Under Trump, The Republican War On Science Has Been Succeeding-- And Just When Mankind Needs Science Most

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a blistering note excoriating me for using the picture of Trump above. That isn’t why I’m running it again-- at least not the entire reason. This absolutely crucial piece in the NY Times hadn’t run yet but the perspective it conveys is exactly why the Trump-Morlock portrait is so perfect and so appropriate. The illustration does H.G. Wells proud.

"In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years. Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus."





Are Trump and his supporters the equivalent of Wells’ Morlocks? Do you think the Climate Crisis is an existential threat to humanity? I asked a few of the candidates campaigning on a Green New Deal platform exactly that question. Rachel Ventura, a member of the Will County Board, was originally inspired to run for Congress for two big reasons: Medicare-for-All and the Climate Crisis. The district’s useless New Dem incumbent, Bill Foster isn’t interested in working on either issue and is, in fact, hostile to progressive policy solutions. Rachel responded to my question very simply: “Yes the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity.” And the went on in some detail-- including the video below:

I am supporting the Green New Deal because I envision using healthy tax incentives or direct rebates for people to make their homes more energy efficient, incentives to buy EV’s or hybrid vehicles and incentives to use wind or solar when it makes sense geographically. The same tax levers could be used for businesses and municipalities who want to make their automobile fleets electric or improve the efficiency of the building envelope, or HVAC system. Lastly, the Green New Deal is a large-scale jobs package that will put people back to work with a federal job guarantee that pays living wages. There is a jobs training program to transition people who are working in the fossil fuel industry over to green collar jobs. The focus is to reward people, businesses and municipalities who make carbon-free decisions.

Bill Foster supports the Use It Act and the 100% Clean Economy Act. The USE IT ACT appropriates $50 million of taxpayer money to capture carbon and use the carbon + water to push more oil out of the ground through a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Researchers have shown that this is far from being a "carbon neutral" process even though scientists who work for the fossil fuel industry claim it is.

The 100% Clean Economy act may sound good because it uses some of the same "findings" as the Green New Deal, but the bill doesn't clearly transition to renewable energy. Instead it creates a carbon balance sheet that requires carbon producers to sequester that carbon through the use of carbon sinks or other means. The goal is to get to a zero-carbon balance. The bill is not clear about who will get tax incentives, but it is most likely the fossil fuel industry that will be asking the taxpayers to fund their continued existence and pay for the catastrophe that they created. The remainder of the bill defines the federal agency so various entities can have a seat at the table.

Unlike my opponent, I believe that we need to leave oil in the ground, and I oppose the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure (pipelines or otherwise). We need to make companies that profited from pollution, pay to clean that pollution up. I have taken the no fossil fuel money pledge and am also not taking corporate PAC dollars.

In this 1-minute video I explain the difference between the Green New Deal and a fossil fuel bailout bill that my opponent supports called "The USE IT ACT.”

Similarly, Liam O’Mara is the progressive Democrat running to represent Riverside County residents in a district held by useless conservative Trumpist (and long-time crook) Kevin Calvert, a notorious climate change denier. O’Mara teaches history in a university and respects science for what it is. "Global warming, left unchallenged," he told us, “is an existential threat to life on earth. It requires changes in the way we conduct business, and in the products and resources we use, and it demands serious innovation. Ken Calvert has a 5% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, and while he pays lip-service to renewable energy sources, he opposes the needed investment, and continues to support expansion of fossil fuel extraction and subsidies for polluting industries. We need a Green New Deal to transform our energy infrastructure, and unless he is replaced Calvert will remain a road block to any serious effort to combat climate change."

Eva Putzova is running for Congress in a vast ecologically-vulnerable Arizona district whose current rep, Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran, was formerly a Climate denying state legislator. He's changed the "R" next to his name to a "D" but he hasn't changed what he believes. "The climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity," said Eva without hesitation. "I support the Green New Deal which is the very least we can do to start addressing the problem of the ever-rising levels of C02 in our atmosphere. My opponent, the incumbent, opposes the Green New Deal or any large scale effort to address the climate crisis. He is part of the practical-do-nothing-corporate wing of the Democratic Party that is more concerned with business profits and mindless growth than with the fate of the earth. He, and all the other blue dog Democrats need to be replaced!"

Please consider helming Eva, Liam and Rachel do just that by clicking on the Blue America thermometer above and contributing what you can. Saving the planet is real and we all do what we can. Contributing $10 or $20 to candidates like this trio who will replace Climate Crisis deniers is one way to pitch in-- and relatively easy way at that.

Fall TV Watch: Tonight the new season can be said to be truly underway

I haven't watched this official season preview of Season 5 of Homeland, which launches tonight, for fear of of spoilers. I started watching one of the series of preview clips CBS has posted in advance of tonight's Season 7 premiere of The Good Wife, and within about three seconds star Julianna Margulies had revealed more than I wanted to know before watching the show.

by Ken

However bleak the new TV season becomes, it doesn't seem to crap up Sunday night. Tonight we have the season premieres of both The Good Wife and Homeland, and it's a good bet that, however I finally decide to finagle my DVR schedule -- it's complicated by the usual start-time derby CBS puts people who insist on watching The Good Wife through with their goddamn NFL game pushing the schedule back -- I expect I'll have watched both by the time I go to bed.

Plus there's the start of Season 2 of Showtime's The Affair (I had very mixed feelings about Season 1, but I watched the whole thing, and I'll probably stick with it, at least for a while). And a new episode of HBO's Project Greenlight, And of course a new episode of John Oliver's HBO Last Week Tonight.

By the time I go to bed I'll likely also have watched the new episode(s) of the current Masterpiece Classic offering, Indian Summers (at least on my PBS station), about life among the rulers and the ruled in the Raj of the '30s, as the independence movement was only beginning to form. By the end of last week's episode, I would have liked nothing better than to be able to go right into another episode. There were enough characters whose situations had grabbed my interest to the point where I really wanted to see more. And I still do!

Which is sometimes the best test of my relationship to a show. How badly do I want to see more of it?

I've already suggested my answers in the cases of The Good Wife and Homeland. Both shows are such familiar commodities that there seems hardly any point in going into them now, except perhaps to make the basic points:

• In its six seasons to date, The Good Wife seems to me to have cemented its standing as one of the all-time great TV dramas.

• I divine from (a) my enthusiasm carrying over from the end of Season 4 of Homeland and (b) my eagerness for the start of Season 5 that I think it's a substantially better show than most people seem to.

In both cases, the explanation seems to me basically the same: a core cast of characters I'm really interested in and care about -- both people who've been with us the whole way and people who've been brought in at the relevant opportunities -- and stories that make me want to see how they react and what happens to them. Chalk it up to the overriding vision and season-by-season vigilance of the creative overseers, and of course to the teams of writers and actors.

As I mentioned the other day, The Big Bang Theory is another show that involves me in this way -- to such an extent that I usually manage to block out the hideous un-laugh-like noise that disfigures every episode. It doesn't surprise me that this ghastly intrusion may cause many viewers not to realize how good a show this is that's trying to happen while its producers seem to be apologizing for the crap they're fobbing off on us.

I did actually watch the premiere of the show CBS has paired with BBT, Life in Pieces, an extended-family comedy that obviously makes you think of Modern Family, and I thought it wasn't terrible. I thought, this is something I would watch again. And I almost certainly will, but I have a feeling Episode 2 may sit on the DVR for a while until I get around to it.

The same sort of thing happened to me with HBO's Doll and Em. I somehow missed its whole first season, and didn't become aware of it until HBO posted the whole thing on On Demand, obviously in anticipation of the launch of the second season. And via On Demand, I loved the first season. I devoured it.

Em (Emily Mortimer) and Doll (Dolly Wells)

In Season 1, Emily was about to start production on a film that, whatever its problems, has the professional attraction of riding squarely on her shoulders (and in the course of the season -- spoiler alert! -- we got some glimmering of the kind of pressure that puts on an actor) when she was confronted by Doll back in England in crashed-and-burning breakdown mode, and asked her to come to L.A. to work as her assistant on the film, and tensions built into all those years of separate evolution begin to surface.

I congratulated myself on my unintentionally brilliant timing: I would be able to segue right into Season 2.Only it didn't work out that way. I thought the first episode of Season 2 was interesting, as Doll and Em resolved to create a project they can work on, together, as equals. But I noticed that I didn't pounce on Episode 2. And now I seem I'm falling behind, in what is, after all, only a six-episode season. Oh, I'll get to the others eventually. But I'm in no rush. Maybe I'll pick up at a point where the show once again really grabs me, and we'll finish together, the show and I, in a rush.

