No Emmys For You!

BEFORE I LEFT ON FRIDAY M.P. reminded me to show up early today, in case L.TV brought home a bushel-full of awards from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences last night, also known as the 58th annual Emmy Awards to all of you outside the industry. Alas, it was not to be, as the nominated Human Trafficking, Ambulance Girl and A Little Thing Called Murder were shut out, unable to garner any respect from the Academy. So there will be no self-congratulatory trade ads running in the industry press touting actors Donald Sutherland, Robert Carlyle, Judy Davis and Kathy Bates, as was the case when the nominations came out in June. I didn't watch a second of the Emmys show actually, but I was glad this morning to see that The Office won for best comedy. I wonder if Deadwood won for anything or if it was even nominated. Hard to believe there is better acting (Ian McShane), better writing, better directing, etc., going on elsewhere.

Working my way thru the Season Two DVDs of Deadwood, up to Episode 9, watching all the extras and commentaries. Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, these commentaries by the actors seem to add very little, but are usually good for a few laughs and even more cursing than the show itself. Series Creator David Milch's comments were interesting, but the actors rarely provide insight about what's happening onscreen. Best line so far of season two goes to (who else) Al Swearengen, speaking to newspaperman A.W. Merrick:

"Pain or damage don't end the world.
Or despair or fucking beatings.
The world ends when you're dead.
Until then, you got more punishment in store.
Stand it like a man ... and give some back."

For some reason, other than critics, nobody I know seems to like this show as much as I do, or as much as they once did. Unlike The Sopranos, which people seem eager to return to week after week despite bitching over decreased quality, ridiculous plot lines etc., I've heard complaints from friends that there's too much cursing on Deadwood and that it takes too much work to decipher what's being said in terms of the archaic period language, etc. But to me the reward is so great that it makes all the effort worth it.

Darn good Deadwood piece from New York Times here:
www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/arts/television/11mcki/html?ex=130767
Each episode costs around $4.5 million to make, and it's all there up on the screen, as they say in the business. It's also mentioned that writer David Milch was a former heroin user, alcoholic and gambling addict. That knowledge, too, undoubtedly adds to the richness and texture of this "blood and profanity-drenched Western," as it's called.

And last but not least, there's actually a Website that keeps track of the number of "fucks" and "cocksuckers" uttered per episode. Seriously, it's cataloged here at www.thewvsr.com/deadwood.htm. For instance, you can discover that there were a total of 98 fucks in Episode 18 ("Something Very Expensive"), while the same episode had merely 9 cocksuckers, a ratio of fucks to cocksuckers of 10.9 : 1. The most profanity-laced 10-minute segment in Episode 18, for those keeping score at home, was achieved by Minutes 20-29, which got off a staggering 31 fucks in that time frame. Cumulative running total through the end of Season 3? 2,980 fucks so far, with more to come. This Website also thoughtfully makes use of bar graphs for season recaps of number of fucks, but didn't get around to including cocksuckers until the second season. Helpful and edifying nonetheless.























Great interview with David Milch, series creator of Deadwood, here:
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2005/03/05/milch/index.html

L(Time)'s Been Good To Me So Far

SITTING HERE AT LT, where I have been kept unusually busy this morning, going over around 10 posters and ads. LT has been berry berry good to me. For instance, this week I will have worked four days. That seems to be what M. and the staff here have settled on; working from 10 to around 4, 4:30. Also, just got a call from A. asking me if I was available this very day to work a shift at S.Comm. Claro que si! I will shoot downtown at 4, get to S. around 4:30, and work as needed. That gives me a nice check for next week. I last worked for S. around three weeks ago, so it's good to get them back into the rotation.

But I've been making ends meet here as a freelancer. Since late June, when I got the hotel job and then turned it down, I've only missed three days of work. The great majority of the work has come from LT, where I've settled into a nice daily routine. I get up at 7:30, have my breakfast of cereal and soy milk, out of the house by 8:30, and if the sun is a-shining I take the train to the Fifth Avenue stop, go to Central Park to have my ritual cup of Earl Grey tea, and then soak up the atmosphere for around an hour, from 9 till 10, before walking the short distance to the LT offices on Eighth, riding the elevator to the sky 32 floors up, where I settle into my cozy cubicle. Unfortunately, I've been eating at Mickey D's far too often, usually off the dollar menu, where I get a McChicken or a small burger and fries to hold me over. To put it in pespective, I've eaten at McDonald's more in the last month than the previous, oh, 10 years put together. They say that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but does it make you any healthier? We'll see. I just can't afford to spend 6 or 7 bucks on lunch like I used to back in the Transcript days, and there are far fewer food choices here in Midtown.

