On-Air with Diane Rehm

Diane Rehm at the mic. and kicking it

I took communion - or ate glazed donuts - as a member of St. Columba's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, with a variety of notables - Ray Suarez, Mort Kondracke, Judy Woodruff, and occasionally (C&E) James Baker.  Also in the lifeboat with us?  NPR's wonderful Diane Rehm.

Tea & Simit by the Bosphorus: and NPR on the radio!

Diane and husband John were among the faithful, and among the very involved.  I enjoyed meeting and getting to know Diane, and especially hearing her distinctive voice.  Mesmerizing!

We two exotics spoke once or twice about our shared roots in Turkey - she from Mersin and I, Istanbul - and in fact it was Diane who recommended the new Cafe Divan on Wisconsin Avenue, NW when it opened, as the place I must go for döner kabap.  She knew her stuff.

Today, at 11:00 a.m., Diane is presenting a fantastic program on Claude Debussy and I wouldn't miss it for all the world. Neither should you!

One Degree from Breitbart - An Arthur Sando Moment

Arthur

This day, after Andrew Breitbart's untimely collapse and death in Brentwood, I am remembering Arthur Sando - a hot-shot PR executive at Superstation TBS when I met and worked with him between 1986-1989 to promote National Geographic EXPLORER in the prime 8-10pm Sunday TBS timeslot.

Sando connected with Breitbart less than 24 hours ago, last night at The Brentwood in L.A.  Here's a nice account of their very brief acquaintance and conversation.

I thought of Sando as a bit of a Koren character in a suit and, back in the 80's during our collaboration, when Ohio band Royal Crescent Mob put out its album Omerta (Get On The Bus, Blow One Off, etc.), I fixated on the coda to the cut "Mob's Revenge," in which a voice behind the groove pronounces, like Wolfman Jack naming a song dedication, "This is for Upper Sandusky"  I always, always sang along "This is for Arthur Sando!"

Andrew

R.I.P. , Andy.  Thank You.

Hallowe'en and The Visible Hand of the Market: Trick-or-Treat with Alan Greenspan

Smith got it right*

All Hallow's Eve, 2003 and I am the chaperone to my daughter and her fourth grade friends as we wend our way door-to-door toward the upper end of tony Chain Bridge Road, N.W. in Washington, D.C.

Knock! Knock!  A door swings open and NBC Newswoman Andrea Mitchell beams at the kids. I beam back - I've always thought Andrea was delicious.

Wealth Redistribution

Andrea reaches for the large candy bowl and prepares to offer it, but stops herself short as it's nearly empty and in need of replenishment.

Holding the bowl in mid-air, our lady of the house calls back over her shoulder, "Dear! More candy!"


A rustling of plastic is heard, and then a gnarled hand appears from behind the door, extends over the bowl, and deposits a 4 or 5 "fun size" 3 Musketeers bars.

Greenspan: Visible hand of the market

The hand retracts, then appears again - three more times, the hand extends, like The Addams Family's "Thing," but sporting French cuffs and a suit jacket.


Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand acolyte** who freely admits the U.S. income tax system is a wealth redistribution scheme, doling out scarce resources to the needy.

A couple of Romantics

Fun Size from the Fed

...and,

this night, to the irrationally exuberant.



* Smith (1776): "It is not from the benevolence of the Butcher, the Brewer or the Baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages"

** Greenspan (1957): “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.” 
(emphasis mine)
 

Jobs for One and All - Walter Isaacson in Silicon Valley

Steve Jobs - Genius

Lots of hooting and hollering today about the new Steve Jobs biography.  I can't wait to read it!

Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson (he's also written bio's of Ben Franklin and Al Einstein) is a fixture of the American literary-intellectual firmament.  Within Time Inc. he helmed TIME Magazine and later CNN; more recently he's been head of the prestigious Aspen Institute.

