In Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd (as Dr. Raymond Stantz) and Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddmore) had this exchange while riding in the Ectomobile on the way to incarcerating various Focused Non-Terminal Repeating Phantasms, and Class Five Full-Roaming Vapors:

Winston: Hey, Ray. Do you remember something in the Bible about the last days, when the dead would rise from the grave?
Ray: I remember Revelation 7:12. And I looked, as he opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth. And the moon became as blood.
Winston: And the seas boiled and the skies fell.
Ray: Judgment Day.
Winston: Judgment Day.

Guardian blog contributor Susan Blackmore - whose website proudly describes her as "Dr." (the honorific having been earned with her acquisition of a PhD in parapsychology, a field since abandoned in favour of the equally relevant "memetics") - has, seemingly unwittingly, solved one of the thorniest moral dilemmas surrounding the inevitable human suffering resulting from climate change: How should residents of Great Britain respond?

* * *

Dr. Blackmore (pictured), proud winner of the prestigious 2005 Spirit and Sky "Best Spiritual Site" award, gets right to the point - immediately establishing credibility by citing an equally qualified commentator on climate change:

"The archbishop was right about climate change on the Today programme this morning. In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades."

At which point an unkind reader is tempted to point out that this is no doubt true - billions will certainly die in the next few decades. Over the next five of them, for example, we'd expect no less than 3 billion to die if things stay pretty much as they are now.

Such an objection would be unfair, of course - what Dr. Blackmore really intended to say is that billions more than that three billion will die. She knows this:

"I know this. The science has been building up for years and is now clear. When sea levels rise further millions will drown, when the deserts grow bigger millions will starve, when the glaciers end their present flood of excess melt water vast cities will become uninhabitable almost overnight."

Ed Morrissey writes:

Today the Democrats launched their mission to revamp their image on security and national defense. They have long complained about a national perception of their party as wimpish, but Cynthia McKinney decided to set the record straight -- by slugging a cop:

According to two sources on Capitol Hill, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., walked through a metal detector in a House of Representatives office building. When an officer asked her to stop, McKinney kept walking. The officer followed her and tapped her on the shoulder.

McKinney then allegedly turned around and hit the officer in his chest with her cell phone..

Members of Congress are not required to stop for the metal detectors, but that policy should change soon. Obviously, some members have less emotional stability than others. Cynthia McKinney probably has less than anyone.

In the freewheeling early days of this blog, we were quick to give last rights to MSNBC. Perhaps we were premature, as Don Singleton notes that MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann has beaten CNN's Paula Zahn in the ratings.

MSNBC lives! Cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra"!

(On the other hand, Singleton reports that Fox News is still ratings king on cable; meanwhile, Clive Davis wonders why they can't spin-off a version of FNC for the UK market.)

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Michael Ware, Iraq bureau chief for Time Magazine yesterday, via phone--as Ware is currently in Baghdad. Needless to say, there were several troubling comments from Ware; this might be the worst:

HH: Because we talked about this on CNN. Do you think Iraq is better off today, just...than it was under Saddam? Do you think that...

MW: Well, I was never here under Saddam. My period during Saddam's regime was in the Kurdish North, where with U.S. air cover, they've forged their own autonomous sanctuaries. So I never lived under Saddam, and I can only imagine what the horrors were like, and what the restrictions were like. All I can tell you that life here right now is extraordinarily difficult, and there's a lot of killing going on, and there's a lot of deprivation going on, and to be able to compare that to something I never saw is a bit difficult for me.

HH: Well, do you think the Russian people were better under Krushchev than they were under Stalin? Neither of us saw Kruschev or Stalin, but both of us...

MW: Yeah, I wouldn't have a clue, you know?

Tim Blair spots yet another great moment in journalism at the New York Times:

One way to collect nasal secretions from a ferret is to anesthetize it, hold a petri dish under its snout and squirt a little salt water up its nose so that it will sneeze into the dish.

