Bob Barker Comes on Down for the Last Time

It's kinda like hearing Santa Claus is moving to Florida to retire.

But longtime Price Is Right host Bob Barker -- who has been doing his thing since 1972, for those keeping score -- told the Associated Press today that he's hanging up his microphone for the last time in June, after 35 years on Price and 50 years on TV "while I'm still young." (even after all these years, he still gets the girl!)

I had a great time when I spoke to Bob, who has somehow managed to avoid irrelevancy, scandal (for the most part) and infirmity well into his 80s. He will retire as the TV personality with the most Emmys, the longest-running show and the sharpest wit.

Check out this Q&A I pulled together with the man in 2003, just before his 80th birthday. Sure, he had a list of quote-worthy bon mots ready -- I've seen the story about the topless woman in countless interviews. Still, if the man wants to tell it one more time, I'm gonna listen.

Best of all, after the story ran, Bob sent me a handwritten note of thanks. Now that's class...

Times: What do you know at age 80 that you didn't know at 60 or 70?

Barker: "I'll tell you one thing, in what I do for a living, there's no substitute for experience. I don't care how much natural talent you may have. . . . In the type of show I do, you can depend on surprises. By that I mean props don't work, cameras go out. Contestants don't react the way you expected. You're constantly facing a crisis, or something unexpected."

Times: You had one incident in which a woman's top came off during the show, right?

Barker: "The most talked-about incident in Price Is Right history. That lady was wearing a tube top, her name was called to be a contestant, and she jumped to her feet and began jumping up and down, and out they came. She came on down and they came on out."

Times: How does experience help when something like that happens?

Barker: "When I made my entrance, the audience was screaming, and I thought, "Well, they love me.' Then I realized no audience had loved me that much. So I turned to Johnny Olsen - he was (the announcer) then - and I said, "Johnny, what has happened out here?' And he said, "Bob, this girl has given her all for you.' " (He chuckles.)

Times: In 32 years, you've survived the decline of game shows on daytime TV, sexual harassment allegations in 1994 and two announcers: Johnny Olsen, who died in October 1985, and Rod Roddy, who died in October. What's your secret?

Barker: "I owe it all to the viewers, because they make the decision. Networks decide who will have a chance to do shows, but it is the viewers who make the final decision of who stays and who goes. I am very fortunate, in that the television viewers of our country have decided that Bob Barker can stay.

"Many people have the idea that game shows are easy to come up with. And nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, game shows are a very delicate combination of several things - and one of the most important things is the basic premise. You can't fool television viewers with dancing girls and flashing lights.

"In our case . . . everyone identifies with prices. When we bring out something and offer it for bids, you think, "That bid's too high,' or "That's a good bid.' Whatever you think, you're involved. That is one of the reasons we've been able to survive for so many years."

Times: Even though people like Johnny Carson, Mike Wallace and Dick Clark started on game shows, for many of them it was a transitional job. Why have you stuck with it for so long?

Barker: "I've learned my song, and I sing it. This is the area that I know. (While finishing college in the early 1950s), I got a job at a radio station. And it wasn't long before I had an opportunity to do an audience participation show, where I talked with unrehearsed contestants. When my wife heard this show, she said, "That's what you should do. You do that better than you've ever done anything else.' She didn't say I was good. She just said I did it better than anything else. I had great confidence in her judgment, so I thought, "Well, that's what I'll do.' "

Times: What did you do that worked?

Barker: "The first thing on the list is listen. So many hosts will ask a question of a contestant and pay no attention because they're so busy thinking about what they, the host, will say next. If you ask a question or make a remark and listen, often that contestant will provide you with a little gem you can work with.

"I play more than 70 games on the Price Is Right. I know all of these games so well that I don't have to worry about cue cards, or worrying about the rules of the game. I'm completely at ease. So what I try to do is have fun with the audience and get laughs . . . make it a big party. On our show, we don't solve the problems of the world. But hopefully, we can help people forget their problems for an hour."

Crist and Davis, 1. Chris Matthews, Zero.

The reviews are in. And the big loser in Monday's goober-natorial debate bewteen Charlie Crist, Jim Davis and Max Linn was...moderator Chris Matthews.

That's because Matthews managed to deliver a performance that played down to his worst excesses -- confirming fears that he would parachute in, clueless to Florida issues, and spend too much time making the debate about his questions rather than their answers.

As anyone who read my interview with him in Monday's paper noticed, the guy talked a good game about asking short questions and getting out of the candidates' way (by the by, if any of his questions met the five-word standard he set for himself in my interview, i didn't hear them).  and for the first few minutes of monday's debate, it actually seemed he might live up to his promise.

But then -- perhaps because he was rattled by a judge's last-minute decision to force third-party candidate Linn into the mix -- Matthews let the conflict degenerate into sniping over superficial issues, as Linn broke a debate rule by addressing his opponents directly and the moderator himself compared Crist to admitted crackhead ex-mayor Marion Barry.

While Floridians are so crippled by high insurance costs they are leaving the state or losing their homes, Matthews badgered Crist and Davis about whether they would want someone's candidate choices recorded on a paper record of an electronic vote, and challenged Crist for emphasizing a reduction in most all kinds of crime in Florida except murders (which, apparently, Barry also did during an election).

If he would have done a bit of homework, Matthews would have realized some of the issues Floridians cared about were: insurance, insurance, insurance. Along with high taxes, failing schools, the FCAT system, the influence of lobbyists, the use of referendums to achieve what the legislature cannot, the growing exodus of peopel who find it too expensive to work here, the dissonance between the urbanized south Florida and countrified Panhandle, and more.

Instead, we got a confusing fight that felt more like a Saturday Night Live parody than a real debate -- right down to WFLA anchors Keith Cate and Stacie Schiable getting cut off in mid-sentence while signing off because the whole thing ran too long. My colleague, Times Political Editor Adam Smith, was much kinder here.

Here's hoping Tim Russert acquits himself better taking on Bill Nelson and Katherine Harris on Wednesday. He'll have a lot to live down.

At least, I think so. What did you think about it all? Don't save all the juicy comments for the Buzz!

Studio 60 Dead. Or Not.

