My pal Aaron Barnhart thinks the Trio cable channel is not long for this world. I hope he's wrong but he probably isn't.

I'm watching a rerun of The Flip Wilson Show that TiVo (we love TiVo) snagged for me this morn from TV Land. In the sketch, Dennis Weaver is playing a Justice of the Peace and Flip is in wedding dress drag as Geraldine, who's waiting for her never-seen boy friend, "Killer," to show up and marry her. Okay, you got the picture?

There's a knock at the door and Flip/Geraldine says, "Come in, Killer." And in comes another guest star on the show, O.J. Simpson, looking very groom-like in a tuxedo. I am not making this up.

"You're not Killer," Geraldine says. (Right the first time, lady!) Actually, Simpson's the Best Man, and he's there to stand in for Killer, who's too busy shooting pool to show up for his wedding. Weaver proceeds to try to conduct a proxy marriage of Geraldine and Killer…until Simpson tries to call it off because "he won't treat you right." Geraldine goes ahead and marries her absent beau anyway.

Geraldine Jones has not been seen in many years. Which proves it's dangerous to stand next to O.J. Simpson at your wedding…even if he's only the Best Man.

Ronald Brownstein discusses how partisan and just plain nasty this election has become.

Hey, I've done my part. I've bought five of them over the years. It's not my fault TiVo isn't selling very well.

The other day, I recommended a new book called All the President's Spin, written by the staff of the Spinsanity website. I've since given it another read and decided that I was off a bit in what I wrote. It really is more anti-Bush than it felt to me the first time through. But I still think that the main point of interest here is not that George W. Bush and his crew have said so many things that were misleading or just plain untrue, but that the mainstream press did not call them on these fibs.

You can read part of the introduction over at this website. It's a good preview of a good book.

You may see this elsewhere but I can't resist. I have to quote it. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert appeared today on Meet the Press and discussed the decision (in which he played a major role) to recruit Alan Keyes to run for the Senate in Illinois. Here's what he said…

I talked to Mike Ditka, and I decided maybe he made a good decision. I talked to a guy name Gary Fencik, who was a great star, Harvard-Yale, star for the Chicago Bears. He couldn't. And the problem in Illinois, you've got to have $10 million to run; $6 million or $7 million of that has to be done for name I.D. I got down last week to interviewing a 70-year-old guy, who was a great farm broadcaster in Illinois. He decided since his health problems — he couldn't do it. You know, we were down — we needed to find somebody to run, somebody who wanted to run. And, you know, Alan Keyes wants to run, and I hope he's a good candidate.

Rough translation: "We were so desperate, we had to pick Alan Keyes, and I have no faith at all in him." If I were Barack Obama, the guy Keyes is running against, I'd just use the clip of Hastert as my commercial.

Broadway: The Golden Age is a theatrical documentary on a couple of decades of shows that played the Great White Way with an emphasis on the folks who starred in them. Filmmaker Rick McKay spent many years hauling his camera around the world interviewing enough theater legends to fill 250 hours and he also acquired a lot of rare performance footage. All of that has been edited into a film of just under two hours which is currently playing around the country. You get to hear Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Carol Burnett, Gwen Verdon, John Raitt, Carol Channing and countless others discuss their lives and craft. In fact, there are so many worthy interviewees in this film that a lot of important theatrical figures are confined to the briefest of clips.

Over at the film's website, you can view the incredible cast list and see a couple of trailers. You can also read about the many awards the movie has received and study some of the rave reviews. Rex Reed (who is among those interviewed in it) never wrote a more positive notice than this one in a recent current New York Observer and just about everyone else who has appraised it has called it a must-see. Since I love Broadway and the people who work there and the anecdotes they tell, you can just about bet the farm that I'd love this movie, right?

Well, you'd lose the farm, but it's okay. I'd have made that bet, too. I can't recall ever coming out of a movie more amazed that I didn't have a great time. I admire the effort and I respect the hell out of the filmmaker's intentions…but I was unmoved and, at times, bored by a movie that I think reaches to cover too much in its limited time, especially when so much time is allotted to trivia. And I say that as a guy who ordinarily loves trivia…but we hear more about where the actors went to hang out after the show than about how those shows were created or even what any of them meant to their era.