I'm in sort of the same situation with the CBS drama Limitless, about a guy Jake McDorman) who stumbles into an experimental drug that for a limited time makes his brain work like gangbusters. He winds up in trouble with the law, in the person of an FBI agent played by Jennifer Carpenter, our old friend from Dexter, who was so good as Dexter's succeeding-but-always-fucking-up cop sister Deb. The thing is, the drug -- unbeknownst to the guy -- has devastating side effects, except the other thing is that he appears to be somehow immune, which makes him invaluable as a test subject. If you're not quite believing this, neither am I, quite. But I'd probably have an easier time with it if I was being made to care more about the characters.

In the case of Doll and Em, for example, I wonder if my current less enthusiastic reaction has to do with the fact that, for me at least, Emily Mortimer as an actress usually has strong personal appeal; it's a cinch to care about most of the characters she plays. And Dolly Wells, not so much, and if I have to work to muster emotional support for the emotionally needier Doll character, it's apparently a challenge I'm not rushing into.

As a matter of fact, the show that, before the return of The Good Wife, I've found myself most looking forward to this summer is Showtime's rerun of the whole of its Queer as Folk, its many-season drama, developed for American television by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, about a group of largely LGBT folk in Pittsburgh, but also including a fair number of non-LGBT characters, of which the network has been showing back-to-back episodes Monday nights into Tuesday mornings at 11pm and midnight, at least in my time zone. Earlier on, Showtime was showing whole masses of episodes on a couple of weekend nights, running into the wee or even not-so-wee hours of the morning, and I waa having the TV on, drifting in and out of sleep, watching as much as I could, and wanting more. Since they scaled back to the two episodes per week, I've been feeling majorly deprived, having to wait till late nigh Monday each week for a mere two episodes.


The North American Queer as Folk gang: Standing: Peter Paige (Emmett), Scott Lowell (Ted), Gale Harold (Brian), Robert Gant (Ben), Thea Gill (Lindsay), and Hal Sparks (Michael). Sitting: Randy Harrison (Justin) and Michelle Clunie (Melanie). Unaccountably missing: Sharon Gless (Michael's mother, Debbie).

When I started rewatching the Queer as Folk episodes, I found that the more I watched, the more I became reinvested in the characters, and the more personally I took each succeeding episode. This might be worth talking about at some point, especially in connection with the English Queer as Folk on which the American version was based, especially since almost everything I've heard about the two versions, purporting to "compare" them, seemed to me -- once I finally caught up with the U.K. version -- idiotic. But for now what matters about the American Queer as Folk is that it presents a large and diverse cast of characters I find it ridiculously easy to care about, and scripts and direction that make me want to see what happens next.

I think it's worth noting that when Queer as Folk aired originally, my understanding was that it had a significant core of non-gay fans. I'd like to think this was partly because some people were genuinely curious about what the lives of gay and lesbian folk looked like, but probably even more because the characters and stories made a lot of viewers really wanted to see what happened to these people next.

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TV Watch: "The Big Bang Theory" comes roaring out of the gate at the start of Season 9

For a limited time you can watch last night's Big Bang Theory season premiere, "The Matrimonial Momentum," free online. Even more exciting, you can watch this entire "half-hour" show in a mere 20:26. (This must be that "miniaturization" fad we hear so much about.)

by Ken

As the new TV season officially launches, it's never been clear where the medium is headed, though there seems widespread agreement that it's going to very different from what we have no. I'm less optimistic than a lot of people -- mostly, I guess, because these days most of the programming that's celebrated as the cream of our crop seems to me so awful. (Emmys for Game of Throw-Up and the ghastly Veep? Maybe it's time to revisit The San Pedro Beach Bums.

I know no one is expecting a new creative path to be blazed by the TV networks, and I certainly don't. Once again I paid no attention to the new-season announcements, and from what I've managed to glean from a couple of "Fall Preview" features, it looks grim. Which leaves me not much to look forward to except the return of a few shows that may have some creative life left in them.

Which is why I couldn't have been happier with last night's Big Bang Theory season premiere. In terms of plot capital the show's overseers have been so frugal that even in Season 9 they've got plenty of material still available. Movement in the Penny-Leonard and Amy-Sheldon relationships has been so slow that they're really still mostly to come; there should still be a lot of stories left in the still-evolving marriage of Howard and Bernadette; Raj's future is still unmapped; and so is that of Stuart the comic-book guy. (The team is getting some earned yuks out of his super-doofusdom, but it might be nice if they remembered that he doesn't have to be that completely hopeless -- one of the early things we learned about him was that he has artistic talent as well as training.)

On some of these fronts, of course, last season's finale made it clear the team was preparing to make decisive moves forward. We last saw Penny (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki) headed to Las Vegas on the spur of the moment to get married. And when we last saw Amy (Mayim Bialik) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Amy was announcing that she needed time to evaluate where that "relationship" was going, which to Sheldon meant "break-up" -- and if Amy has any sesne, to her too.

As I've mentioned, I do have a problem with those gales of not-very-laugh-like noise that repeated disfigure Big Bang Theory episodes, but sometimes I can ignore them better than others, and last night I was hardly noticing them. What I want to pay tribute to here is the ongoing vitality of the writing -- and I mean specifically the writing for these characters (and of course these actors), who have been nurtured so carefully over the previous eight seasons.

So I laboriously transcribed this scene from the episodes' pre-credits opening, where we find Penny and Leonard in a Vegas wedding chapel. Let's just slip in quietly and join them . . . .

No, we're not yet at the point depicted in the above screen grab -- I think you'll recognize it when we get there. As our scene starts, LEONARD and PENNY are in Las Vegas, perusing wedding-chapel packages, when LEONARD's mobile phone rings.

LEONARD: Excuse me. [Looking at phone] Sheldon. [Into phone] Hey!
SHELDON [in his and LEONARD's apartment]: Leonard, have you gotten married yet?
LEONARD: Uh, no, why?
SHELDON: Good! Don't do it!
LEONARD: Why not?
SHELDON: Some important information has come to light. Women are the worst. I thought it was paper cuts, but I was wrong. No piece of paper ever cut me this deep.
LEONARD [wearily]: What happened now?
SHELDON [sighing, sort of]: Amy has ended our relationship.
LEONARD: Oh no! Seriously?
PENNY: What's going on?
SHELDON: Amy broke up with Sheldon!
PENNY: She did?
SHELDON: Is Penny crying?
LEONARD: No . . .
SHELDON: No! Of course not. They thrive on our suffering.
LEONARD: Buddy, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?
SHELDON: Yes! If I ever talk about going out with a girl again, roll your eyes at me like I do to you when you say dumb things.
LEONARD: O-O-Okay. Just because you're going through this with Amy doesn't mean that all women are bad.
SHELDON [rolling his eyes]: Whatever.
PENNY [having gotten her mobile phone out and placed a call]: Hey, I just heard about you and Sheldon. Are you okay?
AMY [sitting on the couch in her apartment, in a bathrobe]: Not really. Can you come over?
PENNY: Uh, actually, I'm in Vegas. Leonard and I are about to get married!
AMY [indignant]: Hold on! You're getting married and you didn't invite me?
PENNY: It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.
AMY [sarcastic]: Wow! Hope I can catch the bouquet from here!
PENNY: Amy, don't be like that!
SHELDON: Why'd I just hear Amy's name?
LEONARD: Penny's on the phone with her.
SHELDON: Did she say anything about me? [Shaking his head and spitting it out] N-n-never mind, I don't care. Well, if you care, you could find out and tell me. Just don't be shocked when you find out that I don't care.
PENNY: Will you relax? You're not missing anything special.
LEONARD [moving phone away from his ear, looks at her]: Hey!
PENNY: She's upset. It's gonna be a great wedding! Look at you in your little suit!
SHELDON: Amy's upset. Is it about me?
LEONARD: I think it's because we're eloping.
SHELDON: Your marriage is causing her pain? [Perking up] Yeah, great! I take it back! Go ahead and do it! Yay for love!
[Cut to opening credits.]

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TV Watch: With all those horrible zombie noises exploding, can anyone tell whether the new "Odd Couple" is funny?

by Ken

I thought I was more or less keeping track, but I missed it -- I mean, the pilot-premiere of the new TV Odd Couple. After all, you can't set your DVR before the week of the show, so if you miss the week of, then you can't set your DVR, right? So anyhow I did watch this week's episode, more or less, and after watching it, or trying to, I still don't know -- was it funny at all?

I think maybe it could have been. Thomas Lennon and Matthew Perry and seem plausibly enough cast as sloppy sportswriter Oscar Madison and nutjob-fastidious Felix Unger, who's still a photographer, as in the first TV Odd Couple series; as anyone who's seen the great film adaptation of Neil Simon's original play, written by the playwright and directed by Gene Saks, remembers from the great "date" scene with the Pigeon sisters, one of the girls asks Felix where he gets his ideas after he tells them, "I write the news for CBS."