By the way, except for the relative proximity to Central Park, Midtown sucks compared to the Downtown area I used to work in. I used to love the Seaport in the summer. In addition, the traffic here in Midtown Manhattan can only be described as a nightmare blend of speeding taxis, delivery trucks, gargantuan double-decker tourist buses and selfish suburban SUV scumbags constantly running lights and blocking the intersections. I take comfort somehow in the fact that even saintly Walt Whitman would be shouting obscenities and profanity at these obnoxious obstructive bastards who make getting around such an ordeal. You never see anyone ticketed for blocking the box or other violations, never mind talking on their cell phones while driving. It should be suspended license for at least a month each time some self-important asshole is caught driving while ego-impaired, as I like to call it. How about a commuter tax, Bloomberg, or some traffic congestion ideas like London has successfully implemented -- you pathetic excuse for a mayor.

This just in: Pluto is no longer a full-fledged planet. It's been summarily downgraded to the status of a "dwarf planet," ending its brief 76-year run as the ninth planet. Not that it was one of my favorite orbital bodies, that's an honor reserved for sexy spheroids like Mars, Venus and big old badass Jupiter. But I hate when they change stuff like that. No word yet on the fate of the goofy Disney character, but if Pluto is not a planet, what the hell was it doing taking up so much space in MY solar system all these years. Now we're down to just eight planets, which for me ruins the whole damn galaxy really. Next they'll change the pronunciation of Uranus back to your-anus. Now that would be painful.

The Most Horrible Person In America

THAT EPITHET remains applicable to only one man: Long Island's own Bill O'Reilly. Consider this your one-stop O'Reilly Hatin' Station.


I remember how at the start of shock & awe this noxious creep proposed giving the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to clear out before leveling the city lest there be any resistance to our wonderful, heroic invading stormtroopers. I still regard that comment as one of the sickest comments ever heard uttered on television.


For an introduction to his vileness and a debunking of this sanctimonious bully's facile talking points, go to www.newscorpse.com/Pix/TPoints. Hear delusional O'Reilly call for a boycott of Mexico and bemoan the popularity of the Dixie Chicks, while you revel in the knowledge that the average O'Reilly Factor viewer is 71 years old.

Another Website doing God's work (i.e., devoted to taking down this venomous scourge) is www.sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com. It rightly bills itself as An Organization Of Hope.

The Nation (www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/bill_oreilly) does a fine job of skewering O'Reilly's feeble attempts at book-writin' in its current online edition, taking aim at his often unintentionally humorous effort to indoctrinate the young folks against the evils of secular humanism. It would be even more funny if the man wasn't such an evil bastard who way too many people take seriously. The man is a non-stop hate machine, with a primetime cable show, radio program and syndicated newspaper column spewing his outrageous McCarthyisms all too often unchallenged.

O'Reilly is the subject of nightly lampooning on the Keith Olberman show, Jon Stewart tweaks him mercilessly, and the Colbert Report is a demented, bizarro world homage to Clueless Bill. David Letterman famously told him he was full of crap a few months ago. And of course there was the infamous sexual harrassment case that he settled out of court. But there seems to be no stopping him, because as long as you preach hatred of liberals, there is always a built-in audience of goobers, hicks, trailer trash know-nothings and neo-nazis.

Enemas Of The State

No list of the most dishonest, delusional and dangerously disingenuous demagogues would be complete without the following: Elliott Abrams, yet another Republican chickenhawk still wielding tremendous power over American policy in the Middle East; John Lund, a neofascist corporate propagandist in the mold of Doctor Goebbels; James Woolsey, ex-CIA madman now working tirelessly to promote U.S. military intervention as the solution to all world problems; Larry Kudlow, an uber-yuppie economist with the smug mien of an eternal preppie who, I am not making this up, recently credited the Reagan tax cuts for the robust state of our current economy. Read it here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjIxNDVlYmZhZjI4ODk3ZDMzMjViZjdhMTE3NjMwZjA

In a related matter, the other night I mentioned to my friend that I am boycotting Imus in the Morning for the foreseeable future because of his penchant to alternately swallow and espouse right-wing bullshit. Well, he did have John Kerry on the other day, he said, so with that in mind I turned Imus on this morning and what do I hear inside of two minutes but more tired, infuriating crap. When a caller from Connecticut suggested she was not gonna vote for Joe Lieberman in the fall, he started to berate her, saying Lieberman was great for the state, great for the country, and was one of the greatest men in the history of the nation. I kid you not. He then said that even though he disagreed with Lieberman on Iraq, he was still a supporter, and brought up Rick Santorum as an example of someone who he disagreed with occasionally but on the whole was more good than bad. Sorry, unacceptable at this stage of the game. Man, my instincts are honed. I mean, the man had Larry the Cable Guy on as a regular in-studio guest. I don't need that kind of aggravation first thing in the morning.

