Just catching up on back Lisa de Moraes columns and this one is gold:

It’s hard to be one of the Reporters Who Cover Television this time of year. While the rest of the population gets to attend holiday parties and amuse themselves with witty conversation about the regrettably low standard of morality among that segment of the population younger than they are, the poor RWCT usually can be found backed into a corner by a mob of partygoers angrily demanding to know why their favorite TV show was canceled while “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is still on the air even though no one is watching, why reality programming continues to be perpetrated upon them, why TRWCT are so mean to that nice Katie Couric and, finally, to give details of their own idea for the next sure-fire gimongous TV hit.

Generally, at the first party a Reporter Who Covers Television has enough distracting factoids in his arsenal to come back pretty chirpily to this onslaught, if the eggnog is of high enough octane. But by the second party — third, max — his knotted and combined locks begin to part and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, as Hamlet’s dad used to say. . . .

Did you know, for instance, that “Studio 60,” in addition to having an unusually upscale audience, as NBC likes to remind us, also is the year’s No. 1-ranked show on Nielsen’s Timeshifted Primetime TV Program list?

“Studio 60” enjoys an 11 percent increase in viewership when you add in all the households watching the show up to seven days after its Monday 10 p.m. broadcast. That’s the largest percent increase of any program on prime-time television, Nielsen says.

This suggests that (a) NBC should try to strongarm Nielsen into using so-called “live + 7” numbers — how many people record a show on VCR or DVR and watch it up to seven days after its broadcast — in its weekly ratings reports so as to goose “Studio 60’s” ratings and (b) maybe NBC should find a better time slot for “Studio 60.” . . .

The Top-10 timeshifted programs are mostly serialized — “Heroes,” “Gilmore Girls,” etc. — but include the CW’s reality series “America’s Next Top Model.” That makes sense since this fall it aired in the same time slot as ABC reality hit “Dancing With the Stars.”

“American Idol,” meanwhile, had the most product placements on broadcast TV this year with — you want to be sitting down — 4,086 occurrences in calendar 2006, which in the case of “Idol,” really means between January and May.

“Idol” is the Mount Everest of product placement. Nothing else touches it. The No. 2 show on the 2006 Product Placement Top 10 is “The Amazing Race” with a mere 2,790 occurrences, followed closely by “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” with 2,701.

We’re guessing about 3,346 “Idol” product placement occurrences come in the form of those three insidious red Coca-Cola cups prominently placed in front of judges Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson. Every time the camera cuts to Paula sitting at the judges’ desk drinking “whatever” out of that Coke cup, it counts as one “occurrence,” a nice Nielsen spokeswoman explained to The TV Column.

The rest of the occurrences on “Idol” are probably Cingular cellphones, from which we’re urged to text-message in our vote for that week’s best performance.

Not coincidentally, Coca-Cola is the most product-placed product of 2006, with — will you look at that — 3,346 occurrences. Cingular Wireless also is in the Top 10, but with a mere 532 occurrences. That’s behind the Chicago Bears football team’s 600 occurrences — thanks to the ABC sitcom “According to Jim.”

Here’ s a fun fact you can wow them with at the next office party: All of 2006’s Top-10 Product Placement Programs are reality series. Except for one scripted show, at No. 8.

Can you guess what it is?

[Pause] “King of Queens.”

She’s the best.

Not from Blog Crush or Blog Crush II, but from the original OG, Fr. Neuhaus:

Mark C. Taylor of Williams College is among the most nimble of nimble minds perched on the cutting edge of whatever, just possibly, might be the next big thing. His many books over the years on religion, philosophy, economics, architecture, and whatever have in common a neophiliac’s conventional delight in debunking what he takes to be conventional wisdoms. He was a friend of the late Jacques Derrida. (Earlier this year, The Onion ran the headline “Jacques Derrida ‘Dies.’ ”) Taylor is most noted for his conjoining of postmodernist a-theology with the “death of God” and a deconstructionist employment of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Older readers will no doubt remember the death of God. Taylor’s newest book is “After God.”

