It’s the Readathon month, which means kids are commanded to read as much as possible to raise money for the school. Last year they raised over $160K. Yes, that much. So the pressure’s on to top that number, just like a telethon, although the principal doesn’t slump in a chair with a cigarette and bawl while singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” – which seemed a curious choice for the MD Telethon, because, well, you know.

So the child is reading a lot. She prefers to write. I asked her why: she said there’s more imagination involved in writing. True, in a sense, but also a dodge. Get Reading! Stop writing, and get reading! She has quickly turned this into a clever cudgel: time to practice piano. But I’m reading! Clean your room. But I’m reading! You want me to read, don’t you? Sigh.

At night she sketches a bit before bed. This may be my favorite, ever: the dog.

(Yes, she has a proper sketch book, but she likes to use this book when drawing in bed)

Good day – got up at o-dark-hundred, got the paper. Thin, as Monday papers usually are, but it’s odd to start your day with a weight-based evaluation of your employer’s situation. Snow and lots of it – nothing like the pounding the East Coast got, of course, and it’s fluffy as a kitten. A 900 ton kitten fed to a giant industrial fan. No, there would be blood. Well, you know what I mean. Drove to work with the wonderful calm feeling you get when you know everyone’s going to be late. First order of business:

Go outside and stand in the snow and talk about how it’s snowing. Don’t misunderstand me: I love to do this stuff. I love to do weather. If all goes well I’ll be doing a short weather segment for the Strib site every day, complete with big graphics and forecasts and all that stuff. Not that I’m a weather junkie with all that stuff about baronometrical pressures: no. I just want to be a TV weatherman.

Then I banged together a script about the Superbowl TV ads, ran down to the studio; miked up, stood in one place while the lighting was adjusted with great care, faced the TeLeProMptErs, and here you go.

The stats are in for last month, and the newspaper had (Dr. Evil voice) 100 meeeelion page views. That is sweet. Seriously:100 million. So, YEAH. This doesn’t mean we’re heading into our third century with eff-u cash in the vault and vats of caviar wheeled through the newsroom, but for a local media company it’s very nice news. I feel better working for a newspaper than a magazine, since a great number of large famous titles have done a header off a cliff: Newsweek (or Newsreek, as we called it in high school) had single-copy decline of 41 percent. FORTY. ONE. PERCENT. The total number of copies sold was 62K per week, which is smaller than the population of the Fargo-Moorhead area. Imagine the country. Now imagine the Upper Midwest. Focus on a small blip of humanity in the empty prairie. Imagine that half the people are buying your magazine. Not reading it all: just buying it. Now zoom out to the entire country again.

Now imagine you have a more venerable competitor who’s doing better.

Now imagine you’re US News and World Reports. (Or “Useless News and World Distorts,” as we called it in high school.)

A shakeout is coming in the next year, to state the obvious, but it’s not the first time. Every horrid economic contraction brings a die-off, as bad economics combine with shifting tastes to winnow the herd. The last big die-off took away Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post – each of which was a staple in the magazine rack by Father’s Chair or the coffee table. I think part of it was self-inflicted, though – for magazines devoted to graphics, they got ugly in the 60s and 70s, and coupled with the uglification of the ads they lost their snap and pizzazz. I wonder: if someone put out a magazine like Life today, but gave it the feel of the 40s – hand-drawn ads bursting with color that seemed to contain real people purchasing and enjoying real products, as opposed to static conceptual illustrations of a product, would they do well? I may be a romantic, but I believe that good graphic design can save a product or bring it back, and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of talent. There’s a shortage of inspiration in the MadAv world, as evidenced by the Superbowl ads. Make every issue a McSweeney’s Panorama.

No, we can do it on the web! True, but some web ads that are really, really attaining subcutaneous-irritant status. They’re not as ubiquitous as the ads that tell you how to avoid paying for white teeth by following one rule about akai berries, but oy. The first:

Since we have a small rodent in the house, I can assure you they’re mostly unaware of government refinance initiatives, and hence require the occasion prod. But leaving side the use of this creature to snare your eye, what’s the deal with the date? 9/10? Is that in The Future, or is it a reference to September 10th, and hence a suggestion that you’re locked into a bad mortgage because you have a pre-9/11 mentality?

