Sean Flynn has an amazing piece on what went wrong out there on the Deepwater Horizon…with emphasis on the oft-forgotten human side of things.

My pal Marc Wielage pointed me to this interview with Bill Carter, the N.Y. Times reporter who covers late night and who authored the book, The Late Shift. He has a new book coming soon on the whole Conan/Jay mess.

One odd moment in the interview. Carter is discussing whether Craig Ferguson might one day take over for Letterman and he says…

We know that Craig has the show that follows Dave, and usually those things happen — a guy steps out, and the 12:30 guy steps in. That is what has happened although never very smoothly in the past.

Uh, when has that ever happened? 12:30 talk shows are a fairly recent development. Only about five guys have ever done them. When Johnny Carson stepped out, the guy who was at 12:30 behind him didn't step in. Leno was replaced by the guy at 12:30 but he didn't step out. He was pushed because the 12:30 guy wanted his job. There's been no succession at ABC or CBS. I'm puzzled as to where Mr. Carter thinks this precedent has played out.

Senator Al Franken recently gave an address at the American Constitution Society's annual convention in Washington, D.C. His thesis was that Conservative forces are manipulating our court system, and the Supreme Court in particular, to enact an agenda that most Americans would reject if it weren't so cunningly disguised. You can see the whole speech at this link but I wanted to yank out this quote…

What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation's right to profit? And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.

I'm not sure the majority of self-identified Conservatives in this country realize this. Most of the folks they think are working in Washington to protect "traditional American values" (and even traditional Conservative viewpoints) have a higher mission. It varies slightly depending on who's paying them and the potential profit points…but it's all about the money.

Michael Emond writes…

Sorry to bug you but being in Canada I can't link to your Daily Show clips directly (but I can watch them at a Canadian site). If you just give a clue to what is in the clip (in your text accompanying the clip) it would be helpful for me to track it down — giving the date it aired would be even better.

Oops, didn't know that was necessary. It's a clip about how every danged U.S. President for the last eight has spoken of America's need to become independent from oil, especially foreign oil, and how nobody ever does much about it. It ran on 6/16/10. Well worth seeking out.

As you probably heard, Congressman Joe Barton today apologized to BP for the "tragedy" of them having to come up with money to cover the damages that their drilling operation is doing. Barton has since backpedalled and retracted his apology, claiming it was misunderstood. But of course it wasn't. He was just operating via his natural instincts, which are to always side with the overdog…and with his campaign donors. According to this blog post, his biggest contributor is Andarko Petroleum. And what is Andarko Petroleum? Well, they're a partner in the operation that led to the oil spill/leak.

The seven dumbest things that BP execs have said about the oil spill.

And come to think of it, is "spill" really the right word for this mess? Doesn't "spill" suggest the oil was all collected and then somebody dropped it? Isn't this more like an uncontrollable leak?

This time each year, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce votes thirty more names to be embedded in the coming year in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's thirty more people (or acts) who'll have their handles placed into the sidewalk so tourists can walk over them and read the names aloud and dogs can editorialize. This year, the thirty are as follows…

MOTION PICTURES: Penelope Cruz, Bruce Dern, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Ed Harris, The Muppets, Kenny Ortega, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ridley Scott, Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon.

TELEVISION: Danny DeVito, Tina Fey, Simon Fuller, Neil Patrick Harris, John Langley, Ed O'Neill, John Wells, and Oprah Winfrey.

RECORDING: Melissa Etheridge, Los Tigres Del Norte, Rascal Flatts, Go-Go's, Slash, Will i. Am, and Bebe & Cece Winans. Posthumous: Buddy Holly and Louis Prima.

LIVE PERFORMANCE/THEATRE: Joe Mantegna.

No dates have been announced for the unveiling ceremonies. Something will be worked out with each star and their agents, and the celebs have up to five years to schedule their ceremony. Every so often, they don't. Stan Lee was voted a star in 2008 and I guess he's been too busy…or something. It hasn't happened yet.

