Category Archives: Uncategorized

I won't be posting much today but e-mail I've received lately prompts me to mention…

• Yes, I know Howard Stern's available "on cable TV" via the iN Demand (that's how they type it) service. That's just the videotaped radio show without the bleeps and blurs. I think one of these days, he's going to do a real show for HBO or Showtime or one of those and it'll be a huge success.
• Yes, I know there are some practical applications in math and encryption to having the largest possible prime number. It's just not something I figure on using in my life. Not unless I have to tally the number of mistakes of the Bush administration.
• Yes, I know there are a few remaining outposts of the restaurant chains I described as "extinct (or nearly-extinct)." That's what the part in the parentheses meant.

Back soon with more fun stuff as soon as I catch up on some deadlines. Ta-ta.

The only three certain things in this world are Death, Taxes and Pat Robertson saying something really, really stupid and divisive.

Larry King's guest tonight is Howard Stern, thereby proving that even two guys who loathe each other can get along for an hour if they think it'll help their ratings.

Tip for Howard Stern, who I know doesn't read this site: Next time Mr. King berates you for having naked women on your radio show and talking about sexual stuff, ask him about the time he had Marilyn Chambers on his radio program. She invited him to have sex with her during the news break and then to discuss it in the following segment. Not only did they attempt it but The Iron Horse of Broadcasting (L.K.) was, perhaps understandably, unable to perform in such an odd circumstance. For all of Stern's "littering the airwaves," as King has put it in the past, I don't think he's ever gone that far with a guest, at least during a broadcast.

As everyone in the world has heard eleven times by now, Howard Stern's radio show moves to Sirius radio next Monday. I won't be springing for a Sirius subscription because of it but I'll bet a lot of people have or will. Frankly, I sometimes like Stern when he's doing a one-on-one conversation with a guest. When he wants to be, and when the guest has something to say, Howard is a very good interviewer. But every time I've tuned him in the last few years, the premise has been to bring in some poor young lady who cluelessly thinks an appearance on The Howard Stern Show will help her career, and get her to disrobe and/or talk about her sex life while Stern's cohorts insult her I.Q. and (often) her appearance. Or sometimes, they bring in some geeky, slightly-retarded male and abuse him. Neither fits into any known definition of Entertainment for me but, hey, someone must like it. Stern has always done well and one of these days, some cable TV channel will put him on uncensored and they'll all make so much money, they'll have to digitize it and store it on CD-Rom.

Nice to see that Newt Gingrich has come out against members of Congress taking money from lobbyists and special interests. I'm planning on coming out against overweight Jews having weblogs.

For those of you following the saga of Stan Lee Media, this latest development.

Jon Stewart to host the Oscars this year…

There's no cleverer comedian working today so in that sense, he's a good choice. The problem is that he's probably not a first choice. The crop of movies that will be competing suggest one of those years when few people have seen enough of the nominated films — or have enough emotion about them or their makers — to tune in to the award telecast.

There's always a tendency to credit/blame the host if the Oscar ratings go up or down, which is probably unfair. The host doesn't do that much and the bulk of the show is what it is. Some years, we care a lot about who wins Best Actress and some years we don't. This is looking like a "don't" year which is probably why it won't be Billy Crystal or Steve Martin doing that opening monologue. They don't want it said that the ratings dipped on their watch lest it taint their respective movie stardoms. It wouldn't surprise me if a few others — maybe Robin Williams, maybe Tom Hanks, maybe someone else — turned it down before the call went out to the host of The Daily Show.

Stewart, of course, has little to lose. He's not concerned with being a movie star. If the ratings for the Oscar telecast are strong, he'll get a lot of credit and some industry heat. If they aren't…well, what do you expect from some guy on a cable channel? The funny thing is that he'll probably have very little to do with those ratings, either way.

Here's a quick reminder that it's only a little more than a month until this year's WonderCon in San Francisco. If you've been to the San Diego Con but not to WonderCon, think of it this way: It's like the Comic-Con International but small enough that you can walk the entire dealer's room, see a lot of panels and not wait in line for everything…but not so small that you won't have plenty to see, do and buy. It's run by the same folks and, of course, San Francisco is a great city to visit.

