T(V) & A

The Smoking Gun, God love 'em, has sifted through the thousands of complaints that followed Janet Jackson's infamous Superbowl nipple flash. Some of these outraged letters are just, well, wonderful.

Just one example: "Fine them, imprison them" -- "them" presumably being Jackson and Justin Timberlake and not Jackson's breasts, since there was only one offending nipple, the other apparently content to mind its own business --"along with the majority, if not all national news media including ABC, NBC, CBS PBS, they are anti American anti Christian anti Republican, pro death for babies and seniors. They are not reporters [but] fear and sex peddlers and bias against anything good."

Really now, I'm willing to concede that a sex-saturated mass media has fed the nation's cultural divide as much as anything, but it is mighty difficult to take the howls of protest too seriously when this is indicative of the mindset -- and let's be honest, does anyone doubt that this really is the mindset of many? It's not for nothin' that, excluding the Jackson episode, 99 percent of complaints registered with the FCC stem from the Parents Television Council. My own proposed solution for objectionable programming is a complicated one; it involves not watching.

And now to that other Jackson, the peculiar one, the bleached cyborg creature king of sleepovers, candy canes and delicious gingerbread castles. The Los Angeles Times tells us that upwards of 4,000 prospective jurors will be summoned for the Jan. 31 jury selection of his child molestation trial. "Under the direction of Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville," the paper reports,"prospective jurors will be probed for telltale attitudes on a spectrum of issues, including racial prejudice, divorce and plastic surgery."

OK, forget the regrettable wording about jurors being "probed" at the Michael Jackson trial. We wonder if would-be jurors will be asked to gauge their interest in writing a book or appearing on morning TV shows after the trial, because those are really the only two things we can think of that would be worth sitting through what is certain to be a months-long media circus.

Anyway, back to sex on TV (there's an old joke in that phrase somewhere), folks in northeast Ohio recently got an eyeful when they switched on the TV Christmas morning. Apparently, the local public-access station had inserted (heh heh) the wrong videotape to air. Instead of the scheduled Christmas carols, viewers got chickie chickie boom boom adult programming. No Christmas Carol, but plenty o' Dickens.

From a TV news report:

"I turn it to Channel 15 and there's this naked lady on the screen -- I mean full-frontal, get-the-hell-out-of-here pornography," said David Umana. "When I tell about Christmas 2004, I'm betting this will be one of my best stories."

And Tiny Tim was tiny no more. God bless us -- everyone!