Lou Dobbs versus ... Rick Sanchez?

Things didn't work out for him very well at MSNBC, and his Miami talk show got beaten in the ratings by Japanese monster cartoons. But Rick Sanchez is quietly becoming an important presence at CNN. On Sunday night, he even went one-on-one with resident immigration ranter Lou Dobbs on CNN Newsroom With Rick Sanchez. If you didn't see it, you missed some good television. Without throwing any shoes at each other Dobbs and Sanchez really squared off. Sanchez started things off by saying, politely but steelily, that Dobbs' immigration rants have an ethnic edge to them. "I feel sometimes like I'm not valued after I watch one of your newscasts," he said.

"When Hispanics define themselves in terms of illegal immigration, which is what I hear you doing," Dobbs replied, "that's troubling."

"I'll tell you how I'm defining myself," Sanchez retorted. "I'm defining myself as the son of Paco and Adella,  who came to this country as refugees, who came to this country as immigrants and to this day don't speak a lick of English but their son does.  And you know why they don't speak a lick of English, because they worked three, four different jobs, they worked until 9, 10:00 at night just to be able to get home and they used to say to us, 'It's too late for us to make it in this country but we're going to be darned well sure you guys get a good education me and my brothers, and you do make it somehow, and you will speak English.'" 

There was a good deal more, and I'll see if I can get a video link from CNN. I think we'll be hearing more from Sanchez.

Rick Shaw's replacement: bad news for oldies fans

Bruce Kelly will replace Rick Shaw as the morning man on WMXJ on May 14 when Shaw retires after more than 50 years on South Florida radio. Kelly's name may be familiar to some South Florida listeners; he worked at the top 40 stations WMJX (known as 96X, it eventually morphed into WPOW, Power 96) and WHYI (still doing business as Y-100 all these years later) from 1979 to 1981.

But it's Kelly's most recent job that holds a clue to the future of WMXJ: He developed the all-'80s music channel at XM Satellite Radio. WMXJ has remade its oldies format over the past few years, dropping '50s music altogether and steadily phasing out '60s records in favor of the 1970s. Kelly's arrival almost certainly presages a WMXJ that plays only 1970s and '80s material. I wouldn't be surprised if this time next year, a British Invasion weekend on WMXJ will mean lots of Bananarama and Culture Club records. Oh well. The Beatles were fun while they lasted.

Monday morning jamook: April 29 on 'The Sopranos'

If you're one of those people who gets bored with The Sopranos when 30 minutes go by without a decapitation or disembowelment, then Sunday night's episode was an hour in hell. But if you're interested in character development or understand that stories advance in stages, rather than hopscotching between murders, then it was a satisfying night.

The episode's main theme and major revelation are established in the opening scene in a casino, where Tony has just a roulette number straight up and won a small fortune. He lets his chips ride on the number for another spin, and of course loses everything. That same scene is played out several times over the course of the episode, with Tony losing huge bets on horse races, harness races and football games. How huge? It turns out gambling debts have forced Tony to borrow $200,000 from his own loanshark, Hesh, at an interest rate (1.5 percent a week) that would make Alan Greenspan drool. Even paying the $3,000 a week vig is a strain on Tony's finances.

The debt has not only strained his relations with Hesh, who has grown frankly fearful at Tony's testiness over the payments (‘‘Get them cornered," he observes of his Mafia pals, "you're getting nothing more than an animal... At what point is it cheaper for him to settle it another way?") but complicates other business, both Family and family.

Some of it is poignant, or at least as poignant as anything ever gets in the wolfish world of The Sopranos. Last season's homophobic murder of uncloseted Soprano captain Vito Spatafore has unhinged his young son Vito Jr., who learned that his father was not a heroic spy as family legend had it but a gay mobster instead. Now a goth kid whose hobbies are toppling tombstones and crucifying cats, Vito Jr. has his mother at wit's end, and she asks Tony for $100,000 to relocate the family and start over.

Tony, deeply touched "Apparently Vito Jr.'s a wack job," he tells his consigliore Silvio). tries to dodge the request by passing it along to New York boss Phil Leotardo, who not is related to Vito's widow Marie but is also the one who had him killed. Phil instead offers his inimitable services as a counselor. Meeting Vito Jr., who's in full goth uniform -- black clothing, black mascara, black fingernail polish and black lipstick -- Phil starts the conversation by noting that "You look like a Puerto Rican whore." It's all downhill from there.

Tony's attempt to get through to Vito Jr. by mentioning his dad is no more successful. ‘‘We were friends, you know?" Tony says. "Butt buddies?" shoots back Vito Jr., striking home by unknowingly aping the homophobic jeers that Tony and his own men privately threw around about Vito Sr. It's a pyrrhic victory: Tony, lowballing Marie Spatafore's request, puts up $18,000 to send Vito Jr. to one of those boot camps for delinquents in Idaho. (Cheer up, kid, it could have been worse: You might have wound up in Bay County.)

If the episode with Vito Jr. is a snapshot that offers a glimpse of Tony's reptilian heart, the argument that follows between Tony and Carmela is an X-ray of his soul. Carmela has finally sold the house she remodeled, to a young couple expecting their first child. By cutting costs on construction materials and bribing her way through the permit process, she's turned a cool $600,000 profit.

Tony wants to bet the money on a football game. When Carmela objects, Tony offers an amendment: "Just my half." To Tony, even his own family is an engine for economic exploitation, foot soldiers who owe him a taste. Carmela's protest that the house deal was all hers enrages him. Shaking her like one of his punks at the Bing, he shouts: "The fact is you're a [bleepy] businesswoman who built a piece of [bleep] house that's gonna cave in and kill that [bleepin'] unborn baby any day." Carmela's riposte -- hitting him with a ceramic gimcrack -- doesn't bely the essential truth of what he's said. Tony and Carmela are two sides of the same coin, and as The Sopranos moves into its end game, the naked
greed at their core is burning through everything else.

Final scorecard: No killings and no fistfights; one revenge defecation. That stray plot line about Islamic terrorism bobbed up again, with Tony staring intently as his driver takes him through a Muslim neighborhood, his gaze intense but unreadable. And if there was any doubt that Tony and Phil Leotardo are on a collision course, Tony's anger about the Spatafore situation -- a problem, as far as he's concerned, that Phil created and now will not help solve -- should lay it to rest.

Sunday night's biggest winner: Vito Jr., who sent a pack of bullies fleeing from his school locker room with his own personal WMD.

Sunday night's biggest loser: Jay Feely. Tony lost a $100,000 football bet when a Dolphin kicker got off his sick bed to win the game.

Honorable mention winner: A.J., who persuaded his Dominican sweetie to marry him with a giant pear-shaped diamond.

Honorable mention loser: A.J, who got dumped by his Dominican sweetie a few days later while taking her kid to a Latin Pride parade. Man, neither money nor multiculturalism nor male sensitivity worked. What do women want?