We move on:

The reason this guy drives less than two hours a day is because he is locked up in a security facility, the result of a government program to create multiple clones of Steve Wozniak using electro-stimulated bio-putty. Never could get the mouth right; doomed the whole thing.

There’s this one, which prompts me to posit one simple idea: your nipples should not be equidistant between the top of your shoulders and your belly button.

Hipster men with bohemian grooming standards! APRs have never been lower!


Since I’ve been collecting these, I’ve noticed a fall-off in the ones that employ the hortatory invocation of the President. Wonder if there’s a program that swaps ads in and out based on daily tracking polls among independents. Hey: it’s the future of advertising. Everyone has to be nimble now.

Speaking of which, click on the ads! Can’t hurt. Later today: Comic Sins, and an update of 1930 Magazine Ads. See you in a bit.

Meet Uncle William! Go HERE.

I am backstage at this place:

It’s around the corner from this tableau in my beloved Minneapolis:

It’s a trick – the two tall buildings in the middle-ground aren’t the same size, and the slender tower in the middle is taller than the buildings on the right. Yes, Sunday was another gig at Orchestra Hall, the thirty-somethingth time I’ve done this. En route I realized I’d forgotten to wear a belt. I took that as an omen.

Sure enough: the first time I mentioned a composer, it was the wrong one (script was wrong) and when it came time to introduce an actual living composer, he was nowhere to be found. We were supposed to have an interview on the stage. Much dead air. Huge, elephantine, loud, dead air. I went to Plan B, which consisted of “not interviewing the composer,” and on went the show. If this had happened the first few times I did this, I think I would have soiled myself, but long ago this just became loose and fun, and today was fun. Waiting now to take my bow.

Odd weekend; nothing was normal. Friday we had company over, so the usual pizza routine was SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, and roll-with-the-punches-guy I’m not, this was a trial. Yet I managed. Somehow I got everything done for the website, and ended up watching “The Wrestler” until that hour of the day F. Scott Fitzgerald postulated was the constant time in the dark night of the soul. Moral of the movie: save your money, and don’t try to date strippers. I liked it a lot, inasmuch as something this downbeat and grim can be enjoyed; mostly you marvel at the ravaged, putty-faced bulked-up actor, who took the name of the long-gone actor “Mickey Rourke” and made a stunning debut. (Unless you believe that was actually Mickey Rourke. Hah!)

Looking for the exact Fitzgerald quote, I found a page of epigrams. Such as:

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I couldn’t disagree more. Well, I suppose it’s so for some, but for others they are the level plains from which we can see new ideas approach, and old ones recede.

Hmm: a bit clunky, but I get the point:

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

So many of his quotes sound like a drunkard’s regret, no? You can sense the man forcing his spiny sadness into the tiny lacquered box of a maxim. But he’s right; whenever we remember the past, we always forget to take something along: ourselves. We live each day with our own problems and hopes and doubts; why imagine it was different then?

On alkies:

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Well, he’d know. I remember once I was walking towards Times Square at night, and saw a young man in a tux leave a restaurant. He was heedless of all, gloriously smashed; he ranted and sang and yelled and staggered towards the bright lights, listing and tripping without ever planting his mug on the concrete. It was like watching a rocket out of control. Crowds parted. He may have ended up in the river; his last thought might have been ah jeez, I fell in the toilet.

This is the famous one:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

I don’t agree. The test of the first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, favor one, and not let it cloud your ability to understand the other.

This is the other famous one:

There are no second acts in American lives.

Tell that to Steve Jobs. Or Mickey Rourke.

Here’s the quote:

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

See, I like 3 o’clock in the morning. For one thing, it means I’m going to sleep, with much done or observed or thought or said. Granted, three o’clock in the morning is grim business if you’ve been drinking beer since noon. But if you’re working the overnight shift at the restaurant, it’s the hour when you have the place to yourself, the moment between the last mutterings of the previous day and the first stirrings of the next. To rule 3 AM is to rule the world – and at 3 AM the world is quite pliable, and amused by anyone who wants to take the scepter.

I like Fitzgerald – he’s a local boy, after all, and Gatsby was a North Dakotan. (Or so rumor had it.) I still think John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra” is a better novel of the 20s – “Gatsby” floats over its era, “Samarra” walks alongside. Fitz is always seen as a Symbol of the Jazz Age, because he was glamorous, his wife went nuts, and he cracked up, dying a beer drunk. But O’Hara was more typical of the people of the era: he went on working as best as he could with the tools that he had.

