Pop Culture Archives

Dan Federici, founding member of the E Street Band, has died at 58 of skin cancer. A great loss; the E Street Band has several key components, but Federici has always been one of them.

CBS, besides defending a $70 million lawsuit over the dismissal of its last Evening News anchor, is now pondering dumping Katie Couric, who has failed to earn her own $75 million paycheck.

For Couric, this turned out to be a bad case of hubris: she assumed that, having been a commercial success in morning TV, she could switch to the different format and audience of evening news and not only succeed but turn around a floundering, scandal-tarred news division. It didn't happen; not only did she lose one of her principal assets along the way (Couric's chipper demeanor always went over well with the morning-TV crowd), but once CBS made the decision to stay a nominally straight news outlet rather than becoming an openly left-leaning news source, Couric was always the worst possible person to try to correct CBS News' decades-long reputation as the most liberal news source on TV.

Clearly, CBS should have listened to me when I suggested back in December 2004 that they hire CNN's Erica Hill instead. Hill's career has only headed up since then; Headline News ended up rebranding her prime-time shift as "Prime News with Erica Hill," and more recently she moved to the mother network to pair with Anderson Cooper on one of CNN's two most prominent news shows (the other being The Lou Dobbs Really Hates Foreigners Hour). Hill probably wouldn't have singlehandedly turned around CBS overnight either, but hiring a younger, lower-key and undoubtedly less expensive anchor would have kept costs and expectations lower, and signalled a commitment to rebuilding the brand from scratch rather than trying to poach from NBC. Instead, CBS is now reduced to denying reports that it's going to outsource newsgathering to ... CNN.

*This analysis of major league managers' tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is...well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It's bizarre. H/T Rays Index.

*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball's MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.

*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.

*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That's a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano's name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola's books...as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.

*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I'm more optimistic about Cabrera's potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I'd generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don't regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.

*There's no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can't buy into Hawkins' notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins' logic, I have to admit that that's more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.

*While I don't agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there's no point in fighting over the past. The Administration's enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers' ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).

*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.

*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.

*Guns don't kill people, guns kill movie scripts.

*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

This story about Chuck Norris' cult following among U.S. troops in Iraq is pretty amusing, but he is apparently popular with the locals as well:

Norris' appeal is not restricted to U.S. troops either. At an Iraqi police graduation ceremony in Fallujah, graduates called out for their "Chuck Norris" to pose with them for photos.

"Truthfully, I didn't know who he was. I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that's why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it's true, he's a great fighter" said police trainer Mohammed Rasheed.

With his handle-bar moustache, Rasheed has a vague resemblance to Norris.

Another police trainer said Chuck Norris was a role model for the police in Fallujah, which until 2007 was an al-Qaida stronghold and the scene of fierce battles with security forces.

"I've seen his videos, he's a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris," Khaled Hussein said.

One of yesterday's biggest stock losers was Build A Bear Workshop, which saw its stock price plunge 20% on a disappointing earnings report. Motley Fool looks at the roadblocks the company has faced, mainly escalating costs and a general sense that the novelty of bear-building has worn off. The suggestion that someone like Disney snap up the company makes some sense, and probably a lot more sense if the price continues to drop.* When we took the kids to Citizens Bank Park last summer, they had a Build-a-Phanatic store; I would think that Disneyworld could do something similar. The good news for a brand like this is that if kids get bored with it, there's always another generation of little ones for whom everything is new.

One thing that isn't mentioned here but should be, though, is the rising threat of Webkinz. If you're not familiar, Webkinz sells stuffed animals, much like a slightly larger version of Beanie Babies, but the hook is that each Webkinz can be registered on a website so that kids can then play online games with an online avatar of their stuffed character, buy things for the character (e.g., furniture for its room). The site is engaging and it's kid-safe, in that while kids can interact with others over the site, such as by playing games with them and exchanging some canned forms of communication, there's no way for them to actually talk to other kids on the site - and thus no way for them to talk to people pretending to be kids, either. It's enormously addictive, and the Webkinz site has definitely drawn my kids away from Build a Bears to Webkinz.

That said, we were back at Build a Bear this weekend (much to the particular joy and amazement of my youngest, who is almost two). Why? Because Build a Bear has opened its own website, and in addition to registering all new stuffed animals on the site they are having a limited time offer to register previously purchased stuffed animals. While "Build a Bearville" doesn't seem to be on a par with "Webkinz World," it at least got my kids back to wanting to go to the store and check out the site.

So that's the real story from the trenches. It remains to be seen which of the two prevails in the long run (Webkinz has the advantage of lower margins, since they don't operate retail stores), or whether perhaps there is even an opportunity for the two companies to merge their operations (less likely). But it's proof that even so prosaic a company as Build a Bear needs to adapt to the internet to stay competitive.

