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.

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.

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.

“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

As someone who works in the economically-challenged television business, I'm naturally concerned about anything that might keep people from, you know, watching television. So I'm not happy to see this new academic study that came out this week:

"According to new research presented at Sleep 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies,* television watching may be an important determinant of bedtime, and may contribute to chronic sleep debt." sciencedaily.com

Uh-oh. So it's not healthy to watch TV leading up to the time you turn in. What does that mean for people like me -- and maybe you -- who watch television after they go to bed? Or people -- like me -- who leave the TV on in the bedroom even after they go to sleep? What's to become of us, Associated Professional Sleep Societies members?

Now he’s going to be remembered as the old Kung Fu dude who died in the closest of his Thailand Hotel room with a rope around his neck and his privates. So much for death with dignity.

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.

It happened late at night in the Eastern time zone, so my parents woke up my brother and me to make sure we saw history as it happened. That’s probably what makes my entire memory of the first moonwalk almost like a memory of a dream; those two men in space suits, bouncing along through the lunar dust, the black and white television pictures miraculously beamed hundreds of thousands of miles through space to where we sat in our suburban family room. It still gives me shivers.

It seems our modern electronic conveniences have left no part of the body safe...

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 a lot to like about this idea. And a few concerns...