To fill the scheduling void left by the forthcoming UPN/WB merger, Fox is starting a second network service, tentatively titled “My Network TV.” The first announced shows: Anglophone versions of Mexican novelas! No word whether the new net will appear here.

…today to legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy, one of the few TV personalities to have had simultaneous gigs on all three oldtime networks, and one of the hardest-working nonathletes in the sports biz. (In September weekends during the ’60s, Gowdy would call a baseball game on Saturday, immediately fly to another city, and call an American Football League game on Sunday.)

• The NBC coverage so far has, as my fave TV critic Aaron Barnhart calls it, “less fluff, more stuff.” Fewer interminable human-interest profiles of the participants, more footage of them participating. They’re even showing the greatest winter sport of them all, curling, live on CNBC! (Too bad NBC’s HDTV transmission can be so spotty at times, due to excess signal compression.)
• The opening festivity was a mishmosh of Cirque du Soleil-esque pomposity and truly heartfelt symbolism, such as when the Olympic flag was carried in by eight women from around the countries (though you had to have watched the CBC telecast to have learned about some of these women’s intense political activism).
• Two-man luge!
• Did I mention lots of curling in the US coverage? (But strangely enough, almost none on CBC, which farmed that part out to Canadian cable channels which we can’t get down here.)
• The downhill ski courses with painted boundaries, which the skiers have to keep from crossing.
• Women’s hockey.
• Women’s speed skating.
• The incredibly complicated (and therefore funner) new figure skating scoring rules.
• Just enough return-from-gruesome-injury moments to keep from overdoing the shtick.
• Non-USA athletes are winning a lot, and we even get to see it.

Blame the Seahawks’ Super Bowl loss on inept (or even crooked) officiating, if you must. Many have, on sports talk radio and online chat boards.

There, fans have been ranting with levels of invective that might make Ann Coulter blush. But the title of a chat room at sqidly.com/seahawks said it cleanly and simply: WE WUZ ROBBED.

Of course, it was really only a professional sports event. A show. A big, spectacular show, one as American as apple pie and Enron. Given the nation’s current overabundance of cynicism, it’s easy to fantasize about corruption in high places everywhere.

But even if the Seahawks didn’t entirely lose on their own accord, does it really matter?

Was the past autumn and winter’s Hawk-hype all that important in the universal big-big picture?

I say yes.

Sure, there were the silly moments within the whole mania. Such as the “Seahawks Mass” held last Friday evening at St. James Cathedral.

Granted, the mass might have been just one more publicity stunt in a fortnight of publicity stunts, a means for local Catholics to get onto some of that God-plus-football media attention. So what if, as one of the priests at the mass was later quoted on the TV news, “I don’t know if God is necessarily a football fan”? It’s still a good excuse to bring the parishioners together on a less-than-somber occasion, to pray that our heroes entertain us without getting too seriously banged up in the process, and perhaps without getting caught performing un-role-model-like behaviors.

On the Friday afternoon before the mass, the whole city seemed abuzz about the game. Bank tellers and checkout clerks dutifully wore team apparel; team flags and banners abounded, especially downtown during and after the big rally in Westlake Center.

But on Sunday afternoon, the place was as quiet and ghost-town-esque as Christmas morning. Everyone, it seemed, was watching the game, working, or finding some alternate activity to deliberately avoid watching the game. The Capitol Hill bar where I’d watched the previous two Super Bowls was particularly calm; it turned out the owners were holding a private party at their suburban home and had invited most of the bar’s regular patrons. When I went wandering outside at halftime, Broadway and Pine was as quiet and devoid of human activity as I’d ever seen it in the daytime.

That’s part of the social dynamic of pro football, particularly as it played out this year in this town.

The Seahawks’ miracle season was played out in huge public gatherings (the home games) and smaller public parties (the sports bars). The two big rallies the week before the game were free celebrations open to all ages, genders, races, and classes.

But the championship game itself was held, as it always is, on (presumably) neutral turf. Its telecasts are often viewed at private parties and semi-private bar events (reservations recommended).

The result: The Seahawks won in public and lost in private. The fans’ cheers were out in the open; their tears were behind closed doors.

And so the conventional wisdom, the national media, and the Vegas oddsmakers were right, and the veteran and newbie members of Seahawk Nation were sent away with a few tart remarks about how we were lucky to have gotten as far in the playoffs as we did.

