Poor Arthur Batchelor. Not only did the British seaman get teased by the Iranians, who called him Mr. Bean, but now he is being criticized by his fellow Brits for everything from selling his story to crying after suffering all those “Mr. Bean” taunts. None of this would have happened had the Iranians ever heard of Giovanni Ribisi.

I’m no fan of the Denton blogpire and I hate New York City. So I don’t particularly care for Gawker since it is both (a) part of the Dentonverse and (b) about New York. Also, I kind of like Jimmy Kimmel, who can make with the funny. But Kimmel’s recent ambush> of Gawker editrix Emily Gould is positively retarded. Evil Beet has an excellent retort:

I lost a lot of respect for Kimmel after watching this. He was in a bad mood, and I suppose he was trying to prove he could do “serious” television, and he really ought to have picked on someone his own size. His points don’t hold up. Celebrities these days know what celebrity means. You went to those auditions, Jimmy. Walked there with your own damn feet. You pitched those shows. You wanted to be a big star. You wanted people to write about you. People write about you now, Jimmy. Take the good with the bad, asshole. The Man Show did those candid segments that fucked with real people’s lives. I bet they didn’t all think it was as funny as you did. Oh, and remember how you left your wife of 14 years, with whom you had two children, for Sarah Silverman? Just checking, Mister Morality. Stick to sports and drinking beer and ogling women, Jimmy.

Whatever. The real shame here is that CNN is letting a game-show host anchor what’s supposed to be a news show. (Not for the first times.) Several years back, when some other TV head moved from sports casting to “serious news,” a friend journalist friend noted that the medium of television supercedes all of the imaginary subcategories we invent for it: In other words, TV news and TV gameshows have more in common than do, say, TV news and newspapers.

We can’t expect someone like Jimmy Kimmel to remember that; but we should.

Galley Sis MAL sends us this hilarious set of directions from Google Maps on how to get from New York, NY to Paris, France.

Scroll down to #23 for the punchline. Someone at Google has a sense of humor.

If you’re trying to get off the WoW pipe, CNET has this bit of virtual oxycodone.

Mike Russell is back! With The Lords of Breakfast. It’s what would happen if Capt. Cruch went to war with Count Chocula and the rest of the sugar cereal characters. Don’t miss it.

Heresy time: I liked the first season of The Sopranos quite a lot. It was good stuff. But it didn’t capture my interest enough to stick around for the second season–and if the first season is a fair measure of the show’s quality, then it may be the most over-praised series of our time. (Of course, maybe the the show got a lot better after I stopped watching, which is totally possible.)

The Sopranos seemed to me like a really great show, but the best thing ever to grace the small screen? I liked Homicide better. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too. Ditto my latest TV crushes, Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica. But these shows don’t get giant billboards and Vanity Fair covers like The Sopranos does. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on David Chase’s show–I just wish people would save a few plaudits for some of the other great TV being produced.

All of which is a long wind-up to this interesting bit from Ross Douthat:

I would actually go a little further than this (and I do, in a forthcoming piece), and argue that The Sopranos is implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – a show about damnation, and how ordinary, often-sympathetic people can willingly choose to go to hell.

From Discovery’s Channel’s Planet Earth series, in super-duper slow-mo:

PLANET EARTH – Great White Shark Jump – Watch the top videos of the week here

Riddle me this: Who do you take in a fight, Bruce here, or a giant squid?

Galley Friend M.C. sends us this priceless quote from Peter King’s MMQB column:

“I have made horrible decisions about who I am with or who I am going places with … Two of my friends who had never driven a Bentley, I let them drive my Bentley one night just because. Not just to show them the upside, but I never had anyone do that for me. It’s always the little things that get me in trouble.”
–Pacman Jones to Deion Sanders on the NFL Network.