Okay, so far Lennon is overacting and Perry is underacting, or perhaps overdoing something-other-than-acting, which involves deliving lines like a line-delivering machine while staring straight at the person he's not-talking to, as if he'd never acted before. All perfectly workable: Oscar has been given some potentially usable cronies: Wendell Pierce as his agent, Yvette Nicole Brown as his assistant, Dave Foley as . .&nbsp. well, his lazy 'n' chubby chum. There's also a weird girl who comes from I-don't-know-where, since I missed the pilot, played by Lindsay Sloane, who I guess is supposed to be antically amusing.

And maybe she is. Amusing, I mean. This is what I can't tell. Because, as you may sort-of-notice in the clip above, where it's not nearly as bad as it is in the actual show, every time one of the actors delivers a "gag," as soon as the last syllable is completed there arises this horrible noise, which makes it impossible, for me at least, to actually register what the actor just said, and therefore makes it impossible for me to guess whether it might have been amusing if I had actually been able to hear it. When the so-called gags are closely spaced, this hideous racket keeps thundering away at the innocent viewer until one wishes it would just stop.


Yes, once upon a TV time Oscar (Jack Klugman) and Felix (Tony Randall) played Password, with the real Allen Ludden.

It's been a long time since I saw an episode of the first TV Odd Couple, but between its original network run and years of saturation syndication, I once watched those episodes a lot, and I don't remember them being anything like this. My recollection is that that cast -- Jack Klugman as Oscar, Tony Randall as Felix, Al Molinaro as their friend Murray the cop, Penny Marshall as Oscar's hapless assistant Myrna Turner (and even, occasionally, her then-husband Rob Reiner as Myrna's boyfriend Werner) -- had to earn their laughs (and I mean from viewers, not from whatever professional laughers there may have been on the noise track), as of course had been the case with the great stage and screen Oscar (Walter Matthau) and Felixes (Art Carney and Jack Lemmon).  (Okay, eventually there was an Odd Couple II, with Matthau and Lemmon, and written by Neil Simon, and it seemed to demonstrate why Simon hadn't wanted to revisit his great creation. But surely this isn't a standard to which anyone is aspiring?)

Once upon a time we used to hear about the great artistry involved in laugh-trackery -- having a wide range of kinds of laughs available, understanding that people hardly ever cackle in unison but respond differently to different kinds of humor, and sometimes respond singly or in small groups, and at different lengths with different intensities. Oh, the laugh tracks that resulted were ghastly, and made every show they were applied to seem horribly unfunny, but at least you appreciated the effort. Now it's just those more or less unvarying explosions of sounds seemingly made by very loud zombies declaring their miraculous return from the presumed-dead.

Come to think of it -- and as a matter of fact, I've been thinking about it a lot -- I've been having this problem a lot in recent years. Chuck Lorre shows seem particularly problematic. For example, much as I love The Big Bang Theory, and really I think it's a great show, every now and then I find myself trapped in the Valley of the Exploding Zombie Noise-Bombs, and I suspect that somewhere along the line I developed the knack of focusing on the great characters and filtering out all those laugh-unlike noises. I recall too that for the first few years of the show, I wasn't all that crazy about it, and wonder if maybe I hadn't yet developed my general immunity to them. When I get caught in one of those horrible-noise vortices, I wonder too whether this has something to do with why some people really hate the show.

I also tried to watch a few recent episodes of Chuck L's Mom, which I had dismissed after an early episode or two as simply unwatchable. Now they had this new plot line where the daughter's apparently refound father is killed off and sorrow ensued. I thought maybe that might be interesting, and I had a vested interest in thinking better of Allison Janney, who plays the mother, because she is, after all, Allison Janney, and we have those terrific years of The West Wing to show us what she's capable of doing. Nobody since Aaron Sorking seems to have been able to use her without making her look cartoony, and in that initial episode or two of Mom that I tried to watch, I thought she was ghastly, and was only consoled by the assumption that after a few episodes it would disappear without a trace, and maybe Allison will be luckier next time out.

Go figure.

So I tried several times to watch the show, seeing where this new plot development might take it, but there were the horrible zombie noises exploding all around us, and this time, since I was concentrating, or trying to, I was pretty sure that it wasn't anything that the actors were saying that was making the zombies rise.

And don't tell me this or that show "was recorded in front of a live studio audience," because it's been years since that helped. Those audiences have been transformed into crude versions of the newfangled horrible laugh tracks -- making those same blood-curdling loud risen-from-the-dead noises in unison before they've had a chance to actually react to whatever may have been said, and keeping on doing it. It all sounds like a great deal of retro-tech anti-wizardry to me, possibly coupled with heavy drugging of the so-called audiences, taking them beyond even the expectable euphoria when civilians find themselves sealed inside the Gag Chamber with real live TV cameras rolling -- often the only element of the proceedings that seems close to live.

There's some food for thought as the viewer tries to figure out whether it's a machine or a "live studio audience" making those ghastly noises. It surprises me to think, though, that that's what TV-makers really want us thinking about while they're purportedly "amusing" us.

In the end, I guess I'll keep watching The Big Bang Theory as long as I'm able to navigate the zombie explosions, and I'm relieved that Two and a Half Men, another Chuck Lorre show, has departed first-run prime time -- for a bunch of reasons, but definitely including the zombie-noise factor. This is a show that, at least in earlier seasons, was often genuinely amusing, but seemed noticeably less so under the influence of the roaring zombies. I certainly won't be revisiting Mom anytime soon.

But the new Odd Couple is not a Chuck Lorre show. Given my attachement to the material, it's something I would love to be able to enjoy, and as I say, it does seem to have a bunch of workable elements in place. It's just that, after one shot at it, I don't seem able to hear it.

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What, you say Comic-Connies aren't big spenders? Suddenly my regard for them has jumped!

NYT caption: "Comic-Con attendees lunching near the convention center. Spending by visitors to the five-day convention, San Diego’s largest by far, is about $603, a fraction of that of much smaller events."

by Ken

Hey, almost everything I know about Comic-Con comes from watching The Big Bang Theory -- and that hasn't made it seem any more like a gathering where I would want to, you know, gather. But now comes word that the Comic-Connies stand accused of one of the vilest crimes in Consumerist America: being cheapskates.

I'm not exactly free and easy when it comes to parceling out my free nytimes.com clicks, but I couldn't resist this listing on today's "Afternoon Edition" e-mail:



Awww!

I suppose this sticks out because we generally think of the Connies as among America's free-spendingest suckers consumers, don't we? Now here they are being portrayed as making their pilgrimage to San Diego and keeping their mitts in their pockets! I want to know more!

You want numbers? We got numbers, from Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes's report, "Large Crowds Spend Little at Comic-Con":

In a recent report from the San Diego Convention Center, where Comic-Con is held, the fantasy fans ranked first in terms of the convention center’s attendance, far outstripping the combined total of its next four largest conventions, expected to be about 62,500 people.

But the Comic-Con fans were expected to spend only about $603 each during a convention that began Wednesday night and ran through Sunday. And that was only a little more than a third of the per-capita spending by those who showed up for the American Association for Cancer Research gathering in April, and similarly lower than per-person spending at the next three largest conventions in San Diego.

A measly $603 for four days? Jeez, no wonder the cancer people have the Connies eating dust! The specifics are no cheerier:

At Comic-Con, dining out is apt to mean eating a sandwich while squatting on a city street. McCormick & Schmick’s, a high-end seafood restaurant across from the convention center, sold wraps from a cart, two for $10. At midday on Thursday, more than 150 people stood in line at a nearby Subway.

“For everything? I would say, like, $50,” said Arnold Duong, a fan who was dining on the sidewalk on Thursday, when asked how much he and each of his two friends had budgeted per day for their Comic-Con experience.

Some penny-pinching attendees may actually turn a profit on the cheap posters, hats, action figures and autographs handed out at the convention. As of 3 p.m. on Saturday, more than 4,000 listings were active on eBay under the title “Comic-Con 2014.”

So what if the Connies are a bunch of penny-pinching tightwads? Here's what (lotsa links onsite):

The Toronto International Film Festival has Bell, L’Oréal, and the RBC Royal Bank among its official sponsors. Sundance this year attracted Chase Sapphire, Acura, Hewlett-Packard and Sprint. At the Golden Globes, guests sip from promotional bottles of Moët & Chandon.

But at Comic-Con, a lower-rent affair, official convention sponsorships are largely confined to media companies or game companies, like NBC and Nintendo, and the giveaways — well, a visitor is lucky to snag some lime-flavored Red Bull or a pack of Stride chewing gum.

At this year’s convention, the Samsung Galaxy weighed in with both a convention sponsorship and backing for events related to a pair of upcoming films, Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1.”

Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s adult-themed programming block, also picked up corporate sponsorship for individual shows from the likes of Intel, Lexus and State Farm. But those products and their companies were kept pretty much in the background as the cartoons took center stage.

“We develop all this stuff with the idea of a sponsor in mind, but not for the sponsor,” said Amantha Walden, Adult Swim’s director of events.

In truth, companies that might flock to a Tribeca Film Festival, which for years was backed by American Express and now has AT&T as its lead sponsor, would do well to stick with the soft sell here, because nobody is buying much.

The Times team notes that "for media companies, which compete as much for eyeballs as for direct spending, a crowd this large can be irresistible, even when it does not have much cash."

“I absolutely feel like it’s a pop culture carnival, and there is an unspoken competition among networks to outdo each other,” said Michael Ouweleen, a senior vice president and group creative director at Cartoon Network.

But if you're looking to score some actual sales, you probably wish you had the cancer crowd rather than the Connies. The Times-ies report glum tidings for "the few consumer brands that took a chance on Comic-Con":

One of those was Chrysler, which sponsored a popular Dodge Challenger simulator attraction in a parking lot promotional spread for the Weinstein Company’s “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Another car company, Hyundai, sponsored a display for “Legends,” a crime series from TNT. And there was a snappy, flame-orange Mini Cooper in the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel, part of the campaign for “Pixels,” a 3-D action fantasy set for release by Sony Pictures next May.

Yet even the Elio Motors Tadpole, a three-wheeled vehicle priced at a modest $6,800, looked like a reach for some of the Comic-Con types who eyed it on Friday in the doorway of the Hotel Solamar, just a few blocks from the convention center.

“The federal government says it’s a motorcycle,” said a salesman, trying to make a glamour point of the two-passenger vehicle’s exceedingly compact nature. (A rider sits behind the driver.)

“Oh,” said one of three young women who were giving the Elio a look. Then they turned and headed back . . . to the convention.

Now that's a tough crowd, sales-wise.


"THE CAST OF THE BIG BANG THEORY
WAS INCREDIBLY NICE TO US"


What I was hoping for was the characters of The Big Bang Theory at Comic-Con. I guess we'll have to made do with the actors. Says TVFanatic Matt Richenthal: "The cast of The Big Bang Theory gathers here for a photo at Comic-Con. They were incredibly nice to us at the event."

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Just when you think right-wing intelligence can't be any lower, it is -- they don't know the meaning of "choice"

Dint ol' Ronnie Reagan hisself promis us we dint hafta beleeve in no stuff we dint wanna like no Big Bongs which anyways is just a big bell or somethin' in Inglund?

by Ken

Do you know what the word "choice" means? What it means to choose between options? Yes, you say? You do? Then I'm sorry to have to tell you that apparently you have just been disqualified from being a right-winger.

We'll come back to this in a moment. Meanwhile I want to commiserate with Daily Kos blogger LaFeminista, who yesterday found herself banging her head up against the limits of right-wing intelligence, in a poignant post called "Breaking: Americans Find Something Else Not To Effing Believe In."

Evolution is so absurd but the idea of humans walking with dinosaurs is quite interesting.

Climate change is a liberal commie Nazi plot

Now we have the Big Bang

WASHINGTON, April 21 (UPI) -- In a new national poll on America's scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang."

The UPI "Science News" post in question, by the way, is headed "Majority of Americans doubt the Big Bang theory."

This leads our author to wonder, "What is the basis of their opinion/lack of confidence?"

Oh right.

The same as everything else when faced with complicated theories.

suggesting more respondents are aware of the science than originally suggested -- they just don't believe the science.

I don't believe. WTF?

It has come to the point where all debate is reduced to belief, that is all well and good when debating about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

What annoys the crap out of me is that it has become the lazy way of getting around having to study and think.

I don't believe the science, yada, yada plus vacuous anecdotal evidence; fairy dust.

Well fuck you then

Show me some bloody data or just admit that you don't know.

Yes indeed, "it has come to the point where all debate is reduced to belief," and as I note frequently, to my mind this is the most enduring and profound (measuring in at a tiny fraction of a micron deep) of America's folksiest sage, Ronald Reagan. Professor Reagan taught Americans that they didn't have to fear or even entertain doubt in the face of unpleasant reality. In reality, he told them, reality is only what you want to believe. (The corollary, which wasn't actually part of the Reagan doctrine but has since been intuited, is that if anyone tries to force you to believe stuff you don't wanna, well, isn't that why God gave us guns?)

I COULDN'T HELP THINKING OF THIS POST IN
CONNECTION WITH A THINKPROGRESS ONE

Why on earth shouldn't Chelsea and Marc be happy?

It's a piece by Tara Culp-Ressler called "Why Chelsea Clinton’s Pregnancy Is So Baffling To Abortion Opponents." The post begins (links onsite):

Last week, the news that Chelsea Clinton is expecting her first child inspired its fair share of headlines — even fueling suggestions that it was somehow carefully timed to benefit her mother’s potential presidential run. The announcement also made the rounds in the right-wing blogosphere, inspiring several op-eds attempting to highlight the apparent contrast between the Clintons’ stance on reproductive rights and their daughter’s decision to have a child.

Now this too kind of floored me when I belatedly heard about it. This goes beyond the usual category of "You can't make this stuff up" to "Why would anybody try to make this up?" There is supposed to be some conflict between being "pro-choice" and choosing to have a baby? Huh? What am I missing here?

Abortion opponents expressed confusion that the Clintons would refer to Chelsea’s unborn child as a “baby” and not a “fetus,” suggesting that’s wholly incompatible with their support for legal abortion. “When it’s their own grandchild, it appears the Clintons see things differently, with their words most definitely betraying their true feelings on the matter. No talk of a non-person fetus, only of a child,” a Christian Post editorial noted, declaring that the Clintons must actually believe that life begins at conception.

The insinuation, of course, is that the people who support abortion rights must always opt for abortion over pregnancy. But that’s an incredibly black-and-white view of reproductive rights that doesn’t actually reflect the reality of Americans’ experiences — including the women who have chosen to end a pregnancy at some point in their lives.

Although the issue of reproductive rights typically separates people into two camps, either “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” there’s increasing evidence that those labels don’t accurately capture Americans’ complex relationships to abortion. Many people identify as both, and say their attitude about the procedure depends on the situation. Some people who tell pollsters they’re “pro-life” don’t actually support overturning Roe v. Wade. It’s possible to believe you are carrying a baby and choose to end the pregnancy anyway. Many times, personal experiences with abortion fall into what’s known as a “grey area” between the two political camps.

Tara goes on to make some excellent and interesting points about the actual attitudes of actual people on the subjects of pregnancy and abortion. It's a fine piece, and I encourage you to read it.

But I found myself still stuck back at ground zero, this supposed incompatibility between being pro-choice and choosing to have a baby. Until it finally hit me that the supposed pro-lifers, who as we know are only in favor of a few very narrowly defined forms of life, and are in fact enormously hostile to most others, literally do not know the meaning of the word choice. And possibly, it occurred to me, they have no concept of the mental process of choosing, of arriving at the best possible set of alternatives in any given situation and then, using all your developed mental faculties, making the most informed possible choice among those alternatives.

It is, in other words, the basic, essential process by which everything that can be accomplished by these minds -- with which we were endowed by some sort of creator -- is accomplished. And of course the process includes accepting responsibliity for our choices.

Which takes me straight back to "what annoys the crap out of" LaFeminista: that this business of reducing all debate to belief "has become the lazy way of getting around having to study and think."

Yes, it has. It's not only the groupthink mentality's way of protecting its Borg-like nonthinking collective from any necessity or even impulse to think. It's the groupthink mentality's front line of protection against the danger of anyone outside or inside the collective who may be infected with such an impulse.

Ladies and germs, I give you, on a platter, the Right-Wing War Against Science. Just because people were once able to get along with dinosaurs doesn't mean we have to subject ourselves to scientific silliness like evolution and climate change and now these damn big bongs.

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TV Watch: Professor Proton (Bob Newhart) makes a charming, wistful, and droll return to "The Big Bang Theory"

In this week's Big Band Theory, Sheldon (Jim Parsons) was stung by rejection from his hero Professor Proton (Bob Newhart), who chose to work with Leonard (Johnny Galicki). Sheldon countered with Bill "The Science Guy" Nye, and as Newhart recalls: "There's bad feeling between the two of them, and I actually, physically make a move toward him. He says, 'My show was really patterned after yours.' And I say, 'That's what I told my lawyers.'"

by Ken

There are pluses and minuses to keeping one's distance from the mindless flow of TV news. I had no idea that Bob Newhart had won an Emmy (his first ever, amazingly) for his appearance last season on The Big Bang Theory as Sheldon and Leonard's childhood hero Professor Proton -- or rather Arthur Jeffries, who once upon a time did a kiddie science show that hooked our two future physicists on science. It was a wonderful episode, with the Jeffries character only too keenly aware, in the trademark low-key Newhart way, of the toll taken by time and the memory of a man in his 80s who traded his love of science for a stint as a minor celebrity -- a onetime minor celebrity now confronting the peculiar form of worship available from Leonard and of course especially Sheldon. At the same time, our Arthur isn't so far gone as to fail to appreciate the charms of Kaley Cuoco's Penny.

