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I haven't seen one in years but when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Bat Masterson, a western TV series starring Gene Barry as a more gentlemanly kind of cowboy. It was on the network from '58 to '61 and after that, it was not to be avoided in syndication. The show was a light-hearted one with a good sense of humor, and I recall it as kind of fun and entertaining.

Our link today will show you the last few seconds of an episode, leading in to the end credits and — most importantly — the show's theme song. I thought it was a great tune but I could never understand why its composer thought "young" rhymed with "Bat Masterson." Those words didn't rhyme then, they don't rhyme now and they will never rhyme in the future. And the mysterious part is that it's not like there aren't a lot of words that rhyme with "son." The first line could have been, "Back when the west had just begun" or "Back when the west was not yet won" or "Back when the west was overrun." I came up with those in under two minutes when I was ten. How long might it have taken the guy who wrote it to stick a real rhyme in there?

I also didn't understand if there was reason, apart from the fact that it did rhyme, that the song called him "The man who had the fastest gun." I didn't see all 100+ episodes but in the ones I did catch, I never saw Bat actually outdraw anyone. He rarely touched a gun at all and folks in the storylines often commented on — and even admired — his dexterity and elegance in using a cane instead of a pistol. (Apparently, the real Bat Masterson, who bore little resemblance to the one Gene Barry played, was a heckuva gunman but he did carry a cane — because after a gunshot injury, he needed it to walk.) Yet in the theme song, it said he had the fastest gun and the show's logo had him holding a tiny pistol. This is the kind of thing I spend way too much time thinking about.

On a whim, I just checked my TiVo and I see that the old Bat Masterson show runs on the Encore Western channel, which I can get on my satellite dish. So I just set up to record a couple and I'll report back here in a few days as to whether they're still good or if, like certain shows of my childhood, they appear to have been refilmed to make them cheap and stupid. In the meantime, here's that great closing theme song, complete with its odd rhyme and gun reference. Some sources say the vocalist is Bill Lee, a prolific studio singer and member of several noted singing groups but I don't know that this is so. I also don't know that it's not. Note also in the credits that William Conrad took time out from narrating Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as he was doing at the time, to act in this episode.

Tonight on the Republican Presidential Debate, Rudy Giuliani said, "I'm not running on what I did on September 11th."

James Langdell informs me that A. Whitney Brown has been writing blog-type columns for Bill O'Reilly's favorite website, Daily Kos. Here's a link to a page of Brown's commentaries there.

And speaking of folks who used to be on Saturday Night Live: A. Whitney Brown was a terrific stand-up comedian and a writer-performer during one of the better periods of that series. I've asked a few times on this weblog (like here) what had become of him. I still don't know much but he does have a couple of commentaries now up on the Internet. Here's one of them…

The legal problems of former Saturday Night Live and SCTV cast member Tony Rosato may be nearing their conclusion. Thanks to "ptshghnssy," who sent me the link.

Mario Cuomo surfaces from the undisclosed location where he's been hiding for so many years to remind us of something. It's that Congress has the power to declare war and the President of the U.S. does not.

A lot of people have built some amazing things with Lego blocks. But as you'll see if you scroll down his page a ways, Andrew Lipson has been building replicas of M.C. Escher works. This is not humanly possible.

I don't understand much of what you're about to see. Some years back, the beloved childrens' entertainer Raffi recorded a nonsense song called "Banana Phone." Someone who heard it got the idea that the record could be improved by being sped up…and they're right. It's very catchy that way. So people began speeding it up. Keith Olbermann often uses a sped version to lead into commercials and there are dozens of places one can find the song on the Internet and it's almost always sped up, sometimes too much. The following video doesn't have the greatest visuals but it seems to have the pace about right…

Jeffrey Rosen profiles law professor Jack Goldsmith…who not that long ago was advising the Bush Administration on what was legal and what was not. That all ended when he started telling them that some of the things they wanted to do were not legal. Goldsmith has solid Conservative credentials and I think his outrage at the current White House definition of Presidential Power is more in keeping with a true Conservative position.

Evgenia Peretz (that is not a typo, at least not by me) has a powerful article in Vanity Fair this month about the press mistreatment of Al Gore during the 2000 election. I thought for a time that Gore would soon jump into the '08 presidential sweepstakes but with the low profile he's been keeping lately, I'm inclined to think not. Given this article, he may just be waiting until Maureen Dowd and Katharine Seelye are dead.

The slang expressions and vocabulary from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A few years ago, back when Cartoon Network used to run cartoons, they commissioned a batch of short animations under the category of "Cartoons That Never Made It." One was this great one-minute episode of Rupert the Grouper…and for several weeks, I went around with Rupert's theme song resounding in my head. Now, it's your turn…

Electricity just came back on here, a little over twenty-four hours after it went away, which is just about long enough to ruin the bulk of what's in the refrigerator. A weary crew of D.W.P. workers has been outside for about three hours. I kept taking bottles of water out to them and apologizing because the H2O wasn't chilled. "My power is out," I told them…as if they didn't know that better than anyone. One told me he there were so many outages around town that he was on a triple-shift — well into his third consecutive eight-hour stint. Tough way to make a living…especially working thirty feet above the asphalt in a little basket attached to a crane arm.

While waiting for power to be restored, I mused on how much of my life — not just professionally but personally — is entwined with computers and how I have trouble functioning when I don't have access to one. The battery on my laptop lasted only so long and after it went out, I was rather paralyzed. Never mind not being able to write all the scripts and assignments and e-mails I have to write. It was worse than that. A thought would come up and my first instinct would be to go Google the topic for further info and —

Whoops. Can't do that. Can't do a lot of things I need to do. Fortunately, I have my new Blackberry so I was able to do some of the more vital e-mail and to even post a little here, plus I have my whole phonebook on it. About an hour ago, I was sitting here in my office, talking to someone on my Bluetooth-enabled cellphone/PDA interfacing with my Bluetooth headset. I was the picture of high-tech splendor except, of course, that I was sitting in the dark without electricity.

Anyway, it's good to be whole again…though I think I'll keep a flashlight handy and wait a while before I start resetting clocks. Just in case.

Still ain't got any.

And we're still powerless here in the otherwise-luxurious newsfromme offices. But then you don't really need electricity when you have scripts due, vital e-mail to answer and it's only (only!) a huindred and two degrees. If only I could watch Jerry…