I'll be moderating around five panels over its three days. The one that most interests me is that Gerard Jones and I (and maybe one or two other folks) are going to sit down and discuss his book, Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. As I said here, I think it's the most important book ever written about comic book history and I believe it's very accurate. There are, however, some points with which I might take issue, and Gerry is being gracious and professional enough to chat about them with me. It's not so much that I think he's wrong about anything in particular but there are a few places where his interpretation of events differs with mine and I thought it would be educational to converse about them.

I'll be posting a list shortly of my other panels. Don't wait for it. Make your plans for WonderCon.

One quick thought about the mining disaster…

It would be an additional tragedy — and perhaps the cause of future mining disasters — if all the investigations and remedies that came out of this accident were about the media coverage and the fact that the families were misinformed for a time. Things went wrong there but things really went wrong in that mine. Twelve men were killed in a facility that had repeatedly been cited for "significant and substantial" safety violations. What a shame it would be if someone thought that was less of a scandal than how their deaths were and were not reported.

NBC Universal has launched its new cable channel that features nothing but recyclings of old detective and action TV shows and a few movies in the same genres. It's called Sleuth and it's not available yet on DirecTV or from most cable services around the country. If you'd like to see what you're missing — a lot of Simon and Simon reruns, mostly — here's a link to the Sleuth website.

Sleuth starts with, the website says, entry into 5 million American homes. Trio, the channel which NBC Uni terminated when they launched Sleuth, was in 8 million homes when pundits, including Yours Truly, first began predicting its demise. That was down from the 20 million they had when Trio was included in the DirecTV lineup. Obviously, they must have some strategy to get Sleuth into more households soon.

If we are to believe Fred Kaplan — and I've yet to see anyone seriously suggest he's wrong about this kind of thing — the whole funding of the Department of Homeland Security has become just a way to shovel your tax money into pork barrel projects that have nothing to do with thwarting terrorist attacks.

This is another one of those "I don't know why there isn't more outrage about this" kind of things. If some Congressguy got up and said we should stop allocating funds to this program, people who are terrified of another 9/11 would accuse him of being soft on terrorism. But they have no problem with that money going to help developers in Kentucky build more shopping malls.

Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest-ever prime number.

This is so exciting. I can't wait to put it to good use.

GSN skipped over the two Michael Larsen episodes in their Press Your Luck rerunning. This morning's episode was from the day after Larsen's big win.

Don't know why they did this. I believe GSN is now on its third rerunning of this string of PYL episodes. The first time through, they jumped past Mr. Larsen, reportedly because they wanted to save those shows for a special promotion. They did that documentary about the event and then the second time through the 1984 Press Your Luck reruns, they included the two shows with Larsen. This time around, they skipped them again but the documentary is being rerun next Monday. Go figure.

Anyway, sorry for getting anyone's hopes up or making you set your TiVo unnecessarily.

My pal, TV critic Aaron Barnhart, has a little different view of Dick Clark's return to broadcasting on New Year's Eve. I don't have a strong opinion on this. I said at the time I was unsure which of two views to take of it and there are others I didn't even mess with.

Did it make some people uneasy? Sure. Did it gladden the hearts of others? Yes. Would some folks have preferred not to see it? Of course. Did others tune in just to see how Dick was? You bet.

Let me throw one other thought into the discussion, even though I'm not clear enough on my own feelings to have much of a discussion on it. As I said, I worked with Dick a number of times. I've had no contact with him in over a decade but I doubt this has changed: The guy was and I'll bet still is a workaholic. I don't know whether it's vanity or greed or just some inability to deal with the whole concept of leisure time but the Dick Clark I knew loved to work and lived to work. He would carefully plot his schedule to see how much he could do in a day and if someone came to him with a project or offer, he'd immediately rejuggle that schedule to see if he could fit the new thing in, whatever it was. All of us around him knew the Golden Rule when it came to Dick Clark: He was the most cooperative, professional person you could possibly deal with as long as you didn't waste his time.

