Quote of the day: It's a holiday at QOTD (see below), so we're stuck with Honorable Mention to a dead guy, TV schlockmeister Aaron Spelling

It's written into the contract that Quote of the Day always gets a holiday the day after Paul Krugman takes a vacation day. So, technically, we shouldn't even be working today.

(By the way, since our last estimate that it takes these guys maybe 20 minutes to bang out one of those columns, it has been suggested that it can hardly ever be done in less than half an hour. We're prepared to concede the point, though we can't help thinking that a simple video installation would reveal that 10 minutes out of that half hour is devoted to such activities as waiting for the weather and traffic report on the local news-radio or cable-TV-news channel, opening pistachio nuts, and scraping off that mysterious gunk that suddenly appeared on the letter-opener.)

So, no QOTD today, just Honorable Mention to a dead guy.

HONORABLE MENTION

"I think there is a need to escape. I think it is a release valve that keeps people from blowing their brains out or having nervous breakdowns. We find that the majority of our audience is worried, really worried, about the cost of food, how much it costs to send your kid to school, the cost of clothes."
—TV schlockmeister Aaron Spelling, who died yesterday at 83, quoted in his Washington Post obituary

Say this for Aaron Spelling: He didn't project this need for escapism into the real world of politics and government (at least as far as I know!), although I suppose you could argue that encouraging people to wallow in dumbness didn't exactly elevate our marketplace of ideas. By contrast, many (most?) of the people whose job it inescapably is to deal with those often-crippling daily worries Spelling talks about choose instead to manipulate and exploit them. (If you think this includes you, Karl Rove, you're right.)

In any case, among all the Spelling dross there was at least a certain amount of hearty entertainment, and even the occasional show that did contribute to the marketplace of ideas. The Post obit pays rightful tribute to the fine old ABC series Family, but doesn't mention the recently ended WB 7th Heaven, which for all its limitations really did welcome viewers into a world that contained real-world problems that couldn't be swept under the rug.