Talk about seeing a glass half empty: TV-related blogs are buzzing today over a Fox News report that, despite ordering three new scripts of West Wing mastermind Aaron Sorkin's Saturday Night Live spoof Studio 60, castmembers are telling people cancellation is imminent.

This buzz emerges on the same day as the network pre-empts the show for an episode of its equally good and equally low-rated football drama Friday Night Lights.

My bet: somebody at Fox is playing the odds. If Friday Night Lights juices the timeslot, there's no way triggerhappy TV execs will return Studio 60 to the space, effectively canceling it. And Studio 60 has been losing half the audience of NBC's surprise Monday night hit, Heroes.

But I haven't seen any other news outlet echo Fox's reporting -- probably because everyone starring on the show knows its fate is so precarious that any extra negative buzz will just push it closer to the abyss.

Hey, it's a 50-50 chance of being correct. And if you believe Studio 60 is as awful as some critics seem to think, maybe the odds are better than that.

Personally, I've enjoyed the show -- which is basically Sorkin's eggheaded take on the TV biz. But my sneaking suspicion is that Studio 60 is suffering from a few problems:

-- Viewers have never been that interested in Hollywood satirizing itself, even when it does a really good job of it.

-- Masses of viewers don't dig TV characters that make them feel dumb; they'd much prefer watching characters who seem more dysfunctional than they are.

-- I liked it, which means it's doomed to failure.

Wow. Guess who is Mr. Glass Half Empty now?

UPDATE: I was right. Fox is full of it.

 

Chris Matthews Tears Fla. Gubernatorial Candidates a New One. Hopefully.

Is this the guy to finally make sense of Florida's trippy Gooober-natorial race? (yes, I spelled it that way on purpose; I will go anywhere for a bad pun -- don't you know that about me yet?)

We've got a Democratic candidate whose image with black voters is so bad he had to bring one on as a running mate. And a Republican candidate who is taking credit for investigating the state's first civil rights murder and battling rumors of sexual impropriety with people of both sexes.

Do we know how to have a election in Florida, or what?

Tasked with getting to the nitty gritty of all this on statewide and national TV is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, an excitable political junkie whose reputation for interrupting guests on his frenetic talk how Hardball had the usual suspects in Florida political circles tsk tsk-ing over NBC stations choosing to parachute in a TV star. See my brief story on his intentions from today's paper here.

Even Matthews himself seemed a little cowed by the controversy when I talked to him Friday: "I read all the clips – that’s all I’ll say," he offered, before continuing on for about five more minutes.

"It’s always been my experience that the best questions are the simplest ones -– the ones everybody agrees should be asked. The questions that are only surprising in their obvious directness. You go wow, thast’s a surprising question, only because it’s so appropriate. People can hear the questions. There’s something that’s an automatic real-time sense of fairness about the question. People listening to them, they decide whether they think it’s a fair question and they look to the candidate for an answer. If anyone were to ask a question that wasn’t really over the plate, they would say that’s an odd question, and they wouldn’t really expect much of the candidate. You really have to put it over the plate and make it clear, and easy to understand so the viewers are curious most of all about what the answer’s going to be. Thoe are the best questions, you know? It’s my job to keep it very clear and, as they say, stay out of the weeds. So when you walk away, you’ll know where each candidate stands on a number of issues. I think that’s my job."

Umm, okay. He also promised to try and keep his best questions down to just five words. Good luck with that one, guy.

But I think Matthews is an excellent choice for this debate. He's got an interview style tailor-made for throwing well-scripted pols off their game (likely the real reason Charlie Crist's campaign resisted the debate in the first place). He brings enough glamour to get the debate on nationwide TV -- even if it is just MSNBC. And he brings an even-money chance of inspiring a Saturday Night Live parody that could make our goober-natorial race an even greater exercise in absurdist humor.

What do you think, Chris? "They have to talk to their voters and say to them why they have in common, what they care about. You have to show what you care about. You have to encourage people to vote and give them a reason to vote. It’s hard to change a mind at the end -– it's very hard -- most of these campaigns right now are about getting your supporters out. Although I have to tell you -- I wrote a book on this -- George W. Bush won the (2000) election on the debates. He wouldn’t even have been in it;  he was way behind before the debates and after the debates he was ahead. That’s what you look at. Where were they before the debates and where were they after? You never ask who won. That doesn’t mean anything to people. Gore may have won  the last debate, but Bush was better off afterwards. So who really won?"  (check this image: have we been voting on four versions of the same guy?)

Couldn't have said it better, myself. See how he does at 7 tonight on WFLA or MSNBC.

From Bad to Badder: Newspaper Circulation Woes Continue

Audit Bureau of circulations just put a big-old pile of candy corn in the newspaper's industry's trick-or-treat bag today (see earlier note on bad puns, which extends to unwieldy metaphors), announcing severe circulation declines for most big metropolitan newspapers year-to-year.

Close to home, Mother Times saw daily circulation drop 3.2 percent from Oct. 2005 (about 9,500 subscriptions), while Sunday circulation basically held fast with a gain of .2 percent (867 subs). The Tampa Tribune saw a 3.6 percent drop (7,500 subs) daily and a 4.6 percent loss on Sunday (13,338 subs).

For those keeping track, the Times is still the largest-circulation newspaper in Florida, thanks mostly to the way the Miami Herald has been hemmoraging readers. This time, it's a 8.8 percent drop daily (25,615 subs) and a 9.8 percent drop on Sundays (39,342 subs). The continuing lesson: midsize dailies need to better focus on the needs of their readers -- the Heralds, Inquirers and (Chacago) Tribunes can no longer be all things to all readers, because you wind up speaking to no one.

Here's the raw numbers:

St. Pete Times -- 288,676 daily (M-to-F); 386,661 sunday

Tampa Tribune -- 204,177 daily; 278,411 Sunday

Miami Herald -- 265,583 daily; 361,846 Sunday

Orlando Sentinel -- 214,283 daily; 317,226 Sunday

Times Festival of Reading Aftermath

Is there anything cooler than standing in the same room with noted historian John Hope Franklin, former New York Times editor Howell Raines, former St. Petersburg Times editor Gene Patterson, and former tennise star Martina Navratilova?

