…during a soliliquy about Thursday’s heroic plane rescue: “What I always say about Airbus, they float better than they fly.”

…today to the memory of Patrick McGoohan, who created, wrote, directed, and starred in perhaps the greatest TV drama ever, then spent his last four decades taking occasional supporting roles and generally looking out for number six.

Earlier this week, I complained about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropping the Zippy comic strip. Now, according to unconfirmed rumor, there might not much longer be a P-I to carry or not carry the strip.

KING-TV claimed Thursday night that the Hearst Corp. will put the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, as a formality under the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times toward shutting down the P-I within months. P-I and Times bosses all claimed they haven’t heard yet of any such move. However, it would seem a plausible possibility. The owners of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, also the junior partner in a JOA, have made just such a move. And both the Times and P-I severely cut their page counts following pathetic holiday-season ad sales.

We, and the papers’ staffs, will learn the degree of truth of this telecast rumor sometime Friday. (There likely won’t be an official announcement in the papers themselves until at least Saturday.)

Needless to say, I’ve not wanted this to happen. I’ve supported the efforts of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, which put public pressure on the Times to keep the JOA alive. I’ve long preferred the P-I, which long ago shed its last vestiges of William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s right-wing squareness to become the region’s dominant center-left editorial voice.

Yet few people, especially within the newspaper biz, quite expected industry-wide ad revenues to plummet so far so fast. Recent Times and P-I issues have had fewer than four pages of display ads and fewer than two pages of classifieds.

And you can’t expect the papers’ owners to just eat these declines. The Times’ majority owners, the Blethens, have tried to sell some of their other properties with no takers. The Times’ minority owners, the McClatchy chain, allegedly wants to sell its most prestigious possession, the Miami Herald, also with no apparent takers.

And the P-I owning, family-held Hearst Corp. is notoriously private in its business dealings; but it’s clear that its major income-earning properties (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire) also carry far fewer ad pages these days.

I’ll talk more about this when I know more, which will be after anyone else in the business here knows more.

My mother told me that she’d once heard my late father tell of the delightful and luxurious time he once had staying in the Taj Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai), as he was about to be shipped home at the end of WWII. Now, the place is a battle zone instigated by one of those thug bands that think blowing stuff up + killing people = victory (or its emotional equivalent). How macho; how dumb.

Forty-five years after JFK’s slaying, it’s still poignant to view the initial TV coverage. CBS happened to be the only network feeding programming to its eastern/central affiliates at that hour. As the World Turns was such a ratings powerhouse in those days, NBC and ABC didn’t bother to program against it.

Thus, the catastrophe that (according to some perverse nostalgists) jump-started 12 years of further catastrophes first came to the nation’s attention by interrupting the most sedate and reassuring TV series yet devised.

ATWT creator Irna Phillips had sensed that TV was, by nature, a more ambient medium than radio. (Former ABC exec Bob Shanks called TV “the cool fire.”) So she toned down the melodrama and the histrionics, and devised an extremely quiet, low-key drama, in which an average Midwestern family discussed its average Midwestern daily doings.

Thus, the media’s most lulling, calming tribute to Ike-era ideals gave way to Walter Cronkite telling us, indirectly, of that fantasy America’s violent demise.

This year, T-Day week sees the nation in another cusp between eras.

A “perfect storm” of economic collapse has yet to reach bottom.

An unneeded, unending war continues to destroy lives.

Yet tens of millions of us still bathe in the afterglow of that great joyous moment three weeks ago.

There’s a feeling in the social zeitgeist. A feeling of optimism, of unashamed sincerity. A feeling that we really can turn the corner on all our crises. A feeling that the world really canturn, into a better place.

I share this feeling, and hope you do too.

…in certain paid political announcements, we know who the true original Mavericks are–James Garner and Jack Kelly.

Telemundo’s now cablecasting Mr. Bean dubbed into Spanish! My day is now complete.

I watched part of the Repo Men’s convention tonight on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that’s the HBO-esque drama (actually on AMC) about an ad agency in 1960 that’s so behind the times, it still devises whole major national product campaigns around two-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post.

Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party’s retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that’s so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven’t got.

Note the convention slogan, “Country First.”

In the first half of the last century, “America First” was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries’ business when it didn’t directly affect us. In practical terms, the America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.

Today’s “Country First” means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else’s kids have to fight ’em.

But “Country” could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that’s no more real than the world within a ’50s magazine ad.

Meanwhile, several blogospherians have noted that the most outlandish (and probably false) rumor about Sarah Palin (that she’d faked a pregnancy to hide that of her own teenage daughter) resembled a storyline in the past season of Desperate Housewives. As you may know, that’s the ABC drama set in a refined residential suburb where fantasies of The Good Life violently clash with brutal reality on a regular basis.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which Republican Convention celebrities are more like which Desperate Housewives characters. (To me, Cindy McCain looks like a Bree but acts more like a Gabriele.)

Other thots: Fred Thompson’s speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Lawn Order star I like is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I’ll always remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.)

Same could not be said for George W. Bush’s satellite speech. NBC’s prime-time convention hour included an excerpt from Bush’s speech in D.C., without the applause audio from the convention in St. Paul. It just made this failed-head-of-state seem even clumsier.

A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign’s got a a really slick graphic-design department.

One of this design team’s major motifs is a solitary, serif capital “O.”

To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner is a big Obama supporter.

To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one’s being to a figure of strong authority.

