As Kathy Shaidle writes, "Establishment baffled, shocked, outraged", by the winner of a Canadian history magazine's poll of the Worst Canadians in History.

Here's one part-time resident of the Great White North who won't be too surprised, though.

Pretty amazing color footage of "Galloping Gertie", the Narrows Tacoma Bridge disaster of 1940:

It makes a dramatic companion piece to these more placid color still photos from the first half of the 20th century.

Reuters: "News Corp board OKs deal to buy Dow Jones: source":

News Corp's (NWSa.N) board of directors has approved a deal to buy Dow Jones & Co Inc (DJ.N) for $5 billion, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The board met on Tuesday to consider its $60 per share offer.

Or as the Journal itself puts it:

A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sealed a $5 billion agreement to purchase the publisher of The Wall Street Journal after three months of drama in the controlling family and public debate about journalistic values.

Maybe that explains why this synergistic partnership is being formed concurrently in the lefthand side of the news world.

Update: And away we go!

Though many journalists impose their views regularly in biased political coverage, and last year the New York Times publisher made clear his left-wing world view, on Tuesday night the broadcast networks framed Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal around what agenda the “controversial” Murdoch will “impose.” That matches the “fear” expressed in online journalism forums and media magazines about Murdoch's “conservative” agenda. Leading into pro and con soundbites, CBS's Kelly Wallace described Murdoch as “a conservative who put his imprint on the New York Post and brought topless women to the Sun in London. His critics say he may not impose tabloid on the Journal, but will impose his point of view.”

No word yet though on whether or not Maria Bartiromo will be the newspaper's first Page Three girl (in traditional Journal woodcut illustration style, of course).

More: The Journal itself weighs in, via its editorial page:

Editorial independence enhances the prospects for business success. The more credible a publication is, especially one that specializes in financial and economic reporting, the more readers and advertisers it is likely to have. We like to think our readers buy the Journal because of the credibility built over a century, and we believe this is the heart of the "value proposition" that Mr. Murdoch is willing to pay $5 billion to purchase. No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin.

There are nonetheless critics, especially in the journalism world, who claim this is precisely what Mr. Murdoch will proceed to do. And they have certainly had a merry time bashing him and the Journal these past few months. Some of these voices, however, are commercial or ideological competitors who have their own interest in undermining the Journal's credibility.

Both the New York Times and the Financial Times have been especially aggressive in assailing the potential News Corp. purchase of the Journal. These also happen to be the two publications that Mr. Murdoch has explicitly said he might invest more to compete against. Readers can judge if the tears these papers and their writers claim to shed for the Journal's future are real, or of the crocodile variety.

The nastiest attacks have come from our friends on the political left. They can't decide whose views they hate most--ours, or Mr. Murdoch's. We're especially amused by those who say Mr. Murdoch might tug us to the political left. Don't count on it. More than one liberal commentator has actually rejoiced at the takeover bid, on the perverse grounds that this will ruin the Journal's news coverage, which in turn will reduce the audience for the editorial page. Don't count on that either.

In early 2006, we linked to Daniel Henninger's piece on James Frey:

Oprah Winfrey has thrown her support behind memoirist James Frey, whose Number One bestseller, "A Million Little Pieces"--a vivid recollection of his drug and alcohol addictions, crimes against humanity and recovery--turns out on a sliding scale to run from false to faulty. Mr. Frey's literally incredible life was exposed recently by a Web site, the Smoking Gun. Respondeth Oprah, and legions of Mr. Frey's readers: Who cares?

Ms. Winfrey said, "The underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me." Many of the some 1,900 Frey messengers to Oprah's Web site also voted for redemption over factual accuracy.

In an age when controversies are a dime a dozen, this one is worth thinking about. Some have said the publisher should have made clear the memoir was fictionalized. But people don't want that. As with reality TV shows, people now enter into these new kinds of experiences with the conceit that it's somehow true or real, and when they find out later the truth was staged, they don't care. If you think this doesn't compute, tough. That, so to speak, is current reality.

