

Does anyone make an add-on that will add that kind of functionality to Microsoft Outlook, allow you to sync with a handheld, and then have all that data available to you in both places? I need to have a task list on both my desktop and my handheld that can manage that trick. I'm willing to go outside Outlook if I have to. So far, the Personal Information Managers I've tested on the Pocket PC are also useless. They're as cluttered as a cable TV news screen and the extra info you enter into your task lists there doesn't seem to make it back to the desktop when you sync up. Anyone have any suggestions of what might make Mark happy?

• Posted at 12:41 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

"Hey, Evanier," I hear America saying. "We love these clips you've been linking to from the 1985 Night of 100 Stars special. You couldn't possibly have another one of those to embed in your wondrous website, could you?" Well, since I hate to let anyone down, here's an odd one that features Whoopi Goldberg...

• Posted at 11:49 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

William Rivers Pitt on an upcoming ABC mini-series that, he says, will attempt to put the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton administration.

• Posted at 11:47 AM · LINK

Mae Day

This is just for my friends who obsessively track and itemize voice actors and their performances...

Just watching How to Succeed in Business Without Trying for the umpteenth time. How come I never before noticed the lady ("Mrs. Needleman," about 29 minutes into the film) whose dialogue is dubbed in by Mae Questel?

That will be of great interest to about twelve pals who read this weblog. The rest of you...thank you for indulging me.

• Posted at 1:25 AM · LINK

Taking Umbrage

From Greg Eckler comes the following message with the subject line, "Emmys Plane Crash Bit"...

I would love for you to weigh in on that one, as somebody who is both a news junkie and would understand the implications of dropping an opening bit from a major show that probably took weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make.

I think this plane crash was far from a space shuttle incident. It got big play all day on cable because that's what cable does, but was not in the national consciousness and most people probably didn't even make the connection with the Emmys bit (I didn't). The bit could've been dropped just from the Kentucky affiliates. I mean, if it's just about offending bereaved people, how many summer weekend drowning incidents took place this weekend and could those families not have been haunted by the Bob Newhart suffocation bit? Where do you draw the line?

I think I'll weigh in by agreeing with you. We have a tendency to turn into Little Old Ladies about these things, taking offense where we don't have to...and for no good purpose. I have, as I so often do, a story. Years ago, for reasons too boring to even appear on this weblog, I spent an afternoon hanging around backstage at The Tonight Show. Richard Dawson was guest-hosting and his entire monologue was about air travel and being nervous on the plane.

About the time taping completed, the producers got word of a major air crash in the mid-west with many fatalities. I got to eavesdrop on a sudden discussion between them and some network folks about whether or not the show should air in that context. Nothing definite was decided near me but I was struck by the essence of the debate. It was not about whether the loved ones of the crash victims would be hurt. The presumption was that those people probably would not be watching television that evening. If they did, they'd be seeing news footage of the crash that would surely be more unsettling than some reference to airline problems that had not actually occurred.

No, the potential problem was complaints from people who were not, themselves, impacted by the crash. "People who look for reasons to be offended" was what one person called them. And I've found this to be the case in my own wrestling with Standards and Practices. The networks are too quick to react to what are often very few complaints and even then, a lot of the complaints they get are from people who are saying, in effect, "I'm offended because I just know this will offend someone else."

This is the essence of too many censorship moves in television: Worrying about offending theoretical people who rarely seem to be actually offended, themselves. That's pretty much what this bogus controversy over the Emmy Awards comes down to. Yesterday, Matt Drudge linked to all these news reports that quoted people who said they were "horrified" at the insensitive airing of the plane crash sketch...but all those people were upset because, they said, it would upset someone else. Well, maybe. But maybe not. If I'd lost a loved one in a plane crash this morning, I don't think a sketch on the Emmys would make my day any worse.

(By the way: The final decision on that Tonight Show episode was to not air it that night. I suspect it was a matter of "Why take even the slight risk of offending anyone?" They stuck a Carson rerun in its place and then ran the Dawson-hosted show a few weeks later on a Monday night. It was full of dated references...guests plugging upcoming TV shows that had already aired, several topical jokes about what was in the news that day, etc. I always wondered if anyone wrote in that they were offended by having a show that was obviously taped a month or so earlier passed off as "today's" Tonight Show. I probably should have written one, myself.)

• Posted at 1:04 AM · LINK