This week’s ruling that comedian and former SNL personality Al Franken was the winner of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, eight months after the actual election, should have me thinking about things like filibuster-proof majorities and how it affects the prospects for health care reform. Instead, it has me thinking about my career as an actor, and the role Franken played in it.

Having said that, larger market TV anchors do get the opportunity sometimes to appear on the big screen, and on fiction television programs, almost always playing…. wait for it…. TV NEWS ANCHORS! I knew Franken a little bit since I worked at WNBC at the time; he was doing a sitcom called “LateLine,” and recruited me to play the usual role of the anonymous news anchor, appearing on a television within the television show, to advance off-screen elements of the plot. I shot them right in the Channel 4 studio. It was easy.

But then he asked me to audition for an actual speaking role, as a character! I remember going to an office at 30 Rock, where Franken and his producers were doing the auditions. There was a lovely actress (whose name escapes me at the moment, but she gets lots of work and is currently in a CBS sitcom) whom I did my “scene” with. I had my lines memorized, I did what they asked me, the actress was as nice and helpful as could be…. and I totally sucked. But Mr. Franken and his colleagues were very kind, gave me the old “we’ll give you a call” line, and off I went back to doing nonfiction work. “LateLine” had a short run and was cancelled. Serves ‘em right.

Thank goodness I still had my film career. A couple years after I’d moved over to PIX, Kaity and I were asked to play fictional news anchors in a movie called “Marci X,” directed by Richard Benjamin and starring Lisa Kudrow and Damon Wayans. Did you see it? Of course, you didn’t. Nobody did. I was hearing it was a stinker right up to its release, so I was glad no one would see it, and see me IN it. What I hadn’t counted on was the trailer for Marci X—a trailer in which I appear-- running right before one of the blockbuster “Spiderman” movies that summer. That trailer, EVERYBODY saw. Here it is, via youtube: (I come up at about :14. I tell you that, because I don’t think you want to watch the entire trailer any more than you do the movie).

I pretty much retired from acting after that. Now I’m thinking about going into politics. I hear there’s a U.S. Senate race in New York this year.

We humans do hate randomness, don’t we? It’s what’s at the heart, I believe, of conspiracy theories; it’s too difficult for many people to believe that a lone gunman could kill a president, or that a small group of men armed with boxcutters could take over airplanes and change the way we all see the world. It’s understandable that so many people tend to believe conspiracy theories. It’s also nonsense.

Except that celebrities also die in twos. And fours. In fact, if we add David Carradine and pitchman Billy Mays to our June list, that brings the celebrity death toll to five. Then again, Carradine died a few weeks before the others. So depending on what the exact time frame is for the “coming in threes” rule, we might have to exclude him. And Billy Mays… well, he wasn’t really a celebrity in the usual sense. He did commercials. Then again, so did Ed McMahon. Hmmm. This so-called rule seems quite unruly.

And that’s because it is. To even begin to apply a scientific measurement to this, we need to get a few things straight: how long is the period of time within which the celebrities have to die to say that it happened in threes? And exactly how is “celebrity” defined? Be loose enough with your standards, and I think you can find that notable people die in threes every day. I would volunteer to be the person who establishes these time/fame standards for examining the rule of threes…. But I’m kinda busy.

The threes rule is really just another conspiracy theory, just another way that people deal with death and randomness. Here’s one website that looked into the question (you’d be surprised how many people think about this—Google “celebrities dying in threes” and join the party!) that has an accurate take on it, I think:

“We remember the names we recognize and forget the rest. When people with bigger names die in groups, that's evidence of randomness at work in the universe, not a law of threes. People see patterns where there is no pattern.”

It’s more proof that humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and when you factor in the lofty place celebrities occupy in our culture—how could he/she die? He/she is so famous??—it’s a way to deal with loss, not to mention a way to keep the wolf—the ultimate randomness of death-- outside our own door.

So, to sum up: yes, celebrities die in threes. So do opthamologists and people who have bowled 300-games. Except when they don’t. I would like to hear your comments on the matter, and I’m expecting some of you will defend the celebrities-die-in-threes rule quite passionately.

Hearing more about the tortured final years and months of Michael Jackson's life, I can't help but thinking the reason he died this week at age 50, is because at least somewhere inside of him, he wanted to.

I offer that speculation because of the contrast between how Jackson was living, and what he was planning to do next in his life. ABC News is reporting today that the singer was addicted to OxyContin, a wicked strong pain medication:

"OxyContin is a powerful drug that contains a much larger amount of the active ingredient, oxycodone, than other prescription pain relievers."

How powerful is it?