Still, criticism has rained down on Mr. Frey, publisher Doubleday and Oprah for choosing falsity over fact. Most of this comes from authors or teachers of writing defending what they think are utilitarian distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. One might expect that most people would similarly support the primacy of facts in a book making claims to factuality, as Mr. Frey's did. The recent, wide denunciation of Korean stem-cell faker Hwang Woo Suk derives from the centuries-old belief that improving the human condition works better in a world run on facts rather than tall tales.

Eventually, Oprah very publicly tossed Frey overboard on her show, which Nan Talese, his publisher at Doubleday, describes here, and in a clip that's currently being highlighted by Matt Drudge:

"And at the end of it she pulled James aside and said, 'I know it was rough, but it's just business.'"

Jeff Jarvis reminds television news departments that car chases are not news:

Let’s hope that one result of the crash of two news helicopters chasing the cops chasing a bad guy is that local TV — and cable — news give up their addiction to this nonstory. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

TV news loves its own clichés and habits; it likes the sameness and predictability. TV news is OCD: This is how we always cover cities digging out from snowstorms and shoppers mobbing malls on the day after Christmas and cops chasing criminals — and, of course, any fire bigger than a Bic’s flame. There’s no news in any of this. It’s the opposite of news, for we know exactly what will happen. News is what we don’t know. But we know how these chases end.

And we know what will happen with TV news and helicopters: They’ll keep doing it. See earlier journalism-review fretting about chopper chases in 2006, 2003, 2002 and 1997 — and, of course, after the O.J. Simpson chase in 1994. It will never change.

I grew up watching WPVI, Philadelphia's ABC affiliate; their daily Action News broadcasts were amongst the first of the local news shows to adopt the policy of "If It Bleeds, It Leeds", and they've spent the last 35 years or so opening their nightly news broadcasts with lurid murders, muggings and car chases. (They even had their own helicopter crash last year.)

If you type "WPVI" into YouTube's search engine and poke around, you'll see that a popular past-time amongst the more tech savvy WPVI fans in Philly is parodying the Action News opening theme by mashing it up and splicing in even more grotesque shots of car crashes, hit and runs, and other video horrors. At least it's more honest than the real Action News intro, which shows Philadelphia at its finest, in contrast to the daily debauchery actually reported in the body of the show.

There's another reason why television news should abandon their helicopters: if TV news anchors are going to preach the evils of, as Tim Blair calls it, glowball worming, shouldn't they begin to phase out their own gas-guzzling--not to mention potentially lethal--helicopters? If jetting out to a vacation amongst hundreds of fellow tourists in a single plane equals "binge flying" then what's the purpose of TV news 'copters, other than to generate ratings? As Jarvis writes above, it's the opposite of news.

Update: Further thoughts from Michael Mannske, who compares the way the elite media covers the outside world, versus how it circles the wagons when a story involves one of their own.

Dean Barnett introduces "the Nancy Boyda Award". Besides Boyda herself, here are two prime candidates for her namesake trophy.

Update: More from Michael Barone.

More from the memory hole, as Michael Chapman of CNSNews.com interviews Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him:

Cybercast News Service: What do you consider to be some of Guevara's greatest crimes or offenses that people today should know about?

Humberto Fontova: He was the chief executioner. He performed for the Cuban revolution what Heinrich Himmler performed for the Nazis. Everything Che Guevara did was directed by Fidel Castro. Early on, when they were in the mountains, Castro realized that Che seemed to relish executing little farm boys. There were executions carried out, carried out in the mountains, of so-called informers. I interviewed many people who witnessed those executions. There was no due process.

Che Guevara wrote a letter to his father in 1957 and to his abandoned wife. In the letter to her, he wrote, "I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." Then, to his father, "I really like killing." The man was a clinical sadist, whereas Fidel Castro you could describe as a psychopath in that the murders did not affect him one way or the other. It was a means to an end - the consolidation of his one-man rule. Che has a famous quote, where he wrote, a revolutionary has to become "a cold killing machine." The thing was, Che Guevara was anything but cold. He was a warm killing machine. He relished the slaughter.

And Hollywood can't stop making movies idolizing him, which helps to place this recent essay by Jonah Goldberg into context.

28690 Philip Johnson Glass House Opens In New Canaan...
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James Panero of The New Criterion and Benjamin Ivry of Commentary use the occasion of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Cannan being opened to the public to remind us what a piece of work the late architect was.

