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One of the joys of the Internet is getting to read The New York Times every day not only for free but without leaving my chair. There are a lot of articles I think are myopic or pointlessly sensationalized, but less so than most papers. Their coverage of Wen Ho Lee was so embarrassingly wrong that they conducted an internal investigation and ran a partial apology. Their coverage of Whitewater was worse. It made one suspect that, trying to prove they were not the liberal-slanted newspaper so many make them out to be, they decided to stick it to a Democratic President. A rather staggering number of charges that were later proven bogus gained great credibility by being plastered across the first page of the Times, often above the fold.

Still, there are always a few articles in each issue that I find interesting. Today, I'd like to link to…

• A front page article that discusses, one year after the fact, Colin Powell's major report that there was absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was sitting there with Weapons of Mass Destruction by the truckload. So wha' happened?
• An article on lip-synching at live musical events and how it ticks some people off.
• Frank Rich on what's harming marriage in this country. It ain't gays, says Rich…and I think he's right.
• A report by top scientists that says that even if existing air pollution laws are enforced, they won't be enough to keep our atmosphere breatheable.

Some of you may not visit the Times site because it requires you to register. I do not think this leads to Spam. At least, I've never received an e-mail ad that appeared to come because I registered at a site like this. But if you're uneasy about leaving your address laying around the Internet, there's an easy solution: Get a separate e-mail address for that purpose. Go to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or any of thousands of sites that will give you a free e-mail address and mailbox. Sign up for an address that you only use when you have to sign up for something. Very handy.

Apart from the fact that it mentions the silly issue of whether John Kerry has had cosmetic surgery, this column by David Brooks is pretty good.

Every year, the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles has its annual William S. Paley Television Festival. These used to be wonderful: They'd salute great old shows and bring in everyone they could find who'd been a part of them for a big panel discussion. If you ever go to the Museum (and they have these tapes at the one in New York too, I understand) watch the videos of the seminars devoted to classic moments in television.

Alas, the festivals are no longer as wonderful. The last few years, they've had fewer events and they've increasingly been about current shows. I don't think it's posted anywhere on the 'net so here's this year's line-up of seminars…

• March 3 — Creating Characters with J.J. Abrams
• March 4 — Trading Spaces
• March 5 — An Evening With Angela Lansbury
• March 6 — Joan of Arcadia
• March 9 — The O.C.
• March 10 — An Evening With William Shatner
• March 11 — Arrested Development
• March 12 — A Salute to Sherwood Schwartz
• March 13 — The Wire
• March 15 — Smallville
• March 16 — Carnivale

And that's it. Some of the shows being saluted are fine shows and may in the future be viewed as important, classic television programming. But have they yet? Here's an excerpt from the museum's press release for a Paley Fest of a few years back…

The Paley Festival, named for William S. Paley, founder of both the Museum and CBS, offers the public an appreciation of the medium's commitment to quality. During these evenings, the audience views episodes or highlights of the featured work and has the opportunity to ask questions of the cast and creative teams or the individual involved in its production. Since the first festival in 1984, the Museum has honored more than 200 programs, including Cheers, Friends, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Marty, M*A*S*H, Roots, Route 66, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, All in the Family, Will & Grace, Friends, The Untouchables, thirtysomething, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, South Park, The Untouchables, The West Wing and The X-Files, along with such personalities as Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Alfred Hitchcock, Sid Caesar, Cher, Jim Henson, Bob Hope, Jane Fonda, John Frankenheimer, Jack Lemmon, Mary Martin, Carl Reiner, Gene Roddenberry, Garry Shandling, Flip Wilson, Milton Berle, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Winters, and many more.

I suppose one could argue that Angela Lansbury and William Shatner are in the same class as the folks named above. The salute to Sherwood Schwartz will mainly be a salute to Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. Sherwood is a nice man and I love hearing him tell stories about writing for Red Skelton and other such experiences…but the Museum didn't do a salute to Gilligan's Island twenty years ago when more of the cast was alive. What's changed? And have they really run out of shows more than a year or two old…i.e., old enough for there to actually be an overview? This is a very disappointing schedule.

First off, I just edited the previous post to remove the "f" word. I had a couple of complaints, one of which made a lot of sense to me. It's too long to post here but essentially, the guy said, "I encourage my kids to read your site because I like the way you express yourself. I don't want them to read sites which employ foul language and I don't like taking your site away from them because you curse once every four years. So either curse more often or not at all." I think it's wrong to pretend you can shield kids from such words and also wrong to make a big deal out of them. But I also think it's a parent's right to make that decision and the guy is right. I did kind of spring it as a surprise, so I took it out.