"...the National Drug Intelligence Center reports that OxyContin abusers may use heroin if their insurance will no longer pay for their OxyContin prescription.."

Add to that the reports today that he was also getting daily shots of Demerol, and you're talking about a person in the deep throes of an excruciating and debilitating addiction. People who saw Jackson in the final weeks of his life say he had undergone a frightening weight loss, and appeared more frail than ever.

And yet, what was he going to be doing in a few weeks? Launching a series of 50 arena concerts in a foreign country, each one demanding two hours of full scale singing and dancing. It would be a difficult task for a 50-year-old in perfect health. Knowing what we know now about Jackson's physical state, it must have seemed all but impossible that he could pull it off.

Somewhere, deep down, he must have known that himself. With the pressure building, and the addiction raging, something had to give. Yes, it's a tragedy that this immensely talented person has left us. But maybe, just maybe, it brought a merciful end to Michael Jackson's pain and loneliness, before it all got even worse.

But when I watch those clips of Michael Jackson…. my goodness, what a one-in-a-billion talent he was in his heyday. The way he snapped off those brilliant dance moves, his consummate skill as a vocalist and songwriter, his ability to transcend genres and race to become a superstar for everyone. When my young children ask me who this Michael Jackson person was, and why are they making such a big fuss over his death, it’s that part of his life I’m going to tell them about the most: his talent. His incredible, singular talent.

I’ll close with one quick, second-hand story about Michael Jackson I heard a few years ago. I was at a function with movie director John Landis, who directed the “Thriller” video, and became a close friend of the singer. Landis’s wife told a story from the time when Jackson was at the peak of his worldwide fame, in the mid-80’s. He had come to the Landis home for dinner, and then just stuck around at the house. It had gotten very late, she wanted to go to bed, and Michael Jackson was still sitting by himself in their family room, watching television. Finally pulling her husband aside, she whispered “I don’t care if he IS the most famous person in the world. I need to go to bed!” It was a funny story, but also poignant in the way it captured how this strange and gifted person could be so famous, and yet so alone. Feel free to leave some of your thoughts and memories of Michael Jackson in comments.

“The high-altitude jet stream that guides the movement of weather across the country has been south of its normal position over the last couple of weeks, sending a series of storms across the Midwest and East, explained meteorologist Ed O'Lenic of the federal Climate Prediction Center.”
Associated Press

That didn’t make me feel any better. But this did:

“Said O'Lenic: ‘For some reason people have this feeling that they ought to be able to remember, in their lifetime, something similar’ to what is happening. ‘That is not the way it works. There is a lot of natural variability.’"

Which, if I’m understanding Ed correctly, is a meteorological way of acknowledging that stuff happens. It’s pure quantum probability at work: if it’s within the realm of possibility that it could rain almost every day in June, eventually it’s going to happen. Fine. But did it have to happen when the U.S. Open was being played right here in New York? Watching the final round was going to be my one Fathers Day treat!

Enough of my whining. Now it’s your turn. How are you handling the June monsoon?

“Monday night, when Mr. Letterman offered his extended apology to Governor Palin and her family, he had his best night yet in the continuing late-night competition against NBC’s new “Tonight” show star, Conan O’Brien. In preliminary national ratings, Mr. Letterman pulled in 700,000 more viewers than Mr. O’Brien Monday night, 3.9 million to 3.2 million, his biggest margin yet over his new competitor. Mr. Letterman routinely trailed the former “Tonight” host Jay Leno by a million viewers or more.”
-nytimes.com

But I’ll bet you Letterman isn’t feeling all that thrilled about l’affaire Palin propelling him to the top of the late night heap. I have no doubt that, given the chance, he’d wouldn’t do those jokes about the Palin daughters (Bristol OR Willow) getting “knocked up” by A-Rod at a Yankees game. He was correct in his apology when he called the joke “beyond flawed.” While it’s also true the Palin parents exploited the situation at further expense to their daughters’ privacy, Letterman cast the first stone. So since we’re talking about Dave, let’s make a Top 5 list of things he learned from the feud with Sarah Palin:

5. She wasn’t joking about that whole pit bull/lipstick thing.
4. 62-year-old men shouldn’t joke about teenaged girls and sex.
3. 62-year-old men shouldn’t joke about teenaged girls and anything.
2. Good ratings aside, abject, repeated apologies aren’t funny.
1. Beating Conan? Easy. Beating a voraciously ambitious politician? Not so much.

