An epic tale of bad television, plastic toy soldiers and the hidden treasure in your attic

Way back in 1959, when the television airwaves were ruled by Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wagon Train and countless other horse operas, CBS came up with a Western with a new twist. Don Durant played the titular hero of Johnny Ringo, a gunfighter-turned-lawman, whose claim to fame was that he carried a not a six-shooter revolver but a seven-shooter. So every episode ended with a shootout in which the bad guy would eventually emerge from behind a tree to say, "I got you now, Johnny, I've been counting and you fired all six of your bullets." And Johnny would plug him with that seventh shot and ride off into the sunset.

Even among my fellow 5-year-olds, this formula got old pretty fast, and Johnny Ringo's ratings steadily dwindled. And toymakers who had bought licensing rights from CBS under the assumption that any Western was pure marketing gold were pretty much screwed; all those board games and toy seven-shooters wound up in landfills. The biggest casualty of all was a playset made by the Marx Toy Co., which included a tin Western town populated by plastic cowboys, including Johnny Ringo himself. Only about 300 of the sets were sold. And kids being the ungrateful little wretches they are, I imagine everybody who got one tossed it into the back of the closet and has spent the last five decades cursing his parents as fools for buying such an uncool present.

Well, if you're one of those ungrateful little wretches, look around to see if that Johnny Ringo set is still kicking around your attic. It's now worth about $10,000 (not a bad return on a $6 investment, even allowing for inflation). Even the little Johnny Ringo figure by itself brings a cool $900. Johnny Ringo has become the holy grail for a crusading army of Baby Boomers who have turned into collectors of all those little plastic soldiers and cowboys and spacemen of the 1950s and 1960s. And (think of this not as a mixed metaphor, but an earnest attempt at diversity and even-handedness in religious allusions) their Mecca is the Official Marx Toy Soldier Museum in Moundsville, West Virginia. Read my story about it in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Pretty snippy from a country that gave us 'Benny Hill'

British newspapers are reporting that the United Kingdom has banned Martha Stewart, refusing her request for a visit. I realize anybody who accidentally stumbled onto The Apprentice would lust for a terrible revenge, but the Brits seem to be taking things a bit too far.

Mailbag: Bo Diddley rocked, in more ways than one

I was interested to read your posting about Bo Diddley and Nikita Krrushchev. I had some similar experiences with Bo talking in a way that was very prideful about America. Some of the news coverage, like the AP piece, makes Bo sound bitter (like Chuck Berry), which, although he had every right to be, he was not. I knew his daughters and visited Bo's log cabin home on their ranch in Hawthorne, Florida, many times in the early- to mid- '80s. When Bo was not on long tours of Australia and Poland, he always had young people around for barbecues. He'd dig a pit, pile dead wood from the property six feet high and light it with gasoline. Then, watching a mushroom cloud go up, he'd say jokingly: "That's what you do to @*#*#*%@*# (fellas) that you don't like!"

Next, we'd gather around him in the kitchen while he cut and wrapped the wild boar meat in foil...he'd laugh and talk about opening for the Clash on their first U.S. tour. ("Nice kids, but they shouldn't play so loud."). He'd talk about how good we have it in the U.S. ("In Poland, we wouldn't be here talking like this...You gotta carry a card with you at all times that says where you're allowed to be and when, in case the police stop you!") He did a couple of songs around that time for an album that included Ain't It Good to be Free? and I Don't Want Your Welfare. He sure never made the money he deserved, but he never stopped trying to make it.

The last time I saw him play was at Monty's in the Grove in about '95. He played the Stephen Talkhouse on Miami Beach in about '91 and with Ron Wood at Woody's on the Beach in '87. He supported a lot people, both family and friends...everyone from grandkids, to young musicians, to old buddies like his videographer Gordon from a tour in Australia -- and a slew of dingos were all living at the ranch in those days.

He might have had one single sip of a Budweiser in all of the time that I was around him...because as on of the guys told me one day in the recording studio/barn, "Bo don't need to get high." That's so true. On each visit Bo was doing something new, welding a hood scoop on a car, making clay-mation monster videos...he never stopped creating.