The next ceremony is on June 25 at 11:30 AM. It's for the recording group Rush and like most recipients, they've timed the unveiling to coincide with some project they wish to promote. In this case, they have a new CD, a new tour and a new documentary all happening. If you want to be kept up to date when future ceremonies occur, follow this person on Twitter.

As some readers of this site seem to be able to discern from my posting rhythms, I've been pretty swamped the last week or so. I'm sorry…for myself as much as for you. It's a lot of fun to write things for this blog, at least when they're not about friends of mine dying. "Why do you blog?" is a question I get a lot and the answers (plural) have a lot to do with networking and keeping in touch with people but primarily with the same reason that a professional artist sometimes likes to just sketch, drawing what he feels like drawing, not what someone else is paying him to draw.

One of the things I learned from Jack Kirby — hey, there's a name I almost never mention — was the concept of commitment to your line of work. Jack accepted that long hours at the board were a part of the path he picked for himself; that having chosen to write and draw comics, he had to look not for reasons to not work (you can always find good ones) but for reasons to accept and even enjoy the grind. He'd complain about the labor and with good reason. At times, it was excessive and he was always underpaid. But had they suddenly showered him with dollars, he would not have quickly become a man of leisure. He would have continued writing and drawing…just at his pace, not their pace.

I knew I could never match Jack for the sheer brilliance of the output, nor could I come close. Few have. But it was and is theoretically possible for us mere mortals to work that hard. We can be that committed to finishing projects and assignments that meets whatever dubious standards we set for ourselves. So I write a lot. Dorothy Parker famously said, "I hate writing, I love having written." I've never understood that approach. Why become a writer if you hate writing?

Writers, for the most part, tend to over-romanticize their profession and I don't mean to do that. I've never thought whether my job is better than somebody else's except, of course, to decide that it suits me better than some other vocation might. So I guess the reason I blog is that writing is what I do and this is an enjoyable outlet for which to write. Maybe that's not the best reason in the world but I'm afraid it's all I've got.

If you can spare a half hour in the next five days, you might want to give a listen to this BBC radio documentary about the Marx Brothers in Britain. But five days is all you have because it goes away after that.

"When do you sleep?" is an oft-asked question in my e-mailbox. It comes from folks who notice the timestamps on my posts here and on my Twitter and Facebook activity. I average about five hours a night, which is down a bit from a few years ago when I was heavier, and way down from about twenty years ago, before I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea and began sleeping with a CPAP mask strapped on my puss.

Five now seems to do it for me but about once every two weeks, I lie down for a quick nap and wake up many hours later. That happened to me last night, plunging me into a state of deep hibernation. I should have known this would happen. At the moment, I have no immediate deadline. I have things due next week but at the moment, no script that absolutely has to be done tomorrow. That's usually when my body goes all Rip Van Winkle on me.

But as I get older, I increasingly find my need to sleep is linked to my having the time for it. Not always. There are times when I'm up into the wee small hours and I realize things are going way too slowly and I think, "I can plod along here at eight miles an hour or get some sleep and maybe do sixty in the morning." So off to bed I go…sometimes. Or sometimes I just lie there fidgeting and thinking of what I'll write next…and I do it so long that I finally decide to get up and just write what I'll write next.

Years ago, I read an interview with some writer (forget who) who said he always kept a pad and pencil on his bedside table. That was so if he had a brilliant idea, he could write it down and have it in the morning and not lose it. That sounded logical so even though I couldn't recall ever having such a thought and losing it, I placed a pad and pencil bedside and at the ready. It stayed there for about three nights. I never wrote in it but the feeling that I should be jotting something down was a powerful inducement to remaining awake. It was like taking my work into the sack with me, making me feel like I should still be writing. When I took the pad away, I slept better.

That was at least fifteen years ago and in all the time since, I've never lost a brilliant idea. That's because you can't lose that which you don't have in the first place.

Fred Kaplan sees the collapse of General Petraeus in this morning's Senate hearing as not unlike our prospects for the Kandahar offensive. Scary.