Great article on Wikipedia in recent New Yorker mag; read it online here:
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact

Blogs that I dig:
www.jameswolcott.com (always worth checking out)
www.tomwatson.typepad.com (great taste in music, likewise in politics)
www.waiterrant.net (occupation-based angst and anti-yuppie musings)
www.antiwar.com (read Justin Raimondo, an unabashed paleo-conservative who takes on Bush, the Israel Lobby, the folly of Iraq, etc.)
www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com (Her book, Baghdad Burning, and this blog provide an insightful glimpse into living under the American occupation in Iraq)

Most depressing movie recently seen without any uplifting or redeeming qualities had to be 21 Grams with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benecio Del Toro. The performances were uniformly outstanding, but this drag of a film really had no reason to exist except to bum the audience out. Unlike, say, The Killing Fields, an admittedly depressing movie but one based on a historical nightmare, here we get speficic personal nightmares like a car crash that wipes out a dad and his two daughters, a man dying of a terminal illness, and a jailbird trying to save his life with religion. The story is told in jumpcut fashion, taking liberties with the narrative structure for no apparent reason. The emotion you feel while viewing this is not catharsis but dread. I found the individual situations too specific, too non-universal to relate any greater meaning, save that all our lives, no matter how disparate, are somehow intertwined. Not every movie necessarily has to teach a lesson, of course, but art should impart something close to a moral, as Tolstoy believed, otherwise it becomes art for art's sake. This leaves out art forms like surrealism, dada, modern dance, glam rock, etch-a-sketch, sand painting, body art, art deco, Art Carney... Just one man's opinion.

The most absurd promotions I've heard in some time are the corporate tie-ins to baseball. On New York Yankees radio broadcasts, one company picks a random listener and promises $10,000 plus Internet & cable services for a year if there is a triple play in a certain inning of the game. In other words, Joe Blow from Kokomo wins tonite's contest if there is a triple play in the bottom of the third inning. Now, mind you, I would guess that there are, at most, like two triple plays a year total in ALL OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. What do the odds become if you narrow it down to a speficic half-inning of a Yankees game? Very generous promotion, but not the most ridiculous one. That honor goes to the Grand Slam promotion on Yankees games, where another lucky listener can win a car if the fourth batter in a designated half-inning hits a grand slam. So if your name is picked, the first three batters have to get on base, then the fourth batter has to hit a home run. I doubt that each team hits more than 3 or 4 grand slams a year, so the odds approach the infinitesimal when you stipulate not only the specific half-inning, but also set the added qualifiers of specific batter and specific order. If any of those contests actually find a winner and give something away this year, I will join the Marines, vote Republican and immediately close down this popular blog. Does the nature of these so-called "giveaways" not say a lot about how corporations play people for suckers? If you want to advertise on a broadcast, buy the fucking airtime. Don't come up with convoluted contests designed solely to get your corporate entity some free commercial time. Disgraceful, and somehow even more commercially craven than buying the naming rights to a stadium, which in the past has brought us national treasures like Enron Field in Houston and Adelphia Stadium in Tennessee.

Hard to determine what his angle is, but pencil-necked confessor John Mark Karr is unlikely to have carried out the grisly JonBenet Ramsey murder. His sketchy background contains the requisite weirdness to fit the bill, but apparently little else seems to match him to the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, he now stands poised to join the long list of lamentable lowdown losers sporting three names -- Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, John Wilkes Booth -- who have butchered, bungled or blazed their way into American criminal infamy.