Mark Steyn mentions Orrin Judd's new book in his column in Canada's Maclean's magazine:

In Redefining Sovereignty, Orrin C. Judd brings together a splendid collection of essays on the tension between national sovereignty and the new transnational entities. Full disclosure: there's an approving quote from me on the front of the book, but other than that I have no stake in its success or failure; don't know Mr. Judd, nor most of his stellar contributors, from Václav Havel and Jesse Helms to Francis Fukuyama and Kofi Annan. The token Canadian is a good choice: David Warren, represented by a fine essay yoking Bush's approach to Islamism with Lincoln's to the Civil War -- liberating the Middle East is not the point of the exercise, any more than liberating the slaves was. But in both cases it was necessary to fulfill the strategic objectives of saving the Union a century and a half ago, and of saving the nation-state system today. As another contributor, Lee Harris, puts it, "The liberal world system has collapsed internally." He means that there are no longer, in Kant's phrase, "maxims of prudence." That's to say, we don't know the limits of behaviour. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we cannot reliably assure ourselves (though many foolish experts do) that this is just a bit of rhetorical red meat, a little playing to the gallery for the Saturday-night jihad crowd.

The transnational gabfests aren't much use in this new world. The Kyoto treaty is, in that sense, the quintessential expression of the higher multilateralism: the point of Kyoto is not to do anything about "climate change," but to give the impression of doing something about it, at great expense. If climate change is a pressing issue and if the global economy is responsible -- two pretty big "ifs" -- then Kyoto expends enormous (diplomatic) energy and (fiscal) resources doing nothing about it: even if those who signed on to it actually complied with it instead of just pretending to, all that would happen is that by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07 degrees -- an amount that's statistically undetectable within annual climate variation.

That's fine for "climate change," which, insofar as there is an imminent threat, is a good half-millennium away. As Kofi Annan, the bespoke embodiment of transnationalism's polite fictions, says, "There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations." Which is swell if your priority is "legitimacy." That and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee -- unless the tsunami hits and sweeps the lunch counter out to sea. Yet these days, even with natural disasters, the international order divides -- like Bagehot's view of the British constitution -- into its "dignified" and "efficient" halves. The efficient humanitarians -- the Pentagon and the Royal Australian Navy -- have boots on the ground in Indonesia and Sri Lanka within hours, rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. The dignified humanitarians -- the UN's 24/7 permanent humanitarian bureaucracy -- are back in New York holding press conferences to announce they'll be sending a top-level situation-assessment team to the general vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as the USAF emergency team has flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel.

Kofi Annan referred to the UN's "unique legitimacy," and he's right about the "unique" part. The transnational system, in insisting that the foreign minister of Syria is no different from the foreign minister of Denmark, confers a wholly unmerited legitimacy on the planet's gangster states. In Redefining Sovereignty, Roger Scruton wonders of Saddam "how it is that a petty tyrant could have defied the world for so long." But, if "the world" is represented by the UN's "unique legitimacy," you don't have to defy it, you just have to strike a deal -- in this case, the Oil-for-Food program, that Hydra-headed racket under which, among other fascinating codicils and appendices, a million greenbacks from Saddam got funnelled via his Korean chum Tongsun Park into a Canadian petroleum company run by the son of the quintessential transnational Canadian Maurice Strong -- Mister Kyoto himself.

Based on current trends, by mid-century, America, India and China will each be producing roughly 25 per cent of world GDP, with Europe down to 10 per cent. As the columnist John O'Sullivan points out, the three global powerhouses are all strongly attached to traditional notions of national sovereignty, so Europeans and others who've bet on transnationalism have the next 10 years to cement its existing institutions and expand its reach. A worldwide eco-tax? Global gun control? Meanwhile, back in the real world, from terrorism to tsunamis, effective multilateralism is now the province of "coalitions of the willing." I'd like to think the Prime Minister's trip to Afghanistan was a first step toward the side of real global leadership.

The Anchoress writes that Italy's Premier Silvio Berlusconi said that he believes Rahman "arrived overnight".

While I would love to see Rahman ultimately emigrate to the US, he might want to hold off on visiting Yale or San Francisco for the moment.

Theodore Dalrymple once quipped that tattoos are a "refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong". Surely, there's no better example to prove Dalymple's thesis than this:

While perusing the office copy of People magazine at lunch today I saw that "actor" Dean McDermott has a brand new tattoo dedicated to his fiance (grotesque nepotoid Tori Spelling) emblazoned on his left arm. Well...I suppose "dedicated to his fiance" may be over-simplifying things a bit as the tattoo actually depicts Tori's entire head as well as most of her rather ample breasts.

In the People piece, Tori remarks about how much she likes her beau's latest inkblot because of how cool it will be for their grandchildren to be able to see what their grandmother looked like when she was young (I'm paraphrasing, so Tori's comment probably sounded even more inane than what you just read).