Thursday night, though, I counted myself blessed to not know that Professor Proton was making a return appearance, in an episode called "The Proton Displacement." In fact, I just learned --  from an interview Newhart gave Zap2it's Jay Bobbin -- that his deal is for three appearances:

Newhart initially told executive producer and co-creator Chuck Lorre -- who confessed to sneaking onto the set of the 1980s sitcom Newhart and eating lunch there during breaks -- that he'd want more than one stint as Professor Proton. The latest episode is the second in his three-story deal, and he's not sure he'd want to continue beyond that.

"I just picked a number out of the air," Newhart says. "I said, 'I want it to be a three-shot rather than a one-shot,' and Chuck said, 'OK. You've got it.' It's such a great show, I don't want my character to be jumping the shark."

Since Amy is with Sheldon and Leonard when they encounter the professor in a supermarket, he gets to register properly Newhart-like astonishment that Sheldon has a girlfriend, but accepts stoically the news that things are fine between Leonard and his girlfriend, settling for asking Penny if she happens to have a single grandmother. Newhart seems to have enjoyed his previous encounter with Penny.

I've always said that for the [show] I got the Emmy for, Kaley [Cuoco] really threw herself on the sword. She had to act really dumb, and she's not. It was a case of everybody just wanting it to work so much, they kept throwing me hanging curveballs, and I kept swinging at them.

With two episodes under his belt now, he says of the Big Bang Theory team:

If a joke doesn't work, they'll just keep working on it until it does. As we're filming, they're rewriting, and that's a great comfort when you know you're dealing with great writers. You know they're not going to let anything go by until it's as funny as they can possibly make it, and that's a very relaxed feeling.

I'm not sure I agree with Newhart that his second episode "is so totally different from the one I was in before," but I love what he has to say about it:

"You really get insight into Sheldon and Leonard's relationship, which I felt was very tender.

"I have one scene where I ask Leonard, 'Why do you put up with Sheldon?' He says, 'Well, he's a friend of mine.' And I say, 'Why?' In other words, what does he have to offer as a friend? And Leonard says, 'I can't help it.' And that's kind of the theme of the show."

Indeed, Newhart also found that in another scene: "We're in a drugstore, and Sheldon comes up to me and says, 'Hello, I'm Sheldon. We've met before. Possibly, you don't remember me because of your advanced age.' It's not intended to be Don Rickles insulting somebody, that's just the way he is. He can't help it."

Newhart naturally isn't the whirlwind Mel Brooks was in his take-no-prisoners appearances as Paul's Uncle Phil on Mad About You, but it's been good to see him doing, you know, what he does. I also count myself lucky not to have seen the very nice Jay Bobbin interview, which was posted early afternoon Thursday, before I saw the show. A spoiler alert might have been in order.

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TV Watch: Could the barren wasteland of this TV season be somehow connected to the barren wasteland of our social and political reality?

Bright lights in the void: I haven't watched this official trailer for Season 3 of Homeland, but you may want to. If the season turned out to be good, I didn't want it spoiled by the preview, and if it didn't, well, I didn't want to waste my time. So far, I'm happier than I could have imagined. It's less of a surprise the The Good Wife is off to a great season start -- less of a surprise, but still an enormous relief.

by Ken

Let's just throw this out as an off-the-cuff thought rather than a closely argued sociocultural treatise, but do you suppose there could be a connection between this godforsaken wasteland of a TV season and our present godforsaken wasteland of a sociopolitical reality? Is it possible that in a time of such acute polarization and rancor, the programming geniuses sense that the safest thing to try to put on people's screens is mush? With one side of the political spectrum being hijacked by a gang of brain-deprived hooligans in furious flight from reality, and the other side cowering in fear of them, the last thing you might want to shovel out there onto the TV pile is any programming with content, or any sort of connection to reality except "Fuck it!!!"

Let me qualify that since my last rant, I've seen glints of hope. The new season of The Good Wife so far seems to me crackling. You have to hope the show won't be overwhelmed by the new reality that Alicia is the wife of the governor-elect. But there's plenty going on, with the impending flight from Lockhart Garner of the uppity fourth-years with partner Alicia (Julianna Margulies) in tow, and you know the greedy understandable insistence of the others on delaying in order to collect their buses is going to lead to all kinds of hell -- it didn't take wily David Lee (Zach Grenier) to figure out what's going on. Plus there's this net of government snooping settling around the firm, which seems to be equal parts NSA Big Brother and Keystone Cops, and has the potential for some intense plot heat as well as mirthful irony. Meanwhle, Stockard Channing has already been usefully back as Alicia's free-wheeling mother, and the Florrick offspring, Zach (the alarmingly adorable Graham Phillips) and Grace (Makenzie Vega) are growing productively. CBS contributes its usual share -- nothing or less -- by maintaining the show on its football-buffeted Sunday-night Dare-You-to-Try-to-Watch TV schedule.

The surprise is that I've found the new season of Homeland quite engaging. There's the ready-made plot engine of the aftermath of the CIA blowing up real good, with the apparent frame of Brody (Damian Lewis), an actual as opposed to figurative congressman-terroris, holding well, and a heap of trouble in the embarrassing revelation of the assorted ties, including the sexual kind, between Brody Carrie (Claire Danes). Even while it was happening it was of course imbecilic and preposterous behavior on both their parts, but it's the kind of imbecilic and preposterous behavior that spells "human," especially where sex is concerned. And now that Carrie is really poised on the edge of nuttitude, Danes's tic-o-rama acting is actually quite appropriate. I don't want to try to analyze too deeply; I'm just thrilled to be back to eagerly anticipating new episodes.

The Big Bang Theory also seems to me to be doing just fine, with an especially felicitous story idea in the response of Sheldon (Jim Parsons, with another Emmy on the mantel) to having his beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark destroyed by Amy (Mayim Bialik) pointing out that Indiana Jones is irrelevant to the outcome of the plot. How would Sheldon respond except by making it a personal mission to destroy something that Amy loves. There are signs too that Amy may be about to begin to wake up to Sheldon's all too obvious shortcomings as a boyfriend. Let it roll.

As for the rest? Well, Blue Bloods seems still to be suffering from the realization that every possible cop-show plot has been not just used but overused. I've started watching Parenthood, largely on the strength of my mind-blowing re-encounter with producer Jason Katims's great triumph, Friday Night Lights, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on, and Peter Krause, coming off two of the great series acting performances of our time in Sports Night and Six Feet Under, doesn't seem to have much to do except nag.

Then, ominously, there's the rash of so-called comedies that seem devoted to the proposition that people, but men especially, are hilariously useless slugs. I can't even keep track of them all, but I've sampled a number on the strength of some actors of demonstrated class. I mean, the show with Martin Mull and Peter Riegert as the two fathers whose sons would be that much more conspicuous evolutionary duds if their dads weren't so much worse . . . what's the deal here? It has always seemed as if Mull could make something out of anything, but it turns out that no, he can only make something out of something, and Riegert, well, if he'd been offered a better job, I assume he would have taken it.

Or there's Tony Shalhoub, who has given us such treasurable characterizations as Antonio the fatally insecure taxi driver on Wings and of course as Mr. Monk. Wouldn't you think TV creators would be lining up to lure him into signing on to some really creative projects? Again, if they had, I assume he would have jumped, and we and he would have been spared the embarrassment of this show, whatever the heck it's called. Men, is it? And just to show that lunkish galootdom isn't strictly a male affliction, there's one of our best-loved actors, Allison Janney, mugging her way through, uh, her show, which alarmingly comes to us from Chuck Lorre, who has given us so much better. And now that "sass" has apparently taken the place of actual human qualities, 2 Broke Girls seems to have slipped from borderline promising to barely watchable.

The cable offerings don't seem a whole lot more encouraging. mostly offering a pointy-headed-er version of the same nothingness. The pretentious nothingness of Girls now seems to have been a trailblazer.

It's not just the dismal quality I'm thinking of here, but the quality of that quality. We make no demands on you, viewer, the shows seem to say, we're just there to mark the passing of time and of your lives, which are now either an hour or a half-hour closer to the end.

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TV Watch: In series TV, how much is too much?

