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?

Nothing makes me feel a little old like an anniversary, with a big number on it, of an event I remember like it was yesterday. I refer to next month’s 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Like hundreds of millions of people around the world on that July night, I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step off their lunar module onto the moon’s surface.

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.

A story in the news today has convinced me you can now tell who the people are who use more digital devices and games than their peers: they’re the ones looking like this:

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

Scientists found the 47 million-year-old fossilized remains of a creature about the size of a small cat. The young female specimen, known as Ida, will be featured in a television special called "The Link" on the History Channel. (AP Photo / May 19, 2009)

Happy diversions are more important than ever in these worrisome times. We all need our little mental getaways, whether it’s watching a mindlessly fun television show, working in the yard, or taking a yoga class. For me, today’s big announcement of a 47-million year-old fossil that could be the storied missing link between man and ape serves as a reminder of what I love to zone out on: science. That’s right. I am a man of science.

Apparently I chose quite a few hot button issues to blog about this past week, judging by the many comments I received. So I thought I’d jot off a few responses. Even my post last night about the silliness of starting a Lingerie Football League didn’t steer clear of controversy, because a reader was critical of what I DIDN’T write about. Let’s start with that one:

Posted by What's this about?

Jim,
You pick this subject when Nancy Pelosi is doing her best Porky Pig imitation - "ah, ah, mmmm, well, uh." What did she know and when did she know it?
Oh that's right, she is a Democrat. Better to talk about Lingerie Football than about a real subject.

Well, wta, it’s true I sometimes choose lighter things to write about. But I see your point, so here are some thoughts of mine on Pelosi saying the CIA misled her on enhanced interrogation techniques. I watched the news conference she held Thursday, and found it the most inarticulate and fumbling argument by a major politician on an important issue I’ve ever seen. She could barely get a single sentence out without mangling her words, a tendency of people who either aren’t telling the whole truth, or are trying desperately to split hairs. She should have just said something like this: yes, I was given indications that these techniques were being used, but details were sketchy and I was unsure how to proceed with my objections. It was soon after 9/11, none of us had ever been in this situation before, and I’m sorry in retrospect I didn’t speak out more forcefully. Having said that, criticizing me because I didn’t speak out more forcefully at the time is a political argument on behalf of the Bush administration policy, not a legal one.

Hello, students! Today, our media lesson looks at how junk science, marketing, and an insatiable hunger across the globe for odd, easily-digested info-bits, all combine to create “news” stories that are passed along to literally billions of viewers and readers as truth, when they are often anything but.

When it was brought up in our afternoon news meeting, it sounded like a sure thing for our 10 PM newscast: new research showing that the most stressful moment in the average workweek falls at exactly 11:45 on Tuesday morning. I mean, how could you NOT like that story? It’s the proverbial everyone-will-be-talking-about-tomorrow-around-the-water-cooler story. It’s specific (not 11:30, but 11:45!), counterintuitive (I thought it would be MONDAY morning!!), and easily referenced (“Hey, I saw on the news that the most stressful time….?”).

The story is also—at least from what I’ve been able to deduce from a little time on Google—completely, absurdly, ridiculous.

Years ago when I lived in East Tennessee, I knew lots of ol’ country boys who listened to nothing but Lynyrd Skynyrd and other Southern Rock bands. One day, I thought I’d test the limits of their musical tastes, and I asked Screamin’ Chuck Johnson, the singer in our weekend garage band, if he liked the Grateful Dead. “You know what?” he said, staring me coldly in the eye, “I’d be grateful if they was dead.”

I lost track of Screamin’ Chuck some time ago, but I’m going to guess he wouldn’t give two hoots about the surviving members of the Grateful Dead reuniting for a short tour starting next month. (They kicked off the publicity for it today, playing sets at three different small venues in the city). Jerry Garcia, per Chuck’s wishes, IS dead—deceased, I should say, to avoid confusion—so the legion of diehard fans known as Deadheads won’t be getting the full thrill of years past, but I’m betting there will be mostly sellouts for all the tour dates.

I don’t know about you, but if I had wanted to live in a place where spring-like weather arrives as late as it does in Nova Scotia, I would have lived in Nova Scotia.

Wow, my wife is right; I AM turning into Grouchy McGrumpypants. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot of you who are more than ready to break out of this long Winter of our discontent, and at least move into the Spring of our discontent. Discontent is always easier to deal with when you’re wearing Bermuda shorts. Seriously. They’ve done research on this, I’m pretty sure.

I start off every winter with the same optimistic outlook: It’s a great time of year, we can go skiing and sledding, there’s Christmas and New Year, fires in the fireplace, hot toddies on the stove, rosy-cheeked children. And besides, life is too short! If we are to treasure every minute, we must embrace those deep winter moments just as much as we do those spent on a beautiful beach in June! Carpe… um… Winter!!