Most of the discussions I'm reading about his reemergence, including my own first response, are about the impact Dick's New Year's Eve appearance had on us. The more I think about it, the more I think that may not have been even a significant consideration in his decision to do the show. I think he was just going nuts sitting in a wheelchair in Malibu not working. He may well have needed the goal of doing that broadcast to motivate his therapy in the preceding months. Aaron thinks Dick should refrain from public appearances until such time as he's truly overcome the crippling effects on the stroke, and in one sense — and for some people — Aaron is right. But I'd doubt Dick has the patience for that, and if doing the occasional TV show is going to help him get back to being the Dick Clark we know, or anything close to it, I'm fine with that. I see people on my set all the time who haven't had strokes but have a lot less right to be there and who make me a lot less comfortable.

Earlier, as you probably heard, it was reported that the twelve trapped miners in West Virginia were found alive. Now, it turns out that the report was erroneous; that all but one perished. We feel bad for the men who were killed and bad for their family members who lost them twice in about three hours.

When I heard this latest development — just as I was posting about Dave and Bill — I logged onto a couple of Internet discussion forums and read a batch of postings. When it seemed all had survived, people were posting, "This proves there's a God. He answered our prayers." Someone was quoting noted psychic Sylvia Browne, who'd been on the Coast to Coast radio show saying that her powers had told her the men were all alive. Then it turns out they weren't all alive.

I don't think their deaths prove there is no God any more than their survival would prove there was. I wish people would stop linking Him to specific events and deeds like that. We have tragedies and non-tragedies all the time in this world and neither means that God exists or doesn't exist or wants to smite down some state for its morality or anything. I once had a friend tell me that if the Dodgers didn't win the World Series, it would prove that there was no God. I could only wonder if there was some guy who was rooting for the other team and saying it would prove there was a God if the Dodgers lost.

On the other hand, Sylvia Browne's faulty reading proves plenty about her. How long are people going to fall for that snake oil?

And now on CNN, I'm watching them rerunning a clip of Anderson Cooper finding out on live TV — from a person he's interviewing — that the reports he and everyone else had been giving for hours about the miners being all alive were untrue. A woman came out of the church where the deaths were announced and told Cooper what was said in there. Amazing to see how this unfolded. Cooper is stunned, and you can almost see him worrying if he should be putting this out on the network without more confirmation. But you can also see him realizing that the woman couldn't be making this up. So one thinly-sourced report corrects another. Once upon a time, when TV news wasn't 24/7 and so competitive, both accounts would have been checked better before being released to the world.

Hold on a second. I'm going to flip channels.

Well, everyone's saying the same things about how awful it is for the families. I heard the term, "emotional roller coaster" on two different stations in the same sixty seconds. Everyone's saying they don't know how the miscommunication happened. At the same time, they're reporting on how the miscommunication happened and saying that there will be investigations into how the miscommunication happened.

A reporter on Fox News just said, "The miracle has been snuffed out," as if there really were a miracle earlier instead of just a bad news report. And with that, I think it's time to go to bed. Good night.

In case you didn't see it last night, David Letterman had Bill O'Reilly on. The money quote, which is probably already being repeated all over the 'net, came when Dave said to him, "I have the feeling that 60% of what you say is crap."

Even though I feel that's about the right percentage, I couldn't help feel a twinge of sorry for O'Reilly…though I also think he's smart enough to have known he was going to get clobbered. It's just about impossible to beat a guy like Letterman when he has home court advantage.

The question I wish someone would put to Dave is, "Why do you have someone on your show if you think 60% of what they say is crap? Why give such a person a forum? Just so you can insult him to his face?" It's not like Bill O'Reilly doesn't have a place to express his opinions. I can understand booking such a guest to engage in a real debate but Dave wasn't primed for that. O'Reilly trotted out the story he keeps telling about how a school in Wisconsin wouldn't allow students to sing the real lyrics to "Silent Night" and Dave was unprepared to point out that what occurred there didn't happen the way O'Reilly keeps reporting it.

I hear people say they've given up watching Letterman because he strikes them as cranky and grouchy. I don't always agree…but then there are nights like last night. O'Reilly spouted his usual nonsense. Letterman insulted him. The studio audience cheered Dave. The home audience decided to see who Jay had on. Television doesn't always have to be pleasant and happy but if you're going to have friction, make it be about something.