Apparently it works…she has a TV series coming up soon…again.

Kathy Griffin isn’t a newsperson, she actually is a TV comedian. I was confusing her with someone else (I don’t watch TV news).

That puts a slightly better light on it, but Cooper should still have read her the riot act during a commercial.

But I take your point about Uncle Walter. Based on his reaction, it didn’t look like Anderson Cooper agreed, either, except that he knew ahead of time that he was being paid to be a “Good Sport”. Past performances had been limited to Griffin’s vocabulary and removing her own clothes. Playing with somebody else’s body is fundamentally different.

They’re supposedly the people informing us and shaping our political opinions. I guess that’s the professional level we’re operating on now. Explains a lot.

Somehow I can’t visualize Walter Cronkite agreeing to get his “sardine kissed” for “performance art.”

He did keep saying no, though, which really bothered me. No should mean no regardless of who is drawing the line. I guess he could have slugged her to make her stop instead of just physically restraining her, if he had wanted to. I hope he got a lot of money.

When I was a little girl, I was tickled until I almost couldn’t breathe. I begged the person tickling me to stop between the laughing. He was bigger than me and sitting on me, so I couldn’t get away. He thought it was funny to make me laugh so much. Once I stopped laughing, it was no longer fun for him, so I was released. Since then, I can’t laugh when someone tickles me, but I do startle easily when touched by surprise, and I’m liable to hit anybody who does so. The image of someone being touched like an object who is obviously uncomfortable with it is not something I can bear.

I guess torment, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

[A digression: The reason a 12 year old might judge the political content was because of my father's acute paranoia about the John Birch Society, Republicans, and the police. My uncle was known to be a conservative (and quite rational, compared to my father). Relations in the family were very strained. Anyhow, I grew up with quite an early political education. I recall the time I went to the polls when most of the family was voting for Kennedy. I was pretty excited about the election and about Kennedy. When I saw somebody I knew (don't remember who) outside the polling place I yelled "Kennedy!". My dad about had a stroke right there that I'd announce a liberal family preferance to all the spys who were listening and taking notes. He was yelling and screaming all night. I was about 6-7 years old at the time.]

So I found this stack of magazines and there was an article about a Matt Helm movie poster. The poster had Dean Martin riding the barrel of a giant gun with a caption that said, “The city of [the name of a city I don't remember] shoots the works!” The piece was an indictment of how immoral and shameful the poster was. It went on to interpret what the poster meant in imaginative graphic detail. And when I say detail, I mean they described what would happen to one particular woman should the city decide to “shoot the works” upon her person. I would not repeat what I recall of that description here. I was shocked and disgusted and a little angry.

I came away from it with a moral guideline to apply in cases like this that I’ve honed over the years: The real filth is the shit that people publish in an attempt to make us think that sex is something we should feel profound shame about.

But at least Sushi (the famous drag queen) had some class.

The other channels weren’t showing New York live, and my wife and I were settling for an Eastern Time Zone New Year since she had to be to work by 7 this morning.