I agree that the period of the American theater that the film chronicles was a "golden age" of great memories. I'd have liked to see more examples of that instead of a lot of actors telling us it was great, but I don't have to be convinced on that count. What puzzles me is that McKay starts with the premise that this great era has passed and then, if we are to believe Rex Reed's write-up, "…asks all the right questions [about why it ended] and gets fantastic answers from a cast of 100 people who were actually there." That's not the movie I saw this afternoon. We get some nice tales about beginning actors living in poverty, about understudies getting to go on and being discovered, and about going to Sardi's to hear the reviews. But perhaps because the movie is primarily about actors talking about acting, the question of why Broadway has changed goes largely unasked and unanswered. Why there are now shows with people in cat suits and scores made up of recorded music is a topic that is probably best addressed by directors, writers and (primarily) producers, and there are very few of them represented in Broadway: The Golden Age and none is asked that question.

Late in the film, Elaine Stritch assures us the theater is in great shape. Is this the filmmaker's view, too? I really don't know. I also don't know what the proper audience is for this movie. If you know little about theater, I think you'd be baffled. The clips are selected more for their rarity than for any real demonstration of the magic of the stage, and a lot of the references will be lost on theatrical novices. There's some great footage of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon working together, for example, but no real explanation of who Fosse was, where he came from, what impact he had on the theater, etc. On the other hand, if you know a lot about theater, I think you'd want a lot more depth than is offered here. Then again, given how many of my friends love this film, maybe I'm wrong, and the sheer celebration of these folks is enough.

As I said, I really wanted to love this movie. I still want to love this movie, which is why I'm hoping the DVD release, whenever it happens, will include 20 or 30 hours of additional footage from those interviews. I'm also anticipating McKay's announced sequel, which will deal with present-day Broadway. Maybe it will address the question of what's changed and, taken together, the two films will form a far-reaching overview of a topic in dire need of more consideration. If so, I'll be thrilled because, as you can tell, I don't feel good about not liking what I saw today.

Back when Richard Nixon was fighting to keep his tapes private, there was a wide, understandable assumption that he wasn't just afraid of Watergate-related revelations. Even a lot of Nixon's friends assumed there were "other matters" on those tapes; that somewhere on them, we'd hear him allude to some murder or other crime he'd ordered. I remember one "talking head" on TV — and I don't think it even belonged to one of Nixon's more outspoken critics — saying, "Once those tapes are in the hands of investigators, we'll have a dozen more scandals on our hands."

That did not happen. As I understand it, not every single one of the infamous White House tapes has been examined, even at this late date, but those that have been examined have yielded a lot less dirt than anyone probably expected. There's a lot of coarse language and one can reportedly hear Nixon trashing a lot of folks he praised in public…but at no point does he say anything like, "Let's just hope the press never finds out about the guy in New Orleans we had pay off Oswald." (In the late seventies, when I briefly delved into the world of Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Buffs, that was a very active fantasy; that a Nixon tape would prove he'd been involved and would serve as the Rosetta Stone to unlock a vast plot.)

Those who are disappointed can perhaps derive some comfort from this new revelation that just before the '72 election, Nixon decided that South Vietnam was likely to fall. In a newly-transcribed tape, one can apparently hear him discussing with Henry Kissinger how the timing of that would affect him politically.

This is not a huge surprise. Tapes that have already made it to public scrutiny already have Nixon discussing how to time the bringing-home of troops to help him in the election. (You can hear part of one over on this page.) Still, it is significant if as reported, Nixon in mid-'72 is saying, "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." If you'd suggested at the time that was possible, Nixon and his pals would have called you a spineless, America-hating Commie and defeatist. If you'd suggested Nixon was letting election concerns impact his conduct of the war, they would have said that was a horrible thing to suggest about an occupant of the Oval Office. Some folks still say that except that now they pretend they never said it about Bill Clinton.

In the meantime, today is the 30th anniversary of Nixon's resignation, which my father thought was the best thing he ever saw on television. In fact, he wondered why the networks couldn't make a weekly series out of it…you know, bring Nixon out every Tuesday night at 8:30 and have him quit again. Maybe put him in a dunk tank or dress him as Mae West or something like that. I never felt Nixon was quite as bad as my father did but I did think there was a good object lesson in the downfall of the 37th President of the United States. Not everything his enemies said about him was warranted but almost nothing his partisans said in his defense turned out to be true. And an awful lot of things we all thought no American President would ever do, he did.

So to mark the day, how about if we all enjoy my father's favorite TV show?

Hey, remember those "Billy Bass" gizmos? You know…there's a stuffed fish mounted on a wall plaque and when you get near it, it comes to life and starts singing to you. How do those work?

Quietly and over the objections of the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Football League, the F.C.C. has approved "TiVoToGo," a new service that all us TiVo users will soon be putting to good use. Here's the TiVo press release but I can summarize it for you: "TiVoToGo" is a way to interface your TiVo and your computer so that you can record a show on the TiVo and then transfer it to your computer's hard disk. The "To Go" part of the name comes from the assumption that the main usage of this service will be when you move a show to your laptop and then take your laptop on vacation or to your place of work…and you watch the show there. If your computer has a DVD burner, you might also transfer the show to a DVD.

