Changing Channels

And now, our regular Friday feature for snake-and-model fetishists

It was a television producer's -- and maybe a Freudian psychologist's -- dream: Three half-nekkid models, their bodies draped in slithering snakes, with South Florida's version of the Temple of Mammon, the Seminole Hard Rock Casino near Hollywood, looming in the background as the cameras rolled.

Better yet, the snakes were getting frisky.

One wriggled down a model's back, slipped its head into the bow securing her bikini top and tugged: Call it anthropomorphism, but it sure looked like he was trying to untie it. Meanwhile, a second python coiled itself into a noose around another's neck.

A snake wrangler grabbed the prurient-minded python and placed it back on her shoulders. But since the FCC has no clear rules against the on-camera strangulation of reality-show contestants, the second model was on her own. ''Just let me know when you can't breathe,'' the wrangler helpfully advised her.

Soft-core kink and hard-core lunacy were the rules of the game on a makeshift platform alongside the Hard Rock's pool, where the E! television channel was shooting Last Model Standing, which will air Nov. 24. Read the full story from Friday's Miami Herald.

Fangs for tuning in

  ''Children of the night,'' murmured Bela Lugosi, raising those bushy Hungarian eyebrows, ''what music they make!'' Was he talking about the jingle of a cash register? More than three-quarters of a century after Dracula introduced the genre, vampire movies are as popular as ever -- America's top box-office attraction last week was Thirty Days of Night, about a pack of fanged Alaskans on an all-liquid diet. So the entertaining new Starz documentary Bloodsucking Cinema couldn't come at a better time. Read the full review from Friday's Miami Herald.

Classical music returns to the South Florida airwaves -- for now

The good news for South Florida fans of Beethoven, Bach and those guys: The new classical music station WKCP (89.7 FM) is on the air, a week ahead of schedule. The bad news: The abrupt start-up was prompted in hopes of thwarting a lawsuit by fans of the station's old Christian format when its call letters were WMCU. The suit seeks to not only block the format change but even the sale of the radio station that prompted it. My newsroom chum Larry Johnson has the story.

UPDATE: Here's another Larry Johnson story that describes WKCP's programming plans.

Scoop! The next character to die on 'Lost'!!!

Call your bookie right now and place a big bet that Jin-Soo Kwon, the Korean gangster with a heart of gold, will be the next one to die on Lost. My source on this couldn't be better -- it's the Honolulu police blotter, which says Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin-Soo, was busted on a DUI charge in the wee hours Thursday. Kim is the fourth cast member of Lost picked up by Hawaiian cops for driving violations, and the first three -- Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje -- all had their characters killed off within a season. Even poor Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who later beat the charge; those Lost gods producers are tough.

South Florida's broadcast police blotter

Kind of a rough day to be a Miami broadcaster Tuesday. WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Jeffrey Weinsier got busted for trespassing, carrying a gun on school property and resisting arrest after he stepped on the grass while covering a story at a high school. I'm sure that by tomorrow the cops will have managed to link him to the Kennedy assassination, too. Meanwhile, Joel Feinberg, who owns sports-talk radio station WAXY was arrested in California and charged with beating up his fiance. Glad I stayed off the streets.

What you're listening to on satellite radio

Arbitron, the radio ratings folks, are now measuring satellite radio audiences. Since satellite radio is supported entirely by subscription fees rather than advertising, the numbers are an internal research tool for XM and Sirius rather than than a selling point as they are in commercial radio or TV, so they don't get publicized. But a spy out there in radioland passed along to me a list of the top-rated 25 channels, ranked by the percentage of satellite radio listeners age 12 and older who tune in.

Not surprisingly, the ratings show that listeners being cast off (willingly or unwillingly) by broadcast radio are moving to satellite:

** The top two channels are both dominated by Howard Stern, driven to the unregulated frontier of satellite by the FCC. (Sirius channel 100 is all Stern, all the time; Sirius 101 features Stern, Bubba the Love Sponge and other shock-jock shows.) XM's shock-jock channel 202 is also among the top 10.

** Baby Boomer music, rapidly vanishing from the broadcast airwaves, thrives on satellite. Three of the top 25 channels (XM 5, XM 6 and Sirius 5) play rock'n'roll oldies of the 1950s and '60s. Another, XM 13, features country oldies.

** The Beautiful Music format of gentle Mantovani-style instrumentals, which pioneered FM radio but has long been extinct there, is alive and well on satellite --  XM  78 is among the top 20.