In any event, Mr. Taylor’s op-ed (requires subscription) in the New York Times raises the alarm about the growing number of college students who “seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion.” These “fundamentalist” and “chauvinistic” students, we are told, do not take kindly to having their faith criticized. Even “distinguished scholars” are burdened by a new regime of “religious correctness” and some are “even subjected to death threats.” Mr. Taylor does not say whether he personally has been treated to the frisson of a death threat, but an administrator did once ask him to apologize to a student who complained that Taylor had offensively attacked his religion in class. Mr. Taylor writes, “I refused.” There are no doubt those who will admire his courage in the defense of professorial bad manners.

Of course, he does not see it that way. Mr. Taylor writes, “For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” Imagine that. A man who embraces as his life’s work instilling confusion and uncertainty in undergraduates. Challenging work, that.

Then he let the Alpine play.

..wondered whatever became of me? I’m living on the air in Cincinnati. Cincinnati, WKRP. Okay, not really, but that’s where I spent last weekend for a wedding and New Year’s. It was my first trip to Porkopolis (and actually my first time in Ohio) and I enjoyed it very much. They like to eat in the Midwest. No, I didn’t get a chance to sample the Skyline chili but I did have ribs, a skillet of eggs, bacon, onion, and cheese, and a wiener schnitzel. Coming from DC, it was almost disturbing just how friendly those Midwesterners are. They constantly ask if you are okay and if everything is alright. They look you in the eye and smile. And they give you their name and phone number and hotel room…

Anyway, a great town. I highly recommend visiting the bar at the Netherland Hotel (now a Hilton) and the Mount Adams bar & grill.

A few other things. I am in the midst of profiling Civilization creator Sid Meier. He couldn’t have been a nicer guy. Almost Wallace Shawn-like. (“Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”) The interview will be part of a future piece but in case you are wondering, there is, he says, at least one cheat code. No, I couldn’t get it out of him.

Secondly, has anyone else seen the Reuters story on the robot in South Korea that will aid in the delivery of babies? I believe the first two babies it delivered were named Luke and Leia.

I’m not much of a fan of David Denby as a movie critic, but his long piece on the future of movies is brilliant and beautiful. A must read.

Here’s Denby on HD-DVD:

At the house of my friend Harry Pearson, who started the high-end video magazine The Perfect Vision, I watched movies on what must be close to the ultimate home-theatre system, a setup priced at two hundred thousand dollars. I thought that a glimpse of the best now available might be a way of anticipating the affordable future. It was also tremendous fun. Harry’s system uses a digital projector suspended from the ceiling, which fed a movie screen nine feet across the diagonal. Various electronic components decoded or upgraded the digital information or sent the sound to multiple speakers positioned around the room. The player was one of the new HD DVD sets made by Toshiba, and the experience of watching what it produced on that screen was like putting on a stronger pair of glasses for the first time: everything was brighter, crisper, more sharply defined—newer somehow, as if it had been freshly created, even though one of the movies we watched was a half century old. (Digital transfers are made by scanning a film negative or a print; technicians then digitally enhance the images.) With amazement, we watched a DVD of John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, “The Searchers,” which is widely considered to be one of the most successful transfers of an old movie. The southwestern sky above Monument Valley was a brilliant azure; the desert was not a mass of orange-brown glop but grains of sand and pieces of rock; and, inside the pioneers’ cabin, details normally hidden in shadow, like drying corn hanging from the ceiling, were clearly visible. And so it was with a recent film. When Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” opened two years ago, I referred to the Hit Pit—the gym where much of the action takes place—as “sweat-stained” and a “relic.” But the high-definition transfer of the film, bringing shapes and textures out of the murk, revealed a gym that was old and shabby but also tidy and scrubbed clean.

Yet, though the detail was extraordinary, the image was different from a film image, and strange in some ways. In film, the illusion of three-dimensionality is produced by the laws of perspective, by the manipulation of focus, and by the subtleties of lighting: we are led into depth by gradations of color or, in black-and-white movies, by shades of gray. A digital transfer compacts color and increases contrast, so, in the early attempts—say, from a decade ago—the actors looked almost like cutouts against a flat background, their flesh tones waxy and doll-like. The images didn’t breathe the way the original film images did—the faces seemed to have lost their pores. But high-definition digital produces a more nuanced gradation of color and a more definite molding of the face—you see planes and hollows. To my eyes, both in digital transfers and in movies that were shot digitally, flesh still looks a little synthetic, but it looks better than before, and no doubt it will look even better in a few years. (“You want pores, we’ll give you pores,” a digital technician in Los Angeles told me.) The image was steady, too, in a way that a film image is not. A film, after all, gets pulled into place in a projector by pins entering and then withdrawing from sprocket holes; the image onscreen can jiggle a bit. On Harry’s system I noticed an evenness, steadiness, and hard focus into the far reaches of the screen, and also the absence of earlier digital artifacts, like a black edge around shapes or a flaring of solid whites.