Pissed-Off Primary Postmortem

Went a little nutzoid the other day after seeing one too many right wing explanations as to why the end of the Democratic Party is near now that Ned Lamont handed Joe Lieberman his ass. This despite Lieberman's pathetic call for an uprising, his word, on primary day, lest the antisecurity wing (his words) of the party prevail. You see, he even thinks like Karl Rove and uses the same verbiage as Dick Cheney. A girl I used to work with at the Transcript, Emma, has a blog that is occasionally funny, www.weenieenema.blogspot.com, but methinks she leans too far to the right. She has links to Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin and other human feces on her site, so I had to straighten her out the other day, letting loose with one of my trademark verbal barrages in her general direction after she took a shot at my boy Ned, praised Liebeman, called his wife Hadassah a badass, and said she would move to Connecticut to vote for Lieberman as an independent. That really set me off. Here's some of my response reproduced for your benefit:

"Good riddance to Joe Lieberman and his massive puppethead, fuck his wife too. I burn with hatred for the Cult of Bush and their devotees. All Lieberman cares about is the fate of Israel. He hid behind Bush's skirt when Bush was riding high and Democrats didn't forget that. The vast majority of Dems supported ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but refused to conflate the war on terror with the invasion of Iraq because they have minds of their own, unlike Republicans who will support Reichsfuhrer Bush right up until it's time to drink the cyanide Kool-aid. The right wing is out of ideas, save for the time-tested dementia of red baiting and painting their opponents as Al-Qaeda appeasers. The fact that you have links to hateful bitches like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin says it all. Stick to your semi-humorous pop culture ruminations. You see nothing wrong apparently with the culture of lobbyist corruption, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, shock and awe, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, stolen elections, one-party rule, journalists paid by government contract to write pro-Bush articles here and abroad, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, torture and rendition, or supporting the consensus worst president ever. I guess everyone who disagrees with you just hates freedom, right? But Ned Lamont you get worked up about. Get used to it, sweetheart, because you're gonna have to move to a lot of different states come November if you hope to offset a Democratic onslaught. Physician, heal thyself."

Over the weekend I felt bad about using the word fuck, but it's a perfectly legitimate construct here in the blogosphere. Hey, I meant what I said. The gloves are off now. I really have no desire to debate or try to convert Republicans or Conservatives at this late stage if they still don't get the mess they've made. They exhibit all the behaviors that people in cults do -- the glassy-eyed denials, withdrawal from reality, avoidance of fact-based reality. And like a cult they must be deprogrammed. I envision a series of Khmer Rouge-like reeducation camps across the country, forced labor and total public renunciation of past bourgeois lifestyles. But that's just me.

Angelheaded Hipsters Burning For The Ancient Heavenly Connection To The Starry Dynamo In The Machinery Of The Night

Can't put my finger on how or why it happened like it did, but in recent weeks I have become obsessed with the Beats all over again -- Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, Kerouac et al. I picked up a Jack Kerouac bio last week from the library and can't put it down. The faith he had in his own work when publishers were rejecting his early stuff left & right speaks volumes about his integrity, in my opinion. He wouldn't change or edit his stuff when he had no leg to stand on, no money, no leverage -- only a vision. His personal life was a mess while he wrote his groundbreaking books. Alcoholic, drugged out on pot benzedrine morphine, simultaneously homophobic & homoerotic, making it with both guys & gals, freeloading on friends & family, hitching back & forth across the country chasing kicks, charasmatic & confused & religious & hopeless & joyful, free spirit & mama's boy, but always writing typing scribbling jotting it all down ... letters poems novels confessions -- all there in one fascinating package. Mad to live indeed. Above all, cool, when that word had meaning, before mass marketing to the youth market.

A Market Of The Senses

IMAGINE you're a TV critic assigned to write a piece on the 25-year anniversary of MTV and you have nothing negative to say about one of the most pernicious cultural developments in the history of western civilization. Instead, you use words like marvelous and ingenious, and state that, "In its quarter-century, MTV has done everything right." Now, I know the blogosphere is already filled with hateful invective and name-calling, so what's one more rant. Allow me to say that the "critic" in question, The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan, is no Frank Rich, or even Camille Paglia. Heffernan has "no complaints" with EmpTV, save for the white-guilt notion that it took them too long to flood the airwaves with disgusting, valueless, tasteless rap culture on a daily basis. In The Ever-Changing Eternal Youth Of MTV, Now 25 Going On 11, she credits the network with "amply compensating for early mistakes, like its notorious snub of hip-hop." The gushy airhead goes on to report that her mouth is agape at the splendor of the houses shown on MTV Cribs, the show devoted to flaunting homes purchased with the ill-gotten, obscene wealth amassed by these talentless, mumbling, crotch-grabbing video stars. Her breathless celebro-praise is worth quoting in full: "Paulina Rubio, the girlish Latin pop star, led the camera through her spectacular house in Miami. It was immaculate, airy, elegant, filled with light. As she seemed to float through the tour, she appeared to have no obligations or ties except to her yoga teacher. For a moment I thought she had the most beautiful house I'd ever seen. I was agape." Wow! That's how her article ends. The world now seems to be full of young people like this, lost souls desperate to demonstrate hipness at any price, even if a mindless allegiance to hip-hop is their ticket.