"The Thinker" - Stanford's Cantor Arts Center

In the autumn of 1994 while he was "Editor of New Media" (a passing fancy) at TIME, Walt was invited to appear on the Stanford University campus for Della Van Heyst's vaunted Stanford Publishing Seminar (Della happened to be romancing FORTUNE Magazine, at the TIME).  I too was invited to join the same panel.

A fresh-faced Cardinal MBA student picked me up at SFO, whisked me to the campus and I wandered in the Rodin sculpture garden - to which I would return in 1997 - before joining the gang for a cookout preceding the evening program.  Walt appeared at the dais with tech reporter/author Kara Swisher, WSJ tech reviewer Walt Mossberg, and me - then Publisher of Discovery Channel Multimedia.

Our most interesting exchange that night, prompted by my observation during discussion of the future of books and magazines, concerned whether writing for interactive media was best and most creatively accomplished 'from whole cloth,' versus when adapted from literary source material.

One half of this Hollywood dichotomy is "Best Writing - Original Screenplay" (in 2011, David Seidler for The King's Speech) - from 1976 to 1978, in a fit of disclosure, the Academy formally referred to this category as "Screenplay written directly for the Screen - Based on factual material or on story material not previously published or produced").  The flip side of course is the Oscar for "Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay" (Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network - from Ben Mezrich's Accidental Billionaires).

Birches not Aspens - Walt Isaacson

At the time I was trying to negotiate a license with Warner Brothers for a CD-ROM tie-in with the upcoming Twister film, and separately (personally) developing a screenplay concept: a re-make of a film that had originally been produced in the mid-60's based on a 1950's Cold War novel. As he was then a Time-Warner executive-suite guy, I drew Walter out on the development processes at HBO and Silver Screen Partners.

I got the T-shirt...

The earnest Stanford kids pursued the thread, lobbing in some excellent comments and questions.

Walter was a nice guy - made some trenchant observations in his interesting New Orleans accent that is bent a bit conspicuously to the Brahmin by time spent in Cambridge.  He came off as pompous, I then thought . . . but not without solid justification, I now think!

Isaacson and I later shared the panel dais again in April, 1995 at the Software Publishers' Association confab in Atlanta.  More of the same, and a lot of fun!

Walt definitely got the big "get" with this book from Simon & Schuster.  Here's an excellent NPR story and interview from Fresh Air.  At this moment when "jobs" are the biggest issue of the election season, and "Jobs" the departing icon of American ingenuity and growth, can the biography fail to captivate?

  I think not !!

Steve Jobs - Zen and the Art of Innovation

Ridin' the Storm Out with Bob Hager, NBC News

Robert Hager - Newsman & Family Man

You've seen the dashing Bob Hager on NBC since the late 1960's.  He covered Vietnam and the Palestinian atrocity at the 1972 Munich Olympics.  43 years ago today he was in lock-up, arrested in Chicago while covering the protests at the Democratic National Convention.

Over time, Bob developed a couple of specialized beats, notably Air Disasters (TWA 800, Pan Am 103, ...) and Weather Disasters.  Every year, when NBC changed its new anchor set and logo, Bob would be issued a new company windbreaker to wear on camera as wind, waves and rain battered the coastline somewhere, or as volunteers picked through tornado wreckage.

Well, in 1981, I dated Bob and wife Honey's daughter for several months.  She and I had a great time and once made a trip north, stopping in Westport to visit her old home (and to make a furtive dash up the driveway of neighbor Mary Travers).  This Hager house - and all others the itinerant newsman and his family had inhabited - were lovingly recreated as scale models (Bob had impressive skill as a woodworking hobbyist), and linked by a string of Christmas lights in a village scene that the Hager family would set up each year.  An entire town center made up of their past homes.  I'm a sentimentalist and have never seen a similarly sweet scene, anywhere.