All in all, high definition is a big improvement over standard digital imagery, though in truth I admire it without loving it. To arrive at a film print ready for exhibition, the image has to go through at least four generations—from negative to positive, and then back and forth again—and, by the end, the multiple printing produces some minor softening and darkening of color. I like the way color blends on film: the image is painterly and atmospheric; more poetic, perhaps, than a digital image; lyrical rather than analytic. I may have seen more of the Hit Pit in the high-definition transfer, but expressive metaphor had yielded to workaday reality. I was happier with my earlier sense of the gym as a place of defeat redeemed by Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. And I think that Eastwood, having directed almost thirty films, may have intended “Million Dollar Baby” to look the way it looks on film.

And here he is on the idea of platform agnostism:

No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn’t exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel—Dickens’s novels, especially—were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what’s exhibited.

I looked at “Brokeback Mountain” on a portable DVD player with a seven-inch screen and headphones—the kind of rig people use on airplanes and in jury waiting rooms. The focus was precise, the color bright. And, through the headphones, I heard such extraordinary details as the flip-flip-flip of the rain on the tent when Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are up in the mountains. Yet there was something wrong. I was not in the mountains. The grandeur of the terrain is not something the men are necessarily conscious of, but the massiveness of the mountain range, the startling clarity of the air, the violence of the weather enlarge the experience of feelings they have no words for and can’t control. If you watch the movie on a small screen, you’re not living within this great breathing, palpable place. The small screen takes the emotion out of the landscape.

Go treat yourself to this great read.

Blog Crush II has the following spit-out-your-coffee-awesome line in this post. It’s dirty. Real dirty. So I’m going to put it in invisotext. Highlight if you dare:

Dude, have seen the cock on Darwin Walker? Good fucking Lord. You could hang Saddam Hussein with that thing and have enough left over to dock a battleship . . .

Dustin Rowles has a ridiculously fun list of the most disappointing (“hype-busting”) movies of 2006. Absolutely worth reading. What’s that? You don’t believe me? Sample the goods. On Nacho Libre:

Granted, by the time Nacho Libre arrived in theaters, I’d long since become sick of anything associated with Jared Hess’ directorial debut, Napoleon Dynamite (cubicle monkeys and frat boys had ruined all that was quirky and fun about the film by exhausting each and every catchphrase ad fucking nauseum and basically Lindsay Lohaned a cute, somewhat endearing indie film), and School of Rock had already sapped what little entertainment value Jack Black had remaining from his arsenal of fat-boy witticisms. Still, I’d naïvely held out some hope that the combination of Black and Hess could somehow rekindle their respective magic. Unfortunately, Nacho Libre was the ultimate comedic disappointment: Not only had Hess’ whimsy been exorcised by the big budget, but the film didn’t even work as mainstream gross-out, dick-and-fart fare. It was lame sketch comedy run amok, based on the flimsy premise that Jack Black’s flabby torso was intrinsically hilarious, especially in combination with a bad accent.

Galley Friend C.W. has sent us this unspeakably funny radio ad for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. The ad, which C.W. said was commissioned, but never aired, was done up in the style of Monster Truck Rally ads. As in:

This Sunday-Sunday-Sunday! It’s a Sacramental Showdown at St. Andrew’s!

I’d transcribe more of it here, but you wouldn’t believe me. So just click on the link and turn the volume up. Because this is the funniest thing you’ll hear in 2007.

Bonus: The St. Andrew’s in question is this church in Birmingham, Alabama.

How smart am I? This smart.

There will be no other discussion of the topic; talking about it will only detract from the enjoyment.