Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert discuss the current state of television news:

Colbert: I am proudly owned by my sponsors. I will never say one thing against the Pasta Pro™ pasta strainer.

Moore: Right. And that’s why you’ll have a long and successful career.

Colbert: Good.

Moore: And so, your point is … ?

Colbert: That I have a healthy relationship with my sponsors. And that’s how TV works.

Moore: In other words, it’s not really about telling the truth.

Colbert: No, we are selling things

Probably only partially true, but well spoken nonetheless.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gets leaked.

Super-nerdy Wikipedians attempt to add information revealed within said leak to Deathly Hallows Wikipedia entry.

Dedicated super-nerdy Harry Potter fans do whatever possible to preserve the sanctity of the Harry Potter marketing campaign magical novel, expecto patronuming all mention of the leak from said Wikipedia entry.

Super-nerdy Wikipedians counter with further obsessive leak-related Wikipedia editing.

The battle rages on, via Wikipedia Talk Pages.

(FYI, link may reveal sensitive information)

Andrew Sullivan seems to think no TV is good for the body, good for the soul, going so far as to approvingly post this letter from a reader:

If I were married with a 13-year-old today, I would make a very similar proposal. If my child did not watch TV for a year I would give my child $1,000 for the first year, $2,000 for the second year, $3,000 for the third year, and so on until he/she was 18. Any time during which my child watched TV would reset the progression. I might also offer the same bonuses for not drinking any soft drinks/highly sugared drinks as well as not eating from fast food chains.

Sugar soda and fast food is one thing, but encouraging your children not to watch any television comes at the inevitable expense of emotionally and culturally retarding them for the rest of their lives. No Lost? No Sopranos? No Daily Show? No Wire? No Colbert? No Meet the Press? No Office? No Simpsons? It’d be like paying your child not to read.

Though there’s always been a lot of crap on the set, TV is not inherently bad for you. In fact, it’s one the greatest blessings of the last hundred years. Without TV there’d be no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, no gay rights. Television is the 20th century’s great illuminating equalizer, the one, pioneering medium that first brought other people’s lives right into the comfort of our living rooms, finally ending America’s long, nasty love affair with segregation and the separate-but-equal.

Shame shame.

Paris Hilton has taken to her MySpace blog with a plea to fans to support an online petition calling for her release from the unjust claws of the American justice system:

We, the American public who support Paris, are shocked, dismayed and appalled by how Paris has been the person to be used as an example that Drunk Driving is wrong. We do not support drunk driving or DUI charges. Paris should have been sober. But she shouldn’t go to jail, either.

…

Please sign to tell The Honorable Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of the State of California, to think about the welfare of this young woman who has made a mortal error and deserves a second chance like so many others in our great nation have been served with after a mistake they have made. If the late Former President Gerald Ford could find it in his heart to pardon the late Former President Richard Nixon after his mistake(s), we undeniably support Paris Hilton being pardoned for her honest mistake as well, and we hope and expect The Governor will understand and grant this unusual but important request in good faith to Ms. Paris Whitney Hilton.

She is not a crook!

(Via Ross Douthat) In the wake of the Girls Gone Wild bonanza (a party which looks to have recently come to an end) Garance Franke-Ruta thinks the age of porn-star consent should be raised to 21:

It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21—”consent,” in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.

This is silly. To borrow a mantra from the fight for the 26th Amendment: if you’re old enough to fight a war and die for your country, you’re certainly old enough to show that same country your beaver.

The real problem with the sweet sweet degeneracy that is Girls Gone Wild lies with the parents who somehow think it’s ok for their 17 year old daughters to go off to Panama City in March, unsupervised, with nine of their friends, an assortment of fake IDs, and incredibly low self-esteem.

CNN checks in on the still-to-come R Kelly child porn trial, now five years in the making. It’s like the Chinese Democracy of sex crimes litigation.

Apparently there have been some road blocks:

A series of sometimes bizarre events, including a judge’s tumble from a ladder and a case of appendicitis, have delayed the 40-year-old R&B superstar’s trial far longer than the norm.

It’s clear someone upstairs has been willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the full-scale fruition of Trapped in the Closet.

UPDATE: It’s strangely inspiring to me that the man behind The Wire’s Omar Little, perhaps the greatest character in the history of television, is also responsible for James the Policeman.

It’s genius! As the AP Reports:

Miss America can add crime fighter to her resume.

Lauren Nelson recently went undercover with police in New York for a sting targeting sexual predators.

Officers with Suffolk County’s computer crimes unit created an online profile of a 14-year-old girl that included photographs of Nelson as a teenager.

Forbidden sex! Young teenage girls! Naughty thoughts of Miss America as a sexually adventurous 14-year-old girl luring older men into her Long Island den of explicit sexual impropriety! And all in time for May sweeps?? It’s gold!