Buck Henry: "Mr. Leech"

Jessica: Golden Girl

My favorite inside-NBC News story that came from Bob (via his lovely daughter who observed the tableaux as a teenager at the time) is of bow-tied old Irving R. Levine chasing the ill-fated but quite gorgeous Jessica Savitch around the Hager living room during a cocktail party, with fingers a-pinching (a bit like Buck Henry coming after Mary Woronov in "Eating Raoul," I always liked to imagine).

With Irene bearing down on the east coast, let's salute Bob Hager, NBC Newsman Emeritus.

J. C. Duffy: Fusco Father

Porter Brothers Meet the Fusco Brothers

J.C. Duffy, the hilarious cartoonist whose work appears frequently in the New Yorker and elsewhere, is a friend of my brother's whom I met at the bachelor party that I'd organized before Dave's wedding in 1997.  The two were classmates at U. Penn in the glory days.

We chatted again at a 40th birthday cookout in Trenton, N.J.

A lot of Duffy's tableaux take place in bars - and I support that!  For instance this one and that one. And here is something to enjoy in the sunny summer season:

Happy Summer Reading, friends...

Yes . . . a laughing, funny, burly guy is J.C. Duffy!

Watergate Doug Feaver - You Heard It Here First

Got The Feaver

<< ------ Who's the beatnik?  He's the night city-desk editor who answered the call in the wee hours of Saturday morning June 18th, 1972 about a bungled break-in by some ersatz plumbers at the Watergate apartment & office complex.  39 years... and it seems like only yesterday!

Doug Feaver was my cubicle neighbor in the Post newsroom for 6 months in 1999 while I worked on a "top secret!" editorial technology project for washingtonpost.com. A painstaking, personable, and funny guy, Doug had seen it all - and 'though he was by then only 5 years or so from retirement, he kept up exceedingly well with the rowdy young journo's.

I'd watched my dad build an entire back patio of bricks and railroad ties by hand during the summer of 1973, his energy fueled by the live radio coverage of the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings, chaired by Sam Ervin and starring a cast of astonishing characters ("Abplanalp," anyone?), and a featuring the almost-daily detonation of a new bombshell in the fascinating disintegration of the second Nixon administration.  Years later to be inside the Post newsroom was pretty cool, but to meet Doug was to shake hands with history.  A true newsman's newsman.

Where it all began . . .

"On the average there are roughly fifty burglaries daily in the District of Columbia. Some are reported at length in our newspaper. Most are reported in smallish type in a crime column.

Obviously, this burglary was different."

—Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons in 1973

Double-Dating with George Stephanopoulos

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GEORGIE BOY!

ever charming...

In the mid-eighties, while I was courting the first Mrs. Porter, we often would go out with her best friend, a most attractive co-worker who'd begun dating a very bright (Rhodes scholar), nice, and attentive young man.

Friday afternoons, I recall he was wont to skip out of Congressman Feighan's office on the Hill, hop the Metro, and show up at Cheryl's desk with a bunch of daffodils in his hand.  We spent many, many hours out as a foursome, enjoying the DC nightlife - often in Adams Morgan where young George Stephanopoulos lived.

Stopping by the apartment one morning I caught George in a fascinating ritual: with NPR on the stereo, he maintained an extemporaneous dialog with the liberal politician being interviewed.  As George walked around buttoning his shirt and knotting his tie he improvised a stabbing, conservative counterpoint to every statement, every phrase.

I knew George's politics, and understood he was training himself - like a "profiler" - to think as the enemy thinks, to get in-character so as to sharpen and speed his reflexes.  George had amazing instincts for this thrust-and-parry, and was naturally armed with a chessmaster's foresight.

Two Handsome Dudes

We made a few long trips together, notably a great Fourth of July weekend with friends in Wrightsville Beach, NC.  While there George and I went for a 5-mile run together, and rounding the crown of a hill we passed a solitary shack where AC/DC's "Long Way To The Top (If Ya Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)" was playing at top volume.