In the end, Daisy Buchanan was a bore, and Gatsby was a fable. You can read all the Doomed Romantic Notions you want into it, but remember the scene where they drive through the hellish burning ash-mounds en route to Manhattan? Turns out it had a second act of its own. And a third.

Saturday night we went to the History Theater to see some theater about History. It was a Gala Event, a fundraiser for a local hospital, and through my wife’s job we nabbed two seats at a table stocked with High-Powered Lawyers. You know it’s not a normal event when there’s an iron lung in the theater lobby.

Those things terrified me when I was a kid – the idea of being stuck in a metal tube all your life, probably in the living room, pooping in bags and watching TV upside down through a mirror: shudder. I grew up after the great Polio Scare; all the symbols of the polio panic (March of Dimes PSAs, matchbooks that had pictures of little girls with crutches) had faded away, but the horrifying power of the Iron Lung remained.

The main event of the evening was a play, of course, but first: dinner. I found myself seated next to a smart couple – he was a lawyer, she taught religion at a local college – and halfway through the conversation came that moment every writer lives for, the ol’ Dawning Realization. Turns out they were Constant Readers, to use the King term. As is often the case, they had no idea there was also a website. (Hi, guys! Hope you have fun exploring.)

The play was quite good, even though it had 12 child actors. It was the life story of Sister Kenny, who turned standard ideas of polio-treatment on their heads. Don’t immobilize; move the limbs. I knew nothing of her, and had assumed she was a Mother-Theresa-type nun moving through the ward in a wimple, hunched with humble piety, her name attached to the hospital because she’d set up a place to succor the stiff and the lame. Whoa no. First of all, “Sister” was a rank in the Australian nurses corps, and second, she was one of those force-of-nature types who brooks no nonsense, rails against the establishment, et cetera. She was played by the best actress in town, Claudia Wilkins, and the play was so well-staged you didn’t care that there were 12 child actors. I mention that only because some people find child actors to be unbearable no matter how good they are; you have to overcome your initial instinctive dislike of kids who are so obviously good at lying.

The tricky part? Dealing with the movie version of Sister Kenny’s life, where Rosalind Russell played the tireless, tempest-toss’d scold of ossified medical theories, and lotsa romance was thrown in. The tagline for the movie: A woman made for love . . . but whose service to humanity became her destiny! Sorta kinda yeah, but no. The play more or less said SHE WAS A LESBIAN, OKAY? It broached the subject with a scene of recollection whose pathos was so sharp it managed to make its point despite the booming detonation of chestal coughs from three different locations in the theater.

And now the week begins; gird up, get ready. New glasses on Tuesday. Yes, I will post pictures. It’s a whole new look.

Yes, it’s one of those days that’s Bleat-poor but link-rich. Fridays sometimes turn out that way. Thursday had the spirit and mood of Friday, though – I’m working at home on Friday, as I did often in the now-distant Golden Age – but it didn’t include any of the things I usually do Friday, like redesign sites, scan stuff, watch the B&W World movie, and such. As I’ve said before, I love Fridays because nothing is due on Saturday. Ever since the Bleat began, I’ve had a weekday deadline at the end of the night. I wonder if I would have started this if I’d known what it would mean. Probably. Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a link on Twitter, only to find it’s a link to a site that links to someone else’s site that copies something someone else said, then says “these people are insane” or “that’s a point more people should be making.” Drives me NUTS.

But I expect some people have set up automation routines that spit tweets when they update. They’re not alone. Today at the paper I was amused to see our website note that unemployment had gone up, “unexpectedly.” This is something of a jape in certain circles; any bad economic news about joblessness or housing seems to be “unexpected.” Since I sit right next to the tireless crack web-conductors who mediate the gush of the wires, I noted how “unexpected” is a rather . . . perennial term these days, ot derided for its inevitability, and doesn’t it constitute a wee bit, a tiny dram, of editorializing, no? Because in the back of my mind I’m thinking there will be bloggers who will say the paper is part of the TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED cabal that furthers this meme. As was explained: the program automatically scrapes the AP heads, and puts them on the page – and since AP constantly updates stories, any attempt to remove “unexpectedly” from one story would be countermanded in a tick, as soon as AP sent along another version. I did not know that. I learn things every day. Which is why it’s always amusing, and somewhat depressing, to hear people on the gauche and the droit make Wide Sweeping Assumptions about things they see on the site.