“The story was that they knew I was 14, and I told them I was cutting school to meet with them,” Nelson said. “I stood outside on the porch, and I would say, ‘Hi’ to them and wave them inside.”

Once she entered the home with the suspect, Nelson said, she left the room, and police and “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh confronted the suspect.

“That part was very scary, but the police were all over the place,” Nelson said. “I was nervous, of course, but it was a very controlled environment, very safe.”

I’m not sure any media sensation where the attempted sexual exploitation of children becomes a sure-fire, sexy ratings phenomenon can really be considered a “controlled environment.”

Slate offers up a pretty stirring and incredibly fascinating look at the role of online social networking in yesterday’s tragedy:

MySpace holds a central position in this drama. This morning, it was noted on Fark.com that the shooter identified by police, Cho Seung-Hui, did not have a presence on MySpace—another sign of his outcast status. There’s a two-fold disappoinment at this fact. For the angry, no way to leave a flaming message (or worse). For the media, it’s as if his MySpace page would have held the key to his motive, as if the online life of college students is where they hide their true selves.

The article links to a number of facebook memorial pages created in memory of some of the victims, including this group for sophomore Caitlin Hammaren, the creator of which wrote this firm yet very gracious note directed at what appears to be a somewhat overaggressive press:

To those reporters who have been trying to contact me: I would love to help, however I have put this group up as a memorial to my neighbor and friend, Caitlin. I did not realize doing so would result in so much support, and it would be wrong of me to go any further with this and supply you guys with information and photos of Caitlin without the consent of her parents.

To those members who read this: if you want to talk to some of these reporters (look in discussion board) feel free to express any feelings or memories of Caitlin, I would just appreciate if you kept in mind her family. I do not know if even having this page would be ok with them, so until I talk to them, please do not share any personal information or anything that you would think might offend/upset her family. Thank you.

Another facebook memorial here, for freshman Emily Hilscher, which too included a rebuke of the press.

Despite overwhelmingly positive reviews, an endorsement from the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time, and an Academy Award nomination, I just couldn’t bear to get through this movie; I think we shut it down about 15 minutes in.

An even handed portrayal of contemporary American evangelicalism? Sure. Valuable insight into a potent American political movement? Looks like it. But any documentary featuring a woman whose only wish is for the christian youth of our country to be as God-crazed as the sons of suicide bombers and 9/11 hijackers isn’t one I’m going to be able to stomach.

Some pertinent thoughts on the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut:

The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.

Rest in peace, friend. And thank you.

Oh, and here is a drawing of an asshole.

Jack Shafer joins in the chorus of criticism against David Sedaris for embellishing aspects of his non-fiction:

Sedaris and company want to erect a penumbra that shields humorists from criticism when they blend fiction into their nonfiction but still insist on calling it nonfiction. The logic behind this is difficult to follow. If writing fiction is the license Sedaris and other nonfiction humorists need to get at “larger truths,” why limit this exemption to humorists? Let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture “larger truths,” too.

As editor of a popular online magazine, I recognize Shafer may be wary of fabricated non-fiction. But there’s a difference between embellishing situations in a humorous personal memoir and publishing an article about a guy who fishes for monkeys.

Reporters “covering city hall, war, and business” are writing as means of delivering factual information to their readers; they traffic in facts and we read their work (hopefully with a healthy dose of skepticism) in order to draw our own conclusions about the state of the world.

The writers of personal memoirs, on the other hand, present the conclusions up front, trafficking in something greater than the mere sum of the real-life minutia of their lives. It doesn’t matter to me if Sedaris’s brother never really referred to himself as The Rooster; I’m ok with some slight embellishment so long as it allows Sedaris to write, “Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”

If the writing’s good, then, fuck it, it doesn’t much matter where it came from, I’m just happy it’s out there. You know what I’m saying?

Memoirs don’t deliver facts, they deliver something much bigger: personal truth and stories of life that are consumed more like fiction than like dry news. Sure, memoirs may be popular because readers feel a closer connection to stuff that actually happened to someone else. But all great memoirists, from Sedaris back to Mark Twain, are really just great story tellers. And, as anyone who has ever told a story to anyone else will know, you gotta editorialize just a bit, otherwise it’s just not worth telling.

I’d like to think most readers of personal non-fiction are savvy enough to be satisfied with that.

After devoting the past month to back episodes of The Wire, it’s tough to return to mere-mortal television. But Lost is still a pretty good show (this season’s “buried alive” episode notwithstanding).

While Lost is all up in that internet ish like whoosey-whats-it, this is something I hadn’t seen before: a blog by Lost stuntwoman Heather Poohs, double for Evangeline Lilly’s Kate.

I didn’t realize stunt people had agents. (Or blogs).