The Sound of the Crowd

If not more. But can I just say, have I ever been happier to see a character show up on a television series than I was at the end of tonight’s 24?

I don’t think so!

(Side note to Corey and anybody else who I hooked on the show this season: After you watch the episode, if you want to know who that is, you may wish to click here. But be warned; there are spoilers for earlier “days.”)

You can also click below for a little bit of non-spoiling, personal trivia.
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…you think, Bill O’Reilly cannot get any grosser, and then you open the latest notification from Media Matters for America, and oh, hello, yes he can! It’s excellent!

As one or two of you know, over the course of the last four months Gilmore Girls has become one of my favorite shows. What I want to do here is say a few things about why while trying to remain as concise as I prefer these blog entries to be. (I might as well tell you now, I’m going to lose that battle.)

For a long time when I thought about writing about the series, I kept thinking of the opening line of the Smiths biography in Trouser Press. Which I guess is appropriate enough for a show with characters who are Smiths-loving (among many other bands too numerous to mention) music geeks.
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…and a tip of the hat to the aforementioned Harlan Ellison, from whose Hornbook I stole that headline. Here’s Joshua Marshall with a TPM on the Iraqi elections.

Mark brings us the sad news that TV writer-director-producer Phil De Guere passed away. De Guere was the executive producer of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival, the DVD release of which I wrote about here earlier this month.

Mark’s item notes that he also worked on the Max Headroom series, which I either didn’t know or had forgotten, but I remember really enjoying that series. It made much more out of what could have been a limited premise than you had any right to expect, as I recall.

My various readings about the making of the Twilight Zone series tend to support Mark’s statement that De Guere was a well-liked and respected man. You want proof? Well, he kept Harlan Ellison happily employed in television for over a year. If that’s not a job for a master of the Twilight Zone, I don’t know what is.

(When Ellison departed that series, it was because of conflicts with CBS, not De Guere, by all reports)

I’m glad he lived to see the release of the first season of his TZ on DVD, and hope he died with the knowledge that his work now had a little more permanence. I also hope there are already pre-existing commentary tracks by him for the next season’s release.

The lyric:

It’s only the wind blowing cans along the street
Someone’s dustbin lid playing havoc with the peace
There’s nobody hiding behind a locked door
And no one’s been lying, ’cause we don’t lie any more

It’s only the wind, how it takes you by surprise
Suddenly begins, then before you know it dies
My hands are not shaking, I don’t touch a drop
You must be mistaken, I know when to stop

It’s only the wind (they say it’s getting worse)
The trouble that it brings haunts us like a curse
My nerves are all jangled, but I’m pulling through
I hope I can handle what I have to do

–Pet Shop Boys, “Only The Wind”

The link.

This is just fun. Over on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann has a blog entry about the ever-literate responses he’s been getting in response to their coverage of the Spongebob/Dobson teapot’s tempest.

The best:

“…not a misspelling but a Freudian slip of biblical proportions. A correspondent, unhappy that I did not simply agree with her fire-and-brimstone forecast for me, wrote “I showed respect even though I disagreed with you and yet you have the audacity to call me intelligent.”

Well, you have me there, Ma’am. My mistake.”

And:

“Still, if there was one disturbing element, it was the number of emails– maybe 20 percent–which invoked Dan Rather and “what we did to him.” There is evidently a mass misunderstanding of the history of Rather’s retirement from the CBS Evening News. He was not hit by vengeful lightning, although don’t go telling that to the religious right. That his retirement was being planned last summer is an irrelevancy to them.

Even in this, though, one emailer provided mirth. “We got Tom Brokaw at ABC,” he warned, “and we can get you.”

I’ll have to drop Tom a note.”

Accoring to the LA Times via Kos, Democratic leaders are growing scared of crossing progressive blogs…like this one. My god, the power.

Okay, first things first, Dems, to appease me, I want you to use your influence in liberal Hollywod to have Virginia Madsen meet me in the shower room…

Think someone tried to poison Hilary? Ah, the soap opera of politics. Another potentialy sensational storyline would be that she’s pregnant, but at age 57 that’s probably unlikely.

Taegan has links to two different articles about Barbara Boxer, both of which are excellent. But the headline of the first, which Taegan co-opted for the Political Wire headline, is “Boxer Doesn’t Pull Punches.”

See, cause her name is Boxer, you see. It’s funny.

But seriously, both articles are recommended (and not that long).