David Bruce

Coral Gables, Florida

Thanks for sharing those memories, David. My own favorite memory associated with Bo Diddley goes back to sometime during high school, when I first heard Hey, Man on the radio, in which two vocalists needle each other about their girlfriends over Bo's staccato rhythm line. When one guy says of the other's girl that "she looked like she been whupped with a ugly stick," I laughed out loud. And all these years later, every time I hear it, still do.

When Bo Diddley threatened to kick Nikita Khrushchev's butt

Tuesday's papers, reporting the death of rock 'n' roll pioneer Bo Diddley, will certainly recount his membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and analyze the influence his stuttering guitar had on everybody from Buddy Holly to George Michael. But I bet not very many of them will mention that he made one of the great right-wing rock and roll records of all time, Mr. Khrushchev. (I wonder if Bo and Jimi Hendrix ever got together to talk politics?) Listen to a bit of it for free -- when RealPlayer asks you for an email address, check the box marked "do that later" and then ignore all the stuff about free newsletters and signing over your first-born child. Don't worry, Bo's watching.

Remembering some unlikely vets on Memorial Day

When you hear the words celebrity and serving in the same sentence, it's usually followed by -- best-case scenario -- "sushi'' or, more likely, "time in jail." But believe it or not, a lot of show-biz folks have spent time in the military. A few to keep in mind on Memorial Day weekend:

** Bea Arthur played TV's first prime-time character to get an abortion back in 1972 on Maude. Thirty years before that, she broke another cultural barrier when she was one of the first women to volunteer for the Marines, where she served as a nurse during World War II...

See the rest of the list from Monday's Miami Herald.

The best horror movies of all time, sort of

In honor of Halloween, those guys at Moviefone have picked the top 31 horror movies of all time, probably half of which are airing on cable TV tonight. I promised them I'd pass along their list, even though it unaccountably fails to include The Incredibly Stange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies; or the 1931 version of Frankenstein, a far superior film to Dracula, issued the same year; or The Wolf Man, with Maria Ouspenskaya's weary, grief-stricken eulogy to Lon Chaney Jr.: "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end..." And how could anybody think the silly Donald Sutherland disco version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was better than the grim old Cold War allegory with Kevin McCarthy? In fact, the Moviefone guys are idiots who should be flogged. But here's their list, anyway.

31. The Ring (2002)

30. Hellraiser (1987)

29. Nosferatu (1922)

28. The Descent (2005)

27. The Omen (1976)

 

26. The Fly (1986)

25. Wicker Man (1973)

24. Carnival of Souls (1962)

23. The Eye (2002)

22. Scream (1996)

21. Friday the 13th (1980)

20. Dracula (1931)

19. Evil Dead 2 (1987)

18. Carrie (1976)

17. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

16. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

15. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

14. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

13. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

12. Rosemary's Baby (1968)

11. Frailty (2001)

10. 28 Days Later (2002)

9. The Haunting (1963)

8. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

7. The Thing (1951)

6. The Sixth Sense (1999)

5. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

4. The Shining (1980)

3. Psycho (1960)

2. The Exorcist (1973)

1. Halloween (1978)

   

Before the blog: bashing the mainstream media, 1930s-Berlin-style

Look at that poor fellow over there on the right, rendered senseless by the depradations of the mainstream media. Only catch: He's German, and the year is 1930. Yeah, the first anti-MSM blogger was a photomontage artist named John Heartfield, an ace propagandist with the German Communist Party. Read my review of an exhibition of his work at Miami Beach's Wolfsonian Museum. It includes a gallery of Heartfield's photomontagees and a section on an appallingly interesting display of propaganda targeted on children -- a display available for a virtual tour in case you're part of the Pepsi generation and find brick-and-mortar museums too tedious to contemplate.

Critics, who needs 'em?

