Viva BBC America

I caught the first episode of Viva Blackpool last night on BBC America, a six-episode mini-series that features the most wonderfully vile lead character since The Sopranos.

The show's a funny drama about Ripley Holden, an Elvis-loving Brit trying to bring Vegas-style excess to Blackpool, England, in the form of the Yankee Dollar Casino. When a dead body turns up one morning, a Scottish detective shows up poking around Ripley's business (and his wife).

The comparisons to Tony Soprano are unmistakeable -- Ripley's a larger-than-life oaf ruling the lives of his wife, son and daughter, and he mixes bullying and charm in a way that makes me think the U.S. will steal actor David Morrissey the way we've absconded with Ricky Gervais.

The strangest and most amazing thing about the show was the occasional use of musical numbers a la Cop Rock. The first episode ends with a "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" dance between Holden and the detective, and though it sounds excruciatingly bad, it was so great I scrambled for the TiVo to record the show for my wife.

I try to avoid watching television aside from Law & Order and football, because it robs me of time I could be wasting on the web. But I'm in for the next five hours of Blackpool, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. and has one last repeat airing of the first episode at 7 p.m. tonight.

Television · 2005/10/30 · 30 COMMENTS · Link

Harriet's Homework Helpers

A postscript on Harriet Miers, buried in a Washington Post story on the burial of her Supreme Court aspirations:

White House aides finished Miers's second response to the Senate questionnaire and delivered it at 11:40 p.m., more than three hours after she decided to abandon her nomination. The 59-page document makes it clear that the struggle to learn about her advice to Bush would have continued had she stayed in the fray. Asked for details about her work, she submitted 135 boilerplate, publicly available fact sheets on White House policies and 67 policy statements the administration has sent Congress on legislation.

Miers wasn't even working on her own questionnaire! I know that Supreme Court justices often lean heavily on their clerks in drafting opinions, but you'd think a person described as "detail-oriented" in four billion media stories might have given her homework a look-see before aides turned it in.

I'm beginning to wonder if she's even a good bowler.

Politics · 2005/10/28 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Brownie Backs Brown-Noser

The White House has enlisted a new ally in the effort to seat Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court:

Conservative activist Michael D. Brown said internal GOP polling being cited by party and administration emissaries purports to show that "70 percent of self-identified conservative voters have a favorable impression of Harriet Miers."

The emissaries are warning that ordinary Republicans beyond the Washington Beltway continue to support the nomination because they trust President Bush, even after several weeks of conservative opposition to her, according to several conservative Miers critics who have been courted by the White House.

The administration is "disappointed that conservatives inside the Beltway are fighting among ourselves over this nomination, and it fuels the fires for our enemies, for Democrats," said Mr. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director.

Brown also gave Miers 500 leftover bottles of water and $200,000 in federal relief to replace a tree outside her Dallas home that was toppled by Hurricane Rita.

Update: Miers withdraws nomination.

Politics · Hurricane Katrina · 2005/10/27 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Britannica Editor Throws Book at Wikipedia

The Guardian newspaper asked several experts to evaluate a Wikipedia entry in their area of expertise, including the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, who critiqued encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's a moving target, which makes it tough to criticize. Errors cited by the Britannican were corrected by Wikipedians before his review saw print:

It is clear that the critic is commenting on an earlier version of the article -- for example, the typo he takes pains to note was already corrected, and more importantly the article seems to have been substantially revised since he read it.

I'm becoming addicted to Wikipedia as both reader and writer. I would not compare it to a print encyclopedia's quality (yet), but there's unique value in an open database of knowledge that accumulates in real time. Wikipedia operates on the principle that the more people care about a subject, the more likely its entries will be accurate and useful. I don't know that Wikipedia can survive spammers and sloppy editors -- critics are lining up to write it off -- but it's a good first stop when you're doing research in your pajamas.

I recently contributed a new entry on the Baby Richard custody case, which I wrote to supplement a sentence I added to the biography of journalist Bob Greene.

Writing in the authoritative voice of an encyclopedia is fun, but it was tough to avoid bias. That child never should have been in a position to be ripped from his home at age 4, especially in front of a media circus. He was only three months old when his biological father informed the adoptive parents he had been misled about the child and wanted custody.

Wikipedia · 2005/10/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Nude Dancer Denudes Wallet

Today's New York Times has an op-ed defending the right of strip clubs to rip off their clientele:

With many customers, fawning is key. What a stripper sells is not her ability to dance or take off her clothes, but her ability to suspend the customer's disbelief.

If she is doing her job right, his bald spot and his mortgage cease to exist, and he enters an adolescent fantasy of sexual prowess, temporarily transformed into James Bond, Han Solo and Hugh Hefner all rolled into one. The dancers keep cooing and flattering until the money runs out. It's not duplicitous; it's what the patron signs up for.

The author of the essay is Elizabeth Eaves, a former stripper who has turned the experience into a work of scholarship: Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power.

There's something poetic about a stripper who hates her customers so much she believes her job is to bankrupt them, since there isn't a lot of respect coming in the other direction of the "shake your moneymakers" business.

Eaves has an extremely low opinion of the men whose wallets she used to lay bare:

I don't have a lot of respect for these men. I don't think they're evil people, but I think that they're weak. I see visiting strip clubs as a form of cheating; I'm bothered by the idea that women are for sale, and I see this in many aspects of our society.

2005/10/25 · 38 COMMENTS · Link

Stuart Smalley: Bush Needs Therapy

Stuart Smalley made his first appearance on Al Franken's radio show Friday, venturing into politics to discuss tabloid rumors that the president has returned to the bottle (attached podcast).

I'm surprised it took so long to hear from the caring nurturer, who believes the president should get into an anonymous recovery group, regardless of whether or not he's drinking:

Right away. Imagine the stress. There but for the grace of God go I. If I were president, I'd be a complete wreck. I'd be doing a worse job than him, I really believe that. If that's possible.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/10/24 · 47 COMMENTS · Link

Harriet Miers is a Bear Market

The steady pace of bad news for Harriet Miers appears to have accelerated within the last 24 hours, based on the prices at an Internet gambling site trading on her nomination to the Supreme Court.

Tradesports, an Irish betting service that provides a system for speculating on current events, has a contract on the confirmation of Miers that has plummeted.

Prices in a bet like this range from 0 (no chance) to 100 (absolute lock), and Miers hit an all-time low of 11 today. The current price of 20, 30 percent below yesterday's price, means that only 1-in-5 bettors believes she'll make it to the Supreme Court (more graphs).

A skim of ConfirmThemButNotHer.Com shows recent events that might have prompted the drop, from the Wall Street Journal editorial calling her nomination a "blunder" to the bipartisan request to redo her questionnaire to an embarrassing factual gaffe in an answer about the Equal Protection Clause.

My money's on a story that ran yesterday in the Washington Times:

Harriet Miers -- whose courtesy calls with senators in their Capitol Hill offices have been more chaotic than courteous -- has finished the tour, the White House has told congressional aides.

Miss Miers will spend the next two weeks cramming for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Republican Senate staffers working on the nomination told The Washington Times yesterday.

The meetings have been fraught with misunderstandings and disagreements, giving ammunition to detractors, both liberal and conservative, that Miss Miers is in over her head.

I can't recall a Supreme Court nominee who stopped making courtesy calls to senators like this -- Miers has met half as many members as Roberts did. If the Bush administration can't get her safely through a private, generally cordial process, the confirmation hearings must be scaring the stare decisis out of them.

Politics · 2005/10/21 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

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