BuzzMachine

Brush with infamy
: I made mention of hate mail from Bill Cosby below (in the item about Daddyhood) and Jim Treacher sent me email demanding:

“Bill Cosby sent you hate mail? Details, man! Details!”

Nothing I love better than someone who actually asks to hear one of my stories from my (not-so-)good(-not-so-)old-days. Pull up a chair, young man.

When I was the TV critic at People, I wrote many a rave review of Cosby’s original family sitcom when it first appeared. I said that he saved sitcoms themselves (which were being written off about then). He (along with shows like Hill Street Blues) proved that you can make money with quality. He helped herald the real golden age of television. But then Cosby started reading his own PR and he turned haughty and his show turned into the weekly sermonette. I said his show went downhill (he saw it differently: as far as he was concerned, I turned on him). So I started getting the poison-pen letters. After I said that he was a has-been, he sent me a tin cup and a note asking where the flowers were for his funeral (a mixed metaphor I never fully groked). He went to a lot of trouble getting a test cover I had created for Entertainment Weekly before its launch — a cover that touted the arrival of wise-ass women Roseanne and Murphy Brown and touted the end of the Cosby era — and he had someone replace his image with mine and a coverline that said farewell to me when I left Entertainment Weekly.

I ended up on lots of enemies lists — not just Cosby’s and not just that anti-warblogger twit’s.

: After Murphy Brown went bad (or I turned on the show, depending on your perspective), they wrote my name into the script with a network executive warning a Kathie-Lee clone not to get on the bad side of powerful people, like Johnny Carson or “Jeff Jarvis, that man is a bottomless pit of hate.” I’m thinking about making up CafePress T-shirts with the slogan.

: Alan Thicke sent me mail begging me to stop making him my “personal whipping boy.” I only begged him to stop making talk shows.

: Jay Leno called me to whine about my view in TV Guide that Johnny and Dave were both funnier.

: Bill Moyers complained to my bosses about me because I said that he was boring.

: But my proudest moment came years earlier. During my tenure as a columnist in San Francisco, I suggested that Frank Sinatra should have stayed retired and at a concert the next night, he stopped in the middle of singing My Way, of all songs, to call me “a bum.”

Life doesn’t get much sweeter.

Lotto fever
: Max Power takes on my challenge to defend the economic impact of the lottery.

Inked stained wretch vs. linked Layne kvetch
: I’m delighted for Matt Welch and Ken Layne that they’re working on the not-so-secret project to start a new paper in L.A. (if New York’s new paper is the Sun, should L.A.’s be the Moon?).

I have just one complaint, just one fear: They’re already blogging less. What happens when they have to publish or perish? Will the boys still blog?

: Update: Layne doth protest. Good. We’ll keep him honest.

He also brags about posting more than I do. Hey, I’m on vacation… sort of.

Storms
: Whenever I think I’ve finished cataloguing the changes from that day, another one pops up.

I got caught in an awful storm last night as I drove home: 76 mph winds, dust and debris flying everywhere, the sky suddenly dark, huge flashes from some transformer blowing up, vision cut off from all the rain.

I didn’t get a flashback to 9.11; this was just rain; I don’ t have PTSD.

But I did realize that I approached the danger in a wholly new way. I found myself going through a calculus of risk, as I did that day: Could I be hurt? Could I be killed? Is there an escape? How was I stupid enough to end up trapped here? I then found myself with a very calculated calm, forcing myself to keep my wits to keep safe.

Just another change for the list.

D.C.
: My uncle and his mate wanted to take us into Washington today to show the kids the sights. But the anti-globo bozos took over the city. So much for our capital.

Outa here
: Going on vacation. Will post between raindrops.

Daddy
: Lileks explains kids to those who don’t have them as his adorable Gnat enters into the wonderful world of conversation:

Imagine if your dog or cat began to talk. Imagine if you had rudimentary conversations. You’d love your pet if they didn’t speak, but man! Imagine if they could! That’s what it’s like….

I

Here we go again…
: Robert Blake and his bodyguard arrested tonight in the killing of his wife.

It’s starting with echoes of O.J.: Helicopters following a white vehicle with the suspect inside as it wends its way through L.A.’s freeways. And Geraldo’s preening. So is Greta. Deja view.

This will be the test of whether we are a newly serious America or whether we love filthy gossip best: Will Blake push the Middle East and terrorism down and off the front page?

Geraldo is treating this murder trial as “entertainment” — “a welcome diversion” — from the gore of 9.11 and the Middle East.

There’s no clash of civilizations in this story.

And at least there’s no race card ths time.

Those wacky French
: Thousands of employees and Frech people rallied against the firing of the head of Canal Plus. Can you imagine Americans rallying on behalf of any fired executive?

Less dead
: Nick Denton has a correction/clarification on the suitcase bomb sweats below.

Freaked
: Years ago, when I was Sunday editor of the SF Examiner, it came out that the neutron bomb (you remember: it destroys life but leaves buildings intact) had been developed across the way at the Livermore Labs and in my sensationalistic effort to scare the bejesus out of the readers, I took an aerial photo of San Francisco, placed the epicenter of a neutron bomb smack-dab on the Transamerica Pyramid and drew concentric circles of death and destruction out from there: Would YOU survive?

Now, thanks to PBS [via Nick Denton] we can all play the same fun game with a suitcase bomb set off in Manhattan. How dead would I be? Very. Whether I’m working in New York or Jersey City that day, I’m just plain dead.

See, too the fallout map. Even Philly is sick.

You can detonate the bomb wherever you are.

When I did this in the ’70s in San Francisco, it was smart-assed sensationalism; it was fun.

This is now real. No fun.

If that didn’t freak me enough, I go now to the Washington Times — usually a scary experience but especially so today. They visit a tunnel in West Virginia where officials are training for responses to terrorist attacks in subway tunnels. “The Marines say the Washington Metro and New York subways are among the top targets for which they are training.”

Oh, joy.

I honestly sit on the PATH train these days and have daymares (v. nightmares) about blasts and flooding and grappling in the dark with no air and no escape.

Now I get to worry about gas, too. And more.

This, too is real:

The Defense Department set up the facility in the abandoned turnpike tunnel two years ago after a Border Patrol agent stopped an Islamic extremist trying to cross the Canadian border with material for a large bomb in his trunk. An investigation revealed that the explosives were part of a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.

Defense Department analysts realized that the United States increasingly was becoming a target for terrorists with conventional bombs, toxic chemicals, biological agents or nuclear weapons.

Blog book debate
: I get pissy about the people who would try to edit the blogbook according to the demands of a mob — here.

Eclipse
: The Sun isn’t online (yet), but the competition is:

Five days a week we take a piece of the Sun