This week we said good-bye to Burn Notice.

by Ken

* This week we said good-bye to USA's Burn Notice, after however-many seasons and however-many episodes. (If you care, you can look it up as well as I can. LATER: Okay, I looked it up: seven seasons -- of 12, 16, 16, 18, 18, 18, and 13 episodes.) My instinct is that it went on a couple of seasons too long, and this despite the creative team's diligent work at creating new and different hells for ex-CIA spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) and his crew -- (ex-)girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), old pal Sam (Bruce Campbell), later-in-the-run add-on Jesse (Coby Bell), and of course Michael's indispensable mother Maddy (Sharon Gless) -- the plots kept coming out the same. And while the detailing was probably as fastidious as in seasons past, it just didn't matter to me. In these late seasons when I half-watched an episode, I didn't feel any need, as I used to, to go back and watch the whole thing properly.

It was certainly clever to make this season's "villiain," James (John Pyper-Ferguson), something closer to a good guy than most of the supposed good guys. That wasn't the change that registered for me, though, which was having Fiona really and truly trying to put Michael in the past and get on with her life. Now that was a change, perhaps because what kept the show going, and kept me watching, was the tight bonds among that core ensemble. In retrospect, the addition of Jesse in Season 4 was a masterstroke. It not only added a core character but added one with no past ties to the others, so that the bonding process with them became an intriguing process in its own right.

The show certainly never embarrassed itself, and had a number of compelling and original seasons, and maintained a certain viability to the end.

* Also this week, USA's Royal Pains, featuring Mark Feuerstein as newly minted Hamptons "concierge doctor" Hank Lawson, completed its fifth season (seasons of 12, 18, 16, 16, and 13 episodes), and here again you can't accuse the creative team of repeating itself. But their idea of "new" ideas has always veered to the preposterous, like the whole business of zillionaire Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz and his on-again, off-again hereditary illness, made bearable by Campbell Scott's unflappable dignity in the role.

Again they've held on to an appealing "core" group, but additional supporting players have been shuttled in and out. I've been increasingly put off by the element that probably the producers and much of the audience considers one of the show's fascinations: the leering ogling of the Hamptons' richfolk. At the end of the show, we were told to watch for a new season in summer 2014. I can wait.

* Fawlty Towers racked up a total of 12 episodes in two seasons (1975 and 1979), three-plus years apart. John Cleese, who co-wrote all 12 episodes with Connie Booth, has explained that the reason there weren't more episodes is that they were so hard to write. I've always found it fascinating that in the first season they were still married, and in the second season they weren't.

If there's anyone who disagrees that those 12 episodes represent one of the greatest achievements in TV history, I'm guessing we wouldn't have much to talk about. By the way, I note in the Wikipedia article that BBC execs of the period have fallen over themselves saying that they didn't see anything funny in the scripts. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

* Recently I wrote with awe and delight about a DVD re-watch of seasons of Friday Night Lights, the amazing series focused on a small town in Texas and the role high school football played in its life, with career-defining performances from Kyle Chandler as coach Eric Taylor and Connie Britton as his wife, Tami -- and a large and superlative surrounding cast. The show was on NBC's chopping block after most every season but managed to make it to five seasons -- of 22, 15, 13, 13, and 13 episodes).

In a DVD audio commentary for one of the early seasons, executive producer Jason Katims and co-executive producer Jeffrey Reiner talk about the unusual way their show was produced: shooting enough material to produce an initial cut maybe a half-hour longer than most shows do even before they cut down to the 42 or so minutes of a network prime-time drama. The key was to provide material to create the best possible show in the editing process.

That has to be an expensive way to produce a show, and I assume has something to do with the network's paring down of the later seasons. But in a later audio commentary, I'm guessing for the Season 3 premiere, Katims and Reiner talk about how much they liked the 13-episode "arc." It did mean they couldn't do the kinds of individual-character digressions they'd done before, but it also meant that they could really plan out that "arc." Reiner wasn't around for them all, but the team produced three sensational 13-episode seasons.

* Speaking of the importance of the editing process, Six Feet Under creator-producer Alan Ball has said that it played a huge role in his show, which had three seasons of 13 episodes followed by two of 12 on HBO. As I recall, he credited the intensive editing experience with the capacity to transform a good episode into a great one.

One of these days I plan to rewatch SFU start to finish. My recollection is that there were a lot of great episodes.

* If you haven't seen E! Entertainment's hour-long tribute to Modern Family, obviously occasioned by the show's leap into syndication this fall, as it enters its fifth season of new episodes), you should try to. There's the obvious pleasure of tracing the history of a show in which all the important decisions, but there's also a fair amount of information that may surprise you, as it surprised me.

Notably, there's the information that once the show got into production, co-creators and co-showrunners Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, both of whom were used to running shows on their own, found themselves stepping over each other during actual production, with too much time being consumed by it to produce its order of 24 episodes (which all four of its seasons to date have been -- it seems to me that 22 or 23 has become a more usual number). The solution they arrived at: They alternate episodes as showrunner.

Now 24 half-hours a year seems to me a brutal drain on a creative team's resources. Can you imagine John Cleese and Connie Booth, plus however many other writers they would have had to bring in, cranking out a few 24-episode seasons of Fawlty Towers? Modern Family seems to me the exception that proves the rule -- far from exhibiting signs of strain, the show seems to me if anything stronger than ever going into Season 5.

Obviously it matters that the show relies on a large cast of characters, which makes it that much less unlikely that any individual character is played out. It matters too that Levitan and Lloyd have assembled a team of outstanding writers, and that for story ideas they're drawing on their accumulated experience of family life. But I wonder if it doesn't also help that the co-showrunners, who I assume are both involved in the planning of all the episodes, each have on-the-ground responsibility for only 12 episodes.

I can't wait to start rewatching the older shows. I've written about my experience with The Big Bang Theory, which I like a lot in first run but didn't come to really appreciate until I began seeing the same episodes over and over and over in syndication. I had no idea (a) that they would hold up that well and (b) that I would keep discovering new cherishable things in each episode.


Is Modern Family going to hold up in syndication as well as, say, The Big Bang Theory?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

For the new pope, tell your cardinal to vote for Chuck Lorre (pass it on!)

Chuck 'n' Charlie: Not to worry -- given the current state of relations between them, it seems highly unlikely that Charlie would be popping in at the Vatican (with or without "goddesses") to visit Pope Chuck.

"[D]on't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled 'Pope Chuck, P.I.' (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!)"

- from Chuck Lorre's vanity card (#409) proposing
himself as an "outside the box" candidate for pope

by Ken

I was turning over ideas to maybe kick off a weekly series of musings on TV tonight when I got derailed.

As to the TV musings, I haven't done much writing about TV lately, I think because I've been feeling less and less confident that what I'm looking at (let alone looking for) has any relevance to anybody else. I'm not sure why I should be the only person in the world who seems to pay attention to this factor, but it's made it tough.

But for tonight I had this idea of writing about the purge I just did on my DVR "Series Manager," finally freeing myself from shows I've stopped watching anyway and finally got tired of deleting every week. (It can be really tough with the cable shows, because if you delete one "scheduled recording," the device will attempt -- helpfully, it thinks -- to substitute another showing of the same damned episode, and will keep doing it as long as there are other showings to schedule-and-delete.) So I wouldn't be so much "reviewing" these shows as explaining the decision to sever those DVR ties.

Meanwhile, while I was turning these ideas over, I was watching this week's Big Bang Theory, reflecting that you could take any two minutes at random from the show's entire run to date and that would represent a vastly greater achievement in terms of creativity, character insight, human empathy, intellectual seriousness, and entertainment value than the entire bloated corpus of these HBO and Showtime shows I've finally flushed. And then came the vanity card came on, and I realized I had to stop the presses, or whatever the blog equivalent of stopping the presses is, to spread the word about this bold proposal from the show's runner.

I myself have made my own suggestion for a new pope: one of those pesky nuns who have been causing such agita to outgoing Pope Cardinal Ratguts and the rest of his cadre of deviant sociopathic Church overlords. Of course I have no standing in matters papal, but surely it has occurred to you faithful Catholics that neither do you! You're just going to let the old cardinals bicker and come up with some other repellent scumbag and you can all pretend that this dingbat too is infallible.

(I was delighted, by the way, to see that my idea of one of those pesky nuns for pope also occurred to E. J. Dionne Jr. Sorry I can't find a link, but that piece seemed to me at the time to disappear when E.J.'s studiously fair-minded appraisal of Ratguts appeared.)

Anyway, I think it's time for you Catholics to start kicking up a fuss to make sure your cardinal knows that you're an interested party. (That's assuming you have a cardinal. As I understand it, you aren't automatically entitled to one. You get a bishop and very likely arching over him an archbishop, you lucky devils, but only the pope can determine if and when your archbishop is entitled to a cardinal's beanie. You folks in the L.A. area, for example, are still having to make do with just an archbishop. He will no doubt be elevated by the next pope, since it's unimaginable that L.A. won't have a cardinal. But for now, remember that you still have a conclave-eligible cardinal in the person of your former "ecclesiastical prince," that douchebag Mahony. So e-mail him; I'm sure he'll be interested in your views, just as he always was.)