Maybe it was getting a compliment from Arianna Huffington.

These wonderful experienes came courtesy of the Times' 14th annual Festival of Reading on Saturday, which drew a record crowd to the University of South Florida. I had the good fortune to interoduce one of the highest-profile authors there, pundit/blogger/celebrity pal Huffington, and speak on my own toward the end of the festival (Huffington liked my intro, saying it was the best she'd gotten on a book tour so far).

For those of us who work at the paper, it's gratifying to rub shoulders with people you've admired from afar (getting a compliment from puzzlemaster Merle Reagle will keep my confidence up for weeks), while hearing directly from readers about what they love -- and loathe -- about Mother Times.

Not surprisingly, the redesign wasn't a big hit with many people, but I told folks what I've been telling myself -- give it a chance, because change is hard. Arianna couldn't stay long -- she wanted to get home to Los Angeles to be with her family -- but actress Meg Tilly, Navratilova, Franklin and Raines all charmed various volunteers and staffers with their good cheer, great stories and open attitude.

Can't wait to see who stops by next year.

N-Space Arrives, Closet Racists Rejoice

I know I shouldn't even mention it, but when the Huffington Post offered a link to a web site dubbed Niggaspace, I had to check it out.

According to FishBowlNY, its a site established by a fellow named Tyrone, who swears he's not doing it to be racist and will not divulge his own ethnicity. But, of course, the homepage has a poll asking what kind of Kool Aid you like most, or how well endowed certain peopel are.

In other words, it's filled with the kind of nonsense racists often imagine black folks saying as some awful vindication of their feelings about us. It's the same crappy dialect that crops up in the racist messages posted to this blog and sent to me personally -- never with a real name attached. Even these kinds of knuckleheads aren't dumb enough to put their own names on such awful prejudice.

Anyway, it may turn out this guy is some self-hating brother from the Shelby Steele mold. But it smells an awful lot like a racist in-joke to me, and I only mention it because I remain flabbergasted at how far some of these guys will go to further a putrid point.

Let the deluge of knuckleheaded -- and anonymous -- rebuttals begin.

 

 

The Fearless Ways of Arianna Huffington

It sounds a little like those supermodels who insist that they really, truly were geeky, unattractive kids long ago.

But self-assured, poised Arianna Huffington swears in her latest book that she too has faced the fears which bedevil modern-day women: fear of being unattractive, fear of gaining weight, fear of being ridiculed for her thick Greek accent (think Zsa Zsa Gabor with a degree from Cambridge University) and fear of being ridiculed as a public figure during her 2003 run for California governor.

"If you want everybody to like you, there's a very simple solution: do nothing and say nothing, smile a lot and compliment people a lot," she told me when I interviewed her for a feature story on the one-year anniversary of her Huffington Post blog earlier this year. "That's got to be a very fearful way to live. And its a recipie for a very unfulfilling life."

Huffington takes on fear in her latest book, On Becoming Fearless...in Work, Love and Life. You can hear her talk about the book in person at the Times Festival of Reading -- and hear me introduce her -- at 12:15 p.m. tomorrow in the University of South Florida's Campus Activities Center.

So, how does Huffington reconcile her latest book's plea for women to find independence from the fear of not fitting into the roles society expects of them with her first book, 1971's The Female Woman, in which she called feminism a threat to western civilization that denigrated marriage and motherhood?

"My book in the ‘70s is more about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater," said Huffington, who developed On Becoming Fearless in part by posting exceprts of the work-in-progress on the Huffington Post. "In the ‘70s, women felt hat they had to choose between career paths and motherhood. I was only 23 at the time, and I kind of felt instinctively that we didn’t have to choose. This new book is (inspired) by my having two teenage daughters, and seeing all the fears my generation had to overcome rearing their ugly heads. As I’ve been reading the book this morning – I see how empowering it is to have dozens of other women’s fears before you -- you have this essense of how universal all those fears are.”

When I finally talked to Huffington, I was already fascinated by her story. To prepare for our intwerview, I had devoured a mountain of past profiles and discovered this woman who was tough to pin down.

A fiery intellectual, she has courted high society allies (socialite Ann Getty and Barbara Walters stood in her wedding) with such tenacity Los Angeles magazine called her "the sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers." A proudly independent woman, she developed her political reputation initially as wife and political strategist for Michael Huffington, a conservative heir to massive oil wealth who later unveiled himself as a closeted homosexual.

Once part of Newt Gingrich's political brain trust, Huffington left behind a sure success as a slick conservative pundit -- think Ann Coulter with better ideas and manners -- to forge a new identity as the well-connected voice of beseiged liberals everywhere. And now this intellectual product of England's best schooling and New York/Hollywood high society has created a lefty blog which unites the ramblings of geeks like me with the musings of Bill Maher, Al Franken and Ted Turner.

"Having a site that has an attitude in the way it presents the news -- smart, articulate, edgy responses to the news from people who are really good at presenting their views in an intimate, intense way, has been much more important," she said. "Being an aggregator of other voices online -- ever since I was growing up in Athens, I loved people and I love entertaining. Even when it meant having people in my room eating grape leaves my mother had shipped from france. And for this, I’ve drawn on people I’ve known for years...all people I’ve known and whose work I’ve loved and whose voices I wanted to make part of the online conversation. The most important conversation to have I’ve seen online, and I wanted these voices in that space.”

If you want to learn more, stop by and see us Saturday....

And stick around for my own featured speech at 3:15 p.m Satuday in Davis Hall 130. i'm going to be talking about why media matters -- and so many of our assumptions about it don't.

 

Michael J. Fox Pilloried on our Bruising Political Culture

This is what our caustic argument culture has come to: a shaking, agitated Michael J. Fox gamely answering a politely put, yet horribly insulting question on national television.

Did you gin up your illness to wring sympathy from viewers in a political ad?

The minute I heard Rush Limbaugh had gone out on that creaky limb -- of course, he now says the "drive-by media" distorted the points he was making -- I knew he had committed the same mistake Republicans have been making all year.