Well, the movie studios. They need us so much for blurbs that they inflate some guy in Tucson, Arizona to an "ABC critic" when they stick his words in ads. When it comes to TV, I've usually found that the networks don't much care what you write about their shows as long as you write something. (Though I did once get a memorable email from Chris Fleming, the host of the Biography Channel's silly seance show Dead Famous, after I suggested that the ghost of Jim Morrison's dog could beat him at checkers.) But according to Variety's Brian Lowry, it's a little bit different if you're working in Los Angeles where you run into TV people at parties. By the way, Brian says he reviews shows while dressed only his underwear. Casual Fridays at the Herald haven't quite reached that stage yet.

The OTHER war

Despite its accuracy, there's a deadly irony in David Halberstam's new book when he scathingly observes that what little Americans think they know about the Korean War is mostly derived from the film and TV series M*A*S*H, both nominally set in Korea but actually thinly disguised parables of the Vietnam War. For if The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War proves anything, it's that Halberstam's own vision of history was hopelessly and permanently clouded by Vietnam. It doesn't have anything to do with TV, but you can the rest of my review of Halberstam's book that appeared in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Just an old-fashioned love song to South Florida's cops

Thirty-six years ago -- you have no idea how it pains me to write this sentence -- I went to a Three Dog Night concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my high school buddy Rod Sanchez. Rod and I had a bootlegged bottle of bourbon that we sipped during the concert, which was certainly illegal at our age (note to self: check with company attorney on statute of limitations before posting this item). But we took some comfort in the fact that practically everybody else in the audience was consuming substances that were illegal at any age and in some cases would get you thrown not in jail but under it. When the group sang Mama Told Me Not Come ("this is the craziest party there could ever be/don't turn on the lights, 'cause I don't wanna see") the whole place roared with approval.

So I had to smile at a press release that came across my desk this week for a police-benefit concert called Cop Rock 2007 Friday night at Gulfstream Park headlined by former Three Dog Night vocalist Chuck Negroni. Also on the bill is Mike Pinera, a former member of Iron Butterfly, whose In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album to this very day has never been heard all the way through by anyone not seriously under one influence or another; Peter Rivera of Rare Earth, who specialized in 17-minute stoner versions of old Motown records like Get Ready; and the comparatively innocent Jerry Corbetta of Sugarloaf (Green-Eyed Lady) and Dennis Noda of Cannibal & The Headhunters (Land Of 1000 Dances). Although, let's face it, nobody in the 1960s was really that innocent.

In the old days at a concert like this, cops would have been having a nervous breakdown finding enough jails to hold all the people they busted in the audience, not standing up onstage and thanking the musicians. But times and people change, and the house doctor at Gulfsteam will be worrying not about the brown acid but the possibility of Viagra overdoses or catastrophic Depends failures. The proceeds from the $20 tickets (or $100, if you want a VIP seat where you can meet Negroni and ask him just what the hell they were singing about in Never Been To Spain, anyway) go to the Miami-Dade County chapter of the Police Officer's Assistance Trust and the Sheriff's Foundation of Broward County. Oldies radio station WMXJ is one of the sponsors and you can buy tickets at its website or the Gulfstream box office.

And then Emmy voters could apologize for nominating 'Two And A Half Men,' too

Us magazine is reporting that Fox has invited Britney Spears to appear on Sunday night's Emmy telecast to apologize for her clumsy show at the VMAs. This is almost a good idea. But better yet, why  not invite Fox President Peter Ligouri on to say he's sorry for his new fall lineup? Anybody who came up with Nashville, K-Ville and Hell's Kitchen in the same season certain owes us an apology, if not a self-lobotomy. Besides, I've always wondered what Liguori would look like in a sequined bra.

Happy birthday to us!

It seems like just yesterday, though that's probably the Jack Daniel's talking. But really it was exactly one year and 544 posts ago that Changing Channels went online for the first time. And really, don't you think the world's a better place for it? I mean, what if you had to waste your work days surfing Hong Kong porn sites? You'd have been caught and fired by now. Whereas when your boss walks by and you're reading Changing Channels, it looks almost like actual work, give or take the occasional risque Jennifer Aniston photo. If our page count here is correct, that means I've saved 81,120 jobs. Ha! Take that, Ben Bernanke!