In my post about U2’s Bono watching me play a music set at a Nashville bluegrass club back in 1989, I promised a performance picture, so here you go!

From left to right, that’s mandolin virtuoso Bobby Clark; guitarist Pat Flynn, at the time a member of the magnificent band New Grass Revival; Mark Schatz, one of the finest bass players in all of bluegrass; and on the far right, Jerry Douglas, the consensus best dobro player in the world, and a key member of Alison Krause’s band, Union Station. And then there’s me, in my bliss!

Metallica performs live to a sold a crowd At BBC Radio 1s Theatre in London. (September 14, 2008)

I’m very fired up about going to see heavy metal titans Metallica tomorrow night at the PNC Center in Newark. It always surprises people that I would be such a big fan of hard rock. The clichéd TV news anchor image – you know, that whole Ted Baxter/Ron Burgundy blow-dried thing – makes people think more of Engelbert Humperdinck than Rage Against the Machine. I guess I can understand that. But I’ve always loved hard, loud, angry rock. I am, after all, a semi-alienated white dude who grew up in the suburbs. This is my soul music.

My buddy Mark turned me on to Metallica when he dragged me to one of their shows at the Garden in 1997. I was blown away. A few months later, they were the musical guests on “Saturday Night Live.” I was the weekend anchor at WNBC-TV at the time, and the newsroom there is just one floor below the SNL studio. So like a couple of 16-year-olds, we plotted with an NBC page who had been assigned to the band (they always have a couple of pages keep an eye on the musicians, to bring them snacks and keep them from wandering off) to meet James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, the Metallica leaders and co-founders. Success!! They were really nice, and although the picture of us with James has been tragically misplaced, check out this photo of Lars and me...

I’m going to spend most of today getting ready for the PIX News coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday. But I did want to blog about one thing that I know has been of great, agonizing concern to many of you: my Facebook status.

You are reading the words of a broken man. Branded. Marked with a coward’s shame. A digital outcast, sent into exile far from the warming fires of the community of man.

What I’m trying to say is... Facebook won’t let me have any more friends.

Try a little experiment; read the next two paragraphs of this blog… wait, not yet!... and at the same time, have someone nearby speak to you, to convey some specific information. When you’re done, you might have absorbed the information you were reading, or you might have understood what the speaker was saying to you, but I doubt you were able to fully grasp both. Now you have some insight into the newly-hot issue of cell-phone use by drivers.

Kaity Tong PIX News At Ten Guest Blogger

AHA! My dear co-anchor has gone on vacation, leaving his blog unprotected. I feel a compulsion to once again HIJACK his blog. This is turning out to be kinda fun.

I just read Jim's recent musings on joining Facebook. (refer to "Social Networking? Me????")

As much as I hate to admit it, Jim and I are scarily similar. I, too, have known in the deepest recesses of my heart, that I would never ever run in the NYC marathon or climb Mt. Everest. Or ever want to. I am probably the most unathletic person you could hope to meet. So why would I want to inconvenience those poor sherpas who would end up carrying me up the mountain...and back... with all my gear. Sherpas must have better things to do. Like texting and blogging.

A Jim Watkins Christmas, starring Jim Watkins.

My wife and twin sons just left PIX after a visit to daddy at the office. It harkens back to what was something of a holiday family tradition when I was a little boy. Each year, a few days before Christmas, my mom, brother, and I would drive to downtown Cincinnati where my Dad’s office was. (There’s something very thrilling for little kids to see the place where their mom or dad work. I saw it in my boys’ eyes tonight. I wonder what the psychology on that one is.) We’d then go to Shillito’s, the big department store in Cincinnati during those years, where we saw Santa. Come to think of it, it’s almost exactly like the pre-Christmas department store scene in “A Christmas Story,” which maybe you’ll be seeing during one of its 47-showings on television during the next few days. It was fun. A good Christmas memory.

When we last chatted (yesterday), I was looking into the ways people might be getting down on themselves for being caught flat-footed by the economic crisis. I put this self-blame, at least the kind that I’m experiencing, into two categories; first, for not being on top of changes in your chosen field, changes that would eventually, perhaps now, be putting your job and career at risk. My personal example was the way I didn’t realize how the explosion of channels and viewing options on television since I started working in TV would endanger the traditional broadcasting business model. Lesson? Don’t let changes in your industry sneak up on you. Don’t be a casualty of new business paradigms and technologies in your profession.

Or, I should say, don’t be an unwitting casualty. If you’re going to get run over, at least try and see the bus coming. How various occupations evolve (or devolve), when you get down to it, is mostly out of your control, and that’s where it’s different from self-blame category number two: the failure to get your personal and family finances under control BEFORE this bad moon started rising.