Secondly: My e-mail goes through a complex routing of various Internet Service Providers, some of which have been filtering to try and cut down on the percentage of messages that contain the "MyDoom" virus. At the same time, I deleted a few hundred infected messages on my end and I seem to have also nuked a few real ones in the process. So if I don't respond to an e-mail you sent recently, it may be because I didn't receive it. If it's important, please send it again. Thenk yew.

Political websites are currently erupting with the charge that John Kerry has had Botox injections in his face, especially his forehead. May I be among the first to ask, "Who cares?"

I've decided. I'm going to cast my presidential vote for whichever candidate runs on what they're actually going to do for the next four years, as opposed to trying to convince us that "there's something wrong" with the other guy. There actually may be something wrong with the other guy, at least in the sense that there's probably something wrong with anyone who wants to be President. But if Kerry's the nominee, I don't want to listen to months of hearing about his hair and his long face and how he almost looks French. Just as I don't want to hear that Bush's ability to scramble sentence structures proves that he's stupid. No, it doesn't prove that. Nor does it tell us a lot about a man that he was born into privilege or that he keeps marrying into it. To me, when they're bringing that kind of stuff up, it's because they don't have anything intellectually honest to say about the stuff that matters. (This also applies to trying to make the election about trivial issues like school uniforms, burning the American flag, steroid use by athletes and maybe even going to Mars. The space effort itself is not trivial but it is when it's not going to receive sufficient funding to actually do something.)

This personal crap is not new to politics. In the first presidential race I was old enough to follow, some were trying to make an issue of Kennedy's religion while others were telling us Nixon was too shifty-eyed to trust. Then Johnson was a wimp, whereas Goldwater was so pathological about Communism that he was going to get us into a nuclear war…and so on. It's a sad commentary on the American electorate that right this minute, there are strategists sitting around, trying to figure out how to market the notion that an opponent has serious psychological problems and/or that how he dresses, what he eats or other details of his life prove "he's not one of us." I don't think anyone who has ever gotten seriously near the presidency is "one of us." If you think they are, you're probably one of those people who thought John Wayne was a war hero, O.J. Simpson was a great role model, or that when Rock Hudson wasn't making movies, he was out banging hot chicks.

Someone suggested I tell the story about Jack Paar walking accidentally onto a live broadcast of a game show hosted by Merv Griffin. I already did: It's here. (Griffin told it the other night on Larry King Live. Not as well, I might add.) So instead, I'll tell the story about the time Paar replaced Walter Cronkite as the host of the CBS Morning Show. It was a killer assignment: A two-hour live broadcast each day, but because of time zone differences, they had to do three hours, repeating in the third hour some of the things done in the first. Some parts of the country would get the first two hours and some would get the last two, and Paar sometimes went crazy trying to remember not to refer to things said earlier in the show because for some viewers, those things hadn't been said yet. Anyway, Cronkite had failed and Paar, the all-purpose utility infielder TV host, was brought in. There was strong sentiment at the network to dump him and reinstate Cronkite so they kept a running tally of the mail…how many letters wanted Walter back, how many letters preferred Jack. Because his career was on the line, Paar would go by the mailroom every day and check the current tally. One day he walked in and they told him, "We're not sure how to score this letter." It was a handwritten note that said, "I'm sorry Walter Cronkite is no longer on the show because I always enjoyed him." And it was signed by Jack Paar's mother.

Here's an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the pending ban on gay marriage in Georgia. I agree with the view expressed and was especially intrigued by this part…

Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we're going to have to go back into the Georgia Constitution to pull this hateful language out. And some of the very politicians who today will vote in favor of that language will no doubt be there when it is repealed, sheepishly trying to explain how it wasn't really about hate and discrimination, how back then they were just worried about protecting marriage and the family.

That's playing the race card without playing the race card, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of politicians all over (and certainly in Atlanta) who once voted for segregation but now turn backflips to try and explain how such-and-such a vote wasn't really a racist act. The analogy between race and sexual preference only goes so far but I think it works here. We will someday regard "defense of marriage" as the same kind of hateful codewords as "separate but equal."

Dick Cavett, who worked for Jack Paar, writes about his one-time employer.

Over at Animation Blast (where there are great news items about the cartoon field but alas, no permalinks so scroll down a little) Amid Amidi notes that the makers of the recent Spider-Man cartoon show have picked up an amazing endorsement of their show which they are promoting in the hopes of getting an Annie Award. The endorsement is from one of the guys who created the character and who is still on the payroll of the company that produced it.

As I mentioned earlier, a benefit book is being prepared to help Dave Cockrum, a wonderfully-gifted comic book artist who is presently in dreadful health. You can order this book here but Dave's friends know it will not be nearly enough. Some of them are mounting a campaign to get Marvel Comics, which has made millions off Dave's character designs, to kick in with a tiny share of those millions. Here's Clifford Meth, who's publishing the benefit book and leading the charge, telling about Dave's background and his current plight. We're going to hear a lot more about this.