Amongst his links, Panero includes Hilton Kramer's essay on Johnson from the September 1995 Commentary. Here's but a sample:

I was reminded of a conversation I had with Marga Barr in the last year of her life. I was then working with her on the preparation of a "Chronicle" of Alfred Barr's career [as art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art] for publication in the New Criterion. (It was published under the title, "Our Campaigns," in a special issue of the magazine in the summer of 1987.)

On one of the mornings we had set for a meeting in her apartment, the New York Times published Johnson's proposed designs for the rehabilitation of the Times Square-42nd Street area. I found them even more wretched than some of the awful things he had already built, and I was eager to know what Marga thought of them. In recounting to me the story of Alfred's career, she had had frequent occasion to speak of Johnson, and she always did so with fond affection-for the record, so to speak. That morning I asked if she had seen the paper, and she rather glumly acknowledged that she had. I then asked what she thought of the kind of buildings Johnson had lately been designing-and hastened to add that she was under no obligation to discuss the subject if she preferred not to. In responding to difficult questions, Marga had a way of turning away for a few moments while she composed her thoughts and then facing her interlocutor with a very determined look. This is what she did that morning as she said to me: "I feel about Philip today the way I would feel about a beloved son who had gone into a life of crime."

If you're unfamiliar with the endless twists and turns contained within the background of the man who brought modern architecture to America, definitely read the whole thing.

Anne Applebaum's piece on Johnson's decade spent flirting with National Socialism--even as it was kicking his favorite achitects out the door--is also well worth your time.

Update: Video added; the articles in the above hyperlinks make for quite an interesting counterpoint.

As Ronald Reagan liked to say, those are the scariest words in the English language. Thomas Sowell writes that Bob Novak would agree:

Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled The Prince of Darkness by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession.

Even those of us who never had any grand illusions about politicians can come away from this book shedding any remaining illusions we might have had about some of our political heroes in both parties.

Novak covers not only what they said and did in public but also what they said and did in private — and why. He turns over a lot of rocks and shows what has been crawling underneath.

Novak became a Washington journalist back in the days of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. But neither they nor the political leaders of today escape his unsentimental scrutiny.

Most of these big political figures turn out to be very petty, self-centered, spiteful, shallow, deceitful, and incompetent. Novak spells it out in eyewitness detail from behind the scenes.

Nor does he let the media off the hook, including himself. Novak notes how often his own judgments and predictions proved to be wide of the mark, and how his drinking and other shortcomings led to bad results for himself and those around him.

This is history as it happened, without spin or an agenda.

As Sowell writes, you can get "a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness."

John Podhoretz writes:

Only hours after Ingmar Bergman's death was announced, his fellow existentialist filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died. Kind of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, if you think bummer movie directors are analogous to the Founding Fathers.

Antonioni's Blowup was one of the touchstone films of the 1960s zeitgeist (Andrew Sarris dubbed it 1966's "movie of the year"). Its proto-postmodern ending paved the way for the "what is reality" movies of the late 1990s (The Matrix, Dark City, and eXistenZ). The film boosted the career of the Yardbirds during the brief period when both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck were in the band, and made David Hemmings, cast as the film's photographer protagonist, a sixties superstar--not to mention inspiring Austin Powers' civilian identity.

In the New York Post, David French writes:

For more than 25 years, conservative writers have been telling anyone who would listen that our higher education system was broken - that indoctrination was trumping education and our kids were throwing away their tuition dollars propping up vicious relics of the '60s and supporting universities that were increasingly repressive. These words, coming from such luminaries as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Charles Kors and David Horowitz, persuaded much of the conservative chattering class that something was wrong. But mainstream Americans seemed unconcerned, with their own (often fond) college memories drowning out even the most eloquent cries for reform.

Enter Ward Churchill.

French writes that Churchill was "the tipping point":

That will be Ward Churchill's lasting legacy. He was the tipping point. Now, it's not just leading conservatives who view the academy as an out-of-control, disconnected bastion of petulant entitlement. In a recent Zogby poll, 58 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that political bias of professors is a "serious problem." Even more, 65 percent, viewed non-tenured professors as more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

These are not isolated findings. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found that 58.4 percent of Americans had only some or no confidence in our colleges and that 82 percent want to modify or eliminate tenure.