It’s excusable from people who’ve never worked in the media, but amusing from those who have. Especially if they’ve never worked in an actual daily paper.

Okay, I’m rambling. Here are the links for the day.

Comic Ads!

Sears 1934!

100 Mysteries!

The newspaper column, HERE.

The Diner! HERE. (It will explain the Pizza Hut matchbook above.)

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to listen to Beethoven’s 6th and replace some halogen bulbs. Be right back.

Back. As highminded as that sounded, it’s like this: I am writing in the kitchen on a laptop whose iTunes I barely stocked, and haven’t touched for two years. Good thing: the more choices, the more you’re paralyzed. This is okay, but I could be listening to something else. The laptop has the Fantasia soundtrack, which hits that rare nexus of childhood / Disney / Classical / Thirties, and is hence occasionally irresistible. The Beethoven led into “The Dance of the Hours,” playing now; it’s fascinating to hear the Fantasound mix bouncing between the two speakers on either side of my hands. I love that sequence – low comedy and middlebrow music, combined with backgrounds that look like a deserted vision of the World’s Fair: ostriches and alligators and elephants, oh my. But since this was the first time I heard the music, and since I listened to it again and again on the soundtrack (yes: bought it as a teen, at Broadway Music, a record store that inhabited a former movie theater where I’d first seen “Fantasia” during a previous re-re-release; the theater was a porn house that periodically showed Disney flicks as some odd form of penance. The soundtrack album was beautifully packaged, the disks thicker than usual, the paper sleeves so creamy you could slide out the album without a single static pop) I came to expect the real music to be the same as the edited or enhanced Disney versions. There’s a timpani thump in the “Dance of the Hours” sequence to indicate a hippo has fallen on her arse. If I’m listening to a version of the piece performed by an orchestra, I know where the thump is, I expect it, and I usually whap an imaginary mallet.

If my neighbors are watching from across the broad yard of Jasperwood, they just saw me imitate Chernobog at his moment of triumph in “Night on Bald Mountain.” The last part of the piece is really Sympathy for the Devil; you feel for the guy. Dawn is  a buzzkill when you’re uber-evil. Then the genius of “Ave Maria,” which I will always remember as the source of one of an embarrassing moment: standing in the Pantheon on Rome, arguing with a high-school classmate about whether Schubert or Schumann wrote it. She was right. I was wrong. I will always remember that I was wrong, in the Pantheon.

I am damned certain I have written all this before, how the movie begins with primordial abstractions, ends in divinity, and evaporates in the last bright brazing sunset of the last summer night of 1939. As much as it may pain some to admit it, the end of the Old World was directed by Walt.

Actually made it down this far? Congrats, and thanks! Now head back up and hit the links, and I’ll see you Monday.

Finally, I’m starting to see again. Went to get my head examined, subset eyeballs, tonight; all is fine. No chancres in the macular area, no glaucoma, the latter fact proved by an ultrasound exam. Yes, they ultrasounded my eyes. I’m carrying twins! The amount of sheer Technology thrown at me this visit was surprising; last time it was the hated puff-of-air in the eye, followed by a slow, tendentious exam: better? Worse? Same? Is it safe? This time I had the breeziest eye doc ever, a fellow with a line of patter and figures of speech that flowed like water from a spring. He could have sold me a car while he was at it.

But like all eye exams, the diagnosis consisted of a contradiction of the previous diagnosis. It’s all subjective, it seems, an art form, and every time I get my eyes checked the doctor questions the previous prescription. By my estimates I haven’t had the proper prescription for a DECADE, and 10 years ago I was fitted with glasses that were supposedly too strong. Never quite noticed the downside there. Oh, folks appeared as walking skeletons, sure, but otherwise no problem.

Anyway: I did the eye exam. I got the drops. I had the ultrasound. I peered into a camera that scanned my eyeballs for something or other. I had pictures taken of my optic nerve, splashed up on a monitor for my entertainment: here’s your nerve, here’s the gutters that transfer the information to your brain, here’s your macular part. Bad news: high pressure in the eyeball, which could be a precursor to glaucoma. Gosh, doc, what are the symptoms? He said: not many symptoms, unfortunately. You just go along, la da dah, then uh oh. But that’s when he gave me the ultrasound, and said “ah,” and sat down to explain: I had thick eye-walls. Most people have eye-walls that are 500 to 550 microns thick; mine were 650 microns thick. This distorted the eyeball pressure readings.