Back from a few days off. As I prepare to resume blogging (It’s time to ask: is that REALLY the best term we can come up with for this now-common practice? It’s a nasty-sounding word: blog, short for “web log.” Say it out loud. SAY IT! See? It sounds like one of those words that sounds just as yucky as the thing it’s meant to describe.. like “pus,” or “nausea”; “Don’t think I can make it today, darling, I have a touch of the blog, and haven’t been off the commode for more than five minutes all day.” I’ll tell you just how wrong the term “blog” is: it’s literally WRONG! Every time I write “blog” here in my Microsoft Outlook program, the spell checker rejects it with an ugly red zig zaggy underline that I find distracting and which no doubt sidetracks my creative thinking. Oh, sure, I’m certain later editions of Outlook (I think this one is an earlier version, maybe from… well, when did Outlook first come out? There’s your answer.) don’t put the red mark of shame under “blog” or “blogging,” but that only means it’s become more accepted, and will be that much more difficult to erase from the public lexicon. Perhaps it’s too late already. Should I even bother to propose alternatives? I suppose it’s something about which I could blog.. D’OH! There’s that damn red squiggly line again!).

The awful news of a Wal-Mart employee dying in a stampede of holiday shoppers last Friday on Long Island brought to my mind another similar event, one that killed many more people, and stunned the nation: the December 3rd, 1979 concert by The Who in Cincinnati, where eleven people died in a crush to get inside the city’s Riverfront Coliseum. It happened 29-years-ago today, and I was there.

The Who Concert Tragedy made the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine in its January 24, 1980 issue. (Rolling Stone Magazine/January 24, 1980)

But I wasn’t part of the stampede, and I watched the entire concert not knowing anything had happened. So this is really a story, not about my witnessing first-hand rock music’s greatest tragedy, but about how there can be evidence of something unimaginable right in front of your eyes, without you being able to grasp until later what had taken place.

The second—make that the nanosecond—it was out of my mouth, I knew I was in for it. A few garbled syllables on Friday night’s newscast, and I was on my way to a little more internet fame that I would have preferred.

Here’s a link to it, but first, as they say on the late night talk shows, let me set up the clip. It was just before a commercial, and Kaity and I were reading the “coming up” tease. One of the items involved a non-fatal shooting on Long Island, in which the victim was working as a babysitter. Shooting. Babysitter. Roll the clip:

Hundreds of you came to my blog yesterday to check out the incredible downhill skateboarding video, “Claremont” (after the canyon in Berkeley, California where the ride took place). For details on who these maniacs are riding longboards at 60 MPH, and who made the film, check out yesterday’s post.

I’ve probably watched it five times now, and it puts me in a good mood with every viewing. I’m not sure why that is; my interest and experience in skateboarding is exactly zero. But there’s just something about watching these dudes take this death-defying ride (and laughing about it all the way) that just seemed the perfect antidote to this week of gloomy news. Not to mention that it’s a demonstration of incredible athletic skill. Read more after the jump.

As you can see, I’ve been learning some skate slang, inspired by this insane video you’re about to see. Its now starting to make its way across the web, after a couple of weeks on skateboarding websites. Before it goes totally viral, we wanted you to see a clip on the news tonight, then bring you here to watch the entire video.

Photo credit: Colin Blackshear

By way of introduction, I’ll only say this is Claremont Canyon near Berkeley, California. It was shot completely with a handheld HD video camera, with no special effects, as far as I can tell. Skip the first 2:20 if you want to get right to the action. Then watch one of the most intense and thrilling extreme sports videos you’ll ever see. And, yes, the dudes are actually passing the camera back and forth as they travel downhill at speeds near 60 MPH. Check it out, after the jump.

So I’m back. From vacation. Did you miss me, my tiny handful of blog readers? (How tiny? In one of my recent posts, three responses came back in from readers: one from my mother in Cincinnati, one from my cousin in Columbus, Ohio, and one from an aunt in Knoxville, Tennessee. Glad to know this blog is making such an impact here in the Tri-state area).

I’ll blog about something more serious later this week, but today I’m going to make you look at vacation pictures of my kids. We go each August to Madison, Connecticut, a pretty town on the shore about 20-minutes past New Haven. My six-year-old twins were determined to go fishing for the first time, so we went to a few different places; a wharf on the Long Island Sound, a state park. And lo and behold, they each caught one!

So without further ado, I present “Luke and Jamie on Summer Vacation.” Thank you for indulging me, dear readers. And if I may communicate directly with one of my fans: Hey, Mom... how cute are these grandsons of yours??!! Photos after the jump.