Screens: TV the week of April 29

Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built (9 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Ahmet Ertegun isn't a household name. But if you ever boogalooed to Aretha Franklin singing Respect or wailed along with Ray Charles on What'd I Say or tapped your feet to the Drifters' Under the Boardwalk, you owe Ertegun a big debt. This documentary, airing as part of the American Masters series, is the story of how he formed Atlantic Records, the label that -- no matter what they say over at Motown -- practically invented soul music. Not that Ertegun didn't understand rock pretty well (Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones all recorded for Atlantic) and pop, too (Sonny & Cher, Bette Midler, Tori Amos). Watch, but roll up the rugs first -- no way you get through this thing without dancing.

The Mormons (9 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- There's an outside shot the next U.S. president could be a Mormon -- Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is running hard for the Republican nomination -- so it might be a good time to learn about one of America's largest, richest and least understood religions. This installment of the PBS documentary series American Experience is two parts, with the conclusion Tuesday.

Brando (8 p.m. Tuesday, Turner Classic Movies) -- Another two-parter, this documentary follows Brando from his mumbling Method years through the Godfather comeback and on into the twilight weirdness of Apocalypse Now. Both Tuesday and Wednesday's episodes are followed by Brando cinematic triumphs and tragedies, from The Wild One to The Missouri Breaks.

Veronica Mars (9 p.m. Tuesday, The CW) -- One of television's mostly smartly written shows returns from a long hiatus with what will probably be its final three episodes. In this one, Veronica -- the wise-ass collegiate detective who is so not Nancy Drew -- investigates a hate crime against a Middle Eastern student, with predictably unpredictable results.

'Drive' gets parked

Fox has just junked its new cross-country race series Drive after just four episodes. Thus it joins Kidnapped, Smith, Daybreak, Vanished, Runaway, The Nine, and Six Degrees, serialized dramas that debuted this season and were yanked from the air without disclosing the answers to the mysteries at their core. It's gotten to the point where I can't recommend serialized shows on broadcast TV. The odds are overwhelming that any time and effort you invest in watching them will be a complete waste: They get canceled far more quickly than other programs because network executives believe they cannot increase their audience after the first hour or two. And your wasted time and effort ranks just below the goldfish in their office aquariums in terms of their concern.

Bobby 'Boris' Pickett, RIP

I was just a little kid, and didn't know too much about rock'n'roll -- my older brother and sister were folkies who preferred the Kingston Trio to Elvis Presley. But I remember vividly the day in October 1962 when for some reason or other the TV in our living room in Wichita, Kansas, was tuned to an American Bandstand-style local show called Johnny's Record Hop. As the teenaged audience danced, the deejay played the coolest record I'd ever heard. It sounded like Boris Karloff rapping (yes! the invention of rap!) over an R&B dance beat, spinning off ghoulish puns in hollow zombie cadences. My 8-year-old brain practically melted. So, I guess, did a lot of others. The Monster Mash went to No. 1 that month, and it would make the Billboard charts twice more in the next 11 years.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett (that's him to the left, performing at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland a few years ago) was a journeyman garage band player who would make only one other record that got any airplay -- Monster's Holiday, which charted that Christmas. (And was covered by Lon Chaney Jr. -- how many rock'n'roll stars can say that?) Pickett didn't care. Every time I saw him on TV over the years, usually on some Halloween special, he'd introduce himself by saying, "Now I'm going to do a medley of my hit." He never got tired of Monster Mash. "When I hear it," he once told People magazine, I hear a cash register ringing."

Pickett died of leukemia Wednesday night. Wherever he is, they're going to want hear Monster Mash. It's a graveyard smash.

And you thought the Rutgers basketball team was the victim

Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus' producer and the guy who really touched off the conflagration over the Rutgers women's basketball team -- he referred them as "hard-core hos," after which Imus infamously chimed in -- made his first public appearance since the controversy Thursday night on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show. And he certainly cleared up some grievous misconceptions about who was wronged. The injured parties were not the Rutgers players, but Imus and McGuirk, who were ambushed by "terrorists" like Al Sharpton and "free-speech surrender monkeys" like their CBS bosses.

In fact, McGuirk still can't figure out why that word "ho" bothered anybody -- "It's just a pejorative, slang term for a woman.  Unfortunately, and, you know, I didn't get the memo that it was elevated to the status or lowered to the status of the n-word." Though I'd have to McGuirk undercut his argument ever so slightly when he added that if anybody called his daughter a ho, "I'd kick their teeth in."

You think all that took chutzpah, listen to this: McGuirk not only predicted that his and Imus' dismissal from CBS signals the end of free speech in America, he compared himself to Holocaust victims. "It's like the off-quoted anti-Nazi German pastor who said, you know, first, they came for the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't say anything.  Then they came for the Jews, but I'm not a Jew, I didn't say anything.  Then they came for the Catholics, but I'm a Protestant.  Then when they came from me, there was nobody to speak," McGuirk said, loudly, to drown out the sound of the German Lutheran minister Martin Niemoller spinning in his grave.

The FCC's TV violence report: village idiocy

The FCC's long-awaited report on TV violence is finally out, and it's even worse than anybody expected. Not only did the report say the government can and should regulate violence on television, but in interviews explaining, the commissioners were quite clear that they aim to appoint themselves censors of cable TV as well as broadcast. "We can't just deal with the three or four broadcast channels -- we have to be looking at what's on cable as well,'' FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told the Associated Press.

If that ever somes to pass, TV will be reduced to mush. The FCC report suggests that a crackdown on violence will extend into practically every show on television. “A broad range of television programming aired today contains [violent] content," it observes, "including, for example, cartoons, dramatic series, professional sports such as boxing, news coverage, and nature programs.”

So don't misundertand: We're not talking about The Sopranos and CSI here, we're talking about Iraq war coverage on the CBS Evening News and CNN's Virgina Tech coverage, not to mention the lions and tigers on Animal Planet, fistfights at hockey games, and the Nazis in Schindler's List. Anything that some quack psychologist thinks might give a 4-year-old nightmares (or, as the FCC put it, “a definition based on the scientific literature" that "recognizes the factors most important to determining the likely impact of violence on the child audience”) will be fair game. We'll be going right back to the lowest-common-denominator standard of the old three-channel universe.

This is the lunatic endpoint of the whole "it takes a village" school of collective child-rearing. The FCC is saying it doesn't believe parents can be trusted to make decisions about what their kids should watch on TV, so the Nanny State will take over -- and its standards will be inflicted on all of us, children or not.

This report couldn't come at a worse moment. The idiot shrieks of First Amendment Chicken Littles, who predict the end of free speech over everything from Bill Maher leaving ABC to the Bush White House kicking Helen Thomas out of the front row at press conferences, have large desensitized the public to the issue now that there's a genuine threat. And with an election coming up next year, what American politician wants to be the pro-TV-violence candidate?