Related thoughts from Stanley Kurtz.

In a post titled, "An Ideology of Hate", John Hinderaker writes:

Chief Justice John Roberts, in my view the most extravagantly qualified Supreme Court nominee in my lifetime, had a "benign idiopathic seizure" today. He's fine, but might be placed on anti-seizure medication since he also had one in 1993. This is how the prominent liberal web site Wonkette covered the news:

Chief Justice John Roberts has died in his summer home in Maine. No, not really, but we know you have your fingers crossed.

A lot of them did, too.

And that's hot on the heels of this laugh-riot Wonkette moment from last week.

Where have you gone Boba Fett? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post, who has a new book due out this fall called Nanny State, writes:

Nanny State recently received a short review from the trade publication Publishers Weekly. It was unfriendly. I came away with the feeling that the reviewer hadn’t actually read the book. (I won’t bore you with the specifics.) But then again, who knows, perhaps the review was deserved.

As this is my first book, though, I decided to investigate other Publisher Weekly reviews on Amazon.com. Did a negative review effect sales? Did the reviewer typically betray a ideological position as this one had? This curiosity led to non-scientific stroll around Amazon.com and a discovery. One that Tammy Bruce had already noted. (Update: And Dr. Helen.) I work in mainstream media. Though I’m not someone who buys into the widespread liberal media meme, the one-sidedness of the PW reviews was inescapable. After all, a provocative or combative political book can be well written and worth reading even if you disagree with the central thesis. I’ve reviewed books for almost a decade. I know this can happen.

Yet…

Read on.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

"Old Creepy Ads" definitely lives up to its name.

And speaking of Lileks on acid, it sounds like James could use some antacid, after his recent trip to Alaska:

On a cruise ship you’re either heading towards cake or coming from cake. I did not know it was possible to eat so much. There were meals between meals. There were meals in the middle of meals. You could pass out in the main cafeteria with a room-service menu on your chest and they’d wake you at daybreak, pry open your mouth and pour a rich, nutritious slurry of eggs and French toast down your throat. By the end of the cruise you had to grease the doorframe of your cabin to get out. Every so often you tottered to the window to see whales, and you usually did, although most of the time it was your reflection.

More reflections at Bleat HQ.

Building on our recent Tech Central Station article, several concurrent posts here (such as this one) have attempted to document the birth of the paranoid style (to coin a phrase) on the left.

Dr. Sanity takes things into the present day, such as this recent quote uttered by one of the leading candidates in the presidential race.

Meanwhile, as Barbara Boxer finds Gaia in the mists of Greenland, Mark Steyn reprints a 2002 article that asks when will this trend will conclude?

Update: Related thoughts on "John Edwards' Paranoid Solipsism" from Betsy Newmark. And Dean Barnett's thoughts on the American left and Iraq dovetail remarkably well with the above posts.

This just in from the New York Times: Nerd culture discovered; Asians, other minorities hardest hit.

Update: The International Herald-Tribune, a spin-off of the New York Times, undertakes their own Noam Chomsky-style research on nerd linguistical patterns.

More: Jerome J. Schmitt adds: "In sum, I believe that this article and study reveal a lot more about the racial bigotry and monomania of the NY Times and swaths of the liberal arts and social sciences than it does about nerds."

The cliché is that famous deaths come in threes, but usually not this quickly:

Bill Walsh, the groundbreaking football coach who won three Super Bowls and perfected the ingenious schemes that became known as the West Coast offense during a Hall of Fame career with the San Francisco 49ers, has died. He was 75.

Walsh died early Monday following a long battle with leukemia, according to Stanford University, where he served as coach and athletic director.

Michael Lewis' recent book, The Blind Side documents the revolution in professional football that occurred in the 1980s, as Walsh's West Coast Offense dramatically changed the passing game, and the dominance of Lawrence Taylor had a similar impact on defense. While "L.T." was blessed with once-in-a-lifetime athletic brilliance, Walsh's strategies systematized the NFL offensive game, which is why so many of his protégés have had terrific careers themselves.

Michelle Malkin has "A pictorial pop quiz for you. Which of these is a hate crime in America?"

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens and Ace of Spades have some very much related thoughts.

