JUST WHEN HE SEEMED to have disappeared off the face o’ the earth, Bill Maher roars back with a fervent plea for some politician somewhere to unapologetically support gay marriage: “The only thing abominable about being gay is the amount of time you have to put in at the gym.”

…but Jim Henson’s heirs finally agreed on one of Henson’s last wishes, to sell the Muppets to Disney.

The Canadian and Ontario governments paid Conan O’Brien to tape four shows in Toronto; then went all up in arms over O’Brien’s anti-Canadian and anti-Quebecois insult jokes.

Someone at Slashdot, in a comment that seems to have scrolled off the site, wrote:

“In a country where it’s okay to fry mentally ill people to death, let any eejit carry a gun, consume a huge proportion of the world’s resources and invade a country for dubious reasons, exposing a bit of human flesh is greeted with the sort of outrage that you’d think would be reserved for the end of the world.”

Of course, that’s the whole point. The right-wing sleaze machine loves violence (physical, verbal, emotional, etc.) and loathes sex (especially pleasurable, loving, or otherwise “girly” sex).

And the youth-marketing industry, which devised the Super Bowl halftime and most of the Super Bowl commercials, loves everything hard and “edgy” and hates anything soft and subtle. Faced with record-low TV viewership levels among the corporately-prized young male demographic, marketers are trying to outdo one another in vulgarity and desperation. It’s not that their audiences want this; it’s what they, the marketers, want their would-be audiences to want.

So, in the commercials, we got “jokes” about the following: A farting horse, little children saying a bleeped-out cussword, a wheelchair crash, a dog biting a man’s testicles, a talking monkey hitting on a woman, an old man beating an old woman, a football referee refusing to talk to a nagging wife, a man getting an unexpected bikini wax, and the very idea that a skinny man could love a heavy woman. All of these were just fine-‘n’-dandy with CBS and the NFL. (As were the two erectile-dysfunction-drug commercials, one of which included explicit language.)

In a further attempt to attract young nonviewers, CBS turned the halftime festivities over to sister company MTV. It staged a predictably rude and trite affair with mercifully short performances by has-beens Kid Rock, P. Diddy, Justin Timberlake, and Janet Jackson. Aside from Jackson’s reprise of the oldie “Rhythm Nation,” all the lyrics were about rude dudes boasting of their sexual-conquistadory prowess. Again, all that was OK’d in advance by all concerned.

Then, in the last dance move of the show, Timberlake (a mediocre dancer-singer known primarily for his write-ups in the gossip pages as the first boy to spear Britney) ripped open Jackson’s tear-away blouse and, officially “accidentally,” slipped her bra off as well.

This is far from the first “costume accident” on broadcast TV. (Remember Lucy Lawless’s rendition of the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game back in ’99?)

And CBS has been willing to show seminude women in recent years–as C.S.I. corpses, or as Chicago Hope hospital patients. And the network runs the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, but that’s all edgy and teasy, the way the Super Bowl was supposed to be.

But, like that other youth-marketing vehicle Maxim, rude-‘n’-crude’s OK, but pure physical beauty’s taboo beyond taboo.

Jeff Laurie at Sex News Daily claims the Jackson flash was newsworthy because “like most breasts, it’s scarce, and seeing it is getting a sneak peak at the forbidden fruit.” Uncovered breasts, of course, are far less scarce than they used to be. They’re in fashion magazines, in Oscar-winning movies, on Emmy-winning cable shows, and all over the Internet. But they’re not in “edgy” youth marketing, which is all about forever teasing and never pleasing.

And they’re not in the right-wing bombast culture, forever stuck in the sixth-grade notion that boys who like to blow stuff up are Real Men, but that boys who like girls are faggots.

So now we have, as a blatantly cynical election-year stunt, the Bush FCC promising a swift and thorough investigation into the incident; all while the Bushies keep stalling about 9/11, the Cheney energy plan, and the lack of real causes for invading Iraq.

What does it all prove? That in a supposedly sexed-up pop culture, one of the purest, simplest forms of sexual expression still threatens certain powerful interests–precisely because it threatens the premises of their power.

It looks increasingly possible after Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses in seven states. The candidate was so confident about those contests, he (and Dean) came here, to rally the respective faithful for our own caucuses on Saturday.

The Kerry rally at the Sheraton ran late, as these things usually do. It was scheduled for 7:30, but at 8:15 people were still being herded into the big ballroom. Inside, the event turned out to be the Kerry & Gary Show, with Gov. Locke (seen here to Kerry’s right) introducing the candidate and warming up the crowd.

Kerry’s speech was standard boilerplate stuff. Get a decent health-care system, save the environment, stop sucking up to “Benedict Arnold CEOs,” dump Ashcroft, get some integrity back in D.C., elect a president who’s been on an aircraft carrier for real, bring it on. Some of the comments by audience members were more telling, particularly the catty talks about other audience members who showed up with Dean buttons.