That original post, in case you've forgotten, was headlined Rush Limbaugh. Katie Couric. Sex. in a naked attempt to generate page views. I'm somewhat proud and more than a little horrified to discover I seem to have launched a trend; dump those terms into a Google search and you get 155,000 hits. Sorry, Katie.

'The band is on the field!', TV version

With the start of the new fall season barely two weeks away, television's secret war is heating up again:  As they have been for years, Stanford and the University of California are locked in a video death struggle.

Arch-rivals in both sports (surely you remember the Stanford Band's tenacious defense on that infamous 1982 kickoff return) and academics since opening their doors within a few years of each other in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 19th century, Stanford and Cal are the only two elite universities** on the west coast. And with so many TV shows set in California, executive producers who want to send one of their characters off to college frequently wind up picking between Stanford and Cal.

This may sound hopelessly esoteric if you live outside California, but students and alums from both schools follow it closely. They're thrilled at a flattering mention of their own college, and enraged by insults. 

For instance, a few years back on The Simpsons, the entire family was arrested for something and prissy little teacher's pet Lisa complained that now she'd never be able to go  to an Ivy League school. A clip of the taunt that followed from Bart and Homer -- "You're going to Stanford! You're going to Stanford"' -- turned up endlessly on Cal message boards. But a few years later, a Stanford alum producing a Fox cop show called Killer Instinct topped that. When my Herald review of Killer Instinct included a description of one of its villains -- "a Berkeley professor who uses poisonous Egyptian spiders to paralyze women before he tapes them'' -- I got a call from a horrified Cal publicist wondering if I was making it up.

In recent years, the Stanford-Cal war has been roughly a draw, with each school having its moments in the video sun. Almost all the foxy characters on Fox's teen soap The O.C. had either gone to or dropped out of Cal, but one of the stud ghostbusters on The CW's Supernatural was a Stanford student. Stanford came close to administering a death blow when Veronica Mars producer Rob Thomas seriously contemplated sending his heroine to Stanford and setting the whole show there, but he backed off at the last minute and Veronica went to fictional Hearst College instead. (And, as Stanford people note, look what happened to her.)

This season, though, Stanford seems to have a decisive edge. On The CW's devilish comedy Reaper, a particularly annoying character doesn't get into Stanford; a homicidal villain in the pilot of NBC's time-travel drama Journeyman is pointedly identified as a Cal alumnus, and the producers plan to introduce a heroic Stanford alum later in the season.

But the real story is the defection of producer Josh Schwartz from the Cal ranks. Schwartz, who created the now-canceled The O.C., has a new show this fall called Chuck about a computer-nerd slacker who becomes America's secret weapon when all the government's national-security secrets are accidentally downloaded into his brain. Three characters, including the heroic Chuck, are Stanford grads; nobody went to Cal.

So what does this mean? Is NBC more of a Stanford network than Fox? (Almost all the narcotraffickers on NBC's Kingpin a few seasons back were Stanford grads, but it's hard to figure out whether that was academic flattery, or the reverse.) Or did Stanford pay off Schwartz? Or what? "Well, I'm a USC guy myself," shrugs Schwartz, "so I have absolutely no explanation for any of this."

**One other California school, Cal Tech, can claim elite status, but its graduates are all math-and-physics nerds who are practically impossible turn into TV show characters. This season, however, there's a big exception: The CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory is about blond hottie Kaley Cuoco being understandably but fruitlessly lusted after by a bunch of Cal Tech geeks whose idea of a hot Friday night is gathering to play Klingon Boggle.

Elvis 'n' me

It was 1977, and we could go see Elvis for 15 bucks -- or $12.50 if we wanted to cheap it out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Legally Blonde 3: Hail to the Hottie

So that's what was wrong with Commander In Chief: It should have starred Reese Witherspoon. When pollsters for the Lifetime network asked women aged 18 to 29 to name the woman who speaks for their generation, Witherspoon got more votes than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg or even the humanitarian hotlips Angelina Jolie.

The winner, however, was the ever-popular None of the Above, with 27 percent, followed by Oprah Winfrey (23 percent), Hillary Clinton (16 percent) and Condoleeza Rice (10 percent). The poll was taken in connection with Lifetime's Spotlight 25 special on the women of Generation Y, which airs March 26 at 8 p.m.