I mercilessly made him run through the yard and circle the property with me, provoking George to ask me about the attraction of heavy metal, as he pleaded that "It just doesn't have any appeal to me."  We discussed AC/DC and Van Halen, then Motorhead, which I'd tried (unsuccessfully) to interest him in during the drive south in our VW Camper Van.  George was unmoved.

A week later on Nantucket, when I proposed to my fiance, Cheryl and George were the first people we called back home with the news.

It Had To Be Him

... but could have been me ?

Well, eventually George made his way to NYC, then back to DC for Dick Gephardt's campaign, then the Clinton WAR ROOM, and the rest is history.  He's married - not to the old friend, but to the sister of a different DC friend.

And they say he's on TV...

Without fail, always a super, caring, and decent guy.  Hey there, Georgie Boy!

Elizabeth, er - Eleanor Clift: Be My Valentine!

McLaughlin Group's Eleanor Clift

Battling Pundit Interruptrices:

At a table for eight (with wife at other elbow), I sat to the left of hard-left apologist* Eleanor Clift while attending a lovely Washington luncheon on Valentine's Day, 2000.  The event was held for the benefit of some cause or another, and featured Steve and Cokie Roberts talking about their lovey-dovey joint biography, "From This Day Forward."

Agronsky & Co.'s Elizabeth Drew

Like an idiot, I confused Ms. Clift (sister-in-law of the late Monty) with Elizabeth Drew, and I addressed her as "Elizabeth" all throughout the lunch.

My Valentine Eleanor was too polite to correct me!

* Of the strident Clift it is said that:

During the Clinton Administration, she was jokingly referred to as Eleanor "Rodham" Clift or Eleanor "Rodham Clifton," because of her fierce defense of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton. (Wikipedia)

R.I.P. Bob Guccione - An Afternoon in Caligula's Lair

The publishing world lost a giant today. I am proud that I met paesano Bob Guccione

It was 1991 and Discovery Channel was having continued success with our primetime Science block, and the strategy was to get away from one-off's and look for branded collaborators with pre-promoted appeal.  This led to exploratory sorties or projects with Disney-owned Discover Magazine, James Burke, Arthur C. Clarke, and other recognizables.  But the most fantastical of these discussions is the one that led Clark Bunting, Denise Baddour, Tim Cowling  and me to stroll one brisk autumn weekday afternoon up 67th street off the park in NYC and into the 22,000 sq. ft. Guccione manse for a meeting with Bob and his wife Kathy Keeton.

Bob had summoned us to discuss "putting Omni magazine on TV."

Once inside, we stepped up wide marble stairs, past enormous amphorae to a regal Great Hall: carpeted, gilded and decorated with enormous classical statues.  The home was populated by at least 4 very large, copper colored dogs of Great Dane dimension.  The dogs lounged with us.  Bob and Kathy sat in thrones, it seemed, and we reclined like Roman senators.  The only thing missing was a languid Penthouse Pet to feed me grapes from above....  Somehow in the smalltalk phase we identified that both his family and my mother's had emigrated to Joisey from southern Italy - mine from Naples and his from Sicily - and we talked about spectacular Greek ruins in Taormina, Agrigento, and Siracusa, spots I'd visited while living in Sicily years earlier.

Then we got down to brass knuckles and velvet gloves.  Bob was the consummate businessman: totally focused, impressively literate and knowledgeable on the wide range of scientific subjects covered in Omni, and a keen Discovery Channel viewer.  He was clear and deliberate about what he wanted, and understood that we'd want corresponding benefits. 

There was development follow-up with Omni super-editor Patty Adcroft, and a few more conversations, but the vines that we watered that day ultimately bore no fruit.  Bob was bold and genuine in his pitch; the timing just wasn't right for our budding little original production unit to engage on a large seven-figure commitment, or to properly promote the resulting series.  Like so many development discussions, it was great while it lasted, but the first flush of promise came to naught and the event exists as a bit of a one-afternoon stand.