One thing was sure: From certain angles, he looks remarkably like Jon Stewart, or maybe Clutch Cargo. On CNN later that night, the panels-O-pundits (particularly Mo Rocca and Wolf Blitzer) couldn’t get over how Kerry’s emerged as the most manly Democratic candidate in many an election cycle. Thankfully, CNN hasn’t switched to HDTV yet, so you had to imagine Mo and Wolf salivating and sweating at the thought of ol’ Ketchup Boy’s eyebrows, his dimples, his rugged war-hero shoulders.

The other thing I noticed on CNN Tuesday night: Everyone who mentioned Kerry’s speech on the channel used the annoyingly belittling qualifier “Seattle, WASHINGTON,” except, thankfully, for local-boy-gone-big Aaron Brown.

HERE ARE the two most important parts of the big football telecast:

• Janet Jackson’s attempt to prove, once and for all, she and Michael are different people.
• The anti-tobacco ad that wasn’t by a tobacco company, TheTruth.com’s “Shards O’ Glass.”

The game itself was a surprisingly tight, action-packed affair, ending with a last-second field goal. And it was won by the northern team (the New England Patriots), barely beating the southern team (the Carolina Panthers). Perhaps it’s an omen that someone from, say, Vermont or Massachusetts might whoop a certain adopted Texan later this year.

…to fashion photographer Helmut Newton, the king of opulant sleaze, and to Bob “Captain Kangaroo” Keeshan, the king of wholesome salesmanship.

During Keeshan’s heyday, some Seattle-area viewers occasinally wrote in to the daily papers complaining that KIRO-TV showed only the second half-hour of Kangaroo so it could run the more local, and more light-entertainment oriented, J.P. Patches (see the right-hand side of this page). I’m personally glad both hosts got to be seen, because each had his own set of messages and each cared about us young’uns in his different way.

…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.

Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!

AFTER SEEING a Red Green Show skit about customizing an ordinary modern car with a cut-up fiberglass canoe, I found a webpage about concept and prototype cars from the fifties and sixties. Damn, I wish some of those things had been really made.

…here’s a CBC news report about that wacky new fad, “A network called ‘Internet.'”

WE’VE NOT HERETOFORE discussed the Lord of the Rings movies, except to bemoan that their merchandising rights are controlled (and have been humongously exploited) by John Fogerty’s least-favorite record mogul Saul Zaentz. But the current New Yorker has a fond but not fawning essay comparing the films, not unfavorably, both to Tolkien’s original books and to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle operas. Along the way, the essay gives particular praise to the one member of the films’ creative team with the closest New York connection, composer (and original Saturday Night Live bandleader) Howard Shore.

…to Art Carney, the long-enduring actor who went from The Honeymooners to the original Broadway cast of The Odd Couple to a slew of ’70s and ’80s comeback films.

Unfortunately, none of the initial online obits for Carney I saw mentioned perhaps his most poignant role, that of real-life Wash. state curmuddgeon and volcano victim Harry Truman in St. Helens.

Have written 8850 words. (I don’t warranty them to be good words.) About 80 percent of my projected remaining scenes are now in breakdown/outline form.

The self-imposed deadline exercise has shown me just how much unproductive routine has accumulated in my current life of long-term underemployment. To make more writing time, I’ve cut my TV viewing to three shows (Black and White Overnight, Coronation Street, and Zed). I’ve cut my news reading to one paper a day. I’ve cut my email reading down to messages real individuals have written specifically to me. Next to be cut: The fourteen web sites I try to look at at least every other day.

MTV’s SN magazine, a tiresome rote exercise in the branding of bland corporate entertainment as somehow daring and edgy. I used to defend MTV and its spinoff projects from the unholier-than-thou culture critics. I can’t anymore. It’s not that SN (or MTV itself) is a dangerous influence on our children; just the opposite. It’s an irrelevant nothing, as loud and as trite as the global-superstar acts it showcases. And it’s a mouthpiece for the major record labels, an institution whose sleazeball tactics against its own fan base are giving it a public black eye from which it may never recover.

I’m now adding this paragraph later that same day. Upon further pondering, SN is superficially not all that different from some of the more superficial alt-music magazines of recent vintage (you know, the ones filled with one-page, big-picture, few-words puff pieces about rising young alterna-celebrities). You can interpret that as meaning either that the independent music press has sunk to MTV attention-span levels, or that MTV’s nakedly stealing indie-music shticks for the umpteen-hundredth time to prop up its illusion of street credibility, or something in between the two.

…starts pondering whether TV viewership’s in a death spiral, at least among the young-adult-male demographic all the advertisters want, you’ve gotta wonder if it just might be true. On the other hand, the ABCNews.com article herein linked reads like one of those overblown instant-trend stories seen all over the newspaper living sections, stories that often prove not to be as universally prophetic as they say they are.

Yet the question may still be begged: Is network TV, as we know it, a lumbering dinosaur of a business? Sometimes, such as when Fear Factor or Joe Millionaire is on, it sure seems that way. Other times, such as when King of the Hill or Letterman is on, it still seems like it’s got some of its old industrial-age oomph left in it. Then there are times, such as when a soon-to-be-forgotten rote show like I’m With Her is on, when it seems too far gone to even worry about, like a cool old-time restaurant you never go to anymore but you’d greatly mourn if it went under.