I remember this TV guy from his Fort Wayne days, when he was given to overly dramatic stand-ups, wrong-o reporting (he fell for the old Super Bowl-domestic violence canard) and the day he decided his true on-air persona should include a shaved head.

In other words, I never thought he was Peabody material.

But the years fly by, and things change. He still may not be Peabody material, but now he’s out ‘n’ proud. It’s worth clicking through for that picture, showing TV anchors in the most important part of their preparation. (It played much larger, and much funnier, in print.)

If they’d had this when Kate was nursing, we’d still be there. Happy hours for new moms!

Pamela Foster, who wore a black sweater and jeans, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, said she was happy just to be out of her pajamas.

…Breast-feeding was another frequent subject, one that raised some potentially touchy questions. Would drinking a glass of wine adulterate the purity of mother’s milk and bring the child welfare authorities? Could the early exposure of an infant’s tabula rasa to drink encourage pernicious vices later in life? And what about the possibly hazardous combination of drinking and pushing a stroller?

I look at it this way: Sooner or later, every kid needs to learn how to mix a decent martini for mommy. Might as well start ‘em early.

Met with my advisor today. It was an informal deal — all I needed was a signature, and all he needed was a break from his latest project (proposal-writing. Ugh.). We had a nice chat.

I’ve mentioned many times that the level of ambient technology around this place is pretty stunning for a geriatric soul such as myself. The U runs on e-mail, but so does everyone’s personal life. The computer is at the center of the work we do, and takes up space once occupied by things like, oh, the stereo. And, I regret to say, the newspaper.

It’s like living in the Land of Early Adopters. My advisor, describing his news-consumption habits, says a lot about what editors are up against:

He just got TiVo, which allows him to watch stuff he can’t stay up for. Like? “The Daily Show,” the one that so many young people say they now rely on as a primary news source. And he sees why, because it’s really funny and imaginative, reporting and commentary all in one. He hasn’t watched a mainline network news show on a regular basis in years. He reads the national papers — NYT, WSJ — online. He dropped the Detroit Free Press a while ago, which was good for the Ann Arbor News, but not really; he estimates the time he spends with the hometown paper is down to 10 minutes or less. A zip through sports, the local columns, Page One. Features is mostly wire; little to read there. And lots of what he does read he already knew by monitoring online sources throughout the day.

If I were a newspaper editor, this would worry me. OK, terrify. Here’s a smart guy whose loyalty to his hometown paper is hanging by a thread — it can barely hold his attention — and he’s one of the good guys, the sort who stays informed because it’s his civic duty. The Daily Show won’t tell him about his local school board, but plenty of people in any community don’t care what the local school board does anyway.

And how do editors respond? Most papers are still squeezing payroll and staff in the wake of the 2000-01 downturn, doing more with less, giving less for the same price, and wondering where all their readers are going.

To The Daily Show, maybe? Here’s the other thing: We marveled at how fast the news becomes just another commodity for the audience to play with as they please. Remake the Howard Dean scream into an MP3. Turn the State of the Union into a comedy routine. Link to stupid newspaper stories on a weblog, add snark and enjoy. The audience thinks of your product as theirs (and they should; they paid for it), and is unimpressed by the provider. Which has always been true, but now it’s really true. When Janet Jackson showed her boob, she really gave it to the entire world.

My personal Nall family genealogist, Cousin John, tells me all Nalls in this country are at least somewhat related.

Oh, thank God. The next family reunion should be ever so much more fun.

The sum total of my thoughts on Mel Gibson’s new movie are this:

1) He has every right to make it, and by so doing, has to accept whatever consequences that, good and bad, go with it, and;

2) His father is a total freakin’ whack job.

In the bizarre interview, (Hutton) Gibson also said Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan should be lynched and called for the government to be overthrown. …He said the Germans did not have enough gas to cremate 6 million people and that the concentration camps were just “work camps.” “It’s all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is,” he said.”

You could be forgiven for averting your eyes from any and all “Sex and the City” stories in these days leading up to the final episode, but I enjoyed this Salon take on its most overlooked character. You’ll have to sit through a GE ad, but I thought “Let us now praise Charlotte York Goldenblatt” was worth the time.

…I wrote a letter to Romenesko today, which references a couple of other things. Journalism, blogging, the usual. Go here if you’re interested.

What I Love About the Internet, part six jillion: Finding other people who share my belief that Peggy Noonan is a nutjob. From an online chat at the WashPost yesterday:

St. Louis, Mo.: Will enchanted dolphins arrive in time to save President Bush’s drowning Presidency like they saved Elian?

Peggy Noonan: Maybe. And maybe he won’t need saving. And maybe the Democrats will. And maybe by the election you’ll need saving, and perhaps some of Bush’s decisions made in connection to the war on terror will save you. It’s all the maybes that keep us getting up in the morning with a sense of excitement and anticipation, don’t you think?

TBogg has a bit more.

One thing about these screenwriting courses: It’s sure given me a new appreciation of movies. This hasn’t, as film/video teachers so often promise, ruined them for me. Alan studied music when he was young, and I just listened to it. Of course he hears music entirely differently than I do, and sees shapes and forms within it that I never will. Same with movies.

One thing that’s interesting about the class is the handouts — the teacher’s a working scriptwriter with access to early script drafts of familiar movies, and we study them every week. “The Truman Show,” for instance, started out with Truman a dull, overweight crybaby who lives in New York City. His obsession with the girl who gave him his first kiss leads him to hire prostitutes to wear her sweater while they have sex. If you remember the final product, in which Truman is of normal weight, smarter, not given to tears and living in the creepy Cleaveresque town of Seahaven, where there are no prostitutes, it’s possible to have hope for one’s own script. You see that as long as you’re willing to write the thing again, there’s always hope.

But lately we’re talking about pace. It’s amazing, when you break it down, to see how fast screen stories move, even if they don’t seem to, and how relentlessly a writer has to flog the story along from the very first page. Last night we watched the first act of “The Graduate” — that is: the party, the “Mrs. Robinson you’re trying to seduce me” stuff and the scuba-gear-in-the-pool scene — with our newer eyes, and boy, does it crackle. Not a wasted line. Hell, not a wasted word.

So then I came home, and guess what was starting on cable? “The Fugitive.” I’d seen it before, and thought it was a top-drawer action movie, but watching it again, it’s so much more. It’s a textbook case in how to craft that rarest of birds, the action movie with a brain. Every scene raises the stakes. Every location is significant. Every line is true to its speaker’s character. Every scene has a beginning, middle and end that flows logically into the next. And, of course, it has Tommy Lee Jones, with whom it’s hard to go very far wrong.

“The Fugitive,” in fact, is a great example of a movie greater than the sum of its parts — great direction of great actors speaking great lines from a great script, and presto: Greatness.

Just a quick entry before I trot off for a half day of training in Final Cut Pro video editing — yo, just another sausage for the mixed grill of my unimpressive resume — but I saw this and had to say one quick prayer of thanksgiving:

Thank God I don’t work in television.