I never had any dealings with Penthouse magazine - that is, no professional dealings - but did have an awkward moment in 1987 when Vestron Video, publisher of both the National Geographic's home video line and Penthouse Video, used a cut-rate duplication vendor who mixed up some tapes on the assembly line, resulting in one of our National Geographic customers opening a Nat Geo box, popping a tape into the VHS deck and getting an eyeful of Keisha Dominguez and Teri Weigel. Survival being of the fittest, in the end, we all survived.  And thrived.

Obituary:   The King is Dead - Long Live the King!

Gene Shalit - A Burl Ives for the Rest of Us!

My brother Steve wrote the existentialist stage play Taung Children, in which the characters are Man, Woman, Store-owner, Jimmy, and Burl Ives.  I've always liked that Burl Ives* was in there, among the mortals.

Opening this week on stage at Western Washington Center for the Arts in Port Orchard, WA is Drop Dead, featuring a Cast of Characters that includes "Ex-porn star," who has become involved with a mysterious actor identified among the Players as "Gene Shalit's Brother."

     INTERIOR. Saturday Afternoon, Late Summer 2005.

     Stockbridge, MA. Sun, breeze filter into the Red Lion Inn's comfy lobby lounge.

     Close-up

ME

(in sotto voce)

Isn't that Gene Shalit?  The old NBC movie reviewer?!?

WIFE

Son of a gun - what's he doing here?

Heads turn. A hairy, whimsical-looking gentleman scowls.  Dream Sequence Alert: A cloud passes before the face of the sun.

ME

He's Bozo - or a Koren character!

WIFE
(grits teeth, removes pin from grenade) 
Let's get out of here before he recognizes you!

* btw, my Dad had a Celebrity Romp experience of his own in the late 1940's, riding the train back to college from the muckland outside of Buffalo, NY.  On return to campus, he reported with excitement to his fraternity brothers that he had "actually seen Burl Ives on the train!" - and was roundly rebuked & ridiculed as a rube by his high-born citified classmates.

Hooman Majd: Ahmadinejad's Polymath Translator

Out Today: The Ayatollah's Democracy - An Iranian Challenge.  Must-read follow-up to 2008's The Ayatollah Begs To Differ from Hooman Majd, who may again reprise his unique past role as translator of Iran Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's honeyed words, this week at the U.N. General Assembly.

During the summer of 2001, I spent many days in a cramped 5th Avenue Manhattan office above 42nd street working with hard-core music/entertainment entrepreneurs building Artist Network Ventures, a US/UK based concern with heavy hitter (Mike Philipp, Quincy Jones, Dave Stewart) backing.  In fact we toiled all day September 10th running between the offices and the AN board meeting at the St. Regis hotel a dozen blocks north.  Among the motley crew: Hooman Majd, then most recently Head of Film & Music at Palm Pictures and previously EVP at Island Records (U2, Melissa Etheridge).

The next morning, all hell broke loose.  I'd canceled a Tuesday morning meeting in SoHo to return very late Monday to DC by train, but was safely away from the Pentagon; NY office-mate Larry Werner described the scene on 5th Avenue for me and set about by week's end to re-open the business, with Hooman's help and others'.

I enjoyed knowing Hooman, who was clearly too deep a thinker to be toiling in the music biz.  Here's an interesting account I found, of Hooman's views following the surprising elections in Iran in 2008.  The new book promises to be highly intriguing.

Yours truly is as repulsed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as anyone in the US can be.  But Hooman is the real deal: "100% Iranian and 100% American." I'm happy to know that he's got his finger on the pulse-beat, as Iran is so fascinating and influential a factor in the world of the 21st century.

UPDATE: Ahmadinejad's UN rant and Hooman's coverage in Daily Beast, here.

Katharine Graham: Ass-Grabber!