"Unfortunately, disagreeing with a narrative often seems like a waste of time, because disagreeing with it doesn't make it go away."

Even if the narrative is wrong, and the facts keep changing, to paraphrase Evan Thomas.

"The only genius in cinema today", Bergman's American champion Woody Allen famously said in 1979's Manhattan, was 89.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Update: Jason Apuzzo of Libertas writes, "The chess game is over now. Bergman won it a long time ago."

Back in the 1970s, when television meant three network channels, three or four UHF channels, and PBS, I spent more than few late night hours watching Tom Synder, who sadly died yesterday of complications associated with leukemia, according to AP.

Here's Tom in better days, interviewing a struggling, up and coming rock band, still searching for that elusive big break after years on the cabaret circuit:

And here's the late Cathy Seipp's reminiscing about meeting Tom when he was still searching for his own elusive big break--but already a legend, if only his own mind.

Late in James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson writes:

The activities of the radical right, which were prominent in the years leading up to [Kennedy’s] assassination, were soon pushed into the background by the antics of the radical left. By the late 1960s, the far right’s fascination with plots concerning fluoridated water, federal aid to education, or even communism seemed quaint in comparison with the fevered doctrines put forth by the denizens of the New Left.

Charles Johnson tracks the arc of a modern day conspiracy as it's being born.

"'Hoodie hugging' and the decline of British youth culture".

Related: In America, "cities sue gangs in bid to stop violence".

Paging Mark Steyn: your next demographics-related article awaits; Amy Alkon writes that there's a new book out in--shocker!--France, by an economist/psychoanalyst and, as Amy notes, mother named Corinne Maier that's titled, No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children.

Something tells me that this book will not be widely disseminated in France's burgeoning immigrant community.

"Michael Vick has done something no politician in Washington ever accomplished", Brent Bozell writes. "The star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons has united nearly everyone against him, indicted for being at the center of a gruesome spectacle of dog-fighting and gambling."

To be fair though, I'm not sure if Yahoo's Dan Wetzel would entirely agree with Bozell on the unanimity of Vick's detractors, though.

Baldilocks notes that Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary, in his attempt to both defend the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp and denigrate his attackers (which are now legion) apparently doesn't realize that the word "milblogger" is a portmanteau that combines of the words blogger and military:

Apparently McLeary's Ivy-honed intellect didn't help him to deduce that milbloggers=military bloggers. Nor did that "superior intellect" lead him to discover that all military officers have an undergraduate degree, at minimum, and that half of enlisted men/women have obtained the same.

He denigrates the military bloggers then has the nerve to quote Andrew Sullivan approvingly in the next sentence. :::shakes head:::

I hope that he came to my blog, saw that "101st Fighting Keyboarders" link on the top right and got fooled. What a clown.

Sounds reminiscent of the Boston Globe's Alex Beam being taken in by libertarian Bjorn Staerk 's 2002 April Fools' Day Stalin parody. Too bad that McLeary didn't stop for a moment to read Baldilock's bio page.

Update: Here's a somewhat related item regarding a veteran journalist who's definitely on the other side of the aisle from the CJR: "So That's Why Novak Hates Blogs!"

More: Dan Riehl compares CJR's coverage of Beauchamp with their thoughts on Scooter Libby:

It seems, according to CJR, what Beauchamp himself published on the web should be left alone and kept private. In the Libby case, third party letters are fair game, mock away, it would seem. Given the particulars, this goes beyond simple hypocrisy, or a double standard. It's just plain biased.

Huh--go figure.

In his new book, conservative author James Piereson speculated that the ideology of President Kennedy's assassin caused a form of cognitive dissonance amongst many members of the left that led to an increasing reliance on conspiracy theories. Liberal reporter Jake Tapper of ABC provides bipartisan confirmation of a sort, as he notes that this trend is, if anything, merely accelerating.