Compare that take with one by a real social commentator, someone with guts and an abiding inclination to go against the mainstream. Stanley Crouch of The Daily News, in a column titled MTV, Still Clueless After All These Years, writes that MTV "came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, drug dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast across the world as real black culture." He laments the triumph of "the lowest common denominator" as well as the "misogynist images" and "rule-of-thumb-stupidity" that viewers have become accustomed to. You can read the whole column at www.nydailynews.com/news/col/scrouch.

Squawking Like A Pink Monkey Bird

You know God has a sick sense of humor when you stop and reflect on the comical physical guises he bestowed on some of his creations. One need look no further than the weirdly configured 3-toed sloth, the charmingly goofy manatee and the freakishly puppetheaded Junior Senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman. What else do these Seuss-like wonders have in common, besides their penchant for scaring small children? Perhaps the fact that after this Tuesday's state primary, none of these forlorn creatures will be slithering around the halls of Congress in support of a costly, immoral, unnecessary war. Lieberman's enthusiastic shilling for the invasion, occupation and prosecution of the Orwellian-named Operation Iraqi Freedom likely opened the door for anti-war candidate Ned Lamont to hand the diminutive woodenhead warhawk his walking papers. That news, coupled with corrupt, embattled, scandal-ridden Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney's decision not to seek reelection in the fall, could be the start of a wave of mutiliation for the War Party and the beginning of an end to the almost unprecedented killing, chaos and despair they are responsible for on a global basis. Yes, maybe there is a God.

We Can Hitch A Ride

SO I'M AT THE BEACH, Rockaway Beach, the Sun is out & I Want Some, and in between throwin' the 'Bee, playing catch with a regulation NFL ball, riding some waves, talking to some Brazilian girls we met from Astoria, getting some rays, I see one of those small planes low in the sky above the shoreline, pulling behind a giant banner: it's an ad for D.H. on L.TV, one that I probably proofread. That brings it all home. If just one more viewer tunes in because of that ad, well, at the end of the day, isn't that what it's all about? Hey, I'm asking the questions here...

I'm debating whether to send in a C.E. claim form asking for reimbursement for food I never had getting spoiled for the blackout that didn't hit me. My landlady said our block was literally the only area not affected out of the whole area, something like,oh, I'm guessing 40 square blocks, maybe more, something like 250,000 people. But C.E. sent me a form and I'm not sure if they can pinpoint which areas were affected during which times. The letter said that I only had to lose power for a minimum of 12 hours to be eligible. I could say that some things worked but my refrigerator stopped working and all the food spoiled. I already filled out the form but have not sent it in yet. I have no qualms regarding the moral aspect, I'm more than ready to take advantage of my one opportunity to screw a big utility company right up the ass; I just don't want to be held liable for fraud. I will consult with a few of my advisors and then make a final decision forthwith, maybe fifthwith or sixthwith.

Got a credit card application in the mail recently from some heretofore unheard of financial entity called First Premier Bank. Now anyone who knows me knows that I owe thousands and thousands of dollars to credit cards, banks, etc., but shoot, I am as susceptible as the next guy to better living thru plastic, so long story short, I called up one nite, told some broad my pertinent info and lo & behold the credit card comes in the mail the other day with my name on it. Then I look at the not-even-so-fine print: a $250 credit limit, $48 application fee, and then a bunch of other fees (brought to you by industry lobbyists and a Republican-controlled House & Senate) totaling 178 dollars! That's right, I owe the fucking Credit Card Company $178 before I even use it, leaving a grand total of $72 available credit. I know I have bad credit, but aren't those terms just a wee bit onerous? Well? Again, I'm waiting for an answer here. I have a good right to just use the card up just out of spite. That's just the kind of childish, antisocial, devious thing I've done in the past.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of The Big Layoff, as it's now known in industry circles. August 8, 2005. I get back from lunch at the Seaport when I see a maudlin-looking Paul Smith gingerly approaching me, the quintessential bearer of bad tidings. He regrets to inform me that I have been fired due to various factors, he thinks it's unfair, but all the forces are arrayed against me, it's a fait accompli, I'm to clean out my desk, vacate the premises, turn in my membership card, cease and desist, do not pass Go or collect 200 dollars, see ya wouldn't wanna be ya, don't let the proverbial door hit you on the way out, be kind to the people you meet on the way up because you meet the same people on the way down, praise the lord and pass the ammunition, don't follow leaders watch the parking meters, I don't make the rules I just follow them, be careful what you wish for, there are people starving in China with no shoes or even feet to speak of, so put your nose to the grindstone, get your ducks in a row, sharpen your pencils, and keep your ear to the ground, you're very well read it's well known, but something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones.