The 104-channel universe

A new study released by the Nielsen Company Monday says the average American home now gets 104 television channels. That's up eight channels over a year ago, and up 43 since the year 2000. Not that anybody watches them all -- the average family only really uses about 16 of those channels, Nielsen says, a figure that's been relatively constant since 2000. That suggests that when Congress finally gets around to considering proposals to force cable systems to offer so-called a la carte pricing -- that is, to allow consumers to order (and pay for) only the channels they want, instead of having to accept big programming packages devised by the cable systems -- there may be a lot of popular support for the idea. Why pay for 88 channels you never watch?

The study also says that 87 percent of Americans have their televisions hooked up to either cable or satellite. Keep that in mind some idiot (usually a politician or a sports columnist, two of America's most IQ-deprived demographics) starts screaming about how the move of NFL or major-league baseball games to a cable channel will deprive large chunks of the TV audience of the ability to watch. Of the 13 percent of Americans who don't have cable or satellite, a good chunk -- probably about half -- don't watch television at all. Americans who watch television consider cable not a luxury but a staple, and it's routinely present even in low-income homes. Time for the chattering classes to catch on.   

Screens: TV the week of March 18

This American Life (10:30 p.m. Thursday, Showtime) -- Public radio's oddest program comes to television. For 15 years, Ira Glass has been covering the eccentric and offbeat, a sort of cross between Charles Kuralt's old On The Road reports and News of the Weird. With this new series, we'll see how the determinedly unglamorous Glass does on camera.

The Whitest Kids U Know (11 p.m. Tuesday, Fuse) -- Couple anxiously awaits the outcome of a home pregnancy test. You look, says the girl, I'm too nervous. He examines it closely, then announces: "You peed on my iPod.'' What's the lesson here? Well, yeah, iPods are not pee-proof. But what I was going for is that if you like college-dorm humor, this is the show for you, and if you don't, stay away from The Whitest Kids U Know.

The Real Roswell (8 p.m. Wednesday, National Geographic) -- Did the U.S. Army really recover some corpses of space aliens from a UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947? Or was it, as the Army said, a weather balloon? This documentary promises to get to the bottom of a controversy that has raged among UFOlogists for six decades now. If it turns out that Roswell really was a hangout for extraterrestrials, this may explain the constantly expanding and mildly sinister bosom of local girl Demi Moore, though for a definitive answer we'll probably have to wait for The Real Ashton Kutcher.

How come my name's not on there?

What do Geraldo Rivera, Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Wolf Blitzer, Dr. Phil, Danny DeVito, Larry King, Martha Stewart, Carson Daly, Dick Vitale and Satan have in common, besides being powerful figures in the broadcast industry? Well, they've all been seeded in Paternity Madness, CelebrityHack.com's "Anna Nicole Baby Daddy Bracket."

How to save mass transit in America

UPI reports that Bulgaria has installed televisions at its bus stops which, late at night, show porn movies. Of course, if we tried that here, the TVs would probably show Nancy Grace -- screaming at people, I mean, not doing three-ways with midgets and circus ponies. Though if CNN thought that would attract the 18-to-34 demo, they'd probably give it try.

The Changing Channels Guide to Getting Rich Quick

When Donald Trump appeared on the critics' tour last week, he advised us all to get into the real estate market. "North America is not in a property bubble," Trump said. "New York City is doing fantastically well. I have a big job going up in Los Angeles. That's doing very well. There are certain sections of the country that aren't doing well, but it's nothing like it was in the early '90s. That was a bubble." I'd add more, but I have to run off and put in a bid on Radio City Music Hall.

Trump also offered his perspective on the energy market. "An amazing thing that's happening right now, as you know, fuel prices are going lower," he said. "But don't worry about that; they're doing that purposely to kill the alternative energy sources. As soon as alternative energy stops, they'll raise the prices again." I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic, but then, that's what I thought when he said he was going to buy the Miss America pageant.