* - I should note that (a) I'm not giving investment advice, nor would anyone in their right minds take investment advice from me and (b) I haven't checked on whether Build a Bear is one of my law firm's many clients and I don't personally have any non-public information about the company or any of the other companies mentioned here or in the Fool.com article.

Looks like the writers' strike may be close to an end, which means no more of this. Hopefully, the actors won't go out next.

Season 7 of 24, if it ever arrives, will be missing this thrilling plot:

Come spring, the show's writers and their Fox bosses began having informal telephone conversations about how to recover for next season. By the May 21 season finale, the audience had dropped to just over 11 million. Fox gave the writers carte blanche to "reimagine" the show. One of the team's chief considerations was how to address the controversy surrounding Jack's use of torture. Should Jack be feeling the guilt the media would have him feel?

On May 31, the show's head writers went in for a meeting at the studio to present their first big idea: sending Jack to Africa. In various incarnations, Jack would begin the season digging ditches, building houses, tending to orphans, providing security for an embassy or escorting around a visiting dignitary. "One of the themes we discussed was penance, that Africa was a place Jack had gone to seek some kind of penance. Some sanctuary too, but also penance for things he's done in his life," Mr. Gordon says.

Ms. Walden and Gary Newman, chairmen of 20th Century Fox Television, were receptive but believed it was too much of a departure. "It felt like we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater," says Ms. Walden. The Africa plot also had several glaring problems, the first of which was that at some point Jack would have to fly back to the U.S. The writers proposed that for the first time ever, "24" would break from its real-time conceit; the show would skip the period when Jack was on his 14-hour flight.

The writers agreed to work on the plot. Just three weeks before they were due to start shooting the first episodes, Messrs. Gordon and Surnow joined fellow head writers Bob Cochran and Manny Coto for a pancake breakfast at an IHOP to talk through the elements of Jack-in-Africa that still weren't working. Jack was too far away, they felt, both from the immediacy of domestic terror and from the character he had been in prior seasons.

As Dave Barry would say: 24 has writers?

Yes, another video in lieu of content.

Via Allahpundit.

The good news: there will be a movie version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson will be involved.

The bad news: I gather the "sequel" discussed here will be set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Rings, which means it will have nothing to do with Tolkein, who wrote very little occurring in that period, and nothing resembling a fully fleshed out adventure. The Silmarillion and other parts of the Tolkein canon, including the LotR appendices, provide more than enough material for pre-Hobbit storytelling; I have no idea why Jackson would want to do that other than a positive desire to make his own stuff up. I mean, I want to see the fall of Gondolin, the flight of the Noldor from Valinor, the fight of Morgoth and Fingolfin. If he wants to do a story with a lot of creative liberties, he could do a full film treatment of the Last Alliance or some of the battles in the earlier Third Age.

UPDATE: More than a few people are questioning whether the "sequel" is really going to be something other than doing the book in two parts. I hope it won't, and maybe I have heard incorrectly. When I get a chance, I'll look for more sources on this.

*Studes says Jose Reyes' problem down the stretch last season was not hitting too few ground balls.

*TIME Magazine looked into Vladimir Putin's heart, too, and named him their Man of the Year for discarding the remaining constitutional breaks on dictatorship in Russia. Unlike President Bush, TIME can't excuse this as diplomacy.

*You'll shoot your eye out! Mike Huckabee may have a serious problem with granting too many clemencies to violent criminals, but Mitt Romney's refusal to grant any pardons or clemencies at all took him to the ridiculous length of refusing to expunge the conviction of a decorated Iraq War veteran who was convicted at age 13 of shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun.

*Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one, has announced that she is pregnant. At least she's keeping the baby.

*Businesses that should exist but don't.

My wife and I have been watching some episodes of FrankTV lately on TBS. The show, if you're not familiar, is basically as low-budget a concept as you can get this side of a reality show: Frank Caliendo does sketches in which he plays nearly all the characters, and the sketches are broken up by Frank on a couch with a semi-randomly selected member of the studio audience.

The writing on the show isn't particularly good, but it's worth tuning in for an episode or two if you haven't seen Caliendo's impressions, which are uncanny. Longer term, of course, the show is yet another point in the evolution of original TV programming towards budget-consciousness. Even some scripted shows these days seem to be under pressure to make do with smaller casts and fewer sets. It's an economically rational response to the decline of mass-market ratings.

Julia Roberts designs Armani bracelet for World AIDS Day. Mother Theresa should have been so virtuous.