Now, despite the fact that the woman has appeared in countless horrible made-for-TV movies, equally countless horribly bad films and the wildly successful yet horribly horrible television series Beverly Hills, 90210, she may have a point about this single ridiculous tattoo preserving her image for the ages. If God does indeed exist, surely he'll someday lay waste to Tori's entire body of work leaving future generations with nothing but however much ink remains in McDermott's aging and flabby flesh to recall one of the late 20th century's most truly wretched performers.

When engaged to Winona Ryder, he had "Winona forever" tattooed on his arm. After the broke up, he had the n and a surgically removed to simply say "Wino forever!"

Bill Nienhuis writes:

The Democrats have promised that if they are reelected in 2006, they will ‘eliminate’ Osama bin Laden and ‘ensure’ a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Removing bin Laden is a one trick pony approach to fighting terrorism. It’s a law enforcement solution which might work if we’re talking about cleaning up a neighborhood by taking out the guy who runs the crack house down the street. Unfortunately for the Democrats, terrorism can’t be localized like this. There are other neighborhoods and thousands of guys who run crack houses. There are other countries and a million terrorists.

When Democrats talk about a withdrawal from Iraq, its not about bringing troops home and preventing further death. It’s not about freeing the Iraqi people from U.S. occupation. It’s not about “playing nice” in the hopes that the French, Spanish and the Russians like us again. To Democrats, a withdrawal from Iraq is about stopping terrorism. They believe a redeployment of troops to other parts of the world sends a message of peace which will soften the hearts of terrorist groups and lessen the risk of further attacks. By pushing this ‘solution’ the Democrats do nothing to disprove the fact that they completely misunderstand the terrorist mentality.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Update: TigerHawk adds:

For the span of a generation -- a longer period than the politically conscious lives of the great majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world -- America has fled from conflict in a part of the world where weakness earns contempt and begets more aggression, not less. On September 11, 2001 we reaped the whirlwind. So, whatever our strategy in the long war -- and you will read no argument here that it cannot be improved upon -- we must end Hassan Abbasi's helicopter metaphor. Helicopters can stand for different things. Let them no longer conjure the image of "fleeing Americans."

Betsy Newmark writes:

It's good to know that I'm not alone in having my blog deleted and someone else take over my URL. Blogger did the same thing to the official Google blog!

* * *

You can't go around deleting yourselves. It gets just too existentially weird.

The Freepers have an interesting look at some of the techniques used to inject bias and opinion into what should be a straight piece of newspaper reporting.

On another front in the language wars, The Anchoress notes that the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" have fallen prey to the forces of political correctness.

As she writes, "God forbid we should feel a little bad…"

At the risk of sounding Xenuphobic, this is just bizarre:

Tom Cruise’s pregnant fiancée Katie Holmes will be reminded to keep her vow of silence during birth — by signs plastered around their home.

The couple — following the Scientology tradition of a silent birth — had the posters delivered to their Beverly Hills mansion.

The 6ft placards will be placed so Katie can see them in labour.

One reads: “Be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable.”

Dawson’s Creek actress Katie, 26, must “keep mum” and will not even be allowed painkillers when she has the couple’s first child due any day.

Friends — believed to be Scientology elders — were pictured carrying the huge white boards through the gates.

Update: Michelle Malkin has several more examples of "Hollyweirdos On Parade".

The Ayn Rand-oriented magazine, The New Individualist apparently has become the first publication in the US to run that cartoon on its cover.

With mass media having been replaced by so many niche publications and targeted magazines and newspapers, it's increasingly much more difficult to keep information bottled up. While most of the major TV networks and newspapers have chosen (for whatever reason) not to run the cartoons, there are simply too many sources (both on dead tree and online) to keep them under entirely under wraps.

(Via Stephen Green.)

If Glenn Reynolds' new An Army of Davids reflects what Alvin Toffler would call the coming “prosumer” society, then Toffler’s own Revolutionary Wealth, due out in late April, is about how “prosumption” will radically transform the world’s economy. Chapter Eight of my galley copy begins with this passage, which might ring a few bells to regular readers of the Blogosphere:

The American Airlines 757 was approaching the Rocky Mountains on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles when suddenly passenger Michael Tighe’s arm and head lurched into the aisle. His wife, a nurse, who was sitting alongside him, immediately knew something terrible was about to happen. Tighe’s heart had begun beating erratically, failing to send an adequate blood supply to his brain. Tighe, sixty-two, was at the edge of death when flight personnel appeared with a laptop-sized device.