Hi. This is my first time sharing about Twitter. I’ve tried to keep up with all these social networking fads, even getting a Facebook page. I’ve read countless articles and watched all the news coverage about FB and myspace, and really made an effort to understand how this changes the world, and my world, and everybody’s world, and how surviving in the media business means learning how to use all these new tools, and I’ve tried to understand, I really have, the reasons I need to get on board with friending, and poking, and superpoking, and blowing kisses, whatever any of that means. But there’s one hurdle I’m not clearing:

I just can’t understand Twitter.

What? A tissue? Yes, thank you. It really got bad this week when I saw that it was the cover story in Time magazine. I thought reading it would finally make me comprehend why Twitter is important, and why I need to get on board with it. But it didn’t help! In fact, when I read this sentence, I felt more alienated than ever:

“…as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds.”

No, it’s not! Finding out what your friend had for breakfast—being notified about what your friend had for breakfast—is exactly as interesting as it sounds; Not. At. All. I’m trying to think of anyone—immediate family members, the guy who cuts my hair, Ashton Kutcher-- I want to receive this information from. And with the possible exception of Ashton Kutcher, the answer is NO!

And don’t say don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Anyone with a Facebook page gets more than a sampling of this. In just the last few days, people in my relatively tiny roster of friends have passed along these crucial developments in the fate of western man (names have been concealed to protect the boring):

“____ is almost at happy hour!”

“____ is overhearing his wife gossiping about her new vacuum cleaner.”

And my personal favorite for sheer inconsequentiality:

“____ is home and resting.”

Wow. Home and resting. Let me…. get right on that. Fact is, I did not need to know any of this! But it isn’t just egotistical me not wanting to hear about the daily lives of others; this is egotistical me assuming that nobody would ever want to hear those kinds of details about MY daily life. My parents didn’t raise me to feel the need to tell everyone I’ve ever met that the rain has me feeling a little blue.

But clearly, when it comes to Twitter, I’m on the wrong side of history here, or at least the wrong side of faddishness. We’ve even had a few Twitter training sessions here at work, in case we make it a part of our newscasts, as some news programs already have. So if I must, I will tweet. I will tweet to the best of my ability. Might as well practice right now:

“JIM IS… getting ready to post his blog.”

Thanks for letting me share. I’m leaving now. I hear it’s almost happy hour. After that, I’ll be home. Resting.

We’ll start with Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel’s comment that even President Obama needed to be careful visiting New York in the wake of the Thursday’s fatal shooting of an off-duty African-American police officer by a white on-duty cop. Rangel apologized today:

“In a statement issued today, the Democratic Congressman said, ‘It was entirely inappropriate to bring the President and his wife into this discussion during their visit to New York.’ He goes on to say, ‘I hope my off-the-cuff comment did not cause embarrassment to anyone.’”

“There's nothing like a tragic police shooting to bring a tasteless guffaw out of Rep. Charlie Rangel.”

And there’s the “lighten up” advice from The Village Voice:

“It was a mordant jest, in the manner of Dick Gregory…. (I)t appears the smart-aleck comment….is on its way out as a New York tradition.”

Jim’s Ruling: GET MAD!

The elements of the story of the police officer accidentally shot just don’t add up as a source of humor, smart-alecky or otherwise, especially not from the Congressman who represents the district in which this tragedy unfolded, especially not less than 48-hours after it all happened. Congressman Rangel is the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, a close ally of the president, and an African-American. His role is to be a voice of authoritative calm in a situation that has at least some potential to turn into a full-blown racial crisis—another “New York tradition” that I don’t believe many people want to see carried on. Rangel was right to apologize, and acknowledge his comments as inappropriate.

Secondly, let’s look at that dinner-and-a-show date by the Obama’s Saturday night, separate from the police shooting matter. Lots of Republicans are upset over the president and first lady having a night on the town in NYC, as the nation struggles economically, and just days before General Motors was about to file for bankruptcy.

Jim’s Ruling: LIGHTEN UP!

If Americans were in agreement that a president and his family should cease all attempts at diversion, relaxation, and entertainment during economic hard times, than my ruling would be different. But I think there’s a general consensus that even presidents—perhaps, especially presidents—need some down time and some family time occasionally, in a way that would allow them to do their jobs better when it’s time to head back to the office. With all the various crises and hot spots around the world, it’s almost guaranteed that something will be happening somewhere that would have critics saying the president shouldn’t be seen having fun at taxpayers’ expense. Well, just about every move a president makes is at taxpayers’ expense—it’s sort of in the job description. Going to dinner in Washington D.C. would also come with significant security and transportation costs. It’s the nature of the modern presidency. Singling out this one particular trip by Obama and his wife feels like a desperate attempt by critics to find some sort of partisan angle on an otherwise nonpartisan topic.