Progressives and liberals can't touch conservatives when it comes to crafting a powerful message and amplifying it through a secondary network of TV, radio and print outlets which serve their agenda. So their only problem comes when they wound themselves -- taking the rough and tumble of modern-day election propagandizing way too far.

Limbaugh's comments may have boosted the morale of hardcore Dittoheads who love seeing him tear into a celebrity they perceive as a typical Hollywood liberal. But he also made Fox look sympathetic as hell to anyone with an ounce of objectivity during the former TV star's appearance a few hours ago on Katie Couric's CBS Evening News broadcast.

To his credit, Fox has kept an amazingly good attitude about Limbaugh's blockheaded criticism -- sitting through a set-up report by Couric that included clips of the talk radio king waving his arms in a horribly insensitive parody of his pro-stem cell research commercial. (humor Web sites sprung into action, offering parody stories in which Limbaugh accused Christopher Reeve and U.S. troops killed in Iraq of faking their deaths to serve a liberai agenda)

One sample --

Couric: “I called Rush Limbaugh and he told me, ‘I believe Democrats have a long history of using victims of various things as political spokespeople because they believe they are untouchable, infallible – they are immune from criticism.’”

Fox:  “Well, first thing, he used the word ‘victim’ and [on] other occasions I heard you use the word ‘pitiable.’  Now understand, no one in this position wants pity.  We don’t want pity.  I could give a damn about Rush Limbaugh’s pity or anyone else’s pity and I am not a victim.”

Still, I got a little queasy watching a guy who has done nothing but work hard  to beat a horrible disease patiently explain that Parkinsons sufferers can never anticipate the effects of medication, and that too much medication can also produce uncontrollable movements -- which what he says happened during the commercial taping. He also noted offering similar support to Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, a cancer survivor who also is an aggressive advocate for stem cell research.   

This interview also proved to me the degree to which Couric makes herself vulnerable to conservative critics, simply because she reacts to their flak more visibly. Asking Fox probing questions as a devil's advocate, she wound up treating Limbaugh's paranoid political fantasies as a valid concern, instead of bringing some reasonable perspective to a clearly wacked out concept.

I already knew Limbaugh was full of it, because I had heard from a friend years ago who sat next to Fox and his family at a vacation resort dining hall and told me sadly of how tough it was for the former Family Ties star to control his movements, even then. Couric, who admitted at the end of her interview that she has contributed to Fox's stem cell charity for years and has a father who is struggling with Parkinson's, also knew the deal going in and should have made that clear in her questioning.

Thanks to Couric's fear of looking partisan, we viewers spent long minutes watching a guy with an awful illness explain how it is so awful, he really couldn't have controlled it in the way Limbaugh claimed. It became a living testament to how putrid our political discourse has come, especially on TV -- as debates on terrorism, nuclear arms and the limits of freedom in a democracy at war are boiled down to shouting matches between Susan Estrich and Laura Ingraham on the Today show.

As if from the mouth of babes, former NBC News correspondent Linda Ellerbee has produced a documentary for Nickelodeon on this very issue (airing at 8:30 p.m. Nov. 5), Cheap Shots and Low Blows: How Debate turns to Hate, asking, "is debate more honest when we take the gloves off, or just louder?"

Watching her capture Ann Coulter express sympathy for Limbaugh having to look an Al Franken book with a bruising title (her quote about Muslims: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.") is almost as sidesplitting as seeing Franken criticize the argument culture just before justifying the book's title.

The lesson here is simple. Time for the silly arguments to stop and the search for real answers to begin (I'll be trying to put this ethic into action when I appear on Rob Lorei's local pundit show, Florida This Week at 8:30 p.m. Triday on WEDU-Ch. 3).   

And its time for media figures to stop profiting from the fight and start leading the charge to sanity. Because if they don't, who will?

Media Cannibalizes the Network to Save It

How did this guy wind up becoming the king of cable TV?

In case you missed the news, the Sunday finale of former Public Emeny hype-man Flavor Flav's Bachelor-style reality show, Flavor of Love, became VH1's most-watched show ever -- the Number One non-sports telecast of the entire year on basic cable.

Nevermind that the show basically features burnout Flav sampling the wares of women who once would have been relegated to the back rows of one of his videos; the true charm of the show is that it is so blindingly, obviously awful.

But while Flav climbs the ratings by working his way through a passel of Pussycat Dolls rejects, parts of the rest of network television seems stuck in a slow, nightmarish dive into oblivion.

NBC has decided to move its football drama Friday Night Lights to the Monday at 10 p.m. berth once held by its greatest hope, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in a move that feels conspicuously like re-arranging deck chairs on the you-know-what. And its parent company has already copped to a plan which involves cutting $750 million from the company -- including a reduction of 700 positions, taking all scripted programming out of the 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. timeslot all week and moving MSNBC from New Jersey to Manhattan (no word on what that means for My Name is Earl and The Office - now airing at 8 p.m. Thursdays).

As with so many similar announcements, it feels like NBC is doing less with less and calling it more.

In particular, it's bet on high-minded quality dramas don't see to be working out so well. Lights, Studio 60 and Kidnapped are all going down in flames while stuff like the Deal or No Deal-style 1 Vs 100 finds better traction with viewers (I'm also warming to the X-Men-style drama Heroes, as we see more powers and less angst)

There's a sense that the stakes couldn't be higher and the cartoons are winning the war. Even ABC's once-powerful Lost is losing ground to Mandy Patinkin as an FBI profiler and Gary Sinise's pinched, predictable forensics guy on CSI:MY is the king of Wednesday television.

Somehow, this isn't the golden age of TV I envisioned when the season started.

(I'll be taking a break until Wedneasday for vacation -- the longest intentional break from posting i've taken since I started this thing. Make a note to rejoin me on wednesday and i'll try not to bore you too much with tales from my Jamaican getaway...assuming I even come back!)

Guest Blog Item: TBT's Jay Cridlin Talks with Demetri Martin

You are witness to a first for The Feed: a guest column (probably a relief to some of you -- sorry, Fox News fans)!