It's been a year of struggle, sturm und drang even, but onward we strive, excelsior! Tossed asunder on seas of indifference, shipwrecked on islands of hostility, beached on shores of uncertainty. Yeah, it's been all those things. But I'm a fighter, a survivor, as stubborn as a mule, nobody breaks my rules, I'm looking for one new value, but nothing comes my way.

But seriously. Worse case scenario, best case scenario, who has time to differentiate anymore? I've got a good base here at L.TV. Friday was my first day off in, oh, about 5 weeks. I'm back today & tomorrow, then I talk to M. about the rest of the week, but it looks like I can count on 4 days a week here. Hopefully my other clients will use me more steadily. And then sometime in the fall, the catering biz will get bizzy & I'll take my place in the great merry-go-round of society, filling my destiny in some karmic comedy of conventional comity. Let it be written, let it be said.

The Fatherland's No Place To Die For

HAVEN'T LISTENED TO Air America in weeks, maybe even months. Right after I was laid off I used to listen to Al Franken sometimes, but I really only liked two shows enough to tune in consistently, the morning show with Mark Maron and then Mike Malloy at night (maybe it's an M thing), and of course they have both been canceled, at least in the New York area. Even more tragically, Malloy's time slot has been filled with the uber-lame Satellite Sisters, which Jeanane Garafolo had the guts to blast a few months ago on air, saying that altho she was sure they were nice people, she knew of no one who actually liked them. I agree big-time. Their show consists of 4 or 5 sisters living in different cities on a group conference call babbling endlessly/needlessly about their boring social/love lives. Brutal radio. In practice it's even more hideous than the description would have you believe, with zero political insight or content. It should be used to torture what prisoners remain at camps like Guantanamo, along with archives from the mercifully cancelled David Lee Roth radio program. Hell, come to think of it, anything David Lee Roth does is a form of torture to anyone with half a brain.

For a late night political talk fix I turn now to Lionel on WOR-AM 710 on your dial, just Lionel, no last name needed, who is on my wavelength now both literally & figuratively. Knowledgeable, intelligent and properly vituperative & unforgiving toward the right-wing loonies who call in to voice support for Gruppenfuhrer Bush and our heroic Stormtroopers protecting our freedom and our way of life.

I have decided to boycott Imus in the Morning and the Daily News, for similar reasons. Imus' show has become a platform for some of the most detestable personalities/celebrities of various political stripes, but mostly right wing scum. Imus himself adopts a ridiculous Cowboy persona that would be laughable if he didn't wield so much power; I live for the day when his world comes tumbling down. Here's a short list of the human crap he gives an uncritical pass to: Joseph Lieberman, Laura Inghram, Donald Trump, Orrin Hatch, Rick Santorum, Jay Severin, George Will, etc. But the crowning blow for me was allowing self-styled retard Bo Dietl to give his viewpoint on the Middle East, which was basically kill all the Arabs and let God sort them out. The show is long past its prime and will not be missed.

The Daily News has long been listing to the right under the pathetic Mort Zuckerman's twisted stewardship, coming off like a pale imitation of the New York Post. The paper that used to employ populist writers of staggering talent like Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill is unrecognizable now. The final straw for me had to be a column by Michael Goodwin, a smiling yuppie hack and unapologetic Bushie cut from the David Brooks weenie mold. In a column titled Give War A Chance: Hezbollah Starts A Fight, So It's Time To Teach Terror A Lesson, he posits that Israel, by the very fact that it is Israel, can literally do no wrong and should prosecute this latest war with unbridled savagery so as to stop terrorism for generations to come. Of course, it's not the neoconmen who will be doing the fighting. So now the Post of course is out, the News is out, the Times is too expensive so I just read it online; that leaves me with Newsday, the Voice, the New York Press, and the free daily papers, amNewYork and metro. Which is enuf to get me thru the week. Here's hoping there's a Hezbollah rocket with Goodwin's name on it.