Attaching electrical leads to his body, they shocked him--once, twice, several times--and literally brought him back to life, making him the first person to be saved in-flight by a defibrillator. It had been installed on the plane only two days earlier.

Like the human heart, societies and economies, too, are subject to premature beats, local tachycardias, fibrillations and flutters, as well as “chaotic” irregularities and paroxysms…

Jeff Jarvis attends a speech by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, and notes that to most aficionados of blogs, "there’s not much unheard-of in his speech — except that you won’t hear any of it coming from the mouths of editors elsewhere". Here's but a sample:

Cue picture of Craig Newmark. Russbridger explains Craigslist, its impact on the newspaper industry, and its “very unusual business model: It’s free to both sides…. Now that’s a difficult business model to beat.” He says that “the people who are really terrified of Craig Newmark are The New York Times.” [They're far from the only ones, of course--Ed] He explains that job ads on Craigslist in three cities cost $20 — and that adds up to $10 million a year among 18 employees, he estimates. Then he demonstrates ordering a deluxe $958 ad on the NY Times site — he makes up a call for journalists to work in Guardian America, “and I told them to apply to C.P. Scott in Manchester” (the Guardian’s legendary editor of 57 years). The contrast continues: He shows pictures of Craig’s humble headquarters and the new Times headquarters — “and you see the nature of The New York Times’ problem.” Of course, falling advertising is the problem. Rusbridger reviews the history of newspapers. In Britain, in the beginning, newspapers were supported by their politicians until “advertisers gave newspapers a form of independence.” But now those advertisers are going elsewhere. “There are great, bleeding chunks going out of newspaper revenue at a time when sales are down…. Most journalists are finally getting this The penny is finally dropping….

But he continues: “They’re not necessarily quite up with the next bit, which is about the changing nature of editorial. And this is a thing which is more difficult to grasp and for journalists in a way much more threatening. And I think we’re only at the beginning of trying to figure what this one is all about.”

He calls papers like The New York Times “a tablet of stone, it is a paper of great authority. And if you ever go to a New York Times editorial meeting, it’s a bit like a religious ceremony.” [That's rather ironic--Ed] He talks about the effort and resource that goes into the front page. “‘Believe us,’ is the message. If it goes onto the front page of The New York Times it’s there because it’s important…. ‘You may not want to read it but it’s our opinion.’ And this is a model that has existed again for a hundred years….

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Spot the odd man out in the photos printed onto T-shirts at this Chinese shop. Hint: of all the men featured in the shot, he's rather ironically at the far left of the photo, has got the best free kick technique, and has killed the least number of people.

Orrin Judd writes that Japan has "the immigration limits, trade protection, and isolation that our Left and far Right dream of". The consequences of which include a cratered-out stock market, household assets down 11% from '99, and the enticing prospect of a 22 percent sales tax by 2015.

It's enough to give one The Vapors...

And not even Hummels:

Hollywood activist SEAN PENN has a plastic doll of conservative US columnist ANN COULTER that he likes to abuse when angry. The Oscar-winner actor has hated Coulter ever since she blacklisted his director father LEO PENN in her book TREASON. [Huh? I'm pretty sure Hollywood blacklisted Leo Penn, not Ann, unless she used a time machine to go back to the late 1940s--Ed] And he takes out his frustrations with Coulter, who is a best-selling author, lawyer and television pundit, on the Barble-like doll. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Penn reveals, "We violate her. There are cigarette burns in some funny places. She's a pure snake-oil salesman. She doesn't believe a word she says."

Whenever I visit my parents, I end up spending far more downtime watching cable TV news than I normally do at home, and this past week was no exception. The invention of television 100 years or so ago was one of the great miracles of science, but the medium that's evolved to fill the vacuum tube is one of the worst ways ever devised to convey serious information. As Michael Medved noted shortly before the 2004 election:

Television is an inherently liberal medium. Visuals appeal to emotion, not reason; Bad news is more interesting than good news and it is also invites liberals to demand that government do something to solve the problem.

