"You’ve told this amazing story about Gilda, about how she came to your house to observe you and your husband living. What was she trying to learn?"

Michael Schulman asks, interviewing Jane Curtin (in The New Yorker):

CURTIN: She just wanted to see what it was like.

SHULMAN: To be married? To be normal?

CURTIN: Just to live. “What is your day like?” So she came over in the morning, and she sat on the sofa. And we went about our business. She drank coffee. I think she actually walked the dog at one point.

SHULMAN: What did you do?

CURTIN: I did laundry. Patrick was working in the office. We made lunch. It was just a day.

SHULMAN: Do you think she was really that mystified by normal people?

CURTIN: To a certain degree, yeah, because she wanted a relationship so badly, and she didn’t like being alone. But she hadn’t been very successful at it. She just didn’t know how you could be in a relationship with somebody if you didn’t work at it all the time.... She was very much of this world, but she skipped through this world, because her energy was just constant—until she got sick. When she was feeling good, no one felt better, and it was hopeful and funny and fun. It wasn’t a bipolar thing—she didn’t crash. But she could turn it up, and she could sort of temper it. She would tap-dance for hours and hours, just trying to get rid of some of the energy.

Of course, Gilda Radner went on to marry Gene Wilder, and, as Curtin puts it, "She finally found someone that she could be with."

"I am Blog."

The other day the TiVo dragged in a very old episode of Saturday Night Live -- so old Chevy Chase was on it. One segment floored me. Steve Martin plays a diet doctor, interviewing a patient -- played by Jane Curtin -- who'd tried all the diets and was desperate. Martin recommended the "Blog Diet," and we see Curtin ice fishing for her only food, which is grabbed away from her by John Belushi, barely visible inside a furry, hooded parka. As he steals her food he yells "I am Blog!"

Ever seen that one? I hadn't.

The swirl continues.

I complained yesterday that the Kerry camp is trying to create a swirly mass of confusion about the Swift Boat Vet ads (specifically about who's really behind them), and I see today the NYT TV critic Alessandra Stanley is visualizing cable news as a swirly mass: an industrial laundry dryer, tumbling "Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions ... without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection."

Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial. (It is particularly confusing on Fox News, where so many of its blond female anchors look like Amber Frey.)

Yes, all those blondes look alike, don't they? I think most Fox News viewers can tell the difference between the beautiful Laurie Dhue and anyone else.

Fox News, which delivers its news with "Fight Club" ferocity, has relished the controversy the most, seizing hungrily on charges that Mr. Kerry lied to gain his medals.

From this, you'd never guess that Bill O'Reilly, by far the most prominent news analyst on the channel, repeatedly states his strong opposition to the Swift Boat ads. Stanley makes this point, however, that I agree with:

[Cable news] has grown into a lazy habit: anchors do not referee - they act as if their reportage is fair and accurate as long as they have two opposing spokesmen on any issue.

This is really the basic "Crossfire" idea for a show. It goes back at least as far as the old "60 Minutes" "Point/Counterpoint" bit that Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd spoofed on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s. It seems to work well enough to bring in an audience of the subset of TV watchers who are willing to watch political shows. But I don't know if anyone is getting confused by this sort of thing. People in the middle who want to decide between the two sides just won't watch--you don't sit and watch the laundry tumbling in the dryer. The people who are watching are already bound to one partisan side, and for them it's more like watching a sports match and cheering for your team. You enjoy a lively competition, you don't rethink your support for you team, and you don't long for a more interventionistic referee.

UPDATE; Bill O'Reilly had the Stanley article as "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" on his show last night and noted that he'd be vindicated if the Times would print a transcript of his show from the previous night, which really did have a long segment cooly going through the Swift Boat charges (with Chris Wallace) and evaluating them. His final slam unnecessarily slurred blogs, as he said her article "belongs on one of those bomb-throwing websites, not in a national newspaper." Some day, it may be a compliment to say something sounds like what is written in the blogs. To be fair, he did specify the "bomb-throwing websites" and not blogs in general.