In light of the writers' strike, Jonathan Last asks why the writers don't get paid more simply by operation of the market:

Writers make a lot less money in comparison to directors and actors than they used to. And the less money you make on a project, the less control you can exert over the creative process.

And I think it's safe to argue that, in general, the more control writers have on a project, the better it generally turns out. (By better, I mean both commercially and artistically.)

The importance of writers in TV is, I think, self-evident. They trump everyone else (except the showrunner, but on good shows, the showrunner is normally a writer, too) in terms of their contributions to the success or failure of the finished product. . .

Actors are quarterbacks, directors are running backs, and writers are offensive linemen. That's about how they contribute to the product, and how they're paid. And just like it was a welcome change when left tackles finally started being compensated more closely to their value a few years back, I think we should be happy to see writers moved a tiny bit closer to their real value.

His whole post is worth reading...the analogy isn't perfect in terms of market structure: writers have more of a free market than NFL linemen had pre-free-agency, but as Last notes in the comments, the market they have is not the most effective one, given the stranglehold a handful of consumers (i.e., network heads) have on the decision to hire them.

As Last notes, writers bring a large marginal value to the table: it's far more common to see TV shows fail for bad writing than for bad acting, so improving the writing can dramatically improve the expected return on investment on a show (unless the show's concept is so bad as to be beyond salvage by any writer). That's partly a function of an inefficient market (i.e., inability to identify the best writers, as compared to a relatively efficient market for locating good actors), possibly partly a scarcity-of-quality issue, and partly that - unlike novelists or movie writers - TV writers are signed in advance of turning out multiple stories, so the network heads may not want to pay in advance without assurances that a given writer will produce consistently good work.

The problem with writers not getting their due in terms of their marginal value to the projects they work on is, I would guess, the combination of the first and third points: networks don't have - or don't feel they have - a really good system for telling the difference between good and bad writers, and lack confidence that today's good writer will continue to churn out quality tomorrow. At least, that's my speculation. Because if the networks really did believe they could measure the difference between good writers and bad ones there would be a very big marginal investment return to be made by expanding your writing budget to snag the best ones.

I was, at one time or another, a regular viewer of something like half the shows on this list.

Sean Connery's golfing buddies: Craig T. Nelson and Joe Pesci.

Warning: contains spoilers if you have not watched all 6 prior seasons (I learned things here I did not know, not having yet caught up on seasons 4 & 5):

Via Allahpundit.

Matt Welch links to a cool video of the Beatles performing "Hey Bulldog," one of their lesser-known but still excellent tunes:

Boba Fett: Delicious Cookie Receptacle.

Just a moment to blog here - I just got back from seeing Bruce Springsteen live at Rockefeller Center (which is just a block from my office). It was awesome (and a good deal more fun than last night's Mets game, which I was at Shea for, and which quickly turned from desperation to a funereal atmosphere). Granted, I couldn't see Bruce from where I was standing, and I couldn't hear nearly any of what he said when he bantered with or hectored the crowd or chatted with Matt Lauer, but (a) I was still closer to the stage than I have been for the three times I saw him in concert, and (b) hey, it's free. It was sort of surreal, since I was across the street and while Bruce was playing there were an endless stream of cabs, trucks, cop cars, buses, etc. streaming by. I also got to see Tim Russert, who wandered in front of one of the big panoramic second-floor windows on his cell phone and waved to the crowd.

Bruce was scheduled to go on at about 8:30, but he came out to do a warmup at 8am sharp - and oddly, he played "The Promised Land," which he then played a second time as his opener on the air. Bruce and the band both sounded great. After that he played two of the new songs that for various reasons I had not heard previously. First was "Radio Nowhere," which rocks, and if anything reminded me of "Trouble River," but bouncier. Second up, and preceded by some political screed about tearing up the Constitution and whatnot (I couldn't make out enough of it to really be irritated, and besides, we know Bruce's politics by now) was "Living in the Future," which has a real vintage E Street Band feel to it. Then he did a fairly somber version of "My Hometown," and came back out (I assume for the last time - I left a few minutes later) for an encore of "Night," a little bit of an odd choice at 9am but the longtime Bruce fans in the crowd ate it up.

UPDATE: From YouTube, audio of Bruce doing "Radio Nowhere" in Asbury Park Tuesday night:

And here is "Living in the Future"

It would appear that Bruce may have done one more song after I left....grrr.

Will Collier explains how the record companies' declining profit margins from selling music in the age of iTunes are pushing them to focus on acts who generate profit from things other than their music, with inevitable declining returns on the quality of the music.

It's the feel-good story of the year:

Via Jane Galt.

UPDATE: This is good too.

So, late Thursday night I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the series. My review of the book is below the fold.

WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS!

In other words, don't read further unless you have finished the book or don't mind finding out how it goes and ends.