Turns out, TBT writer Jay Cridlin had some nuggets leftover from his interview with Daily Show/Late Night with Conan O'Brien contributor Demetri Martin. Rather than leave them to journalistic obscurity, has asked to borrow my blog to let you all check them out. Since I'm a nice guy and up standing colleague -- and desperate to grab those young eyeballs flocking to TBT -- I agreed.

So here's his extras with Demetri. If you want to check Demetri's personal web site, click here. And thanks to Jay for giving me one less blog item to report!

What kind of skits did you write for Conan?

I wrote one called "Nick Littleton, Tiny Stuntman." I would do stunts, and it would cut to an action figure who would just get totally f----- up doing things, but all on a really small scale. I had a character that had the torso of a man and the legs of a table, like a mythical beast, but he couldn't really move. And we'd have to write a lot of stuff like "Actual Items," and "In The Year 2000," and "Stamps."

Do you have a favorite one of those?

One of the first things I got on the show was a "Secrets."  And it was Michael Caine. It was just, "Secrets…!" and he said, "I'm tattooed from neck to nuts." (laughs) I just like the phrase "neck to nuts." It got on the show, and it got a laugh, and I was like, "Cool, this is fun."

You don't feel guilty making Michael Caine say "nuts?"

No. Those guys all approve. They just do what they want anyway when they come in. It's like a compliment if they say yours.

Was there anything you wrote that was too weird to get on the air at Conan?

No, but I wrote this thing called "Late Night in Space." that kept getting bumped. It was going to be that Conan sent a probe into space to look for jokes in the year 1999. There were going to be all of us on this ship, basically just writing s----- jokes in space. I thought it was really funny, but it was just too elaborate.

*****

What is your role going to be with Microsoft?

They came to me like in the spring and were like, 'How would you like to be involved in a Web campaign for this new operating system?' I was like, 'Eh, I don't know. Maybe.' I've never had a relationship with a big company before. But they've been really cool so far. I got to make six Web films, and we'll shoot a seventh on the road. I want to make films, and I want to get to act and stuff, so this was a great opportunity.

Are you already using Windows Vista?

Yeah. I play video out of it, and I do a slideshow, like a bunch of drawings, through this laptop. I have a little foot pedal, so I just advance the slides with my foot, which is kind of cool.

It's funny – in a way, you're competing with your fellow Daily Show contributor John Hodgman, who plays the PC in those Apple 'Mac vs. PC' ads. Do you get into Mac/PC arguments with him now?

I haven't seen him since his stuff went down. But John  Hodgman's a great guy. I write these little essays sometimes in the New York Times funny pages, and he's my editor. We both started The Daily Show around the same

time, and I think his book (The Areas of My Expertise) is hilarious.

*****

There is this whole comedy world out there – you mentioned John Hodgman,and there are these other comedians like Aziz Ansari and Eugene Mirman and Zach Galifianakis. You can't even really put a word on what it is, other than indie comedy, or alternative comedy, but it's all kind of the same sensibility.

It's definitely different than the '80s comic with the blazer getting into the differences between men and women. That's not what I think attracts a lot of us to what we're doing. In the end, the journey is to try to be oneself in front of a group of people you don't know, and entertain them. I used to work at The Daily Show as an intern when Craig Kilborn was there, and A. Whitney Brown was one of the correspondents. I was just starting out in standup, and I was asking him his advice, and he said this thing to me

that was really cool: "You've got to tip your audience. You've got to give people what they paid for, but just tip the audience, so they get a little bit extra than what they paid for when they came to see you, so when they leave, they take something with them." That is good advice. Not easy to do, but it's true.

Of course, the most popular young comic in the biz right now seems to be Dane Cook, who's selling out stadiums and has hosted Saturday Night Live twice.

He's miles ahead, in terms of popularity. Dane, first of all, has been doing it for like 15 years. I think you have to respect the fact that he is a comic who did his time. And second, I think he's got a very smart head for marketing. I mean, that dude had a Web site with sound and all kinds of s--- before most people had a Web site at all. And then his very accessible approach to his fans, and doing colleges for years, and building up his mailing list – Dane is a real embodiment of that side of being a comedian.

A lot of people have taken note of that, kind of like, "I gotta get my MySpace going," and this and that. The other thing that makes Dane interesting is that for a lot of us, he makes you ask the question: "What do I want? What am I going for? How badly do I want this? Do I need to play

to 5,000 people a night? Do I need to play to 500? Do I need to just make a living? Do I want to be a movie star?" My style, personally, is I don't want to thrust myself too much on people. I like to sell to people the way I like being sold to myself. I like finding stuff. I think the country is big enough that people find the audience. The audience finds the performer. They find each other, if you just put it out there.

Do you know Dane at all? I get the sense that there are people in the comedy world who don't like him.

That's totally true, but the thing is this: That's true of  every comic. I think it's just because Dane has sold so many albums, and is selling arenas. But there's just no comic everybody loves. In the end, certain guys make me laugh, and certain guys don't. I don't think it's a personal thing. You can't make yourself like somebody. It's just what strikes a chord in you. And I try to remember that, because I've seen people who just hate me, and I'm thinking, "Okay, you don't know me. Sure, you don't find me funny. I don't know why you hate me, but okay, you hate me." And other people, they're like, "I love you!" And again, it's like, "You don't know me, but thank you, that's cool. I'm glad that resonates with you."

You seem have made a career out of just doing what entertains you.

Yeah. And I'm kind of just learning as I go. I never did music. I drew very little. I never painted. I didn't act. I was going to be a lawyer. I was trying to win this whole game in my head, which was, get good grades, go to

a good school, get an impressive job. And then I realized, this is not fulfilling. So when I switched, it was kind of like starting from scratch, but I'm grateful. If I'm making any living doing this, cool. I don't have to have a day job.

Bob Lassiter: A Compelling Communicator, Even to the End

I figured I had time to write about him.

I'm not sure why I felt that way. One look at the heartbreaking blog maintained by former Tampa Bay area radio star Bob Lassiter showed his days were seriously numbered.

But I thought I had time to get Lassiter's last story told -- the sad tale of a talent who never quite fit into the radio business and spent his last months fading in end stage kidney failure.

