This is what happens to local celebs who move to LA intending to enjoy the A-list lifestyle. An author who’s either Bill Nye’s ex-wife or ex-fiancee vandalized his backyard garden with an OD of weed killer. He charges she was trying to poison him; she says it was just a psycho-moment’s prank, and that she’d only wanted to destroy his flowers.

A new DVD release of the first few Sesame Street episodes from 1969 includes this disclaimer: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I was already a preteen when the show debuted, so don’t blame the Street for how I turned out. But I certainly remember the show’s original, pre-Elmo incarnation.

I remember identifying with Oscar (whose lucid if negative zeitgeist was treated with patronizing laughs by the human stars) and Bert (whose intelligence and earnestness only made him an easy target for Ernie’s “friendly” harassments).

I remember a creeping sense of regimentation behind all the committee-written, consultant-contrived, lesson-planned “fun.”

And, of course, my quickly dirtifying pubescent mind could think of new and innovative ways to play “Which of These Things Belong Together?”

In recent years, I’ve rediscovered the now un-PC Muppet song “I Want a Monster to Be My Friend.”

Heck, for that matter, a lot of Sesame Street moments took on a whole new understanding the day I learned the Canadian slang meaning of the word “cookie.”

Drew Carey was at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont on Monday afternoon.

During a typically packed UK soccer day (there was a satellite TV match showing between Arsenal and Reading), Carey showed up in a chauffeured minivan with a small entourage. He plugged his recent status as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. pro soccer (you know, that game where nothing’s made up and the points do matter). Specifically, Paul Allen and partners have recruited Carey as a minority investor in their Major League Soccer expansion team, to launch at Qwest Field in 2009. (Rumor has it that somebody else sought the franchise, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Carey’s big promo point during the speech (which he repeated that night as a Monday Night Football booth guest): The team will offer “club memberships.” For a projected $100/year, hardcore fans will (1) get an exclusive package of merch, and (2) get to vote every few years or so about the team’s future, even getting to fire the general manager.

He also got in a well-received dig about how such a fan-empowerment schtick might have helped with “that basketball team you used to have.”

Maddeningly, MSNBC’s official transcript of Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” on the silencing of a torture critic, is incomplete. The parts of the text that are up are righteously damning enough.

(Wait: Here’s the whole text now.)

John Edwards vows, if elected, to crack down on those annoying prescription drug commercials.

Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.

Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.

Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.

Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.

A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.

We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.

Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.

The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)

Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.

In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).

In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.

And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.

Comcast has been caught blocking some broadband subscribers’ file uploads and downloads. Is it an attempt to ration out bandwidth, or to cripple file sharing services? If it’s the latter, now we know why Comcast’s logo looks so much like the copyright symbol.

• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.

…keep leaving us. The latest sad loss: game-show legend Brett Somers.

On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.

On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.

The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”

I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.

I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.

I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.

Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.

Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)

When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.

He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.

And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:

“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”

And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.

On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:

“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.

Peace.”

Last week’s top TV network among US young adults? The one whose marketing managers are probably in their office this morning shouting “Gooooooooooooooooooal!”

…to remember when Lou Dobbs was a square-but-sane weekend news anchor on KING-TV, what with his recent string of silly anti-immigrant, anti-brown-skin, faux-populist tirades.

I watched the Disney Channel produciton High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale live-action Disney sitcom movies of my own youth.

At minute 41, the precise difference hit me: This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (well, actually filmed in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there–the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme “wholesomeness” turned up to fetish/kink levels.

Elsewhere in East-Meets-West-land, I present the absolute weirdest thing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have ever made. It’s a series of totally-sincere online animation shorts, done in standard SP style, based on brief snippets of speeches by the late philosopher/guru Alan Watts. Really.

…to two of the greatest entertainers and entertainment packages ever.

Merv Griffin was a genius strategic dealmaker who also happened to be a genial talk-show host and made-it-seem-easy raconteur.

I’ve already told my favorite Merv Griffin Show story, about the long Richard Pryor monologue that slowly built up to one big punchline that was completely bleeped. For every moment like that, there were hundreds of smarmy lovefest chats with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Gabor, Jackie Mason, and Jonathan Winters. As dull as these segments often got, there was at least the promise of some opening repartee with his trumpet player Jack Sheldon (who was also Schoolhouse Rock’s favorite male vocalist).

But Griffin’s real talent was on the business end of the business. A brief outline:

• After stints as a big-band singer and radio personality, the Goodson-Todman game show empire signed him up to host Play Your Hunch, a blatant ripoff of G-T’s own To Tell the Truth.
• After four years of that, NBC signed Griffin in 1962 to host an afternoon talk show. It premiered on the same day (and from the same studio) as Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show. Some observers believe the network was grooming Griffin as a potential relief pitcher, should Carson’s show flop.
• Carson, obviously, didn’t flop. NBC dropped Griffin’s show. But as part of the contract, Griffin got to place two daytime games on the network. The second of these, premiering in 1964, was Jeopardy!.
• By 1975, NBC’s daytime boss was one Lin Bolen. She believed in modern innovations, such as expanding soap opera episodes from 30 to 60 minutes. She hated legacy game shows with old-man hosts, such as Jeopardy!‘s original host Art Fleming. Bolen moved J! to worse and worse time slots, and finally axed it. But as part of Griffin’s contract, he got to place another daytime game on the network. That was Wheel of Fortune.
• Meanwhile, Griffin had revived his own show in syndication, then moved to CBS late night, then back to syndication, demanding and getting more cash each time.
• By the 1980s he’d successfully placed Wheel in syndication and revived J! as a sister show.
• He sold the whole thang to Columbia Picutres for $250 million and a share of future profits. He built that stake into a “luxury” leisure empire of hotels, casinos, resorts, and race horses.
• But he remained involved in TV production. He produced a kids’ game show, Click, shooting the second of its two seasons in Seattle. (He lived on a yacht moored at south Lake Union during the tapings.) And in his last days he was selling a new show, Let’s Play Crosswords.

His private life was as delightfully kitschy as his talk show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with the likes of Gabor and even the widowed Nancy Reagan; while rumors spread of his affections toward poolboys and valets. If true, that meant he had a real self he felt he had to hide from the world, even after he was financially set for life.

ACROSS THE POND, meanwhile, we must say goodbye to Tony Wilson, best known here as the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People. But Wilson’s achievements were too big for one movie (let alone one blog entry):

• He began by hosting a local music TV show in Manchester, welcoming acts the London-based network shows wouldn’t touch.
• He went from there into narrating serious network documentaries, and from there into anchoring Manchester’s only commercial TV newscast.
• On the side, he continued to support new music by cofounding Factory Records, home to Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and many more.
• He opened The Hacienda nightclub, where top acts played (and “house” electronic music was partly developed) for 15 years.
• More recently, he became a political activist. His chief cause: “Devolution.” No, not de-evolution, but a crusade to bring more political power to England’s regions, away from London’s central bureaucracies.

Wilson was an honorable man in three often dishonorable professions (music, TV, politics).

And everything he did was informed by his lifelong devotion to his hometown.

He’s someone we could all admire and emulate.