The Movie & TV News section of the Internet Movie Database notes "That's Infotainment!" at ABC

ABC News executive producer David Sloan has indicated that the network will be continuing to move toward the convergence of news and entertainment -- or "infotainment" as the controversial move has been branded. "My definition [of news] is limitless," he told Chicago Tribune TV writer Phil Rosenthal as he plugged next Monday's news special, Six Degrees of Martina McBride in which a group of six singers will try to connect with the country star in six steps or less. "It's a hybrid," Sloan said. "Look, ABC News is looking for new ways of interacting and engaging with the viewer. This represents that effort." A different sort of "hybrid," he noted, will be evident in the forthcoming six-week run of iCaught, using amateur videos posted on the Internet.

Since truth is relative according to liberal postmodernism, "Storytelling" really seems to be the flavor of week.

Finally: Just in time for Christmas, 2019 arrives.

"Gay artist burns $60,000 Koran to protest homophobic hate".

I'm withholding judgment until I read Newsweek's take.

Update: James Taranto writes:

There's an obvious point to be made here about the incoherence of political correctness, which demands both affirmation of homosexuality and indulgence of Islamic fundamentalism, which anathematizes homosexuality.

Instead, though, let's just point out that if you are an advocate of tolerance and open-mindedness, conducting a book burning at best sends mixed signals.

Indeed.^TM

Back in late 2001, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Any time you start to doubt yourself, and wonder if you're fit for the big leagues of American thought and opinion, you can just read The Times and be thankful that the standards of the big leagues aren't so high.

Flashforward six years; technologies change but the song remains the same: the baseline quality control standards for acceptable video punditry has now been set by NBC...err ABC...

"Krauthammer: Obama Is The New Tom Hagen".

As Tom Wolfe famously wrote in Hooking Up:

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point, the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside--quite purposely--were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets, or as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

This process, namely the relearning--following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero--seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.

Of course, some areas are more zero than others, and thus will need just a bit more of a nudge to start the process. Cinnamon Stillwell dares San Francisco Chronicle readers to boldly go where no hippie has gone before: "Rethinking the Summer of Love".

Having not yet seen the new Simpsons movie, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on the TV series in general. Here's a sample:

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay on the death of “youth culture.” The Simpsons would be a good example of what I’m getting at. I started watching the show when I was in college. It was denounced as an example of cultural rot amongst the young — particularly when Bart, not Homer, was the star of the show. While I’m sure that its viewership skews youngish, it’s not really a show for young people anymore. In much the same way that South Park’s most public fans seem to be middle-aged and Family Guy is aimed at an even older demographic. The Simpsons, on the air for nearly two decades, demonstrates how the once hard-and-fast line between the young and edgy and the conventional and staid has been if not completely erased than largely redrawn.

That's actually a topic that Jonah touched upon a few years ago, to very good effect. He noted back in 2003 that The Simpsons and numerous other TV shows which date back to the 1990s are still on the air:

But the networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood. But I think a better sign is the absolute explosion in sexuality. I think by now most readers understand I'm not particularly Comstockish about sex, so I hope this won't be taken simply as the lament of a typical culture vulture. But the reliance on sex jokes on TV is really astounding. Because there's still an ever-thinning veneer of taboo to sex, jokes about it still have a chance at working. But the desperation of writers comes across in how deep, i.e. low, they have to dig. It reminds me of a Simpsons episode that takes place in the near future; Marge says to Homer, "Fox turned into a hardcore porn channel so gradually I didn't even notice."

Anyway, my last bit of evidence is purely anecdotal. I speak to college kids on occasion. And whenever I do, I tend to make references to TV shows and movies because, well, I'm me and that's what I do. At this point you would think that my references would be lost on many of them — and theirs on me. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What's also interesting is that these kids are quoting the same movies that my buddies and I quote, which might be a function of the fact that young men today would rather re-watch, say, Stripes or Roadhouse, than invest time in My Wife and Kids or some other drek. In effect, kids today are living off the entertainment capital of the previous generation.

That's even more true in music, as Live Earth, the celebrity encomium to America's former vice president demonstrated:

Andy Williams didn’t play at Woodstock. He was 41 that summer.

Ray Charles, then 38, wasn’t invited either.

And at age 52, Dean Martin certainly wasn’t.

So what were and Jon Bon Jovi at 45, Madonna at 48, and ex-Pink Floyd Roger Waters, 63, doing headlining a rock concert? None of their top hits were within a decade of the “Live Earth” concert. Williams, Charles and Martin each had released his signature recording within a few years of Woodstock.