The last, best hope to divert the kiddie-knows-best steamroller is for cable and satellite TV operators to warm up to the idea of a la carte programming. A la carte service means that subscribers could pick (and pay for) only the channels they want, instead of being forced to accept vast tiers of channels that bore and/or repulse them. There's no technological reason this can't be done. When I was a foreign correspondent living in Nicaragua in the 1990s and watching TV on one of those giant C-band satellite dishes, my satellite company allowed me to choose the channels I wanted from a menu of a couple of hundred.

The cable industry has bitterly opposed a law mandating a la carte service because it's a greedy government-protected monopoly that's used to getting its own way. Why should it let you pay less money for fewer channels when for all these years it's been able to set prices as high as it wanted without fear of regulation or competition? The television industry has sided with the cable guys, because a la carte would destroy its ability to bundle unwanted channels with their popular ones and force cable companies to buy both. Time to wise up, guys. Nobody's going to be buying anything if we have 500 channels full of The Bobbsey Twins Visit Blueberry Island.

I once asked Brent Bozell, the head of the Parents Television Council and the head of the clean-up-TV posse, what it would take to satisfy him. "What would it take to make Brent Bozell shut up?" he paraphrased, fairly accurately. "If we had a system where I can cable television in my home without bringing MTV along with it. A system where every channel in my home is one I invited. A system like a la carte." If the cable industry will put up, Bozell will shut up.

Look out, Fidel! Bob Woodruff's coming

Bob Woodruff, the ABC news anchor who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb while covering a story in Iraq 16 months ago, is out on assignment for the first time since he was hurt -- and it's in Havana. Woodruff will report on May Day activities in Havana (including, I imagine, Fidel Castro's presence or absence, and what that means) starting with World News Sunday this weekend. His cameraman on the assignment: Doug Vogt, who was also banged up pretty badly by that roadside bomb.   

Cable news: all Virginia Tech, all the time

It's no surprise that the Virginia Tech shootings dominated cable news on April 15 and the five following days. But the degree to which it did so is startling. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index, the shootings and their aftermath represented an amazing 76 percent of all stories on cable news outlets during the five-day period. That's more than double the coverage of the year's previous biggest story, the troop escalation in Iraq, which account for 34 percent of cable news stories from Jan. 7 to 12.

Almost as surprising, at least to me, was how little coverage was devoted to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on partial-birth abortions: just 3 percent of the stories. With both sides claiming it was a landmark event, I would have expected cable's talking heads to go wild.

And the conspiracy nuts of the world wept

ABC and Rosie O'Donnell have jointly confirmed the gossip: She's leaving The View in mid-June. Both sides were appropriately weepy and praised each other as the saviors of modern civilization. And, ABC added, Donald Trump will be taking over O'Donnell's co-host chair. Ha ha, just kidding. Actually, ABC said there are "no current plans" to replace O'Donnell, whatever that means -- perhaps only that, even in Hollywood, it's not easy to find somebody else who thinks the Sept. 11 attacks were staged by Enron.

UPDATE: Donald Trump, interviewed via phone on Fox News' America's Newsroom show shortly after the announcement of O'Donnell's departure, was clearly heartbroken. That is, clearly heartbroken that she's still alive. "Rosie’s a very self-destructive person, she’s a loser by any standard, I mean she’s got nothing going for her," Trump said, adding that she's "a slob" and...oh, you know all the rest. He also scoffed at Barbara Walters' claim that she's sorry O'Donnell's leaving.

“Rosie made Barbara look like a fool; she made her look like her lapdog," Trump said. "Barbara’s the happiest person in the world that Rosie’s been fired.  Barbara can say what she wants and of course she’s trying to put the most positive spin on it, but it’s nothing short of getting fired." Trump refrained from accusing O'Donnell of killing off the dinosaurs, sinking the Titanic and kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, but the day's still young.

From the mouths of mohawk-head babes...

The much-maligned Sanjaya, whose exit from American Idol last week nearly broke my heart -- I'm serious; Simon Cowell had promised to quit the show if Sanjaya won -- delivered the Top Ten Ten Things I Learned on American Idol on Dave Letterman's show Monday night. My favorite was No. 6: On-camera Simon is a bit nasty, but off-camera, he's a total jerk.

UPDATE: Okay, okay, here's the whole list:

10. The camera adds ten pounds to your mohawk.

9.   Work hard and make sacrifices, you can finish in 7th place.

8.    It’s very important to “Keep it real, dawg.”

7.    I should have gone for the immunity idol -- oh wait, that’s Survivor.

6.    On-camera Simon is a bit nasty, but off-camera, he’s a total jerk.

5.    Voting for yourself 100 times an hour causes some wicked carpal tunnel.

4.     When you forget the words, just do this. [He wails ohhhhhhhhh.]

3.     Honestly, I thought I was auditioning for Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

2.     Nothing.

1.     America loves performers with bad hair -- right, Dave?

Katie: Anchor away?

Here's a story by my colleague Gail Shister at the Philadelphia Inquirer that says Katie Couric's days may be numbered on the CBS Evening News. Before we go any further, let's note a couple of very important caveats.

First, the story says if Couric is out, it will "probably" be after the 2008 elections. That's 14 months away, which is an eternity in television time. Couric's ratings could go up -- remember, she just got a new producer, Rick Kaplan, a month ago. Perhaps his plans for the newscast -- which certainly haven't been fully implemented -- will reverse the ratings slide. Perhaps CBS News will latch onto some story that will pull in viewers. Perhaps Charlie Gibson will be abducted by space aliens.

Second, the story is very clear that no ranking CBS executive said, on or off the record, that they're starting to pull the plug. The prophets of doom are all either at rival networks, or they're rank-and-file CBS people who were resentful that an outsider was hired to fill an anchor chair that has always been held by somebody who came up through the CBS ranks. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but it does mean they're speaking deductively rather than authoritatively.

All that said, the CBS bosses would be crazy if they're not giving at least some thought to an escape route. After the curiosity bump in the ratings the first couple of weeks, it'd been all downhill for Couric. CBS' idea that viewers wanted a reinvention of the evening news -- and that that reinvention would look something like the morning-newscast world where Couric had spent the last two decades -- was clearly wrong. Couric and the new format didn't bring in any new viewers, while a number of the old ones moved over to the business-as-usual newscasts at ABC and NBC.

CBS only made things worse by its insane over-hyping of its new star, which has cast her in roles that practically begged to be ridiculed. First there was the Katie Listening Tour, where she spent months as America's mother confessor, learning our secret fears and yearnings, for which the CBS Evening News was supposed to be a panacea. (Imagine my anger when it turned out Katie couldn't really cut my property taxes.)