Over on Slate, Timothy Noah has a short but good article on one of Jack Paar's more dubious achievements: He helped finish off the career of the gossip-monger (and occasional tyrant-in-print) Walter Winchell.

In the essay, Noah makes reference to an anti-Winchell book published by Lyle Stuart. Stuart later became a wealthy (but still controversial) publisher with an empire that was financed in part by his profits from a libel suit against Winchell. At the time he published the book Noah mentions, his other line of work was serving as Business Manager for Bill Gaines at EC Comics. One of the many reasons EC was targeted by law enforcement officials and distributors was that Winchell was using his considerable influence to get them to go after Stuart. New York Police even once raided the EC offices, apparently at the incitement of Winchell, and arrested Stuart for selling what they termed pornography but what we would term great horror comics. (The reason they arrested Stuart and not Gaines was that Stuart, being of stronger stuff than Gaines, deliberately took the heat…a very heroic gesture. The case was soon thrown out of court.)

Paar had other feuds but the one with Winchell seems to have been the only one that proved fatal to his opponent. As Noah points out, Winchell was already in decline but Paar's evisceration of the man was much-welcomed within the show business community. And it was as good a piece of evidence as any that television had outpowered the power of the press.

We link to most Michael Kinsley columns but we especially had to link to this Michael Kinsley column.

I just received an e-mail ad telling me that there will be a great Super Bowl party this Sunday at the Bar Celona in Chicago. I entered its address in Mapquest and found out it's 2,034.25 miles from my house, or 31 hours and 16 minutes if I drive straight through without stopping.

I doubt I'll be making the trip. If I am suddenly seized by the urge to watch my first football game ever, I figure there have to be a few closer places…maybe in Denver or even southwestern Illinois.

For some reason, this kind of Spam annoys me more than the ones for penis enlargement and giving my bank account details to strangers in Nigeria. And I'm wondering if someone just bought a list of e-mail addresses scattered all over the world and didn't care that 99% of the ads were going to people far from Chicago. The only thing I can recall signing up for that was based in Chicago was many years ago when as a treat for a friend, I ordered some hot dogs from Fluky's, a famous Chicago frankfurter emporium. But I gave them my delivery address so you'd think that if they'd sold their mailing list, someone would have taken the 40 seconds to filter out non-Illinois zip codes. (I also signed up for access to the Chicago Tribune site but with a different e-mail address.)

Oh, well. If anyone's going to spend Super Bowl Sunday at the Bar Celona, tell 'em not to hold a stool for me.

If you share my view of how the press is overdramatizing and misreporting every step of the primaries, read this article in the Boston Globe by Brian McGrory. Oh, heck. Read it even if you disagree. It's funny.

Do you know how Jack Paar broke into show business? It's kind of an interesting story. Before going into the service for World War II, he did some local radio but it was in the Army that he became a star. Because of his broadcasting experience, he wound up in Special Services, travelling from base to base, doing shows for other soldiers. There, he developed a series of monologues that were almost exclusively on one topic: Insulting officers. He would get up on stage and do to officers what Don Rickles did to a fat black lady in the front row. I don't know if privates make fun of officers in today's army but they sure didn't then. Paar would talk about how the officers should have rear-view mirrors on their helmets so they can see the real soldiers going into battle. He did jokes about how a whole platoon of privates could live for a week off the food they throw out in the officer's mess. Jokes like that. Soldiers loved it and officers tolerated it…up until the time a general arrived at a show accompanied by two comely WACs and Paar remarked, "The girls were going to do the Dance of the Virgins for us but they went to the Officers' Club and broke their contracts." A furious general had Paar arrested, tossed in the stockades and prepped for court-martial. Only when the general was convinced it would harm troop morale did he relent.

While all this was going on, the war correspondent for Esquire Magazine was hearing about this unknown comedian. G.I. after G.I. told the reporter they'd loved it when Bob Hope came to entertain but this Jack Paar guy was their hero. The reporter caught up with Paar and interviewed him for what Paar figured would be a brief mention, if that. Months later, when Paar was mustered out of the service, he was wondering what he'd do for a career. That's when he heard that the current issue of Esquire had a full-scale article on him calling him the most brilliant undiscovered comic talent in the world. Suddenly, the movie studios and radio networks were calling.

The other interesting thing about Paar's success is that it didn't all flow from that. The Esquire article got him a number of breaks but one by one, he either blew them or they just didn't pan out. By the time he was offered The Tonight Show, he was to the point where one more flop might end his career forever. Fortunately for us all, it didn't happen.