Seattle can return to being largely forgotten in the NYC press, except as the butt of stale jokes about (as one pro-Seahawks ESPN commentator said in chiding a pro-Pittsburgh ESPN commentator days before the game) “coffee, rain, and Kurt Cobain.”

But the faithful know better. Had a few penalties and refs’ decisions gone the other way, our city would have had the opportunity to party in the streets, shouting our presence to the world.

The Super Bowl telecast opened with a rewritten version of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Had our Hawks won, a more appropriate Seuss reading would have been from Horton Hears a Who.
But just wait. One day soon, perhaps this week next year, we’ll get our chance to unite in a rousing cry of “We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Some other pseudo-random thoughts on the game itself, and on the whole show surrounding it:

• After four different commercials with the desperate Bud Light dudes suffering any humiliation just for a beer, I wanted to reach out to them and direct them to the nearest AA meeting.
• What do you know? Mick Jagger can still get his words bleeped at age 62! Either he refuses to go safe and soft, or he’s passed directly from angry young man to bitter old crank without a stop at middle-aged respectability.

Toward the end of last night’s Drinking Liberally meeting, I talked to two ’60s-generation defenders who said protesting could have results. I said protesting wasn’t enough, then eased into my next question: What are leftists today FOR? And I don’t just mean being in favor of being against things. What’s our agenda, beyond stopping the other guys’ agenda? They had no good answers.

With what would we replace the DC culture of corruption? Bush, as everyone who doesn’t watch Fox “News” knows, is merely the transparently incompetent figurehead atop a whole all-encompassing machine of bribery, influence-peddling, warmongering, and the crass exploitation of bigotry and fear. Impeaching Bush alone, or even Bush and Cheney as a team, would only bring new figureheads to deliver the sound bites.

The DLC “centrist” Democrats see no future for the Democratic Party as an organization without corporate money, so they willingly take a donor-chosen role of the all-too-loyal opposition.

The Northwest Democrats and the other progressives around the country? Protesting, marching, sporting angry T-shirts and bumper stickers, staging symbolic acts of dissent like the futile Alito filibuster.

And blogging. And talking at meetups.

At least the bloggers are constantly unearthing and disseminating new damning evidence of the Sleaze Machine’s nefarious actions, and occasionally get the bigtime media to acknowledge this evidence’s existence.

But there’s still damn little discussion on what we’d do instead, aside from not doing most of what the Republicans are doing.

So I ask all of you: Imagine progressive Dems (not just near-right Dems) stand a highly realistic chance of retaking Congress this fall and the White House two falls from now. (I happen to believe this is possible, especially if state-level progressives in certain “battleground states” push through some needed electoral reforms.)

Next, imagine you’re hard at work in some campaign strategy office, trying to make this dream come true. The opinion surveys keep coming back with one public demand: What’s your platform? The kind folk out there in swing-voter-land want to know what you’ll do. Not just what you won’t do, but what you will do.

Now tell us your answers.

…to Charles Herring, Seattle’s and the Northwest’s first TV newscaster (at KING from 1951 to 1967), who passed away this Monday.

Herring’s solid, if square, demeanor helped give the new medium of local TV news a brand of credibility, back in those pre-sound-bite, pre-helicopter days. He’s best known today for his live coverage of the 1962 World’s Fair, preserved on kinescope films and excerpted in many subsequent documentaries.

His final newscast was immediately followed by his appearance in a filmed commercial for White Front, a discount-store chain expanding into the area from California. Herring’s straight-shooting reputation didn’t do much to boost White Front, which folded within six years. (A small subsidiary chain, Toys “R” Us, survived.)

Around the time White Front disappeared, Herring’s son Chuck briefly ran a bookstore on Capitol Hill and self-pubilshed his own essay book, If I Don’t Do This, I’ll Never Do Anything. The “this” the younger Herring was struggling to do? Pubilsh that very book.

The elder Herring ran a mom-and-pop radio station in Port Angeles, then returned to Seattle and worked in Boeing’s industrial-video unit until 1987.

Warner Bros. and the divorced-from-Viacom CBS are merging their second-tier broadcast networks. Instead of UPN and The WB, this September will see the “CW” network, which I’m sure some cynical critics will rename “WC” (Brit slang for a toilet, or “water closet”).

Locally, the merged programming slate will appear on KSTW, owned by CBS’s UPN Stations Group. That leaves KTWB, nee KTZZ, as a true indie again, scrambling for old movies or talk shows or judge shows to fill its evening hours.