Then there was Katie as One-Woman SWAT Team, not just reading the news but reporting pieces, doing live interviews, producing a blog, and probably cooking hamburgers in the CBS cafeteria during her spare time. The entirely predictable result was that some of the work was mediocre or worse (her live interviews were mostly ridiculous) and some of it was outright phony. The real revelation of the plagiarism scandal over Couric's blog earlier this month (one of her commentaries turned out to have been lifted from the Wall Street Journal) was that the only thing Couric was really contributing to the blog was her name; she had a staff of writers churning out all the material.

A lot of this can fixed, and some already has; the soft-news element that came to the newscast along with Couric has largely been jettisoned. Getting rid of the blog and the live interviews would be wise next steps. What's likely to linger, though, is Couric's image, the perky coffee-latsch pal from down the block, that worked so well for her in the morning but has been a millstone around her neck in the evening. And that's why CBS may eventually need a Plan B.

Update: Here's another piece on Couric that suggests she's the victim of an intra-CBS conspiracy. That's probably overstating the case -- by a factor of about a zillion -- but it's worth remembering that some of the people who are predicting Couric's demise are not exactly disinterested observers.

Monday morning jamook: April 22 on 'The Sopranos'

Either David Chase was trying out for a job with Western Union Sunday night, or he was telegraphing some pretty clear hints of where the six remaining episodes of The Sopranos are headed. The repeated references to people who talk too much, and what happens to them (hint: it doesn't involve graceful expiration at home in bed) were so frequent that they turned into a kind of grim mantra.

It started with the opening scene, when Paulie Walnuts show up at Tony's house to warn him that someone has told the cops about the 1982 murder of a delinquent bookie -- Tony's first mob killing, carried out under Paulie's supervision. Unsure what evidence the police may find with the corpse, Paulie and Tony do what comes naturally to murderous sociopaths: They head for Miami. (Or, more precisely, North Bay Village, Hollywood and Hallandale, where some scenes were shot.)

Along the way, Tony's impatience with Paulie's garrulousness -- sometimes merely annoying, sometimes actually dangerous as he gives away their destination to strangers and even jokes about old murders -- turns into a seething anger. It also makes him wonder if Paulie might have been the one spilling secrets to Johnny Sack and the New York family back around in Season 5, but try as he might, Tony's unable to bait Paulie into admitting it.

Tony also seems to be realizing for the first time what the rest of us have known since back in the Clinton administration: that Paulie is an idiot. He's horrified to glimpse Paulie through the window of a hotel room, crouched in front of a TV and laughing maniacally at an old episode of Three's Company -- which, in my opinion, is by itself grounds for inflicting slow and painful death.

The thought certainly crossed Tony's mind. With the news that the informer who steered the cops to the bookie's body has blamed the murder on the now-deceased Richie Aprile, Tony suggests they celebrate by renting a boat for some sportfishing. Paulie, recalling that he helped Tony kill their former pal Big Pussy Bonpensiero on a boat after they learned he was an informer, is nervous. But Tony, though he casts some yearning looks at knives and hatchets aboard the boat, ultimately holds back.

Paulie clearly senses how close he came to sleeping with the fishes. Safely back at home, he's visited by Big Pussy in a dream and -- recalling that in his final Moments, Big Pussy was so scared he collapsed into a chair -- asks him: "When my time comes, tell me: Will I stand up?" Paulie awakes before hearing the reply.

Almost as loud as the drumbeat of informer references Sunday night were the repeated references to advancing age. When Tony tells Carmela he's going to have to lie low for a while -- to dodge an old gambling charge, he says -- her frustration is palpable: "This is what life is still like, at our age?" Later, when a Miami mobster sets Tony up with a young blond, she regards the dinner-table chatter about the 1960s as something akin to tales of dinosaurs. "I wasn't even born yet," she notes innocently, to devastating effect.

But it's Uncle Junior for whom the hourglass is really low. The medication they're giving him at the nursing home to which he's confined have made him lucid enough that he's organizing illegal card games among the other inmates, not to mention fleecing them to the tune of $5 a can for bootleg Coca-Cola. ("The real kind, not that diet [bleep]!")

He's even acquired a lieutenant of sorts, a young Chinese-American named Carter Chong who's been institutionalized with some kind of anger-management problem. (Imagine the squirming that must have gone on at HBO in deciding whether to air an episode with this character barely a week after the Virginia Tech killings).

Chong not only assists Junior with the myriad difficulties of running a poker game where the players are prone to Alzheimer's blackouts and psychotic breaks, but even handles his correspondence as he seeks a pardon for shooting Tony last year. "Dear Vice President Cheney," begins one. "As a powerful man all too familiar with accidental gunplay, i am writing in the hope that you will intervene in my case..."

But Junior's posturing as the capo of the cuckoo's nest is undercut by his tendency to wet himself or interrupt tough-guy speeches with complaints that his new medication makes him drool. When the doctors warn them that if he keeps skipping his meds they'll kick him out, his meek compliance so enrages Chong that he gives Junior a savage beating. The episode ends with Junior, encased in casts, slumped in a wheelchair and stroking a pussycat, the vulgar allusion anything but unintentional.

Final scorecard: One murder -- Phil Leotardo, who last episode said his health problems had sapped his ambition to succeed John Sack as boss of the New York family, changed his mind and whacked acting boss Doc Santoro who vulgarly ate off Leotardo's plate during lunch. Just because you're in the Mafia doesn't mean you don't need manners. Two fabulously violent nursing home beatings, one by Uncle Junior of a patient who ratted out his poker game, one of Junior by Chong.

Sunday night's biggest winner: Carmela. Paulie Walnuts was so grateful to Tony for not killing him that he sent Carmela a $2,000 espresso machine to replace her dinky, defective one. Yeah, Paulie, that'll save you.

Sunday night's biggest loser: Rutgers University. That guy Junior beat up was a Rutgers English professor institutionalized after he stabbed his dean. Man, first Don Imus, now this.

Screens: TV the week of April 22

Sherman's March (9 p.m. Sunday, History Channel) -- What happens to a general who orders his men to starve the local population by burning crops, killing livestock, destroying transportation infrastructure and stealing food from civilians? Well, if he's on the losing side, he probably gets hung as a war criminal. If he's with the winner -- as Union Gen. William Sherman was during the Civil War -- he's acclaimed as a war hero. This harrowing, horrifying account of Sherman's 1864 march across Georgia, if nothing else, certainly verifies Sherman's famous observation that "war is hell."

American Masters: Summer of Love (10 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- A documentary about the cultural and political high-water mark of the Baby Boom, the summer of 1967 in San Francisco, when all you needed was love and maybe a Jefferson Airplane record or two. Of course, soon to come were the Manson Family, Altamont and the anti-war movement's Days of Rage, but man, you're spoiling my buzz.

The Real Wedding Crashers (10 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- Ashton Kutcher and the rest of the Punk'D crew take on weddings in this hidden-camera series about wedding pranks performed by improve comedians disguised as guests, caterers and even pest exterminators. At the end, do we find out that whole Kutcher/Demi Moore wedding thing was a hoax?