Damn, doesn’t that sound exactly like the ol’ Republican seduce-n’-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.

Oh, and the time remaining until Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.

Alas, McCain’s veep pick Sarah Palin is no relation to Michael Palin, who at least has vast experience in foreign relations.

Instead, the GOPpers offer us another pseudo-“maverick,” complete with all the proper pro-gun and anti-choice credentials.

But for now, let’s riff on some lines by the more famous Palin:

“Look, matey, I know a dead political party when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

“No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable party, the Republican, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!”

“The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.”

“Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!”

“E’s not restin’! ‘E’s passed on! This Republican Party is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARTY!!”

“Well, I’d better replace it, then.”

Postscript: Perhaps the one outsider who correctly guessed Ms. Palin’s selection was the lucky joker who’d already registered the domain name VPILF.com.

The Beijing Olympic opening ceremony is the most yin/yang-y spectacle of opposites ever created outside of Hollywood (or the Lucasfilm compound in NoCal).

It’s military/industrial regimentation on a mega-massive scale, put into the service of harmony, humanity, and beauty.

It’s a cross between Busby Berkeley and Bollywood, achieved with a brutal precision that counteracts all the romanticism.

It’s both amazingly beautiful and ultimately scary.

…the International Channel. It aired blocks of programming from all different countries, right on basic cable, with ethnically-targeted commercials and everything.

Part of what I loved about it was the music shows. Samba, Bollywood, tango, Afropop, Hungarian operettas, Japanese techno, and much much more. And it was all curated by and for folks of these various ethnicities themselves! It was the real stuff, not Paul Simonized for baby-boomer comfort listening.

Some of this joyous cacophony is back, thanks to the National Geographic Channel. It’s got a post-midnight music block, Nat Geo Music. The block runs in Italy as a 24-hour channel; Geographic’s talking about launching it as a separate channel here.

The show compiles music videos (remember those things?), documentary shorts, and concert clips by lots of different people in lots of different places. Sure, the show’s got mellow folkie stuff, reggae, salsa, etc. But it’s also got digital cut-up music and raucous celebratory stuff and dissonant percussion. (And, in good National Geographic tradition, they’re not afraid of a little artistic nudity in the videos.)

About all you won’t hear on Nat Geo Music: Elmer Bernstein’s bombastic orchestral theme from the old National Geographic network specials.

…(see below), last Tuesday apparently saw the demise of Procter & Gamble Productions. This would also mean the end of sponsor-owned programming as a regular feature on the old-line broadcast networks.

When network radio was launched in the U.S. in the 1920s, networks would sell whole blocks of time to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, would hire ad agencies to create and package both the commercials for the advertisers’ products and the shows that would surround the commercials. Procter and its soap-making competitors were the main sponsors of melodramatic daytime serials; thus the nickname “soap operas.” One of the first of these, The Guiding Light, was originally sponsored by Procter’s “P and G White Naphtha Soap.”

When TV came along, so did sponsor-owned programming. But TV’s higher production costs meant such ventures as The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Camel News Caravan faded from view.

But Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP) continued, like the stories on its shows. At its 1982-84 peak, PGP controlled 25 hours of network programming per week (more than Fox or The CW broadcasts these days).

Through PGP, P&G financed the shows and exerted both censorship and hiring control over them. But the shows’ actual production was subcontracted to ad agency Benton & Bowles. That agency disappeared some years ago in a series of global corporate mergers. Its TV-production unit was renamed Televest, then spun off as Telenext Media, which is apparently now an independent company.

(I know, this story’s getting to be as convoluted as any As the World Turns storyline.)

Anyhoo, on July 1, PGP’s name and logo disappeared from the ATWT and GL closing credits, replaced by that of Telenext. The shows’ official Internet message boards changed addresses from “pgpphoto.com” to “tnmphoto.com.”

Without any official notice of what, if anything, has changed, online message boards are rife with speculation.

Some users claim P&G must have sold off its interests in the shows. That wouldn’t be out of character with the company’s recent spate of portfolio-shuffling. (In recent years P&G’s bought Tampax, Gillette, Braun, and Clairol, while selling Comet, Duncan Hines, Crisco, Jif, and Folger’s.)

Of course, the credit change could just be a matter of semantics. But many of these message-board users have complained about P&G’s (mis)management of the serials, including drastic budget cuts on GL and its alleged cold feet concerning ATWT’s current gay-love storyline. Some of these users say they would like the shows to become independently owned.

Of course, even the deftest indie producer would have to be pretty clever to effectively confront the daytime-soap genre’s collapsing ratings and revenues.

But that’s a topic for another day. Tune in again.

…Kids WB signed off in May. Someone calling himself Peter Paltridge did notice, and offers a retrospective of the cartoon programming block’s first and last days on the air. If you don’t understand why Earthworm Jim was a greater show than Skunk Fu, you soon will.

…today to Don S. Davis, the unassuming, deep-voiced former U of British Columbia teacher who became one of film and TV’s most prolific character actors. His longest gig was seven seasons on Stargate SG-1. He was also Scully’s dad on The X-Files. But to me he’ll always be Major Briggs on Twin Peaks.

Like many “sixties youth icons,” Carlin was already 30 by the summer-O-love. Aside from being an anti-censorship icon (who nonetheless got his share of “family entertainment” roles, he was one of the last bridges between the Ed Sullivan and Saturday Night Live eras. He also virtually invented the pay-TV comedy special genre, that most direct of storytelling formats.