Did you ever think a TV Head would be capable of a moment of graciousness and genuine humility on this scale? Here’s Ted Koppel signing off last night on his final Nightline broadcast:

There’s this quiz I give to some of our young interns when they first arrive at Nightline. I didn’t do it with this last batch. It’s a little too close to home. “How many of you,” I’ll ask, “Can tell me anything about Eric Severeid?” Blank stares. “How about Howard K. Smith or Frank Reynolds?” Not a twitch of recognition.

Chet Huntley, Jack Chancellor? Still nothing. David Brinkley sometimes causes a hand or two to be raised; and Walter Cronkite may be glad to learn that a lot of young people still have a vague recollection that he once worked in television news.

What none of these young men and women in their late teens and early twenties appreciates, until I point it out to them, is that they have just heard the names of seven anchormen or commentators who were once so famous that everybody in the country knew their names. Everybody.

Trust me. The transition from one anchor to another is not that big a deal.

Cronkite begat Rather, Chancellor begat Brokaw, Reynolds begat Jennings; and each of them did a pretty fair job in his own right.

You’ve always been very nice to me. Give this new Nightline anchor team a fair break. If you don’t, I promise you the network will just put another comedy show in this time slot. Then you’ll be sorry.

That’s our report for tonight…I’m Ted Koppel in Washington…

For all of us here at ABC News… Good night.

Pure class. Good for him.

I have yet to read anything that makes me want to run out and buy an Xbox 360 this afternoon–not that I could get my hands on one if I tried–but these two Washington Post stories make me wish that newspaper reporters could do a more respectable job of covering the video game industry.

In the first piece, in the Post‘s Business section, the reporters write a ludicrous appraisal of the Xbox 360’s prospects as a multi-media hub. No doubt some people will use the new gaming system as a media extender, but surely the vast, vast majority of buyers will use the Xbox . . . to play games.

In fact, the Post reporters admit as much in their story’s sixth graph:

Microsoft’s vision has skeptics. Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank, said the Xbox 360’s non-gaming features “make nice ad copy” but doubts that owners will use all the extras. It remains, he said, a video game machine.

No doubt that Saffo is right. Here’s what bothers me: Do the editors at the Post feel as though they need to puff the Xbox up into something it isn’t to justify the D-1 story? They shouldn’t. Gaming is a big enough business that the story of the new Xbox launch should be newsworthy in its right, without the need to buy into futurist fantasies.

The other story, on the front page of the Style section is even more breathless. It’s a profile of the Xbox “box” designer, Jonathan Hayes. And it begins with this off-the-shelf hyperbole:

There’s something a little off here: The designer of the Microsoft Xbox 360 — the video-game console landing in a place of honor right next to the television in millions of living rooms starting today — doesn’t play video games.

Except that Microsoft’s goal is to sell only 3 million units in the next 90 days. The Xbox 360 isn’t going into “millions” of homes today. Or tomorrow. Or over the weekend.

Which leads us to the third bit of puffery in the Post: In the Business section story we have a passage included which is meant to push readers over to the Hayes profile in the Style section. Here’s the line:

To keep the device from being banished to the basement or the kids’ room, Allard’s team has spent almost as much time worrying over the appearance of the new Xbox as about the technology inside the console.

I don’t mean to be nit-picky–none of this is important in the grand scheme of things–but this just can’t be true. Do you think Microsoft spent “almost as much time” worrying about the cosmetics of their system as they did the technology inside? Really? If they did, it means that Sony has already won the console war and Bill Gates should have everyone on Team Xbox garroted in their sleep.

Dean Barnett has an excellent post on the existential problem of the ADL in general and the bizarre rantings of Rabbi Eric Yoffie in particular:

Last Friday, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, gave a speech in which, according to the Associated press, he “blasted” the religious right and among other acts of verbal idiocy accused “conservative religious activists of promoting “anti-gay policies akin to Adolf Hitler’s.” . . .

As Yoffie doubtlessly knows, Hitler’s “anti-gay policies” were rather well fleshed out and went well beyond distaste, intolerance and offensive rhetoric. Hitler’s anti-gay policies included the extermination of homosexuals. Linking the religious right with such a thing is outrageous, slanderous and, need I add, disgustingly provocative.

And yet there’s another dimension to Rabbi Yoffie’s obtuseness that bears mention. There happens to be a rather sizable group of people out in the world that really does have views of gays that are “akin to Adolf Hitler’s.” Hint: They were throwing homosexuals off of rooftops before America, led by a president who is the darling of Yoffie’s detested “religious right” liberated Afghanistan . . .

OSM–the blogging media company that’s going to change the face of journalism as we know it–is changing its name (again). They’re going back to calling themselves Pajamas Media.

The revolution will now continue.

Try explaining your way out of this one (from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader):

A Sioux Falls man is charged with indecent exposure after being found partially unclothed and lying on the floor with a female mannequin in the Washington Pavilion.

“There was inappropriate activity between him and the mannequin. That’s the only way I know how to put it,” Sioux Falls police officer Loren McManus said.

I don’t normally watch college football and, aside from having a deep personal affection for Joe Paterno, I have no rooting interests whatsoever in the college game. But I did catch the final seconds of the Texas Tech / Oklahoma game, and I’ve never seen a bigger screw-job in sports.

Down by 4 with under a minute remaining, Texas Tech was driving. They had a 4th and 3 on the Oklahoma 26 and threw a pass that was clearly short–maybe by two feet–of the first down marker. Game over. Even the announcers were wrapping up the broadcast.

But the officials spot the ball over the line–first down!

With 1st and goal on the Oklahoma 5, Tech throws a slant into the right side of the endzone. The receiver bobbles the ball on the sideline and then, while running out of bounds, looses the ball completely. The refs jump to signal a touchdown. It’s a ludicrous call and is quickly overturned.

Then, with 3 seconds remaining, Tech hands the ball off to their running back, who is tackled short of the goal line. The officials can’t call a touchdown fast enough. What a homejob.

I’m surprised not to see much talk about it this morning. Did anyone else notice this travesty?

He meant it only in the metaphoric sense. Thus said a New Jersey college professor after getting in trouble for saying, “real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people’s needs.” This John Daly, an adjunct English intructor at Warren County Community College, wrote in an email to a student who was organing a campus lecture by a returning Iraq veteran. Daly did not stop there. “I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won’t dare show their face on a college campus,” he wrote to the lecture’s organizer, Rebecca Beach, a freshman. Welcome to college, Missy.

Stars & Stripes carries a typical military SNAFU story: The Armed Forces Network recently broadcast the John Travolta / Hugh Jackman disaster Swordfish, notable only for the very topless Halle Berry.

But when soldiers tuned in–the same men and women fighting to protect Ms. Berry’s right to express her artistic voice by showing her cans–they found a clothed Halle Berry. It seems that the AFN gets a sanitized, near airline-quality version of movies. This is an outrage!

As Petter Officer 2nd Class Rob Morrison told Stars & Stripes, “We’re all adults here. Why should we be so sheltered overseas when people are paying for this cable service? We’re all adult enough to be fighting for our country. If I want to see a little [nudity] I think I’m entitled.”

Another fantastic nugget from the story:

Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Holliday had the chance to catch “Showgirls” on AFN one night.

“It was pretty funny,” Holliday said. “By the time all of the nudity and swearing was cut out, there wasn’t much left to the movie. I thought ‘Why did AFN bother showing it?’ It wasn’t because of the plot.”