To mark the third anniversary of launching the war to depose Saddam Hussein, the manufacturers of the “news” have established their usual template, Realistic Media vs. Pollyanna Bush. It’s not pessimism versus optimism, but reality versus hallucination.

How, then do we greet the bleats of liberals as they wildly overstate the alleged utter awfulness of the war situation? On CNN, Time writer Joe Klein, one of the nation’s leading worshipers of Bill Clinton, declared to Anderson Cooper, “Rumsfeld ran the most criminally incompetent military campaign, you know, in the last 100 years, perhaps in American history.”

Was Klein making a display of chutzpah, or just of his own historical incompetence? How many incompetent military campaigns can we assign, just for starters, to Klein’s hero Clinton? The bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan? The “Black Hawk Down” fiasco and withdrawal in Somalia? What about Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage rescue that fell apart in the desert and humiliated an entire nation in the eyes of the world?

Klein might protest that the number of deaths don’t compete with the scale of Iraq war losses. Fine. What about Vietnam? Klein looks especially silly in rewinding back 100 years, 200 years in his emphasis on unparalleled military incompetence. Has he never read about the Civil War?

Thank God the likes of Joe Klein weren’t around 60 years ago. Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written that the Normandy campaign in 1944, seen today as so smashingly successful, would be painted as full of dramatic military blunders that were costing 2,500 American soldiers daily. Would Joe Klein like to insist that General Eisenhower or General Marshall should have resigned in disgrace?

Update: "TV vs history? TV was winning." Heh^TM.

City Journal's Nicole Gelinas explores the endless holding pattern that efforts to rebuild the World Trade Center are currently stuck in.

New Jersey's Lawhawk has some thoughts on this issue--and Mayor's Bloomberg's central role in impeding progress.

The Electoral College, that is: Ed Morrissey explains its role to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

As spotted by Charles Johnson:

From the Christian Science Monitor: "Conversion a thorny issue in Muslim world".

Regular blogging should resume tomorrow--if not sooner.

(Although I did a fair amount of blogging late this past week, via one of those Verizon wireless cards that the Professor frequently refers to. It worked flawlessly--and Wi-Fi-fast--in and near the airports yesterday and today, but was pretty rough in the suberbs, slower, and with plenty of disconnects and dropped pages. But it definitely beat dial-up speed.)

Update: Speaking of flying, Amy Alkon looks at what she describes as "the ultimate idiocy in recent memory"--and that's no exaggeration if it comes to pass. But I'd happily take airborne Wi-Fi on all flights.

Betsy Newmark catches The New York Times utterly astonished that Michael Steele is an African-American conservative:

The New York Times Magazine has a story on Michael Steele's candidacy to replace Paul Sarbanes as senator from Maryland. The title tells you the tone of the piece.

Why Is Michael Steele a Republican Candidate?

[Emphasis, via italics, in Times' headline--Ed]

There is that whole marveling tone as if the author is observing a circus performer and just can't figure the whole act out. The reporter dismisses Steele as not being any sort of usual candidate because all he's been has been Lieutenant Governor in a state where the Lt. Governor doesn't have much clout. So, apparently, the only thing Steele has going for him is his race. The reporter can't pin him down on policy proposals. Gee, does that bother the New York Time with other candidates like Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania? Or, for that matter, most Democratic incumbents running today?

* * *

Steele seems like a formidable candidate. And when you put him together with Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania and Ken Blackwell in Ohio, you can see why the Democrats are trying with all their might to portray these candidates as tokens pulled out of Karl Rove's bag of tricks. Note that Karl Rove's name appears twice in the first sentence of this story. At what point would that attitude to intelligent candidates who just happen to be both conservative and black seem so insultingly denigrating that it will back fire on the Democrats? Maybe not this year, but I predict that there will come a point that reporters will no longer report on a black Republican candidate as if he's a trick pony put forth by a masterful GOP magician.

Hollywood comedy writer and frequent NRO contributor Rob Long looks at YouTube and DIY video:

Right now, there are two kinds of people in the entertainment industry. Those who've heard of You Tube, and those who haven't. Which is to say that some of us are a little worried, and some of us aren't. Yet.

You Tube is a website, and yeah, for years people have been predicting that the web will eventually rewrite the rules -- and the economics -- of show business, but this time, maybe, it's really happening. You Tube is a little like Google Video, which is a little like a lot of other sites on the web, which are themselves a little like a mix of reality television, America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol, and tame soft-core pornography. You know: television as we know it.