Even Donna Reed looked hotter as a spinster librarian

Watching It's A Wonderful Life last night, I wondered if I'm the only guy who finds Bedford Falls to be a much more interesting town in its incarnation as Pottersville. I mean, look at all those businesses Jimmy Stewart runs past: bars, pool halls, taxi dancers, burlesque shows, strip clubs. (Oddly, there's also a little American Airlines office. Probably they had really hot stewardesses back then.) Even Martini's little joint, as Nick's, has switched over from Italian accordion music to boogie-woogie piano.

Whatever. Gotta go play with my new remote now, which enables me to tune every television in a 10-block radius to Friends reruns. Merry Christmas.

Attention Holly Marie Combs foot fetishists!

Charmed may be gone, but its commercial afterlife continues. A huge collection of props and other stuff harvested from the set when the show closed down last spring after eight seasons has just hit the memorabilia site It's A Wrap, including the coroner's tag attached to the cute little toe of Piper when she (briefly) croaked in one episode. There's also some stuff from that dating service the demon Succubus was using to -- well, let's not get into it, but anyway, won't it be a surprise when your blind date from Match.com comes in for a drink and finds it on your coffee table.

Why newspapers are better than TV newscasts

Reuters just moved a story that begins: "Dancing and singing eunuchs are knocking on doors in the Indian city of Patna in a bid to embarrass shopkeepers into paying their taxes." Come on, you're never going to get that from 60 Minutes.

Just when you thought Americans were dumbing down...

A new poll conducted for AMC in connection with its MonsterFest orgy of horror movies gives us hope for the future of Western civilization. Asked who in all the world they would most like to see chopped to bits, eaten, infested with snakes in every body cavity or otherwise victimized in a horror movie,  Americans chose not Osama bin Laden or Kim Jong-il or even their local cable company, but...Paris Hilton. Lindsay Lohan was a distant second, with Simon Cowell close behind. If only presidential voters would show such careful consideration and mature judgment, would this country rock or what?

The pollsters also asked about the scariest movie moment of all time. Winner: the shower scene in Psycho, just ahead of the mean ghostie girl crawling out of the TV in The Ring. Third was Jack Nicholson screaming "Here's Johnny!" as he chops through the door in The Shining, followed by  Jason jumping out of the lake in Friday the 13th and my own fave, the hand popping out of the ground at the end of Carrie. Hey, maybe I should have put a spoiler alert up at the beginning of this paragraph. Nah, what's the fun in that? By the way, Rosebud is a sled.

Dave Barry must be stopped!

Exposing the practically unfathomable evil of Dave Barry and his plot to take over the world, one booger at a time, is not, strictly speaking, within the purview of a television blog -- that's what my editors say. To which I reply: 1. Dave Barry's plan for world conquest and subjugation is so heinous and depraved that even the crucial task of writing about The O.C. and Veronica Mars must be put side momentarily in order to stop it, and anyway, 2. Dave's World.

So it is that I invite you join me saluting the heroic Anti-Dave Freedom Fighters of Marquette University, who struck a major blow for our cause recently when they demanded that a grad student in the philosophy department remove a "patently offensive" Barry quote that was posted on his office door. Ordinarily this is a family-friendly blog (provided you are a member of the Manson Family) but for you to understand the magnitude of Dave's offensiveness, I'm going to have to reprint his repugnant words here. Women, children and Parents Television Council members, avert your eyes NOW.

As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.

Whew. Okay, it's safe to look again. Gad, can you imagine if some innocent Marquette philosophy student had been inadvertently exposed to that tirade? Fortunately, they are under the brave and benevolent protection of Thought Police Chief James South, the chairman of the school's philosophy department, who quickly warned the grad student who put up the offending quote that Marquette is not some anarchic hellhole where people can just go around saying what they think. "While I am a strong supporter of academic freedom, I’m afraid that hallways and office doors are not 'free-speech zones,' " South explained. "If material is patently offensive and has no obvious academic import or university sanction, I have little choice but to take note." Subversive groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are trying to undermine South, but I'm confident Marquette doorways will soon once again be safe for readers of Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky and Family Circus.

