Monthly Archives: October 2004

It is a long-standing Internet Tradition — invented by me and followed by very few others — that when the proprietor of a weblog is too busy to update said weblog, the proprietor posts a photo of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. Since this is a comfort food, it is intended to make you feel secure even while I am putting other things ahead of entertaining you. In a day or so, when pressing work is done, deadlines are met and I don't have producers looking to beat and pummel me, all will return to normal around here. Be well.

Jimmy Breslin on the polls and other election-related gripes.

My pal Tom Spurgeon has set up shop as The Comics Reporter, and his site is full of useful info and sharp comments. You'll want to visit often.

Wanna read an article about the replacement of Richard Dreyfuss in the London production of The Producers? Here's one.

One of the many clever cartoonists I know, Peter Kuper, has created a short flash animation that takes the classic Harvey comics/cartoon character and turns him into Guess Who. You can see it at this website [CAUTION: Contains unRichie-like language] and after you do that, visit Peter's site and notice what a versatile artist he is. Those monthly "Spy Vs. Spy" cartoons in MAD magazine are only a smidgen of what he does. (Did you know he does them by cutting stencils and then spraying paint through those stencils? You'd have known that if you read Mad Art, the stunning and incisive history of that rag and all the talented illustrators who've drawn for it. (Hey, don't complain. It's been months since I plugged my book.)

I just want it over with. I'm sick of this election. I'm sick of spin. I'm sick of talk about an October Surprise. It's starting to look like the October Surprise will be that there's no October Surprise.

Most of all, I'm sick of looking at polls and of electoral maps with these states colored red and those states colored blue and the undecided ones white, and Florida and Ohio switching back and forth every day or so like a damn neon sign.

All of us are wasting way too much time with that stuff. We're even getting delusional, acting like the polls are telling us who's probably going to win. We're like people who have seen that the faith healer's patients always die but we still go to him because he's better than nothing.

An awful lot of sites are like Real Clear Politics — which, despite the following wild pitch, is still a well-respected political site in some circles. Four years ago, they analyzed all the different polls and coughed up an electoral projection that had Bush winning 446 electoral votes as opposed to Al Gore's 92. They had Bush winning 51.2% of the popular vote to Gore's 41.9% and said Nader would get 5.8%. (The actual totals, just to remind you, were 271 electoral votes for Bush versus 266 for Gore, and they split the popular vote with Gore getting 48.38%, Bush getting 47.87% and Nader racking up 2.74%.)

As predictions go, that's a pretty wide miss. You wouldn't phone a Psychic Hotline a second time if the first time was that far off the target. But somehow, people are still flocking to Real Clear Politics and to other sites and pollsters with similarly poor track records. The final Gallup Poll in 2000 had Bush at 48%, Gore at 46% and Nader at 5%. The final Battleground Poll had Bush beating Gore by five points. The final USA Today/CNN poll had Bush beating Gore by six.

We're still a week from the final polls…and even when we get them, why expect them to be any more accurate than they were last time?

By the way: In case you haven't heard, Zogby says Kerry is up a point in Colorado.

Unlike most newspapers today, when we get it wrong here at news from me, we correct ourselves. Usually.

In one of the pieces about the Ashlee Simpson incident, I referenced the famous incident where Sinead O'Connor concluded a song by tearing up a picture of the Pope. I said, referring to the way it played on subsequent reruns, "They inserted some or all of the dress rehearsal performance which ended with her ripping up a different, non-controversial picture." Actually, in dress, she held up but did not tear a photo of some children. (I made this mistake before. Then, as now, reader Tom Collins wrote in politely to correct me.)

Also: The two newspapers that endorsed Gore in 2000 but have gone for Bush this time are not The Denver Post and The Columbus Dispatch. The latter endorsed Bush both times. The second paper that switched this time around is The York Daily Record.

The Management of news from me regrets the errors. And plenty of other things he's done.

How long is a baseball game? I just did an Internet search and found varying times, but the average seems to be about 2 hours and 47 minutes. That means there are plenty of games that run over three hours.

The first game of the World Series ran four hours. The second ran close to 3 hours and 35 minutes. In the playoffs, the Red Sox and the Yankees played two back-to-back games that each ran over five hours. One came close to six.

Simple enough. So why does my TiVo presume that all baseball games are three hours long?

