Test your knowledge about the 2008 Presidential Election.

Here's a simple way to look at this election…

1. A Republican can't win the presidency if he doesn't win Florida.
2. You can't win Florida if all the retirees down there realize you want to cut 1.3 trillion dollars out of Medicare and Medicaid.

I'm not sure this plan has been widely publicized in the Sunshine State. But it will be.

I've mentioned Jim Benson here in the past. He has a great Internet radio show called The TV Time Machine and on it, he interviews some interesting people. There is no one in show business more interesting than Peter Falk and that's who Jim snagged for a terrific chat. Go give a listen.

Matt Tauber reports on the Mid-Ohio Con, complete with a bad photo of me.

There are two "lost" Laurel and Hardy films — a silent short called Hats Off and a sound color feature, The Rogue Song. Pieces of both still exist but there are no known complete prints. And you know who's still searching for them? Bob Stowell.

Sorry to hear of the passing of local (Los Angeles) TV legend Lloyd Thaxton at age 81. Thaxton hosted some national game shows and late in his career, produced some widely-syndicated shows. But to those of us who were L.A. teens in the sixties, he'll always be that funny guy with the afternoon dance party show on KCOP, Channel 13. (Yes, I know this show was nationally syndicated, too…but Thaxton was as L.A. as smog, nose jobs and orange juice imported from Florida.)

The show started life as Lloyd Thaxton's Record Shop, then it became Thaxton's Hop, then it was The Lloyd Thaxton Show. By any name, it was a fun hour produced on a budget of about eleven dollars. Thaxton was ingenious, coming up with a hundred different ways to pantomime or otherwise provide visuals for the hit records he played. He wore silly costumes. He did lip-sync and also thumb-syncs, with faces painted on his thumbs. He was a lot of fun to watch.

The L.A. Times has a nice obit up along with a video clip from The Lloyd Thaxton Show. It was nice to see him in action again, even for only two minutes. And it's sad to lose a clever guy like that.

For a while, John McCain was suggesting that he and Barack Obama have a "town hall" debate every week. Based on how boring tonight's was, I think we should all thank Senator Obama for not allowing that to happen.

Okay, quick reaction. I didn't hear a lot that was new, at least about the issues that matter most to people. My feeling for the last week or two is that the problem the McCain campaign has is that it keeps using lines that haven't worked. McCain has said all these things before — many times! — and Obama has a 5-7% national lead and is ahead in states that usually go Republican. He seems to think that if he says, "I know how to handle [problem]" enough times, America will suddenly realize he does and switch their votes.

I'm perfectly willing to see the G.O.P. ticket pursue this approach all the way to an Obama landslide. But if I were advising McCain, I'd say, "John, it ain't working. When you say Obama has always been wrong about Iraq, he's just going to remind everyone how you said it would be a short war, we'd be greeted as liberators, it would pay for itself, etc. You've been pursuing this line for weeks and you're dropping in all those swing states that you have to win."

McCain looked like a nicer person than he did in their first meeting but I didn't hear anything that struck me as game-changing tonight.

If the people in this "town hall" setting had remote controls, they'd all have switched over to Wheel of Fortune by now. Boy, do some of them look bored.

The one great thing about a gathering like this is that it gives us the opportunity to come together as a people. For instance, right about now, I'm sure that everyone watching would like to slap Tom Brokaw.

Didn't these guys say all these things in the first debate? If not for the live "town hall" questioners, I'd swear this was a rerun.

I think I'm going to just watch and not blog. Let's see if I can resist the impulse.

Good article about Stephen Colbert appearing at the New Yorker Festival recently. Let me know if you see a link to an online video of the conversation. Thanks to James Troutman for telling me about this.