A (very classy) little old lady when I met her, Katharine Graham (1917-2001) was larger than life: incredibly driven, energetic and prescient, very wise and supremely influential.  The Washington Post Company, which her father Eugene Meyer had bought in 1933 and she took over on her husband Philip's death in 1963, grew to a dominant position in the news media and to diversify successfully into many other realms (education, television and technology in particular).

By 1999 the Post empire was leading the way in digital news delivery with the ambitious, groundbreaking washingtonpost.com. and for 8 months yours truly sat in the newsroom among veterans like Doug Feaver (the midnight desk editor who took the call June 18, 1972 about the Watergate burglary), young bucks like hysterical cut-up Daniel Froomkin (then Metro Editor), and sundry other journo's.

As we worked together for several months on a cool technology project, the digital division's deputy General Counsel Katharine Weymouth (then Scully) became a good friend, and I eventually learned that she was Ms. Graham's namesake and grand-daughter (young Katharine is now Publisher & CEO, and assumed by many to be heir apparent to WPO when Uncle Don decides to retire).

there's a Ben Bradlee's connection too... but that's another story!

One day that April, Kay left the 15th street NW HQ and surprised the 'post.com staff in Arlington VA.  As she chewed the fat with newsies and with chief executive Marc Teren, the young Katharine appeared and yelled, "Hi, Gran!"  Grandma wheeled around, embraced our legal counsel, and then grabbed a good handful of little Katharine's rear end, giving it a quick squeeze followed by three or four long, loving grandmotherly kneeeeads.

If you have children or grandchildren, you remember this reflexive, affectionate and innocent fondle from when they were 2 or 3 years old. Quite a different effect here for us in attendance - but most pleasing!

Alexandra Steele: Here's That Rainy Day

After fleeing Nantucket ahead of Hurricane Earl and then falling asleep in the wee small hours in front of The Weather Channel's half-decent coverage, I awoke with visions of Alexandra Steele dancing in my head.

Ten years ago, Alexandra was big-market local weathergirl (er, "meteorologist") in Washington DC.  One wet, snowy Saturday eve in mid-December, my wife and I trudged across the lawn for our next door neighbors' annual tuxedo-optional Christmas party & piano singalong, carrying an overdressed eight-day-old baby in our arms.  Our friends had invited a colleague from the WRC "News4" team at NBC's O&O station, and in the door came Ms. Steele radiant, like a warming trend of 80-degree sunshine.

She and I found ourselves sitting together, clowning and singing a few songs.  My wife, noticing our camaraderie, quickly pulled me aside to point out the pure folly of Alex's toes, dripping from the slush she'd walked through in strappy summer sandals.  And handed me the baby.

Later I asked my weathergirl if she'd had any idea that the weather would be so foul when she was dressing for the party.  She dangled the sandal off her toe, looked right at me with a winning twinkle in her eye, and said in southern molasses, "Ah nevvuh pay attention to that stuff!" 

As the man says: "How beautiful she is!"

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams...

Nantucket Week: David Gregory

Spotted at 8:15 this morning, David Gregory, boring his blue Jeep into a tiny spot in the Downeyflake Donut parking lot and grabbing a sackful of chocolate-topped cake donuts: the moderator of NBC's Meet The Press.

"Stretch" Gregory is an island perennial (but this was my 1st-time sighting) who was married in 2000 on the grounds of the Summer House.

Maybe he got sick and tired of eating designer bagles on the other island this week with the President!

Dave and I, we eat the same donuts.

I Nearly Killed Pat Buchanan!

Sunday mornings are a great time to think about Pat Buchanan, whether you're in the first pew at St. Peter's, or in front of the pundit shows.

(Washington, DC) In 1988, I once hailed a cab to cross town between meetings and instructed the cabbie to "Step on it!" Tearing east at the busy midday along H street, we suddenly wheeled left and north, away from Lafayette Square Park, and squealed through the corner at the Hay Adams Hotel. Entering 16th street, a figure was caught squarely ahead of us in the crosswalk: Pat Buchanan - in long lightweight black raincoat, armload of dossiers pinned below his elbow. The hack hit the horn, maybe the gas too - certainly there was no sensation of braking - and the figure instantly and gracefully attained a "flying" posture: both arms forward like Superman, body parallel to the pavement.