In fact, Pink Floyd’s hit — “The Wall” — is as contemporary today as “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was in 1969.

One reason “Live Earth” was dead last in the TV ratings is the music was irrelevant to the target audience. In fact, music itself is rather irrelevant. what with Video games and You Tube getting more action. There is a reason MTV shows so few videos: Nobody watches them.

The other reason is that Woodstock was not organized by Hubert Humphrey, the immediate past vice president of the United States at the time.

Live Earth? Well …

These trends demonstrate the enormous transition our media is undergoing. Relics of the days of Mass Media linger on, simply because of the name recognition they built up prior to the Internet's fracturing of the overculture. And examples such as the Simpsons movie and even older chestnuts being endlessly recycled will be occurring for quite sometime, as dinosaur media hope to stave off extinction for another day.

In "Racial Divide", Dan Wetzel gives us a snapshot of Michael Vick's day from hell:

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Imagine the outrage if this were RJ Reynolds or General Motors getting a column killed on the state of its industry, instead of the L.A. Times:

The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today's Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment. Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed, apparently by associate editor John Montorio. Goldstein's offense was to propose that the Times follow the lead of the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday (which distributed 2.9 million free Prince CDs) and partner with older artists to give away music in the paper. He argued it could help make the Times website a destination for fans and reduce the need for front page ads (which the editor of the Times himself calls a huge mistake.) Seems reasonable enough for a column, and Goldstein was on the Spring Street Committee that was tasked with coming up with innovative ideas:

It’s time we embraced change instead of always worrying if some brash new idea — like giving away music — would tarnish our sober minded image.

Still, the piece was spiked on high after sailing through the desk. The banned column fell into our hands and runs in full after the jump:

Read the rest--given the sorry states of both the recording and newspaper industries, Prince's synergistic marketing strategy is certainly worth experimenting with. And if the L.A. Times thinks they they can keep their remaining readers snowed into not believing that their industry is in trouble, that speaks volumes about what their management thinks of their subscribers.

But then, that shouldn't be entirely surprising at this point.

James Panero's post on the New Criterion's Armavirumque blog brings new meaning to the phrase "Culture of Death":

The other day I remarked on hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen's loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," Damien Hirst's work featuring a dead shark floating in a formaldehyde vitrine. Rumor has it that MoMA and the Met both went fishing for the shark. Now the Met will have the honor of bestowing unearned respectability on Cohen's costly purchase ($8 million from Charles Saatchi in 2004).

By the way, if you want to know the disgusting details about how this work is maintained, read Carol Vogel's story here. (the answer is injections of formaldehyde.) What is not explained in this article, of course, is how Vogel maintains her job as a critic after REPEATEDLY shilling for Hirst and his rich collectors (the answer is injections of formaldehyde). [Ouch!--Ed]

Now in other news, we learn that Damien Hirst has recently wrapped up his latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in London. This was the show featuring Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, called “For the Love of God,” which sported approximately $20 million in jewels and retailed for about $100 million. Even without factoring in the sale of the skull (did it sell? Does Cohen have it on reserve?), Hirst’s exhibition took in $265 million in sales--if reports are to be believed. Such numbers puts Hirst in league with the marketplace for modern masters.

Hirst is a conceptual artist for the art of conspicuous consumption. Hirst’s work exhibits none of the traditional indicators of artistic value. It is not original (take for example his “spin” and “dot” paintings, based on children’s toys and pop art). Nor is it masterly (his work is crafted by an army of assistants whom Hirst openly describes as better painters than he is).

Hirst’s work is, quite deliberately, worthless beyond its material content. But through a conceptual sleight of hand, he has already earned himself a footnote in the history of art, not to mention a pile of cash.

In other words, David Lynch meets Thomas Kinkaid.

James Taranto asks us to imagine "if top aides to President Bush ordered the FBI to produce damaging but false information about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Now that would be a scandal:

And that is what is happening in New York state, as the New York Post reports:

Gov. [Eliot] Spitzer suspended a top aide and reassigned another yesterday after Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a bombshell report concluding they conspired with the State Police to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno by cooking up a plot claiming he misused state aircraft.