Now Chuck L may indeed be an, um, unexpected candidate for Bishop of Rome. But I can pretty well guarantee you that he's a better prospect than any of the slugs who'll be handicapped as potential candidates between now and the day the white smoke blows.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #409

I'm a big believer in the old maxim, "If you don't ask, you don't get." With that in mind, I'd like to throw caution to the wind and ask the Vatican's College of Cardinals to consider me for the job opening that recently became available. Now, before you say anything, let me be the first to point out the many reasons "why not." I'm Jewish. I've never understood the hoopla over the Old Testament, with all the smiting and begetting. I'm a twice- divorced sitcom writer with a shady past. And perhaps most importantly, I look silly in a hat. No argument, the cons are plentiful. But let's take a moment to examine the pros. First, I am completely untouched by the abuse scandal that is currently engulfing the church. I can stand on the balcony that overlooks St. Peter's Square and say to the adoring masses, with a straight, albeit Semitic face, "Folks, I've never even met an altar boy." With me as your pontiff you buy yourself some serious deniability. Next, believe it or not, I happen to be a very spiritually inclined guy. I would love a job where my primary thrust was encouraging prayer, meditation and acts of loving kindness. (Although in the interest of full disclosure, we would have to negotiate some common sense middle ground for any other thrusting I might want to do. It'd be a shame to waste adoring masses as long as they consist entirely of consenting adults.) And finally, there's the issue of my name. How can a billion true believers not smile and breathe a sigh of relief when the white smoke coming from the chimney is to announce the investiture of Pope Chuck? Cardinals, I want to assure you that while my papacy is a little "outside the box," you can rest assured that I would passionately carry the good word to all the poor and the downtrodden, beginning with a holy visit to Saint-Tropez, or maybe the Bahamas or Turks & Caicos. And just think of the marketing opportunities! How is "Pope Chuck" not the name of the next Adam Sandler movie? What's to stop me from busting a move on the balcony and starting a dance craze called "Pope Chuckin'"? And don't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled "Pope Chuck, P.I." (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!) Yes, this transition represents an incredible opportunity for the church to be reborn. And at the end of the day, isn't that the name of the game?

Are you going to tell me Chuck L wouldn't look better than Pope Cardinal Ratguts in this new-style pope hat? I'm not saying he'd look great in this monstrosity, but he could hardly help looking better, no?

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Frontiers of shamelessness: Chuck Lorre hawks his book-form collection of his vanity cards

You know the old saying, "Shameless is as shameless does." Okay, maybe it's not an old saying, and maybe I'm not even sure what it would mean if it were. But somehow it seems pertinent to Chuck Lorre's collection of his celebrated end-of-show vanity cards -- with, he promises, some new material added.

by Ken

So here I was just this week bragging about how I was on top of my new-season televiewing. It shouldn't be that tough, really, since it's pretty much all old and returning shows. (I'm casting a wary eye on CBS's Partners, though I missed the pilot, and the show is apparently too fancy for On Demand. There's sort of something going on there, nothing much is grabbing me except Brandon Routh, whom I don't think I've seen before, as "the other" gay guy.) Then I ran into the usual Sunday-night jam-up, which isn't so easy to clear if you aren't doing due DVR diligence, which for various reasons I wasn't this week -- and then I discovered I've got a Thursday-night mini-jam-up.

Which is a long-way-round way of saying that I only just caught up on Thursday night's Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men. And naturally at the end of the very lovely Big Bang Theory episode, naturally I paused the machine to read producer Chuck Lorre's vanity card. Which looked something like this:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #393

I'm reluctant to use my vanity cards to plug the sale of my vanity card book. That doesn't mean I won't do it, I'm just reluctant. Or perhaps the better word is ambivalent - of two minds. On the one hand it seems a bit shameless to ask people to spend money on a beautifully bound, giant coffee table book filled with amusing stories and biting witticisms, each high-gloss page handsomely illustrated and ready for framing. On the other, it sure would make a dandy holiday gift for that special someone in your life who already has an iPod Nano. Of course, the fact that the book contains some original material which is sure to stir up some old controversies is by no means reason to buy it. Then again, how can you miss out on owning something that is so perfectly suited for toilet reading? The answer is, you can't. Take it from me, don't suffer from ambivalence. Enjoy the clarity of thought and purpose that comes from being of one mind - a mind that says, "I'm gonna go online right now and order me a copy of 'What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Bitter.'"

Okay, so I'm shameless, sue me. Oh wait, that's already been done.

Having written here before about some of Chuck's notable vanity cards (it was, in fact, a DWT reader who clued me in via a comment that you can find them all online), I decided on the spot that I was prepared to shamelessly promote his shameless self-promotion. As indeed I'm doing.

The only thing was, not being exactly a ball of fire today, I didn't head straight for the computer to do the deed, but instead dawdled in front of the TV and, as already noted, caught up on Thursday's Two and a Half Men, also a Chuck Lorre show, and what did I see at the end but -- you guessed it -- good old card #393! My immediate thought was that that may be just one tiny shameless step too far. But that, I decided on second thought, is a subject for another post.

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2011-12 TV wrap-up and 2012-13 preview: It mostly all sucks, and CBS still tries its best to keep viewers from viewing "The Good Wife"

Are The Good Wife's Alicia (Julianna Margulies) and Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) trying to figure out how to get their overseers at CBS to stop working so hard to prevent fans of the network's best show -- not to mention people who would be grabbed by it if they got the hang of it -- from watching?

by Ken

The things I do for you, dear readers. Today I actually watched the last 25 minutes or so of the dreadful Jets-Steelers game, just for the purpose of seeing when exactly the telecast would end and CBS's pushed-back Sunday-night schedule would begin.

As you surely know already, the NFL has pushed its "late"-game start time back from 4:15pm ET to 4:25pm, and CBS has responded by pushing its Sunday-night schedule back from 7 to 7:30 ET. (Fox, the other network affected by NFL late-game starts, has been starting its Sunday-night schedule at 7:30 for some time.)

So tonight I endured that unendurable stretch of Jets-Steelers to confirm just what I suspected: that the 10-minute pushback is totally useless for my purposes. Even in combination with the elimination of any kind of postgame coverage -- except for postgame commercials -- CBS couldn't get 60 Minutes on the air till 7:37.

Now I don't give a damn about the football games. Can people still be watching these dreadful spectacles? Are fans really not noticing that the drawn-out games have become increasingly unendurable? And I'm not blaming the commercial-time inflation. Sure, this is a known (and knowing) drain on viewers' patience, but the generally unspoken reality is that what happens between the commercials has become even more unwatchable. And for me this is just as true of the supposed nail-biters as of a dog like today's Jets-Steelers mess. The only real question in any game seems to me the collective amount by which the lives of the players on the field, not to mention the quality of those lives, has been shortened by the day's orgy of physical punishment. And that won't be known till years and decades afterward, at which point hardly any viewers will be paying attention.

For that matter, I don't give a damn about 60 Minutes either. I can't believe people are still watching that either. A broadcast that once prided itself on punching holes in the status quo has become one of its most ardent defenders. Can anyone care about what's left?

What I do care about is the pushback of the rest of the CBS Sunday-night schedule. And the one thing I care about, as we count down to the start of the fall TV season, is being able to catch the start of The Good Wife, which is close to the only thing on CBS I care about. (Okay, I'm a big fan of The Big Bang Theory, and have managed to continue watching How I Met Your Mother even as it has increasingly run out of steam. And I got through a season of Two Broke Girls, despite the high annoyance level of most of the episodes.)

So let's recap. The NFL think it has solved its late-game start-time problem: that viewers of the early games frequently get their game lopped off because contractually local stations have to switch to the late games of double-headers when they start. Now if they can't get those early games over by 4:25 . . . well, I won't finish that thought. I'm not entirely persuaded that they can. But again, that's not the game-end time which concerns me.

I have a feeling that the CBS programming people are frustrated by the ratings of The Good Wife, feeling that more viewers should care about it. I'm not talkikng about tricking people into watching the show; I'm talking about making sure that all the viewers who would enjoy the show if they got a feel for what it's doing ever find out what' it's doing. But does no one a the network grasp the punishment inflicted on the show by placing it on the Sunday-night schedule? You have to really, really care about the show to put up with what you have to put up with just to be able to watch the show, whether in real time or via DVR.

