Either Relevant or True » The Mysterious Disappearing Olbermann

We have a new recruit to the ERT staff! Everyone say hi to Ashley (”Hi Ashley!”) She’s our new Thursday recapper and will be starting tonight.

Apparently Comcast non-digital cable subscribers in some states have lost their access to MSNBC. Aaron Barnhart looked into a similar problem with the Hallmark channel and spoke to someone at Comcast:

NBC executives typically negotiate cable carriage on behalf of affiliates, and they’re supposed to make sure the cable company carries all their channels with the most favorable placements possible. MSNBC has been relegated to the level of Sleuth and Chiller, two NBCU digital offerings that mostly act as rerun machines.

Odd, isn’t it, that NBC Universal can figure out how to embed a light-bulb contract into its negotiations for TV rights with the NFL, but it can’t figure out how to keep its 24-hour news channel from going dark in hundreds of thousands of homes served by one of the free world’s largest cable companies?

I’d put this one at GE’s doorstep, not Comcast’s.

Talk about dropping the ball!

Meanwhile Josh Levin at Slate is talking about Sports Illustrated and brings up DP and KO:

Let’s begin with SI’s hiring, two weeks ago, of Dan Patrick. The former ESPN host is no man of letters. Take it from his ex-colleague Keith Olbermann, who once called Patrick’s softball-filled jock-talk column “a bi-weekly toe dip in the shallow end of the journalistic pool.” But Sports Illustrated didn’t hire Dan Patrick the writer. It hired Dan Patrick the sports-themed corporation.

Keith was quoted as saying that in 2001, in another Slate piece about Olbermann the Sports Writer:

Unfortunately, if Olbermann ever got a full-time job in sportswriting, he might have a hard time keeping it. (For insight on what Olbermann thinks of his colleagues, take a look at this recent Contentville article, in which he calls Dan Patrick’s ESPN: The Magazine pieces “a bi-weekly toe dip in the shallow end of the journalistic pool.”) But readers would be happy if Olbermann just got his feet wet.

The best part of that particular column is the rebuttal by KO below it. It’s classic Olbermann - make sure to read it.

I’m stepping on the blogging toes of Palaver here, but while Dan’s column may indeed have been fluff of the fluffiest order, I don’t think it’s a fair to judge his ability to write a column for SI by a back-of-the-mag Q&A feature. It is, to borrow a phrase, comparing apples and dragons.

A sad day.

Washoe, the first nonhuman to converse in a human language, died on Tuesday. She was 42. The chimp was born in Africa in 1965 and became part of the Air Force “research” projects. She then became part of an experiment to teach American Sign Language to chimps. She was cross-fostered like a human child with her caregivers, the Gardners, only speaking to her in ASL. She learned hundred of words. She was trained, not using operant techniques, but social learning — a first in animal training. She later moved on to University of Oklahoma then the wonder Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute at Central Washington Univeristy.

Washoe not only learned ASL, but taught it to several younger chimps, without human assistance, showing that language can be transmitted culturally in nonhumans.

She leaves behind her chimp family of Dar, Tatu and Loulis, and her human family Roger and Deborah Fouts, who devoted their lives to their chimps to the point of limiting their careers to take care of them, as well as other researchers at CHCI.

The death of Washoe falling just a few months after the passing of the famed Alex the Grey Parrot, who broke avian intelligence and language barriers, creates a major loss in the world of understanding nonhuman minds. These beings should change the way we look at other minds.

For more information about Washoe and her accomplishments, check out the MSNBC blurb:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21569837/

or her website:

http://www.friendsofwashoe.org

Memorial will be on Nov. 12 at Central Washington University.

Washoe loved shoes. To break ice with strangers she would ask to see their shoes then make ASL conversation about them.

We miss you Washoe. Rest in peace.

Welcome, Ashley!
I’ve read the rebuttal…OMG, KO is a geek(and I mean that in the fondest way…only he would tell somebody to back off with statistics.)

Thanks for the welcome, Chicating!

And, re: that rebuttal. Is this the novel he’d mentioned from about seven years ago, give or take? I had no idea that was still even on the back burner.

Dana Milbank in drag…Hide the women and children!

Welcome Ashley!

Yeah, about that Slate article, I put a few words up over at Palaver about that as well, and I totally agree with Becky. DP has a lot of sports journalistic abilities that cannot be seen in his Outtakes column, and why a magazine as thoughtful as Slate would use that one silly example to sum up DP’s talents doesn’t make any sense. It would be like judging the journalistic worth of Countdown and Keith Olbermann by the “Oddball” segment.

I remember learning about Washoe in college linguistics. RIP, little one.

Yes, Keith’s rebuttal to that Slate article is pure geeky Keith–and pure “on the defensive” Keith, trying to point out that the death-watch on his career back in 2001 might be ever the most slightly premature. Of course, ultimately he was proven right, even if he had to eat some of his words in the process.

The book of essays he refers to here is the one that never saw the light of day after he canceled his contract and returned his advance to the publisher–HarperCollins is a division of News Corp.–in high dudgeon over the role of Page Six in the Murdoch Evil Empire’s New York Post (oh, how we love it) in helping spread a rumor that Sandy Koufax was gay. Not because he felt it was a terrible thing to be gay, but because he was disgusted at how they tried to whip up a scandal about whether or not Koufax was gay, and then tried to blame it all on stuff in the Daily News.

As for Keith’s “novel about the TV news industry,” there’s a vast world of difference between finishing up a novel and getting it sold to a publisher who then puts it out. I suspect he finished the novel, but could never find a buyer. So he was counting his chickens a bit before they hatched there. Maybe he should be grateful–it could be that Keith is a better novelist than Bill O’Reilly, but Billo’s bilious novel on the TV news industry is out there for everyone to laugh at/be horrified by (you could call it the TV newscaster version of American Psycho) and I am not so sure he is the better for it. All it provides anyone with is a frightening insight into the man’s sense of frustrated entitlement (does he wish HE could murder all the people who have pissed him off in his career in various horrible ways?) and a source of unintended comedy at what are intended to be his bold and daring scenes of underworld degenerates addicted to sex and drugs. (”Hey, put that pipe down and get MY pipe up!”)

Yes, chances are Keith’s a better fiction writer than that, but still…

I just wish we could still read the Keith-penned Contentville stories this article once linked to, which are now essentially dead links.

I am still incredibly curious about the novel. Cause I have a novel sitting around my house right now.(Not curious enough to pay thousands on ebay, mind you…okay, if I could spend as much on my collections as Keith can, I might.)
But in this universe, I’m a struggling scribe and textwhore with a secret “You know,” problem.

Oh, dag, You mean I have something in common with Billo?!
I write a decent bad guy, but I spend a fair amount of writing time Smiting My Enemies.
“Say it ain’t so,”

Al Franken used to read the sex scene from Billo’s novel on Air America Radio. Invariably, he would read it about the time I was trying to eat my sandwich at my desk, runining my appetite.

The sex scene from Billo’s novel is the kind of thing we should read to teenagers to prevent them from having sex. “You see kids, sex is lots of fun, but it can also sound like this!” And they would all zip up until they were 21.

I think Keith’s novel would definitely be written for laughs. Intentional laughs.

A quick note.

This Sunday on FNiA, TKO Report will be about Eagles’ coach Andy Reid and the personal hell he is going through with his two oldest sons in jail on drug and DUI charges at the worst possible time: Dallas Week in Philadelphia, and the annual return of Terrell Owens.

Welcome, Ashley, and thanks for volunteering! Anyone who’s willing to put in the time to keep this blog going has my deepest appreciation.

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