Spitzer, who had recently insisted that neither his staff nor the State Police had acted improperly, said communications director Darren Dopp was suspended without pay for an "indefinite period" of at least 30 days.

William Howard, the governor's assistant secretary for homeland security, will be reassigned to a position outside of the governor's staff.

Cuomo's report also recommended disciplinary action be considered against acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton, but none was taken.

The scathing, 53-page report detailed a months-long scheme in which Dopp, Howard, and Felton--at times with the partial knowledge of Spitzer chief of staff Richard Baum--used the State Police to gather and create misleading and inaccurate records on Bruno's use of state aircraft to travel from Albany to Manhattan in hopes of showing he was using the flights strictly for political purposes, a possibly illegal action. . . .

The report confirmed a week's worth of investigative stories in The Post beginning July 5 that found aides to Spitzer, including Dopp, used the State Police as, in effect, a spy agency as part of a broad conspiracy aimed at destroying Bruno.

For what it's worth, Spitzer is a Democrat and Bruno is a Republican. The New York Times, in covering the report, described Spitzer as " a former prosecutor who came into office less than seven months ago with a reputation for integrity and who promised to bring a new ethical climate to Albany."

The ethical climate he brought to Albany is new, all right. But if he had an undeserved "reputation for integrity" before becoming governor, perhaps that is because of the friendly coverage he received from such news organizations as the Times. The Post's scoop and its consequences are an object lesson in the importance of an independent press in holding public officials accountable.

On the other hand, the fawning pre-election coverage of Spitzer and stories such as this don't exactly build confidence in the typical big city MSM newspaper as an "independent" press.

Update: John Podhoretz writes that there's no middle ground: "In the past two days, the governor of New York either a) saved his political career or b) committed political suicide." At the risk of sounding terminally cynical, my money's on the former.

Power Line quotes a a long email from William Katz, whom they describe as having had "a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show".

At the Power Line site, he has a marvelous fantasy of Alfred Hitchcock pitching Rear Window to what he calls a modern "fetus in a three-piece suit" studio executive:

Now, clearly, that meeting never took place, but it's a slightly overdrawn version of meetings that do take place every day in today's Hollywood. They reflect the problem that I call TMCG –- too many college graduates, of whom, I freely admit, I'm one. The industry dare not speak its name, and it's rarely, if ever, discussed in these terms. But everyone knows the problem: To a large degree, Hollywood, in its executive ranks, has replaced talent with education, and what you get is the scene described above, where all the life, the emotion, the entertainment value of a story is ripped out, replaced with analysis and more analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not saying that higher education automatically makes someone a bad filmmaker. There are wonderful artists who've had fine educations. Richard D. Zanuck went to Stanford. The late Jack Lemmon held a Harvard degree. But young people, in particular, are very much affected by the way they're taught to think in college –- and that approach has nothing to do with making movies.

The Duke of Wellington reportedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The movies of today were written in the classrooms of Princeton. But it's highly unlikely that a 2007 Princeton graduate would imagine anyone singin' in the rain. He'd take a cab. And by the way, Mr. Kelly, the umbrella is held over the head, to keep us dry.

Mitchell Parish was one of our greatest lyricists -- "Star Dust," "Moonlight Serenade," "The Stars Fell on Alabama." Some years ago he was honored in New York. He came out before the concert began and spoke to members of the audience. He said, "When you hear my lyrics, don't analyze them, feel them." It's wonderful advice for anyone in entertainment, but not the kind of advice you get in English 101. "Hollywood," David Lean, the British director of "Lawrence of Arabia," said, "forgot how to tell stories." It forgot because Hollywood forgot how to feel. When Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the airport in "Casablanca," we feel it, we don't analyze it.

And how would "Casablanca" fare in today's Hollywood? Not too long ago a local reporter sent out the script of the movie, under a different title.

Almost no one recognized it.

The TMCG problem has another effect. It separates Hollywood from its audience. A talent agency head boasted that half his interns come from Ivy League schools. Well, that's wonderful, and I'm sure they're good, intelligent young people. But I've seen that, too often, they don't think of themselves as the audience. The audience is "those people out there."

And here's what studio executives are selling them!

To be fair though, there's at least one contrarian at Cornell--his take on AMC's new Mad Men mini-series sounds remarkably like my own.