In the wake of the football-pushback story, I found a blogger who like me was mostly concerned about the impact on DVR-ability of The Good Wife. She (I think it was a she; I couldn't refind the post) pointed out that pushing The Good Wife into a 9:30-to-10:30 slot would complicate the lives of many viewers suffering a DVR jam-up on Sunday nights, since it will make it impossible for most DVR owners to record more than one other show in the 9pm slot.

This struck me as in interesting point. What with NPR's Masterpiece and assorted cable offerings that tend to be squeezed into Sunday nights, there really is a DVR jam-up. But there are ways around that, making use of cable repeats and On Demand. However, when the CBS schedule is pushed back 7 minutes, the only solution I've found to avoid missing the last 7 minutes of The Good Wife is to manually schedule a 90-minute recording from 9:30 to 11.

In other words, I'm exactly where I've been since The Good Wife was moved to Sunday night. The powers-that-be are doing everything in their power to keep me from watching, but I'll be damned if I let them stop me!


MY 2011-12 WRAP-UP AND 2012 FALL PREVIEW

I've written hardly anything about the season past because there didn't seem to me much to write about. And sorry, but I haven't been able to force myself to study the fall schedules as I know I should have. My strategy of recent seasons has been to trust blindly that the new shows can't all be as dreadful as they sound. So once again I'll trust that word of mouth will reach me in time to clue me in if I've been missing anything. If you've got any tips, I'm listening.

I can say that I'm looking forward to the new season of HBO's Boardwalk Empire, which begins tonight. Otherwise, even my cable-show interest has been waning. Oh, on AMC I thought the new Mad Men season was fine and the new Breaking Bad half-season ditto. Better still, Lifetime's Army Wives has an outstanding season, but they seemed to be saying the promos that the final episode of the season was the final episode -- though I can't find any actual announcement to that effect, and the season certainly ended with a heckuva cliffhanger.

What alarmed me was the extend to which I found myself thinking that I didn't really need to watch new episodes of onetime USA Network standards like Burn Notice and Royal Pains and Covert Affairs and Suits and even, perhaps most surprisingly, White Collar. At TNT there's still some life in Rizzoli and Isles, based entirely on the strength of the cast and the interest of the characters, and unfortunately less and less on the quality of the writing. I'm relieved that The Closer has been put out of my misery. (The recycling into Major Crimes is a mixed blessing. It's a relief not to have to endure all that awful stuff Kyra Sedgwick has been doing, but without her, does anyone want to keep watching that bunch?)

I don't know, maybe I'm just old and grumpy. The one bright side I can see is that maybe my Sunday nights won't be so jammed up and I'll have an easier time catching The Good Wife.

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Serious funnyfolks: Bob Mankoff's update of "I say it's spinach," Lee Lorenz on banksters, and Chuck Lorre on, well, life

"I say it's government-mandated broccoli, and I say the hell with it."

by Ken

How audacious of our friend Bob Mankoff, not only the The New Yorker's cartoon editor but one of the magazine's elite cartoonists, to offer the above cartoon this week! What's audacious is that, while it's pretty funny in its own right, it really counts on the reader recognizing it as an hommage to one of the magazine's most famous cartoons, drawn by Carl Rose in 1928 with the caption provided by E. B. White.

"It's broccoli, dear."
"I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."

I should add that it was a common cartoon practice in those days, to have captions provided by gag-writers to fit drawings -- or vice versa. Not that I mean to reduce E. B. White to the status of a "gag-writer," but in this case that's what his function was.

If the Rose-White cartoon looks familiar, well, there are lots of places you could have seen it, but one of them is one of the posts I did after attending the Thurber tribute ringmastered by Thurber aficionado extraordinaire Keith Olbermann last June at New York's 92nd Street Y: "Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role 'in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon.'" Bob had been one of the panelists at the 92nd Street Y shindig, and he reconfigured the presentation he gave that night into one of his wonderful weekly newsletters-blogposts, "James Thurber's Giant Swoop."

No, it's not a Thurber cartoon. Bob was using it as an illustration of the state of cartooning that Thurber broke through. "In the early twentieth century," he explained, "cartoons were illustrated anecdotes," and "the same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker. This was all illustrated with select examples, on up to "this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928," which he said "comes from the same template."

For Bob's description of how Thurber broke the cartoon mold, and how subsequent cartoonists have taken advantage of it, check out either Bob's own blog presentation or my hashed version of it. My immediate point is that he has established himself pretty well as custodian of New Yorker cartoon history, to the point of now offering this charming takeoff on the Rose-White cartoon. (Note, by the way, that he has eliminated the anecdotal "dialogue" format of the original.)


BY COINCIDENCE OR NOT, THIS WEEK'S NEW YORKER
ALSO INCLUDES A POLITICAL-THEMED CARTOON BY LEE LORENZ

Lee was Bob's predecessor as cartoon editor of The New Yorker (from 1993 to 1997; for 20 years before that he was the magazine's art editor).


Lee Lorenz's name comes up frequently in Bob's blogposts, not least in the series (which I wrote about most recently in a post called "You'll never guess who drew tonight's first cartoon -- but you can't possibly miss the second") he's been doing on the first New Yorker cartoons of the now-veteran group of cartoonists Lee brought into the fold in the '70s, including Jack Ziegler, Mick Stevens, Michael Maslin, and Roz Chast. (Bob himself is part of that group, and had already written about the first cartoon of his that Lee bought.)

By the way, I stumbled across a terrific, wide-ranging interview with Lee Lorenz, done by Richard Gehr for The Comics Journal last August. In case you were wondering, Lee (who turns 80 this October) is still very much with us and still working. He talks freely about his non-cartooning interests (he's both a Pratt Institute-trained artist and a rabid jazz enthusiast and practitioner, on the trumpet), and fills in all kinds of background about the inner workings, editorial and political, of The New Yorker over the decades since he first glimpsed those insides, in the 1950s. He reveals, for one thing, that when he became art editor in 1973, the job had first been offered to New Yorker insider Roger Angell (the son of longtime fiction editor Katharine S. White and stepson of E. B. White).

[E]vidently they couldn’t come to terms on the money. The New Yorker was making all kinds of money, but they were very cheap. In fact, when they offered me the job, the lawyer who was supposed to negotiate the contract suggested that whatever I made as a cartoonist be deducted from my salary as an editor!

Richard Gehr offers this observation about Lee's cartooning style:

hese days, Lorenz’s brush strokes provide rich visual contrast to the pen-preferring cartoonists who dominate The New Yorker. Like the abstract expressionists he studied at Carnegie and Pratt, Lee’s lines radiate a lively in-the-moment quality. He often captures characters in motion who just happen to make you laugh out loud. And there’s an improvised aspect to his work that echoes both his own abstract-expressionist paintings and the jazz he began devoting himself to as a teenager.

If you're at all curious about any of these subjects, I can heartily recommend the Gehr interview.


SPEAKING OF PROFESSIONAL FUNNYFOLKS WHO TAKE
ON WEIGHTY LIFE SUBJECTS, HERE'S CHUCK LORRE

If you watch any of the sitcoms that Chuck produces (the current list is Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mike and Molly), you know that at the end of each episode a vanity card is flashed, featuring whatever happens to be on his mind, subject to occasional network censorship. As a DWT reader once pointed out to me, the texts of the vanity cards are also archived online, at www.chucklorre.com.

I really loved the card from last night's new Big Bang Theory episode, and even though the power center he's obsessing over here is "the television business," what he writes seems to me eerily applicable to the broccoli-bullying Supreme Court justices, and predatory bankster elites, and really most everything we write about of a political nature here at DWT. I should warn you that Chuck was clearly not in a sunny frame of mind when he wrote this.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #383

For me, the epiphany came in my second season on Roseanne. At thirty-nine years old I finally woke up to the fact that the principles I was taught as a child, like fairness and justice, have no place in the world of power and money. The rules of the sandbox, strictly enforced by a wise and compassionate adult, are laughable when the sandbox is the television business and there are Mercedes and Bentleys parked alongside it. What's odd is that twenty years later, despite my belated awakening to the reality of amorality, that old schoolyard programming continues to insist on its rightness. Ideas like "play nice," "share your toys," "no name-calling," "take turns" and "misbehaving gets punished" still resonate inside me as if they were some sort of fundamental truths. Of course, I now know that they are not. At best, they're ideals. Lofty goals to aspire to. The truisms of the real world are more along the lines of, "my ball, my bat, my rules" and "money talks, bull$#*! walks." Which brings me to our impending presidential election. A classic showdown between the lessons we all learned as children and, well... reality. Further complicating the situation is our collective, unconscious desire to be supervised by that wise and compassionate adult. But there is no such adult. The truth is, we are alone in the sandbox. The game we play, seemingly forever, is called "Ideals vs. Money and Bats." For what it's worth, I'm betting on the latter, but there's a little boy in me who insists on voting for the former.

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