By the way, I myself am an early Anti-Dave Freedom Fighter. I may be the first investigative journalist to have exposed his troubling obsession with sex with dogs.

The season so far

CBS may have been the first network to cancel a new series this fall (rest in peace, Smith) but don't let that mislead you: After four weeks of the new season, CBS is on top of the Nielsens, averaging 13.28 million prime-time viewers to ABC's 11.49 million. In third is NBC with 10.51 million, while Fox, biding its time until American Idol comes back, is last with 7.63 million. ABC has a tiny lead in the viewers advertisers like, the ones aged 18 to 49. Or, as I like to call them, young airheads. Ha ha! Just teasing. As everybody knows, the designation "airhead" has nothing to do with age, but is specifically linked to whether you're from Arizona.

Wait till the Parents Television Council hears about THIS

Sometimes even a grizzled, cynical TV critic is shocked by the open depravity of modern television. For instance, this photo just arrived from a publicist, along with a note: "For your consideration, please find the attached photo of Rachael Ray and singer Jessica Simpson coking on the set of Rachael’s new daytime show." Man, remember when TV stars at least did this stuff in their dressing rooms between takes? Well, at least we know why Rachel's always so bubbly and enthusiastic. This episode airs on Monday, Oct. 16, by the way, if you're like an NYPD vice squad officer or something.

ABC's story about murder in Iraq

In a story scheduled to air this evening on World News with Charles Gibson and  Nightline, ABC will show home video of an attack on a Halliburton truck convoy by Iraqi insurgents that, some witnesses say, was abandoned by its U.S. military escorts. After the troops left, three unarmed Halliburton truck drivers were executed by the insurgents, says a surviving driver interviewed in the report. "They was murdered," says Preston Wheeler of Mena, Ark. "To me, they was murdered." Wheeler, who since has been fired by Halliburton, says the company told him not to talk about the attack and that one of its security guards wanted to delete his video footage of the ambush. "He was afraid it was going to get on the Internet," Wheeler says. Well, what are the chances of that?

Quite aside from the controversial nature of its charges, this report is liable to become the linchpin of a whole new generation of conspiracy theories that cut across all known ideological lines. Not only does it involve Halliburton, which left-wing conspiracy nuts believe rules the world, but the surviving truckdriver comes from Mena, Ark., the little town that was at the center of numerous paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton, drug trafficking, murders and possibly space aliens. Fasten your seatbelts.

Rush Limbaugh. Katie Couric. Sex.

Welcome to my new blog, yet another attempt by the mainstream media to crush and devour all possible alternatives and force you to read us, us, nothing but us. We know there are lots of other places besides the Miami Herald where you could read about television. Don't do it. They're all liars, frauds, charlatans and swine.** We are going to hunt them down one by one, suck their blood dry, and cast their flimsy corpses aside until eventually you can type any URL you want into your browser and it will still take you right here to this very site.

I know, I know. You're nodding your head in agreement, pleased to hear that a cosmic power is going to smite all those other TV critic pretenders, and yet wondering, what about Katie and Rush and the sex part? Because, let's face it, the only reason you're reading the first entry in a brand-new blog is that you're some kind of deviant who goes around Googling "Rush Limbaugh" and "Katie Couric" and sex, and this is the only entry that turned up. (It is, isn't it? If you found others, let me know. I'd like to read a story like that.)

Well, the ugly truth is that I just put all that stuff in the title because they told me to use specific, popular terms that would turn up in search engines. Nobody said they had to be true, or have any actual real-world linkage. So if you feel misled or exploited, tough. The letter of the law, that's what we go by around here.

So check back later. There might be an item with actual content. Or, better yet, a reader may have posted a link to a genuine Rush-Katie-sex item that we can all read and discuss. Whatever. As they used to say on one of those Star Trek spinoffs that you Internet geeks dear and faithful readers always watched, resistance is futile.

** Technically speaking, this does not cover critics at other McClatchy newspapers, though you know I'm only saying that because I'm a corporate tool who wants to puff smoke up his plutocratic fascist bosses' behinds.