Lassiter passed away on Friday after slipping into a "dream like condition" two days before, according to a final blog posting which seems to have been made by his wife, Mary. He already had said goodbye on his blog earlier this year, but his health rebounded, and he began writing again, stopping for good on Oct. 3. He was 61.

"There's nothing left to say," he told me a few weeks ago, when I heard he had posted his last entry. "I found all I was doing was repeating myself. It's reptitious and frankly depressing."

But like his radio broadcasts, Lassiter's blog was also compelling for its honesty and in-your-face attitude. He wrote Sept. 25: "I always thought that I would live until I died - I did not realize that it could take so long, be so hard.  In some respects, it's amazing how a body that clearly is failing clings on to life - fighting a losing battle, refusing to give in to the inevitable. 

It's one thing to sit in a doctor's office, and be told that you are going to die - and having no real sense of what that means - and quite another experiencing the actual agonizing process.  You ask what to expect, what it will feel like - you are told, but the words ring hollow until the sensation begins to kick in.  The day comes where you hope that you simply fail to wake up - when life is no longer desirable - where the morning is a bitter disappointment as yet another day dawns."

And on Sept. 11: "This isn't the way I wanted to go - so sick at times I can think of nothing but my own misery. I wanted to go with dignity and poise.

I do not regret my decision, nor am I about to change it, but I had no idea of how hard it would be. How easily tears would come, how quickly self-pity could overtake me.

I wanted to be stronger, but as I slowly became everything I always detested about the old and infirm, my will has evaporated - as has my interest in life."

It reminded me  lot of tenor and tone of his radio show, which I heard in his last few years on air at WFLA in the late '90s. Chain-smoking though the early evening, he would hold forth of various topics, presenting an incisely liberal viewpoint that seemed to drive some callers particularly batty -- something the "Mad Dog" as he was called back then, seemed to enjoy.

Turns out, there's a fair amount of Lassiter's material online, including this clip of his appearance with Rush Limbaugh on CNN's Crossfire. Someone has kept up a collection of his on air performances here. And thre's even a 30-minute clip from his 1988 appearance on a Tampa public access show dubbed Hot Seat (complete with an aendorsement from Chuck Norris!)

For folks who don't know the history of Tampa radio, Lassiter's passing may not mean much. But I always found him a uniquely compelling and tragic local figure -- a talented guy whose singular, anti-authoritarian style eventually had no home in the homogenized, conservative corporate world of modern-day talk radio.

Slimmer, Slicker and Redesigned: What Do You Think of the New St. Petersburg Times?

We're expecting lots of complaints.

Employees throughout the building have been coached on how to handle angry callers, with tipsheets indicating all the changes involved so we can all coach readers through the upcoming changes.

Starting today, we have a narrower newspaper, it's true. But we also took the opportunity to redesign it, in hopes of making a more reader-friendly, modern newspaper. But change is always hard, so we expect some upset responses.

I won't lie -- I want this to work, so I can keep working the coolest job in creation. So, to keep things positive, I've come up with the Top Five Reasons Why You Should Love the Times' Redesign:

5) Did I mention keeping my job?

4) Less paper for Bill O'Reilly to hate.

3) Fits snugly in the bottom of most birdcages.

2) Just enough features moved around to keep our older readers guessing.

1) An expanded Sunday employment section called Working, in case the whole keeping my job thing doesn't work out.

I'm probably taking my job in my hands making such stupid jokes about something so serious. But it's a landmark step for the St. Petersburg Times at a point when newspapers have to start innovating or get left behind.

I'm sure you'll let us know where we fall on that scale before too long.   

Lost Revisited: Or Why Does Sawyer Taste Like Old Fish Biscuits?

Benjamin Linus?

That's the best name they could come up with for the formidable leader of the Others?

I'm sure there's some literary reference I'm not well-read enough to catch. If he wasbn't played by one of my fave TV character actors, Michael Emerson (major creepizoid on The Practice as a serial killer who loved roping the firm into representing him). But learning Benjamin's name -- and the fact that he's a fortysomething guy who has lived on the island all his life -- are the major revelations from last night's episode.

We also learned it's November 2004 on the island and the Losties have been stuck there for 69 days now. Like with Fox's 24, it's a little tough to believe all this stuff happened t these guys in space of just over two months, but that's the magic of serialized TV.

As we noted last week, Sun and Jin were the center of the flashbacks, as we learn that Sun's ability to lie to those closest to her stretches way back to her childhood. And who knew Jin was such a badass -- beating Sun's partner in adultery within an inch of his life before the guy fortuitously throws himself off a hotel balcony?

Some fans have protested the glimpse into The Others' world we're getting from the series' focus on Sawyer, Kate and Jack's captivity. But I'm enjoying exploring their world; seeing Deadwood's Trixie (Paula Malcolmson) pop up as an Other shot by Sun as they steal Desmond's sailboat, was a welcome bonus.

But now that the Others know Sawyer and Kate are planning an escape -- don't they know these guys are watching them ALL THE TIME? -- thatpair seems headed for a brutal showdown.

Here's what's coming next, according to ABC publicity:

On 10/18: "Further Instructions" - The fates of Locke, Eko and Desmond are revealed after the implosion of the hatch, while Hurley returns to the beach camp to tell the tale of what happened when he, Jack, Kate and Sawyer encountered "The Others." Meanwhile, Claire is shocked to find Nikki and Paulo in Jack's tent.

On 10/24: "Every Man for Himself" - Sawyer discovers just how far his captors will go to thwart any plans of escape he and Kate might have, and Jack is called upon to scrub up in order to save the life of one of "The Others." Meanwhile, Desmond's behavior begins to perplex the survivors when he starts construction on an unknown device.

Poynter Gets all Oprah on Us

Gotta mention that my friend and Poynter writing guru Roy Peter Clark appears today on Oprah to help New York Times columnist Frank Rich and others dissect the rise of a "truthiness" culture that seems to be hobbling America.

Roy writes: "Rich looks beyond governance to America itself, a culture he sees as besotted with self-indulgence, sensationalism and celebrity, where “reality” is increasingly cast, scripted, costumed, produced, and staged."