Cities of the Underworld (9 p.m. Monday, History Channel) -- A documentary series about the tunnels and abandoned train lines that run beneath city streets may sound like it ranks only slightly above putting out your eyes with a red-hot poker in terms of a television experience. But come on, how can you resist an opening episode titled Edinburgh -- Scotland’s Sin City? I mean, what did they find down there? Unused postage stamps? Light switches left on in the daytime for a hundred years?

A cyber-liferaft for 'The Black Donnellys'?

It's probably not going to work, but if you're a fan of NBC's just-canceled Irish mobster show The Black Donnellys, there's an internet petition you can sign to demand its return. It's got more than 28,000 signatures and is sending ripples through the web: On buzz.yahoo.com/tv/, The Black Donnellys was the 15th most-searched term at one point this week, and the sixth most-searched TV show. It was also the No. 18 most-downloaded show on iTunes. Network executives say they're paying attention to this stuff; we'll see if it's true.

Giving a forum to a murderous madman

The Associated Press reports that there's a mounting "backlash" against television for using the recordings and photos sent to NBC by Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech mass murdered, with viewers complaining and relatives of the victims refusing to appear on NBC because of its use of the video. I disagree with the story, sort of: The backlash is against all news media, not just television, and you can't really call it a backlash because journalists themselves are arguing fiercely about how the story has been handled.

Here in the Miami Herald newsroom, one editor posted a complaint on our internal bulletin board that our headline on Thursday's story -- Shooter: ‘I die like Christ'  -- was "objectionable...disrespectful to the victims" and "a victory' for the killer. Meanwhile, Fox News has said it won't use footage from Cho's self-made video any longer, and even NBC -- to whom he mailed it in between rounds of shooting -- has said it will cut back.

Use of the video and other material from Cho -- which included a long manifesto and several dozen photos -- will naturally decline now that people have seen it. Nothing wrong with that. But I don't think NBC or anyone else in the news media need apologize for its use. Not that I don't understand the objections: Listening to Cho's ranting accusations on TV this morning that he was the victim, and the people he murdered had "blood on their hands'' infuriated me. It did seem, in some sense, that we were handing him a victory.

That said, what else could we possibly have done? Using anything at all from the materials he sent to NBC was disrespectful to the victims. But how could we possibly not report it? The very first thing you learn in your very first journalism class is that the lead paragraph of a news story should include "the five Ws" -- who, what, where, when and why. It's impossible to cover that last one without resort to Cho's video, no matter how loathsome it is. There is no way to convey his arrogance, self-absorption and delusion without quoting from it. Journalism is not always fun. This week the news media had to cover a hideously ugly story, and it would have been both futile and dishonest to try to pretty it up.

Why John McCain shouldn't be president

He doesn't know beans about rock'n'roll. Here's a video of him answering a foreign-policy question at a campaign rally in South Carolina by singing "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb Iran...." What's shocking is that he says it's an old Beach Boys song. My feeling is that America cannot afford a president who is obviously entirely ignorant of Vince Vance & The Valiants, who wrote and recorded Bomb Iran in 1980 during that unpleasantness over the hostages. Or maybe McCain was just dissing George Bush? Vince and the boys are from Texas, I think.

Bring your own peg-leg

Here's a video preview of the new CBS reality/game show, Pirate Master, which debuts on May 31. The contestants pretend to be pirates -- who of course raped, murdered, looted and destroyed entire cities. I hope CBS has good liability insurance.

You know, somehow, Dan Rather is at the bottom of this

Believers in conspiracy theories about the sinister Mainstream Media -- whether from the left or right -- should consider the following email, reprinted in TVSpy's newsletter Watercooler. It's from CBS Newspath, the network division that sends news footage to affiliates, explaining why coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings by reporter Claire Leka was going to be late. The reason: a miscreant coffee pot.

   NN-LEKA-7:45-DELAY-WHY?

   URGENT

   STATIONS:

   Our Claire Leka 7:45pm et pkg/insert/looklive will be DELAYED. It will not be available for the 7:59:30pm et Live Generic because .... we plugged in our coffee and blew out our circuits. No kidding. We'll try to get the piece out just after 8pm et. ....and we will try to better manage our caffeine consumption so this doesn't happen again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

   

   We'll be using the 3:30pm et insert for the 7:59:30pm et live generic.

   Lisa Farrell

   CBS Newspath NYNY Newspath

   

   

Move over, PBS

MyNetworkTV, which launched last September as an all-telenovela network, has dumped that format. And what a bonus for us! The just-released schedule of shows for the next month includes such epochal events as Hawaiian Tropic International Beauty Pageant and Unjena Bikini Jam (April 24); America’s Trashiest Weddings and Body Doubles: International Twins Search (May 1); and of course the sublime Hooters Dream Girl Challenge (May 8). I am, literally, speechless.

Welcome back, Reeg

Regis Philbin, out for a couple of months with a more challenging gig -- triple-bypass heart surgery -- is returning to his morning chatfest with Kelly Ripka on April 26. I have no idea what he'll talk about until Notre Dame football starts up in September.

Case closed

After police identified the Virginia Tech gunman this morning as a South Korean student named Cho Seung-hui, Fox News ace Geraldo Rivera -- following an extensive in-depth investigation that lasted at least 10 minutes -- pronounced him a "perverted madman."  Thanks for the clarification, Geraldo. Meanwhile, in a slightly more sane corner of the News Corp. empire, Fox yanked the episode of Bones scheduled for Wednesday night, which concerned a murder on a college campus.

Don Imus, the REAL story

Once again are the mainstream media refuted through crusading on-line journalism. The web version of Pravda, cracking the coverup, has discovered the real reason Don Imus was fired:

In a clear sign of its intent to reign in dissident American media personalities, and their growing influence in American culture, US War Leaders this past week launched an unprecedented attack upon one of their most politically 'connected', and legendary, radio hosts named Don Imus after his threats to release information relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks upon that country.

The "U.S. War Leaders," who apparently include among their number Les Moonves, Jeff Zuckerman, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, knew they were "unable to attack such a powerful media figure as Don Imus, directly," Pravda reports. So they,

as we have seen many times before, resorted to a massive media attack against him using as the reason a racial slur against a US woman's basketball team, but which has been pointed out by other media outlets was not by any means a rare occurrence for the legendary radio icon to make.

Here's the full stunning story, packaged together with a 15-year-old bikini shot of "Daisy Fuentes, hot-blooded actress and model from Cuba," as multiculturally minded Pravda puts it. Man, do I miss the Cold War.

Speaking of Keith Olbermann...

He'll be back on broadcast network TV this fall -- but as a sportscaster. He's joining  Bob Costas, Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis and Tiki Barber in the studio for pre-game and halftime of NBC's Sunday-night NFL telecasts. Seems like about three too many talking heads to me, but I guess they need all the extras for basketball games in the parking lot against the Fox team.