Vacating the plane of transit, stage right, his belly was surely higher than the hood of our cab and - like Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in The Matrix - his right ankle somehow cleared our right headlight. The dossiers fanned into the air. I herky-jerked right as we sped by, to watch the body land face down at the curb facing St. John's Episcopal Church (St. Matthew the Apostle Catholic Church on Rhode Island Ave. being a brisk 4 minute walk).

4 blocks on, I - no Pat fan then - regaled colleagues with the tale of Buchanan's literal flight from certain death. But I have come to appreciate the guy more and more.

Fate was not yet ready that day for Pat Buchanan, and he's had 22 good years since then, even running for President in 1992 and 1996 - and, as you may have heard, reeling in 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County in 2000 ("a Pat Buchanon stronghold!" - Ari Fleischer). Hallelujah!

Connecting my friends Pam Meyer & Bob Feldman - and That's No Lie!

Don't ask me how, but I happen to know the two World Experts on "Lying" and I introduced them earlier this month. Now their publicists are battling it out:


Pam's book "LieSpotting" is on the current bestseller list and she's got a great item - with video clips of all your favorite liars in the act - in today's HuffPost - (note coverage of my friend Charlie Rangel among other). Bob's book "The Liar In Your Life" has been out a bit longer, and was highlighted yesterday on VSL's showcase. Different perspectives and unique 'dishonesty' expertise - Bob is a career academic who has specialized in clinical study, Pam a veteran of 25 years in the venal media business - but both cite the same data set as the foundation of their research.

Pam and I go way back - I recruited her to leave Vestron Video in 1986 and join National Geographic TV, where she did a fantastic job as a program buyer. In 1997, Pam hired me as COO of her web start-up Faith.com.

I met Bob [One of Bob's memorable premises is that two people, on meeting for the first time, will lie to each other 3 times in the first ten minutes] when my wife introduced us at the 2008 UMass Amherst Engineering School commencement ceremony, and subsequently at a few Chancellor's receptions, but mostly we run into each other mid-day at the gym.

The two have competing books in the market and I'm proud to know each one... and now I'm always extra-careful to be absolutely straight-up with Pam and with Bob. Happy to say: you'll not find me noted anecdotally in either book!

Godspeed, Tucker Carlson

I nearly met Tucker Carlson!

My degenerate (Harvard-credentialed) best friend has angled for years to get close enough to take a swing at this guy. But I happen to admire Tucker - and even moreso now, that he and The Daily Caller have broken the JournoList political reporters' collusion scandal.

In late 2000 as the internet bubble was bursting and my start-up WomensNewsLink.com was suffocating without second-round investment, events led me to the beautiful wooded McLean, VA home of Dick Carlson, a Washington 'dean' if there ever was one. I'd been briefed with his 30+ page "Curriculum Vitae," a bottomless trove of publications, appointments, and towering professional achievements including past President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Director of Voice of America, and past U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles. Dick's delightful intellect brought to mind my father's Professorial milieu and colleagues back at the academy, as we chatted in the sunlight-splashed living room for most of a late Friday afternoon. The spacious home was both rustic and stately, with a huge glassed floor-to-ceiling display of (what? - swords? walking sticks? wine bottles?) in the foyer.

As I rose to leave, there on a small side table was a sterling silver frame with a black and white portrait of a bow-tied young man, whom I instantly recognized as Tucker Carlson - then on CNN with Bill Press hosting a hysterical new show called The Spin Room.

Much more recently, Tucker's young kids entered the same school that my own daughter had attended from 1999-2008, but by then we had moved away from Washington DC. So although I feel a connection, we haven't met. Yet!