“Is this peer-reviewed stuff,” I asked, “or something the salesmen for the ultrasound machine say?” He assured me it was actual science. Other things he told me: the eyeglass racket is concentrated mostly in Italy; they own most of the brands. I could get the frames online for cheaper, and there was an advantage – they’re cheaper! – but here I paid for fitting and measuring and guarantees and not having to mail things back, and so on. And so on. Here’s the thing: the guy liked his job. He liked his work. He liked people. Garrulous, funny, ironic, and knowledgeable. (When I mentioned the high price of frames, he said “The prescription’s the technical part,” he said; he jerked a thumb towards to the door, indicating the showroom beyond. “Out there, it’s the jewelry store.”) Got in right away. Flat fee for the job. High-tech diagnostics. Perfect. I’d be wearing my new glasses now, except that -

Well, he was going through the various options, and made a long involved analogy between anti-reflective coating and chrome rims on a car. “You can’t see them. They don’t make the car run faster.” He shrugged: whatever you want; some people like the chrome rims.

“I’m in TV broadcasting now,” I said, amending it to ward off hubris: “On the internet. But we have lots of light on the set.”

I went with the chrome rims.

The salesguy said the frames looked good on me! but I had to ask if he ever told anyone their choice looked stupid.

“Oh yes,” he said. “But not like that. Maybe, like, oh I think this might be a better look.” But if Madame wanted a push-up rhinestone spangled bra and Madame wanted to pay, he’d write up the order. He got out a little machine that fitted over my eyes and did something, and wrote down some numbers. Took my insurance: it had a 25% discount! But the store was having a 30% sale. He recommended the sale price. I said that would be fine.

In seven to ten days, a new look.

Wonder if anyone will notice.

Busy day all around; didn’t get to posting the Black and White World. It’s below. Column night; I also spent a lot of time just talking with my wife, which cut into evening work – and, I watched an old “American Experience” documentary (available on Netflix streaming) about the crash of ‘29, with interviews of old cackling men who were on the trading floor when it all ended. We never learn: every boom ends with the patter of shrapnel.

Bleatplus is up. Here’s a taste to get you, yes you, to contribute to the site and get your password:

I found this at the antique store last weekend, along with several other old labels, examples of commonplace commercial design, the way the world looked. Remember how I’ve lamented how the details of ordinary life are mostly lost – the scents, the signs, the slang, the sound? When I was in the store’s basement I passed a booth where the seller was arranging things, and caught a strong tang of a bygone aroma. Stopped: whoa: what? She winced and said she’d dropped a small sample bottle of men’s cologne. It broke; the scent escaped. It was like the ghost of Dads Past – piney, astringent. It had a brief moment in the air before the ventilation system inhaled it and sent it away. For a moment, there it was. That’s the curator’s curse: the past is in the bottles. But you can never bring yourself to crack the seal. It takes an accident to catch a whiff of the truth. And then it’s gone.

Tomorrow: Sears 1934, Comic Ads, a column . . . and a surprise. I think. See you then; have a grand dat!

They were all blonde and loose in ancient Rome. You knew that, right? Go HERE.

At seventeen you need a better artist, too. They do a nice job of soft-pedalling the stuff’s true nature, which was the dreaded Cod-Liver Oil.

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What are they selling? Besides a regrettable argument for not finishing art school. Yes, this was a major ad for a major product in a major newspaper. Answer later today.

Child had an early piano lesson this week; afterwards we went to Perkin’s to eat. I did not take my iPhone.

“GOOD,” she said. “You always have your head down in that thing and you don’t even look up to say hello when I get off the bus.”

“That,” I said, “is an exaggeration. It happened twice and you called me on it both times. How many times have I been smiling and waving when you get off the bus, and I get nothing? Bupkis?”

“What’s bupkis?”

“Nothing.”

“Well it’s like you’re obsessed with your iPhone.” She picked at her quesidilla. “I don’t think you should get an iPad.”

“What? Why?”

“Well it just looks like a big iPhone and you have one.” Takes a bite. “It’s a waste of money.”

“I will not have you speak about Apple that way.”

Rolls eyes.