I've seen some pretty clever things on You Tube lately. Someone somewhere recut a trailer for The Shining to make it seem like a heartwarming father-son tale. And someone else recut a trailer for Sleepless in Seattle to make it seem like a gripping Fatal Attraction-kind of thriller. And I think we've all seen the various trailer recuts of movies like Back to the Future or Top Gun with a strong Brokeback Mountain angle.

So a few weeks ago, on that lumbering occasionally funny warhorse, Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell made a short digital film parody of a rap video. It was called Lazy Sunday, and it was about two guys waking up late on Sunday and deciding to go see The Chronicles of Narnia, but set in the aggressive rap style. I'm not doing it justice, but it was pretty funny.

I didn't see it on the show, of course. I mean, Saturday Night Live is such a hit-or-miss thing -- I do what everybody does: I watch the first fifteen minutes and then turn it off. Right? After 11:45pm, the show just gets worse and worse -- it's been that way for 10 or 15 years -- so why bother?

I saw the clip on You Tube. Some kid somewhere took it off the TV and zapped it on the web, probably with the heading "This Was The Only Funny Thing on SNL Last Night" or something. So that's where I saw it. That's where a lot of people saw it, too, apparently, because it spawned a constellation of responses from all over the country -- people -- normal people, people NOT in the 212 or 310 area codes -- young men, mostly -- remember them? They're the ones who aren't watching TV anymore or going to the movies -- did their own versions of the sketch using the DV cam and the computer software they've been fiddling around with since Christmas...and it turns out that two guys from Indiana did one and zapped it up to You Tube and called it "Lazy Muncie" and it's pretty funny. I mean, funnier than anything that appears on Saturday Night Live after, say, 11:53pm. Funnier than the last Albert Brooks movie. Funnier than an episode of Joey.

So what does it say if you're Lorne Michaels -- the guy who runs Saturday Night Live -- or, for that matter, the head of comedy development for pretty much any network -- and it turns out there are two funny guys in Muncie who don't really need you to give them permission to make a funny little movie because You Tube is their network and You Tube doesn't have a vice president of comedy development to say, "Yeah, yeah, um, I just don't see where this goes. Can it be about people in their 30's juggling relationships and their careers?" And if there are two guys in Muncie, how many are there in Fort Wayne? Or South Bend? Or Indianapolis? And we haven't even left Indiana yet.

What does that say about that huge, packed auditorium at the Oscars, filled mostly with people who get paid to say yes. Or no. It means, I think, that in the future, a lot of them are going to be scrambling to get out of their pricey car leases. I mean, maybe I'm delusional, but it's just possible that what You Tube means is that sooner, rather than later, this privileged, pompous, overpaid class of gatekeepers -- studio executives, network executives, development executives -- is going to get squeezed pretty tight. Of course, that also means that the privileged, pompous, overpaid class of writers and actors is going to get squeezed tight, too. But I don't know: it sounds worth it.

(Via Mickey Kaus, just back from a huge pro-illegal immigration march in Los Angeles.)

I'm sitting in the American Airlines Admiral's Club in the Philadelphia Airport awaiting my dreadfully early 7:47 AM flight back to San Jose. (Why yes, that is a rather ironic time for an airliine flight; I blame Jerry Lewis.) Meanwhile, Orrin Judd has given us crazy Californians a profile of the future, as the 100th anniversary of San Francisco's Great Quake of April 18, 1906 looms ever closer:

We don't even need the quake to actually happen to know how it goes: afterwards, in the midst of 24 hour global tv coverage, Ms DeMuynck complains that no one ever warned her how dangerous it was, the Reverends Falwell & Robertson clainm it was the will of God because of queers, and Democrats claim it's the worst the federal government has ever handled a disaster while the Right digs up the example of '06 to show how much more civilly we dealt with the looters this time. Meanwhile, most of us just shake our heads and wonder how stupid you have to be to live in California, nevermind on a fault line....

Would-be UNC-Chapel Hill motorterrorist Mohammad Reza Taheri included this curious passage in his explanatory note to authorities:

In the Qur'an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur'an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability

Yahoo sports writer Charles Robinson discovers that many of his readers have nasty cases of what might dubbed Condi Derangement Syndrome:

If Condoleezza Rice ever decides to make good on her aspirations to be NFL commissioner, sh