I’m sure the expensive switch to HDTV played a factor in the merger decision. Perhaps now we’ll get an HD feed of KSTW, the only major commercial broadcast station in this region that doesn’t yet have one.

Herewith, some screen snaps of highlights (as if you’ve not already seen them) from the Seahawks’ incredible demolition of the Carolina Panthers on Sunday, winning the team its first-ever trip to the Sooper Bowl.

It was easily the most important single sporting event ever held in Seattle. (The Sonics’ 1979 championship was won on the road. So, of course, were all the UW football team’s bowl-game victories. The Mariners’ 1995 and 2001 triumphs were really the accumulations of many single-game victories.)

And, of course, it led to the biggest outdoor party Seattle’s seen since the riotous Fat Tuesday of 2001. This time, though, all went apparently smoothly in the ol’ P-Square. Good raucous fun was had by all. (More on this in my next post.)

P-I sportswriter Art Thiel claims this year’s Hawks, and particularly Sunday’s victory, represent a new era in Seattle history. Thiel posits the city’s onetime reputation for “the Scandahoovian trait of reticence,” modest casual fashion, tree-hugging, grunge’s ironic self-deprecation, and rain jokes has now and forever been superceded by a new confidence, an assertive new swagger, an instinct for unhinged joy.

I, as you might expect, am not so sure.

Seattle’s always been defined by great dreams and big schemes. That’s why it became the PNW’s dominant city, even though Portland had a head start and Tacoma had the railroad barons’ blessing. Boeing and Microsoft established their respective world dominations through slick deal-making and aggressive business tactics. Seattle’s infamous “politeness” is, at its best, a quiet businesslike confidence. And that’s exactly what the Seahawks have shown on the field this season.

The Hawks played like a smooth, well-choreographed troupe. And at its greatest moment of triumph to date, the team merely responded with the joy of boyish innocence. That’s what makes these guys so loveable.

More on this later.

Tonight might see the final episode, after years of haggling, of Mike Hunt TV, the cable access show that dared to rebelliously run excerpts from ordinary corporate hardcore pornos.

…watching the Seahawks’ glorious playoff victory at Cafe Racer (nee Lucky Dog) on Roosevelt.

The back room held 13 women and only one other man at the game’s start; three other males showed up by the second half. Apparently, Racer’s boss, my ol’ pal Kurt Geissel, had successfully made it the game-viewing site of choice for U District lesbians. These lovely, loving ladies were all good, attentive fans. Football, beer, and lesbians–what more could a blue-blooded, blue-state straight male want?

After a full year, the Sci-Fi Channel will finally debut the new Doctor Who in the US.

Oh, and Mrs. Alito crying in the gallery during hubby’s hearing? So freakin’ obviously pre-rehearsed…

…but the January Belltown Messenger is now out, complete with a big cover story and pix by yrs. truly.

Also, Messenger correspondent Megan Lee will be on KOMO-TV’s Northwest Afternoon this Friday at 3, as part of a story about “The Truth About Tabloids.”

I’ll always remember the late comedy legend for one of my earliest memories of what would now be called “performance art.” I’m thinking of some of his early appearances on Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin, in which he didn’t tell one-liner jokes but instead weaved a complex comedic story, with minor gag lines along the way, leading to one tremendous big punch line–that was invariably completely bleeped. The buildup, the seconds of silence, the uproarious studio-audience laughter and applause. You just don’t get experiences like that anymore.

…when the local TV anchordrones insist there’ll be snow this-time-for-sure, it doesn’t happen, at least not in town.

• The rediscovery of old film classics thanks to DVD.
• We’re still a two-daily-paper town, at least for now.
• Hi-def TV.
• The strong early sales for my e-book about hi-def TV.
• The so-called Blogosphere, in recent years one of the last uncompromised bastions of democratic debate.
• New awareness of body/mind diversity.
• My father’s long years of slow, pathetic decline finally ended this January.
• I’ve gotten one-third of the way out of my massive personal debt, and should be all clear by year’s end.
• I have a regular print outlet for my work, and am in negotiations about a day job.
• I’ve known some fabulous babes in my day, many with exciting and dynamic careers.
• The many fine products of North America’s convenience foods industry.
• Those who are still willing to fight back against the right-wing sleaze machine.
• Local microbrews.
• Seeing several friends survive debilitating conditions and come back with humor and dignity intact.
• Being back in my favorite neighborhood.
• Being high n’ dry.
• Having a loving, caring, loyal readership. Thank you.