He -- and, presumably, the big "O" -- recommend a dose of gold, old fashioned media literacy, in which folks refuse to be passive consumers of increasingly insincere media messages. It's good advice, because I often find that, no matter how much people think they know about how media manipulates them everyday, they rarely know enough.

Times Joins Forces with Bay News 9

One of the subtler elements of our paper's redesign is a beefed-up relationship with local 24-hour cable newschannel Bay News 9, starting with a weatherpage featuring material provided by Bay News 9.

Tonight, the newschannel partners with the newspaper to present a town hall meeting on the insurance crisis, and we soon expect to see a camera installed in the times newsroom to allow reporters to more easily appear during news segments. And, of course, our political editor co-hosts a jointly-developed Sunday politics show, Political Connections.

Those who have been around awhile remember we had a similar arrangement  with WTSP-Ch. 10 some time ago. But it didn't work so well, so now we're trying it again with BN9. The Times has always viewed these deals mostly as marketing agreements -- we get TV exposure and the TV outlet gets depth of content through an early look at our story lists -- so it will be interesting to see where this all leads.

   

The Season That Won't Stop Premiering

Two weeks into the official start of the new TV season, and the premieres just keep coming.

I remember getting emails and calls from readers way back in August, worried that the new fall season had started and we hadn't laid our munificent fall TV preview on them yet. Nearly two months later, the shows keep dropping -- and most of us are too tired to care anymore.

Which is too bad for ex-SNL vet Tina Fey's 30 Rock, an entertaining comedy about a network TV variety show thrown into a tailspin when a high-handed executive forces the show to take on a mentally imbalanced movie star.

As he's proven through his kickass appearances on Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin is a greaty comedic actor, and he proves the show's secret weapon here -- playing an executive convinced that his skill in marketing convection ovens has qualified him to revamp a struggling TV show. Best of all, Fey resists the temptation to turn the guy into a clueless cartoon, allowing his understanding of oversize egos and corporate politics to make her character -- the show's executive producer -- squirm a bit.

If only the same kind words could be offered for Twenty Good Years, the other NBC comedy dropping tonight. It's an ode to the new middle age -- as boomers turn 60, expect the networks to spend more time reaching out to this moneyed demographic with shows excavating their struggles.

They'll have to do better than this disappointment, which strands John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor in an over-the-top sitcom about two 60something guys trying to reinvent themselves 10 years after qualifying for an AARP card. Of course, considering how off base my predictions have been so far, it will probably be the comedy hit of the season.

Strippers and Solicitors: a Risky Combination

  Notorious Tampa shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge keeps his lawyers busy: This time they're taking on a lawsuit filed by a self-described  "Internet model" who claims the Sirius Satellite Radio personality badgered her into a sex act with a another woman and a, ahem, prosthetic sexual device during his show.

Hope Miller, also known as Brooke Skye, is suing Bubba, his on air crew, another internet model named Melissa Midwest, Bubba's production company and Sirius for an amount in excess of $15,000 for the June 12 incident, where she claims she was pressured into having sex with Midwest. As an aside, she also claims Bubba gave her alcohol even though she's under the legal drinking age.

Since Bubba vanished into the black hole of satellite radio, this lawsuit might actually work to his advantage -- reminding folks outside his circle of fans and Sirius subscribers that he's actually still on the air, somewhere. 

   

The Real Message of the Google/YouTube Buy: Power in the Media Relationship Just Shifted to Consumers

As news outlets continue jockeying to see whether Google's $1.6-million acquisition of YouTube makes any kind of financial sense, I'm struck by a different conclusion.

This business about media companies controlling the product they make after they make it has just taken one big step toward the dumpster.

First, there's the fact of the Google deal itself. Mini media mogul Mark Cuban's derisive comments to the contrary, this billion-dollar deal sends an important message: despite thousands of copyrighted videos uploaded to YouTube every day, the online company with the deepest pockets around is willing to bring this massive warehouse of unlicensed video into their corporate family.

That's likely because, unlike Napster, YouTube never tried to pretend that users uploading copyrighted content was cool. Instead, the site  used a novel defense -- we cant keep up wth al the stuff they're uploading, and hey, doesn't it help promote your projects anyway? -- that pushed media outlets into seeing the marketing potential and cutting deals.

(If you want to really get bummed, check out this message from the two billionaire slackers enjoying their moment in the sun before their 30th birthdays; I was trying to figure out how to get out of living in New Jersey when I was 30...argh)

The site's content sharing deal with CBS announced Monday was a prime example. Under the terms of the deal, CBS provides some programming to YouTube -- like users aren't already uploading a lot of that stuff, anyway -- and gets on the ground floor of a revolutionary system. YouTube will identify when CBS-owed content is uploaded to the site and the network will have the choice of removing it, or keeping it up and sharing the ad revenue with YouTube.

So the Tiffany Network neatly avoids the trap Fox News fell in, when its interview with GOP boogeyman Bill Clinton became one of the site's most-watched videos. First, angry that an unauthorized site was making revenue off its video, it demanded YouTube remove the clips; then they realized what a tremendous publicity windfall the clips were bringing them and they relented (I don't care what anyone says about the MySpace-owning Fox-ites; their understanding of online stuff has always been three steps behind the rest of the media world).

CBS will funnel stuff to YouTube they want to promote: David Letterman's coolest bits, Katie Couric's news reports, its sports coverage, little-seen Showtime series such as Dexter and The L word and more. They also get a mechanism to enable the spread of viral videos which make them look cool and squelch the ones which reflect badly on CBS or corporate parent Viacom (what they will discover: stopping the questionable stuff is easier said than done, when you take a publicity hit with consumers every time you play media cop).

Similar deals with Sony BMG Music and Universal Music Group show the recording industry has also learned from its futile fight with Napster (do you really win if you kill off the hip pipeline that kids are using to access your product?).

But for YouTube users, yet another media company has allowed its product to be used in a way they don't fully control, hoping that the affection they get from YouTubers offsets the precedent they're setting by officially acknowledging that, yes, there are times when some knucklehead in Utah can upload a CBS clip to the world with no prior permission and it's cool.

Feel media's grip on its own work loosen just a little?