Not necessarily the news

Warning: Somebody has drugged the water cooler over at Television Week. How else can you explain this bizarre list of the Top Ten Most Powerful People in TV News? Roger Ailes at the top of the list makes sense -- he not only runs the most-watched cable news network, but his personal imprint -- for better or worse -- is all over it. You can quibble about the precise slotting of the news chiefs of the three broadcast networks and CNN, but obviously they belong. Tim Russert as the dean of the Sunday-morning set belongs there, and you can certainly make a case for ABC anchor Charles Gibson. But where's Katie Couric? Like her or not, her face has become synonymous with her network in a way that Gibson and NBC's Brian Williams cannot dream of matching. And Keith Olbermann at No. 6? Yeah, he's the highest-rated guy on MSNBC, but that's like saying you've got the hottest act in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Of course, Olbermann's presence on the list is pretty sensible compared to Jon Stewart at No. 10. As Stewart will be the first to tell you, he's an entertainer, not a journalist. And despite all the drivel about how younger viewers are getting their news from The Daily Show instead of the networks, his audience is tiny -- a little over a million viewers. Though, come to think of it, that's a lot more than Olbermann's got.

Monday morning jamook: April 15 on 'The Sopranos'

If you're one of those people who think The Sopranos is boring if somebody doesn't get whacked every half hour, Sunday's episode certainly had the requisite number of corpses. John Sack's captain Gerry Torciano was gunned down by a rival as the struggle for control of the New York family turned violent. And a fictional (doubly fictional, I guess) version of Tony wound up with a literally splitting headache in Christopher Moltisanti's long-awaited gangster/slasher/zombie flick, Cleaver, which finally debuted to mixed reviews -- more on that in a minute.

More importantly, though, the stage was set for what looks like some fearsome violence to come. The simmering estrangement between Tony and his erratic protege Christopher reached a low boil; Sack's underboss Phil Leotardo confessed that his thirst for revenge against Tony is unslaked; and, perhaps most significantly, Sopranos producer David Chase signaled unmistakeably that his characters have no hope of redemption, that they decided their own fates long ago, and that they might as well go out with a bang (or at least a cleaver in the head) as a whimper.

The redemption theme came up twice. The first was in the demise of Sack, who for years looked like a prime candidate for a whacking by Tony but instead died quietly in a prison bed night Sunday night of lung cancer. Sack reflects that changing his evil (health) ways didn't do him any good: In prison he quit smoking, exercised and ate a balanced diet. ‘‘For what?" he says bitterly.

After being told in the episode's opening moments that he has only a couple of months to live, Sack is given some false hope by a former oncologist -- played by Sydney Pollack, the director of Out of Africa and Tootsie -- working as an orderly in the prison hospital after being convicted of three murders. (He shot his unfaithful wife, then her aunt who accidentally witnessed the murder, and then a mailman on principle: "At that point I had to fully commit.") But it's soon apparent that only a miracle would save him, and Sack says miracles don't happen -- "not to this family." Or any other on The Sopranos, he
could have added.

The ineffectuality of expiation is also on the mind of Sack's underboss, Leotardo. His ambition withered by heart surgery, Leotardo stands by in disinterested contempt as other Sack lieutenants jockey for control of the now decapitated family. (One of them, Torciano, is memorably assassinated while dining in an upscale restaurant with Tony's startled consigliore Silvio Dante.) "I'd like to do it over, boy, let me tell you," he broods to another mobster. "I [bleeping] compromised everything." But it's clear Leotardo is not expressing a wish he'd become a neurosurgeon or a dot-com entrepreneur; what he regrets is
going through life taking guff from lesser men, starting with the immigration officer at Ellis Island who changed the family name from Leonardo to "a ballet costume'' and ending with Tony Soprano, whose cousin murdered Phil's brother back in Season 5. "No more," Leotardo mutters grimly.

Whatever Leotardo is planning for Tony will be hard to top what happened to his fictional counterpart in Christopher's movie Cleaver. At the movie's premiere screening, it doesn't take long before much of the audience -- including Carmela, Silvio, Paulie Walnuts and Tony himself -- to figure out who Sal, the portly mob boss strutting around in his undershirt throwing flowerpots and ranting threats, was based on. But unlike everybody else, Tony is slow to pick up on the roman-a-clef implications: You don't have to be Pauline Kael to figure out that when the Sal character sleeps with the girlfriend of his young protege, we're really talking about Christopher and Adriana, and you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see the blade embedded  Sal's head by the protege as more than a plot device. (As Freud might have said, sometimes a meat cleaver in the head is just a meat cleaver in the head.) "It's a revenge fantasy," the furious Carmela tells Tony.

Tony won't buy it at first, but when Christopher sends his screenwriter pal J.T. around to take the blame for the romantic-triangle plot line (J.T. hilariously claims to have stolen it from Born Yesterday, in which Broderick Crawford and Judy Holiday do indeed resemble caricatured versions of Tony and Adriana) Tony sees through it immediately. ‘‘This is the image of me he leaves to the world," Tony tells his shrink, Dr. Melfi. ‘‘All I am to him is some [bleephole] bully...All I did for this [bleepin'] kid and he
[bleepin'] hates me so much."

Melfi replies with a shot at deconstructionism -- "Is it possible on some level you're reading into all this?" -- that gave me a critical epiphany: The Sopranos will end with Christopher hunting down and killing all the critics who pan it. Hey, Christopher, I've got Rene Rodriguez's address right here.

Final scorecard: One fictional murder, one real murder, one cancer death, and one brutal sucker punch, delivered by Christopher to J.T. in an effort to persuade him to take the rap for the Tony-boinked-Adriana stuff. For the second straight week a suggestive allusion to The Godfather. The final scene of Sunday's episode showed Christopher and Tony embracing at the christening of Christopher's daughter, each wearing a grimace unseen to the other. Were the characters themselves thinking of the christening scene that climaxes The Godfather, where Michael Corleone hitmen settle a host of scores with family enemies as a priest blesses his new baby? And also, a couple of stray plot lines bobbed up again: The FBI once more asked Tony for help in sniffing out Middle Eastern terrorists moving money or weapons through New York, and Carmen wondered aloud to Christopher if Adriana might be dead.

Sunday night's biggest winner: George Cukor. I'll bet Netflix and Blockbuster can't keep Born Yesterday in stock this week.

Sunday night's biggest loser: The English language. When Carmela mused that Adriana might be dead, Christopher furiously replied, "I don't like what you're inferring." He meant implying. Or was it interring?