Well, I know why: They take their schedules from the networks, and the networks use that number. But that's because that's the least amount of time the game will consume. If it starts at 5:00, the following show is announced for 8:00 because that's when it may start. It won't start earlier than that but it may start later…or not start at all. That's fine for their purposes. But if you're TiVoing a baseball game for later watching, you're not going to use that number. The odds are pretty good that you'll lose the end of the game.

Some day, personal video recorders and TV networks will have some sort of alliance where a little "end of show" signal will be encoded in broadcasts, and you'll be able to set your TiVo (or whatever we're using then) to record until it receives that signal. Right now, if you want to record a baseball game and don't want to live dangerously, you need to pad your recording time with an extra three hours for a total of six. And even then, one of these days, there'll be some incredible multi-inning game that will run longer than that and you'll come home and find your machine didn't get the end of it. The Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers once played a game lasting 8 hours and 6 minutes.

I don't have a solution to this, other than that TiVo should maybe pop up a little reminder any time you set to record a baseball game for three hours. But I'll bet the next generation of digital video recorders addresses the problem…or maybe the generation after that.

John W. Dean tells us why the coming presidential election will probably be decided not in voting booths but in courts of law.

Andrew Sullivan says it's getting difficult to tell who's the Conservative in the current presidential race and who's the Liberal.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson brings us Fear and Loathing on the 2004 campaign trail. If you don't enjoy the logic (there's some in there), you might enjoy the sheer, uninhibited quality of the syntax.

Want to know where your polling place is? Want to help someone else find theirs? Then visit MyPollingSite.com. A free public service of someone who's doing it just for a good cause.

I'm intrigued by all the newspapers and columnists who supported Bush in 2000 and are now behind John Kerry. Some are half-hearted Kerry endorsements, to be sure, but my own vote for Kerry is more a vote against Bush than a belief that the Junior Senator from Massachusetts is the saviour of our nation. And I always like to see someone in the public eye say "I was wrong" because I think the pundits and papers are wrong a lot, and are usually too stubborn to admit it.

Here's Chicago-Tribune columnist Steve Chapman explaining why he's about to take the unusual (for him) step and voting for a Democrat for President.

According to this, at least 33 papers that backed Bush in 2000 have now endorsed Kerry. They include The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Daily News and The Memphis Commercial-Appeal (registration required so I won't bother linking).

Bush has only picked up two papers that endorsed Gore: The Denver Post and The Columbus Dispatch — and both of those, if you read them, are pretty tepid recommendations. An awful lot of papers that backed Bush four years ago are also declining to endorse this time, which means that they're not happy with him.

If anyone sees another example the other way — a prominent newspaper or columnist who backed Gore in 2000 and is now for Bush — please let me know. I'd love to see it and link to it.

The servers are probably overloaded but you may be able to download this video clip of the Ashlee Simpson number from last night's Saturday Night Live.

From a friend who works at NBC in New York…

What happened last night on SNL was that Ashlee Simpson got caught using pretaped vocals. Like you said, singers do pretape and then lip-sync on the air. Usually the show frowns on this but sometimes during rehearsal it becomes apparent that the performer needs it. I don't know the specifics here but I'm told Simpson had prerecorded tracks for both songs she did last night. Her first song was called "Pieces of Me" and it went fine. Second song was supposed to be a new one called "Autobiography" but someone screwed up and they started playing "Pieces of Me" again. Big oops. Someone did a fast patch for the West Coast feed to make it less obvious what had happened but it wasn't that the band started playing the wrong number. It was whoever was supposed to change the DAT or the CD or whatever her playback was on. I wasn't there at the time but I can imagine they rejected the idea of editing in the dress rehearsal tape for the West Coast since it would betray the show's "live" credo more than making a small audio edit. You're right that they'll probably edit the dress tape in when the show gets rerun unless the incident becomes too famous.

A question for anyone who knows: I seem to recall one or more occasions where the dress rehearsal version of some SNL sketch went so well that they didn't even try doing it again on the live broadcast. They just rolled tape from dress. Does anyone else remember this?

I felt bad for Ashlee Simpson, if only because all the late night comedians are going to switch the Britney Spears lip-syncing jokes over to her. These jokes have an interesting heritage. Before Britney, they were about Mariah Carey…then before her, the Backstreet Boys. And at one point, in a slightly different form, they were all about Milli Vanilli. Recently, Madonna has been accused of pre-taping vocals but Ashlee has probably beaten her out to claim the mantle. She will hold it until someone else gets caught allegedly mouthing lyrics. It'll probably be George W. Bush but maybe not before the election.