“It’s just a computer and you don’t need another computer. You have, like, a dozen.”

Good Lord. I don’t even get this from my wife. We have an understanding: she does not complain about occasional technological upgrades (the last of which was 2 years ago) and I do not point out that her clothes and shoes occupy 79% of the closet and drawer space in the house.

“It’s not just a computer. It’s a different machine. When you’re grown up this is the only sort of computer you’ll know. Besides, it’s a book reader. Lets me carry books and things around.”

“I like real books,” she said.

“So do I. But I always – listen. Back when I was in college in the previous century I carried around a big bag, and it had everything I needed – a book, about ten copies of magazines all smushed in the bottom, fountain pens, my journal, and it was a pain to lug it around. I’m even tired of carrying my computer around and it weighs five pounds.”

“I think you’re just saying that because you want it.”

Couldn’t really argue with that. So we talked about cartoons we couldn’t stand but that she used to like, cartoons we always hated (Ed, Edd, and Eddy is back on TV, but Rolie Polie Ollie isn’t: the world has gone mad) and the problems of the Pokemon stories. I imitated Xx, who always sounds like the guy who voices Nelson Muntz trying not to be Nelson Muntz. “‘I’m walking in a forest to get to Sapphire City where we can go to a gym and train Pokemon! Meanwhile I’ll keep them squished in a dark cold ball until I let them out so they can fight other Pokemon until someone faints.’ And what does Brock do, anyway? Why doesn’t anyone have a job?”

A year ago she would have given me the hairy eyeball; now she grins and says “I know.”

She likes talking about these things, of course. It’s, er, validating, and we can Bond. I imagine if I’d talked with my dad about Tom Swift it would have been the same, but in those days Fathers occupied their own stratum of popular culture. We discussed the “Back to the Future” movies, which she’d recently seen. Loved the first, liked the third, hated the second. HATED it. But was interested by it. Bifftown was horrifying but fascinating to her, but Biff just wasn’t dumb and mean, he was EVIL, and that made the movie much different. Her favorite character was Marty. Who was yours?

Besides Jennifer #1, decked out in high-80s garb and hair? “Doc Brown,” I said. Great Scott! ONE POINT TWENNY ONE JIGAWATTS! “

“Yeah.” Grins. “But Marty’s mom in the past was kind of a pervert.”

Oh my look at the time. I picked up a triangular slice of quesadilla and hummed the Imperial March and said “It’s an Imperial Star Cruiser” and then attacked it with two french fries made into an X-wing fighter. PEW PEW PEW. Poured some salsa on it. “Oh look everyone on the bridge is dead.”

This sent her into stitches: salsa standing in for Imperial bridge crew in Dead Form. Got us off Mom-as-perv, anyway. That was possibly the best reaction to anything I did all day, and damn, it was full: did the Newsbreak in the morning, and since it was Groundhog Day I ended the show, then started it right over again with the same script, but with a vague sense of deja vu. I’m not an actor so the concept of “act like you’re having deja vu” is something you just have to . . . Do, and hope it works. Then we reset the studio and did an interview with two reporters who did a huge fantastic story on a Minnesota National Guard unit in Afghanistan. They’re on the sofa, I’m in the Host Chair, and once again, I get that Krusty-the-Klown-seriously-interviewing-Lane-Kirkland vibe, but what can you do. Then I ran upstairs, wrote the headlines, did the quick headlines intro for the Newsbreak. Lunch: a pathetic sandwich and a warm Coke. No time: have to finish the Ringo story.

See, Ringo wore a T-shirt on the Grammies, and it had a logo of a local record store. Shot the record-store part yesterday, as I said; today we interviewed his relative, the guy who sent him the shirt. He works in the building. Alas, the fellow decided at the last minute he didn’t want to do it, since he had not volunteered his role in the first place and was really not interested in getting this out there with his name and face and all. Quick huddle, quick rethink – did a walk-and-talk in the office, employing my favorite trick: walking backwards WHILE talking. Whoa! It’s here.

And that was that.

And this is this; more later, with Out of Context Ad Challenge coming your way around 10 or so, with Black and White World to follow.

Topic for discussion: cartoons today are better. Or worse. It’s hardly fair to compare everything to the golden age of Warner Bros., no? I grew up with Frankenstein Jr., and the rest of the crap-batch turned out by H-B. Better stuff since then? Oh yes.

There, there. HERE.