Screens: TV the week of April 15

CNN Presents: Larry King -- 50 Years Of Pop Culture (9 p.m. Wednesday, CNN) -- This special marks Larry King's 50th anniversary in broadcasting, going way back to his earliest radio days in Miami Beach. It's just part of a week-long celebration marked by some unusual guests on his 9 p.m. show: Oprah Winfrey on Monday, Katie Couric on Tuesday, Bill Clinton on Thursday and Bill Maher on Friday. There's probably a joke to be made about what those people have in common, but I don't want to wind up living under a bridge swapping memories with Don Imus, so let's skip it.

Robin Hood (1 p.m. Sunday, BBC America) -- With the IRS agents howling outside your door, it's a good moment to reflect on how the whole Robin Hood story has been stood on its head: He didn't steal from the rich to give to the poor, he stole tax money back from the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and returned it to the people who earned it. Don't believe me? Watch this seven-hour marathon of the BBC's new Robin Hood series -- which, ironically, was made with British taxpayer dollars. Ehh, it's a socialist country, they won't miss it.

The Staircase Murders (8 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime) -- Treat Williams stars in this drama based on a real case: Best-selling author Michael Peterson reports that his wife has died after falling down the stairs, but the cops don't believe it … and neither does his stepdaughter.

Drive (8 p.m. Sunday, Fox) -- See the full review of this new cross-country race drama here.

America At A Crossroads (9 p.m. Sunday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- A weeklong lineup of 11 documentaries on the war on terrorism, the struggle inside Islam and the complicated lives of Muslims inside the United States kicks off tonight with Jihad: The Men And Ideas Behind Al Qaeda.

Secrets of the Bomb: Manhattan Project to Tehran (10 p.m. Sunday, Fox News) -- Oliver North hosts this documentary that traces the development of nuclear weapons … and ponders what it means if Iran has them.

Was it something we said, Meredith?

Kind of a rough week for South Florida on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Alissa Allen, a tourist honcho at the Broward Center for Performing Arts, came home with just $1,000 after getting tripped up by this question: Infiniti is the luxury car division launched by what prominent Japanese automaker?  A)Subaru, B) Honda, C) Nissan, D) Toyota.  Alissa guessed Honda but that mean Meredith Viera, who has obviously not studied deconstructionism and learned that it's not possible to truly know anything, insisted in her annoying oldthink linear way that the correct answer was Nissan. I say, bring back Regis.

Six degrees of dead

ABC will run the final five unaired episodes of the canceled Six Degrees on its website ABC.com starting April 27, so you 12 people who were watching it, stop complaining.

Take THAT, Jon Stewart

When The Daily Show's Jon Stewart visited Crossfire a while back, he accused host Tucker Carlson of ruining America. I wasn't impressed; Stewart's charge was not only unfair (everyone knows Paula Abdul ruined America) and wasn't even the most memorable insult ever flung at Carlson on television. (That would be Don Imus' accusation that Carlson was "a bow-tie wearing pussy.") Nonetheless, Carlson seems to have taken it to heart. His new gig at CBS: hosting the pilot of the game show, Who Do You Trust? Johnny Carson hosted the original version back in the 1950s but I don't think he wore a bow-tie.

UPDATE: It seems the correct title of this pilot is Do You Trust Me? and it has nothing to do with the old Johnny Carson show. So there are no wardrobe precedents to take into consideration and Carlson can wear anything he wants without having to take a lot of crap from Jon Stewart about it.

Imus, one more time

Here's the story Barry Jackson and I wrote for this morning's Miami Herald on the end of Don Imus' career. Because we ran out of space, it doesn't contain much discussion of Imus' future. Some of the people I talked to yesterday think he'll be back, perhaps on satellite radio. "Sirius radio is an obvious alternative, because Mel Karmazin is the CEO there and he and Imus have a long professional relationship," said Tom Taylor, the editor of Inside Radio, noting that Karmazin was Imus' boss for many years at WFAN in New York. "But there are other possibilities: cable TV -- including, probably, channels that haven't even been invented yet -- and broadband radio." Others, though, think Imus -- who's 67 -- may just hang up his mike, figuring it's not worth the hassle.

Personally, I think the strongest argument that Imus will attempt a comeback is that he won't want to go out as a defeated figure convicted in the court of public opinion of racism. But I also think there are a lot of obstacles to a comeback -- especially on what may seem like the obvious choice, satellite radio, where other infamous shock jocks like Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony have found happy homes, out of the reach of the FCC and advertiser boycotts. The proposed merger of XM and Sirius, the two satellite radio companies, creates real difficulties for Imus.

One is that the merger means the era of zillion-dollar contracts as the two companies compete for talent is over. Another is that the merger requires governmental approval, and opponents are already citing Stern's presence on Sirius as a good reason not to further the company's reach. Imus right now is even more toxic. If he indeed winds up on satellite radio, I don't think it will be for several months, until the merger has been resolved, and even then he'll be working at bargain-basement rates.

Don Imus: color him gone

CBS has fired Don Imus. “From the outset, I believe all of us have been deeply upset and revulsed by the statements that were made on our air about the young women who represented Rutgers University  in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship with such class, energy and talent,” said CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, in announcing the decision. (No, he didn't explain why if he's been upset and revulsed since sometime last week, he only got around to suspending Imus Tuesday, and firing him today.) “Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society – all races, economic groups, men and women alike.

"In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many emails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.”

Next, Ann Coulter hosting Lifetime movies of the week

The Bible may say the lamb will lie down with the lion, but, really, a member of ABC's touchy-feely The View coffee klatsch guesting-hosting on Fox News' red-state red-meat Fox & Friends? Yet there it is: Rosie O'Donnell's foil Elisabeth Hasselbeck will fill in for vacationing Gretchen Carlson on Fox & Friends Monday from 7 to 9 a.m. Volunteers to deliver the news to Rosie, raise your hands.

Don Imus, deeper in the quicksand

MSNBC has just announced that it's dropping its simulcast of Don Imus' radio show, for good. The decision to ditch Imus "takes into account many conversations with our own employees," MSNBC's statement said. "What matters to us most is that the men and women of NBC Universal have confidence in the values we have set for this company. This is the only decision that makes that possible. Once again, we apologize to the women of the Rutgers basketball team and to our viewers. We deeply regret the pain this incident has caused."

UPDATE: A few minutes after MSNBC's announcement, CBS -- which manages and produces Imus' radio show -- chimed in with its own statement: "Don Imus has been suspended without pay for two weeks beginning on Monday, April 16. During that time, CBS Radio will continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely." Translation: If the ruckus doesn't die down in the next couple of days -- and MSNBC's decision makes that unlikely -- Imus is history.

Monday night lights

ESPN has just released its Monday Night Football schedule for next season. I'm going to reprint the whole thing here, so if you watch you'll know who's playing, that information usually being obscured by all the nonstop pimping of ABC shows that is the sole concern of MNF announcers.