Of course, the question still remains whether YouTube is a giant dot com bubble waiting to burst -- competitor vMix sent out emails all day Monday noting that YouTube likely spends up to $3-million a month to maintain its video streams and likely faces a huge lawsuit liability for all the unauthorized video clips on its site.

But comScore Networks notes that YouTube offers 9 percent of all video streams -- or more than 30 million -- increasing Google's number of streams and its shot at advertising revenue on those streams by a factor of 9.

And unless Google is stupid enough to kill YouTube's traffic by forcing it to expunge all unauthorized video at once, the site's unique stance of tolerating copyrighted video unless the owner demands its removal will likely continue -- prodding media companies into giving up control of its product to hang with the cool kids on the snappiest video site around.

A Tsunami in the Distance: St. Pete Times Redesign Almost Here

I've always felt there is no better illustration of the maddening dilemmas of the modern newspaper than the moment when it debuts a new design.

That sense is only heightened by the most recent redesigns -- aimed at scaling back the size of newspapers to save newsprint costs and offer a handier shape for readers, these new formats also sum up all the frustrations and paradoxes which bedevil the modern newspaper.

And now we're about to walk down that rocky road next week at the St. Petersburg Times.

If you've read the newspaper the last two days or visited the portal Web site, you've already seen our stories about what's coming. See the gallery of new pages here. The upshot: the Times will save millions by slimming down to a shape that research indicates readers want, anyway.

But here's the dilemma: when big changes come, we are always caught between the audience we have, which generally likes what we're doing now, and the potential audience we hope might respond favorably to a revamped product.

So when the new, smaller paper debuts next Monday, I expect readers to offer concern, complaints, debate and disssection. We got loads of response when we changed up the comics pages; no one knows for sure how much response a paper-wide redesign will produce, but common sense says to expect lots of telephone, email and letter action.

There are lots of changes:  the book pages, travel section and Sunday arts are coming together in a section called Latititudes; 2A becomes a reader-oriented page, with contact information, the weather map, guide to Tampabay.com and answers to reader-submitted questions; the daily tbt*'s World in a Snap page also comes to the main edition and more.

One thing I learned from writing about other newspapers' redesigns, is that such projects are an ongoing process, fueled in part by feedback from readers. It may feel like consumers don't have much voice in this process, but most other organizations I've talked to pay close attention to how readers react to design changes, and I expect similar attentiveness here.

Many of us have been given note pads to take down comments, along with some information to help with those who have questions. I wasn't involved with the redesign, but I'll do what I can to answer your questions in this space or through phone calls or emails. I do expect that the newspaper will have other online outlets for your questions, which would probably get you more direct answers.

This is a time of tremendous change for all of us at the newspaper -- our newsroom is in the middle of an extensive upgrade and renovation; we recently began using a new computer system for writing and laying out our newspaper; we debuted the daily tbt* months ago and the redesign offers more changes in many areas.

But we've also learned that widespread change also offers opportunites to upgrade, try new things and get a fresh perspective. As somebody who tries to write about media, its been a particular challenge to keep it real on this blog and also balance my responsiblities as a Times employee. 

I know I'm going to miss having the kind of space as a writer I had 10 years ago. There will probably be some readers who miss that acreage as well. But the challenge now is to provide the same journalistic quality in a form that respects the reader's time and attracts those who felt the traditional newspaper form didn't serve their needs well enough.

For me, it feels like that moment when you're in the rollercoaster and it's inching up the first, big incline -- its wheels tick, tick, ticking as the car slowly creeps up to what you know will be an exhilarating and frightening ride.

Hope you guys wind up liking it as much as we'd like you to. 

UPDATE: Newspaper designer Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design offers his own tips for newspapers to survive the current state of upheaval, from the obvious -- get real about the Internet, promote as if success depends on it, figure out how to make money online (no DUH!) -- to the ridiculous: tie journalists' pay to circulation (ensuring we only cover stuff that boosts readership, the same way local TV does) , stop running news stories (put breakng news online and save news on paper for analysis) and ignore your loyal readers (the same strategy which has turned commercial radio into a wasteland).

Jacobson offers some interesting stuff -- dropping subscription prices to avoid cutting ad rates and avoid cutting costs too deply to protect the cash cow -- but much of this feels like the same old advice in a bold new costume.

Why We Didn't Publish a Foley Story Last Year

St. Petersburg Times executive editor Neil Brown weighed in today on why we didn't publish a story on Mark Foley's creepy contacts with Congressional pages before the last week or so.

I'm glad he's written this piece, and I wish he'd done it sooner. As I've written before, I think the Internet has aggregated information and empowered readers to the point where you can't just blow off substantive questions they have about coverage decisions or ethical issues. As bigger outlets than ours have discovered, it is often best to tell readers why you make the decisions you do soon as possible -- and a well-meaning blog post by our government editor just didn't cut it.

What Neil wrote isn't much different from what many have read in our news coverage and a column by Howard Troxler that touched on this -- we got the milder emails, did some investigation and, faced with a single source who was creeped out but wouldn't go on the record and whose parents begged us not to expose him, we begged off.

Frankly, I'm not convinced by all the Monday morning quarterbacking now; I don't think we made an awful decision. It was an understandable judgment call that should teach us to push a little harder in the future.

I'm more interested in what Neil noted later in the piece -- that it took a blogger publishing the milder emails, and ABC News using that publication as an excuse to re-publish them on their Web site, to shake loose the more explicit emails that forced Foley's resignation.

It's the new pipeline for traditional media. In the past, we used to pick up on the occasional scoop by tabloids like the National Enquirer or the Star, which turned out to be accurate. Now, blogs have become the mainstream media's new stalking horse -- airing the kind of questionable stuff we would never risk our reputations by revealing, allowing us to pick up on the real stories when they emerge from the fog of badly-sources allegations an whispered rumors.

It reminds me a bit of the tactic employed by a local TV station's investigative unit some time ago. I remember noting several stories where they would broadcast an initial story filled with innuendo and possibilities. And, as the community responded to their initial broadcasts with tips and new information, the pieces would get more and more solid until they had great investigative stories airing. But getting there meant airing at least one story that wasn't nailed down enough for my comfort and made often-unfair allegations.

Remeber the blog which