There's some sort of security key feature that's supposed to limit your ability to transfer the shows over the Internet but it sounds very easy to defeat. For that matter, it's pretty simple to just record a TV show to your harddisk without a TiVo and send it to as many people as you wish. Someone is going to have to face reality here. We will soon see websites where if you miss last night's Letterman or yesterday's General Hospital, you'll be able to log in and download it. I'm guessing the networks are already quietly preparing to open their own web services for this purpose. Just another way broadcast television will be changing.

Vince Waldron corrects me on something: Amazon only has to charge sales tax in some states, and ours (California) is not one of them. Unless you live in Kansas, North Dakota, or Washington, The Complete Far Side should cost $91.80 if you order it from them with their free "Super Saver Shipping," which in my experience always comes sooner than they predict. If you order the book from Costco, the $79.99 book becomes $97.26 with shipping and California sales tax. So here once again is the link to buy it from Amazon.

To thank Vince for his catch, I will again plug his "Totally Looped" improv show, which has a performance this coming Thursday evening in Hollywood. A team of talented vocal magicians will again do live, unprepared dubbing of film clips they've not seen before. I have no reason to think they will not be at least as funny as they were the last time I went when, as I describe here, they were pretty darned funny.

Let me preface this by emphasizing that I do not believe that any one poll is an inarguable, accurate reflection of the electorate…and that even if one is, a lot can change between now and Election Day.

That said, polls can also have an impact on the election and I think this one [WARNING: PDF file] will. It has generally poor news for Bush, showing Kerry equal or ahead in most categories. There are a number of those out but they can be dismissed as "biased," which always seems to me like a silly charge to level against a poll from a major news organization. They might be inept and inaccurate, but I don't think they're ever intentionally skewed.

But this is a Fox News Poll. Kind of hard to dismiss that as biased against Bush-Cheney. A lot of folks will pounce on this to justify the claim that the Republican ticket is in free fall.

I don't know that it is. But there's an old saying in politics that even when you're ahead, you should always run as if you're five points back. And if everyone starts saying the Bush campaign is five points back, they'll have to run as if they're ten down…which means throwing everything they can think of at the opposition.

We all knew this election was going to get dirty. I think we're all going to be stunned at how dirty it will get. And how soon.

The Onion has a good interview up with Robert Smigel, a great comedy writer and the human presence behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

One of those "must-buy" books for fans of clever cartooning is The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson…a two-volume, 1,272 page extravaganza that contains over 4,300 single-panel comics. About a fourth of them did not appear in those paperback Far Side collections that we all enjoyed way back when.

The set came out a little less than a year ago with a $135 sticker price which was quickly discounted to around a hundred dollars. It's now down to $91.80 at Amazon (click here to buy it there) but that may not be the best price you can get. It's now eighty dollars at Costco. At least, that's the mail order price to which you'll also need to add a $9.85 shipping and handling fee, bringing it close to the Amazon price. (Both stores will also hit you up for sales tax.) But if you're visiting a Costco and they have it there for eighty bucks, you may want to grab one. If you can lift it.

Actually, it's the perfect Costco purchase. Eighteen pounds of Gary Larson cartoons will go just fine with your 40 lb. vat of Smucker's Apricot Preserves and your hot-tub-sized drum of Kirkland-brand Hydrogen Peroxide. I'm always afraid when I go into that store and see them giving flu shots. I figure that's got to be, like, a 30-gallon flu shot.

As a gift to him, I won't mention the date…but a certain amount of years ago on this day, a kid named Stanley Freberg was born in Pasadena, California. The son of a Baptist minister, he went into a different line of work (entertainment) but somehow managed to retain his father's moral balance. Stan got into radio, got into cartoon voice work, got into early television. Bob Clampett's Time for Beany, starring Freberg and his frequent partner Daws Butler, may have been the first truly "hip" TV show. Then he started making some of the best comedy records ever made and became the nation's foremost maker of funny advertising and did a lot of other things in TV, movies, radio and more records. As I wrote here, I discovered Freberg when I was a small lad and the impact was enormous. He not only taught me about writing comedy but about looking at the world with a healthy skepticism. That's half the lesson. The other half is that when you encounter something that outrages you, you try to channel that outrage into something constructive…in his case, a lifetime of smart, snappy satire.

I don't think there's anyone who has ever encountered the work of Stan Freberg who doesn't join me in wishing him…(DA-DA-DA-DAH!*) a happy birthday.

*French horns.