ESPN’S MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL 2007 NFL SCHEDULE
Preseason
Date            Time (ET)       Teams                                          
Aug. 13         8 p.m.          Denver Broncos at San Francisco 49ers
Aug. 16         8 p.m.          Miami Dolphins at Kansas City Chiefs
Aug. 20         8 p.m.          Chicago Bears at Indianapolis Colts
Aug. 27         8 p.m.          Cincinnati Bengals at Atlanta Falcons

Regular Season
Date            Time (ET)       Teams                                          
Sept. 10        7 p.m.          Baltimore Ravens at Cincinnati Bengals
                    10:15 p.m.     Arizona Cardinals at San Francisco 49ers
Sept. 17        8:30 p.m.      Washington Redskins at Philadelphia Eagles
Sept. 24        8:30 p.m.      Tennessee Titans at New Orleans Saints
Oct. 1           8:30 p.m.       New England Patriots at Cincinnati Bengals
Oct. 8           8:30 p.m.       Dallas Cowboys at Buffalo Bills
Oct. 15         8:30 p.m.       N.Y. Giants at Atlanta Falcons
Oct. 22         8:30 p.m.       Indianapolis Colts at Jacksonville Jaguars
Oct. 29         8:30 p.m.       Green Bay Packers at Denver Broncos
Nov. 5           8:30 p.m.       Baltimore Ravens at Pittsburgh Steelers
Nov. 12         8:30 p.m.       San Francisco 49ers at Seattle Seahawks
Nov. 19         8:30 p.m.       Tennessee Titans at Denver Broncos
Nov. 26         8:30 p.m.       Miami Dolphins at Pittsburgh Steelers
Dec. 3           8:30 p.m.       New England Patriots at Baltimore Ravens
Dec. 10         8:30 p.m.       New Orleans Saints at Atlanta Falcons
Dec. 17         8:30 p.m.       Chicago Bears at Minnesota Vikings
Dec. 24         8 p.m.            Denver Broncos at San Diego Chargers

Welcome, Gail, to the nouveau not-rich

Gail Famous, that Boca Raton substitute teacher who was on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire this morning, is only slightly rich. She took home $1,000 after coming up snakeyes on the $4,000 question: “During his 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joseph Lieberman famously coined what pun off his own name?  A) Joetivation, B) Joeactive, C) Joeficiency, D) Joementum.”  Gail answered B, but of course as we all know, provided we have no actual lives and our brains thus have plenty of storage available for hopelessly arcane and useless trivia, the correct answer is D.

Tough break, Gail. Actually, I wouldn't even have made it that far. The $2,000 question was: “In a 1970s TV ad, a child asks which of these characters "how many licks" it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?  A) Mr. Owl, B) Mr. Goat, C) Mr. Moose, D) Mr. Pig.”  Questions like these are the reason nobody will sit with Meredith Viera in the cafeteria and she cries all through lunch. Oh well, let's see how Alissa Allen does Thursday. Maybe she'll luck out and the Daily Double will be under Famous Canadian Stars of Bonanza for $600. Wait, am I thinking of the right show?.......

How to spot your newly rich and famous neighbors

If I were you, I'd be watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Wednesday and Thursday, because two South Florida ladies are contestants and in all probability about to win a gazillion dollars each and then when you see them at Publix you can just walk up and say, "Hey, I saw you on TV" and then they'll probably give you some money because it gets heavy carrying that stuff around all day.

Your first potential donor is named Gail Famous. (When you see her, be sure to say, "Now you're REALLY famous" because that's never gonna get old.) She's a substitute teacher at Addison Mizner Elementary School in Boca Raton, where her third-graders helped her study for the test. That should come in handy if she gets a question like "What's your favorite color?" She also runs a business called Gail's Goodies and Gifts, which she'll probably give you if you ask nicely, 'cause now she's gonna be rich and everything. Her episode of Millionaire airs Wednesday at 11 a.m. on WSVN-Fox 7.

Same time, same channel on Thursday, you can see Alissa Allen. She's a native South Floridian, which is to say, Canadian, and can tell you all those interesting stories about growing up in an igloo and cooking dinner on the tundra over campfires made from moose droppings. I'm just teasing, of course. They don't talk about that stuff at all now that Celine Dion told them to knock it off because it was bad for her image. Anyway, Alissa has been living in Broward for the past 10 years and is even a tourism director at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. You'll be able to spot her at work because she'll be the one who, when you ask her where your tickets are located, replies, "Who cares? I have a gazillion dollars. Here, take some of it." Hey, I wonder if those cheap bastards at Millionaire will try to pay her in Canadian dollars? Then she can be on that other Fox show, When Game Show Contestants Attack.

Another cancellation

Andy Richter, meet Catherine Crier. Court TV has just canceled Catherine Crier Live after seven years. Her 5 to 6 p.m. slot will be reportedly be filled by reruns of Psychic Detectives, whose first assignment will learning from just which planet Court TV programming bosses came and the prospects for returning them to it.

How Google and Amazon took over the world

Here's an amusing mock video history that explains how Google and Amazon destroyed the mainstream media and took over the world by 2014. Happily, TiVo survives, so I won't miss any Lost episodes while rooting around in garbage dumps for my meals.

A great TV deal! Too bad it's illegal in most of Florida

Just in case you had the faintest doubt that allowing telephone companies to compete with cable TV monopolies would result in cheaper rates -- a proposal that the cable companies are fighting like mad dogs in the Florida legislature right now -- ATT has just announced it will offer a free year of high-definition programming to any customer who signs up for HD service through its U-verse TV subscription television operation. (The same deal is also available to customers who buy Direct TV or Dish Network satellite service through ATT.) When is the last time your cable company monopoly offered you anything but excuses? Competition produces better service and better prices. The only people who think otherwise are the cable company monopolists and their toadies in the legislature and local government.

Strike three?

NBC has dispatched Andy Richter's mid-season sitcom Andy Barker, PI to the television equivalent of a Siberian labor camps. The show has been yanked from its high-profile Thursday time slot and the final two episodes will be aired back-to-back this Saturday night, when the viewing audience consists mostly of 2-year-olds propped in front of the TV screen while their babysitters loot the liquor cabinet and talk on the phone. This is the third time in a row that a Richter sitcom has flaked out in less than a full season (do the names Quintuplets and Andy Richter Controls The Universe ring a bell? probably not) and it seems likely the last.

Imus in the mourning

It sure looks like Don Imus is headed for the unemployment line. MSNBC and WFAN radio, in a move that smelled of desperation, announced Monday night that they are suspending telecasts of his show for two weeks. But the calls for both MSNBC and WFAN (owned by CBS) to drop his show altogether kept escalating, and Imus' public apologies don't seem to be making any impact. The latest to chime in is Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP's board of directors, who said it's "past time his employers took him off the air.''

Imus' troubles began last week when, the day after it lost in the NCAA basketball tournament, he launched an unprovoked attack on the Rutgers women's basketball team. "That's some rough girls from Rutgers,'' Imus said. "Man, they got tattoos.'' Agreed his producer, Berna