1 SIRIUS 100 HOWARD STERN 100 ----- 7.81%
2 SIRIUS 101 HOWARD STERN 101 ----- 2.48%
3 XM 25 THE BLEND ----- 2.19%
4 XM 26 FLIGHT 26 ----- 2.03%
5 XM 13 WILLIES PLACE ----- 2.01%
6 XM 46 TOP TRACKS ----- 1.85%
7 XM 20 TOP 20 ON 20 ----- 1.76%
8 XM 6 THE 60S ON 6 ----- 1.75%
9 XM 202 THE VIRUS ----- 1.68%
10 SIRIUS 60 NEW COUNTRY ----- 1.65%
11 XM/Sirius 121 FOX NEWS ----- 1.58%
12 XM 71 WATERCOLORS ----- 1.58%
13 XM 23 THE HEART ----- 1.54%
14 XM 16 HIGHWAY16 ----- 1.50%
15 XM 7 THE 70S ON 7 ----- 1.45%
16 XM 78 ESCAPE ----- 1.45%
17 SIRIUS 1 SIRIUS HITS1 ----- 1.43%
18 SIRIUS 20 OCTANE ----- 1.42%
19 XM 8 THE 80S ON 8 ----- 1.25%
20 XM 5 THE 50S ON 5 ----- 1.20%
21 XM/Sirius 140 ESPN RADIO ----- 1.16%
22 SIRIUS 9 THE PULSE ----- 1.16%
23 XM 49 BIG TRACKS ----- 1.10%
24 SIRIUS 8 BIG 80S ----- 0.99%
25 SIRIUS 5 SIRIUS GOLD ----- 0.98%

#$%**! Red Sox! #$+&# Rockies!

Tired of all that wretched, Swiss-like neutrality when it comes to Fox's coverage of baseball? Well, when the World Series starts Wednesday, you can declare war and listen to the partisan coverage of your choice -- if you've got XM Satellite Radio. XM is offering play-by-play from the home radio stations of both the Colorado Rockies (channel 183) and the Boston Red Sox (channel 176). And if you like neutrality but not television, XM also has the ESPN national radio broadcast (channel 189). Final option: the ESPN Deportes game coverage in Spanish (channel 174). By next year, surely we'll have play-by-play in Lithuanian, Tagalog and Urdu.

A scary moment on live TV

You think those contestants don't take Dancing With The Stars seriously? Here's a video of Marie Osmond fainting during Monday night's episode.

Muera Laughlin -- it's gone

CBS' eccentric musical drama Viva Laughlin debuted Thursday with 8.4 million viewers -- a small audience that looks even smaller when you realized that the show lost 40 percent of the audience it inherited from CSI. On Sunday Viva Laughlin moved to its regular time slot on Sunday and pulled even fewer viewers, 6.8 million. What must really have give CBS programmers the cold sweats was that 1.6 million switched channels midway through the show. I'd say Viva Laughlin looks like a good bet for the season's third cancellation, joining Fox's Nashville and The CW's Online Nation in unmarked graves on the studio backlots.

UPDATE: A couple of hours after I posted this, CBS pulled the plug -- Viva Laughlin has been canceled.

Your television may go on strike

The Writers Guild of America, the union for Hollywood screenwriters, has just voted overwhelmingly -- 90 percent in favor -- to authorize a strike anytime after November 1. This strike talk has been bubbling for a while, but most Hollywood people thought it wouldn't hit critical mass until sometime next year, when the contracts for directors and actors also come up for renewal and the three unions could join together in one (they hope) powerful bloc. Now, though, the LA Weekly's well-informed columnist Nikki Finke reports that there's increasing sentiment among the writers for a strike sooner rather than later, and network bosses are hissing "Bring it!'' because they think their fall season has already tanked. The issue at hand: What cut, if any, writers get from the new revenue stream flowing from the digital world: downloads of TV shows and movies to computers, cell phones and that little chip the Department of Homeland Security secretly implanted in your brain last year.

The last strike, in 1988, lasted 22 weeks, cost the industry half a billion dollars (real money even by Hollywood standards) and gave us such unforgettable shows as the remake of Mission Impossible, produced from old scripts. This time we could be looking at a much longer break, with both sides leaving a trail of scorched video in their wake: the flinty network bosses using cheapie, unscripted reality shows to fill the airwaves, while writers hurl themselves over the cliff like a pack of nerdy lemmings. I have seen the future, and it looks like Kid Nation.

As they used to say in Vietnam, sometimes you've got to destroy the village in order to save it.