• 19 the age of Kirk McCambley, who was getting some lovin’ at a pretty young age
• 60 the age of cougar Iris Robinson, who moonlights as Northern Ireland’s first lady
• bad the effect this could have on the fragile peace between Catholics and Protestants source

• I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.
• Disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich • In an Esquire interview, saying the kind of thing that makes the Harry Reid thing seem tame. He also made claims in the interview that Obama campaign mastermind David Axelrod tapped him as a presidential candidate in 2008 before Obama. This is the guy that apparently tried to sell Obama’s seat, remember. Blago’s next career move? “The Celebrity Apprentice,” where he’ll be able to share haircare tips with The Donald. source

• 
  RNC VS. DNC: RAWR On “Fox News Sunday,” pretty much the only news show worth watching nowadays if you’re being sarcastic, DNC chair Tim Kaine and RNC chair Michael Steele took on the Harry Reid thing. And they both answered as you’d expect, really. Michael Steele comes off as a douche.
• 
  Painting: terminated When California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks, paintings fall down. Was it perhaps a result of the aftershock of speaking to the effervescent David Gregory, or maybe the Eureka quake last night? Either way, we’re freaking amused, just like David Gregory.
• 
  Bad point, bob A week ago, we were giving CBS’ “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer credit for making a pretty spot-on point about the political echo chamber. How does he follow up? Well, by talking about what we could learn from dogs. Uh, WHAT?@! This is an e-mail chain letter.

• 89 ShortFormBlog’s word count
• 1,844 Michael Kinsey’s word count

• one Newspaper stories are too long and filled with too much flowery language.
• two Too much space is devoted to attributing quotes and trying to balance the story.
• three People are often quoted saying obvious things to push the story’s main points.
• four Back in the day, journalists used inverted pyramid writing style; now we don’t.
• five Michael Kinsey wrote a long story about how stories are too long. source

• She still didn’t really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea. She was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11.
• John McCain’s 2008 campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt • Regarding Sarah “Going Rogue” Palin’s faults as a vice presidential candidate – and as a human being, really. Schmidt went further, saying she was woefully misinformed about policy issues and overly concerned about her political standing in Alaska on the day she had a key interview with Katie Couric. Despite this, Schmidt admits that if she wasn’t on the ticket, the campaign would’ve faltered even worse than it did. source

• $48M the size of “Avatar’s” fourth-weekend box office take, making it the first four-week movie champ since “The Dark Knight”
• $429M the movie’s total domestic box-office take, which is within shouting distance of the $533 million take of “The Dark Knight”
• $1.3B the movie’s world box-office take, which is just $500 million shy of “Titanic’s” $1.8 billion haul; this is gonna be huge source

The winners

• viewers After losing five months of first-run dramas on NBC (who had perhaps some of the best ones on TV for a long time), they’re coming back. That’s good.
• Leno Ten to one, Jay Leno is getting his old time slot back – and probably his audience. Considering he was supposed to be retired by now, this rules for him.
• cable This flub-up by a major network helped other major networks – as well as cable networks like TBS, A&E and TNT – gain ground and mindshare.

The losers

• Conan The “Tonight Show” host is probably the biggest loser of all – losing his hard-fought-for perch thanks to corporate manhandling. If we were him, we’d walk.
• Carson Ten-to-one, the “Last Call” host is going to lose his time slot thanks to this. We know the guy’s a tool and always has been, but come on! That isn’t freaking fair!
• NBC It’s going to take a long time for the network to fix the wrongs of what they’ve done to their viewers and the creative community. They screwed up. Badly.

• For us right now, instead of trying to reinvent, going back to basics is probably the smartest play.
• NBC Universal Television Chairman Jeff Gaspin • Regarding the changes to the network’s late-night schedule (which, by the way, he confirmed), but in a broader sense, the entire network. NBC has spent the last few years trying to shake up its business model – getting rid of the traditional television upfront, working on innovative advertising deals and coming up with ways to save costs that turn the traditional network television model on its head. “The Jay Leno Show” was really the crux of a long period of corporate thinking. Gaspin’s basically admitting the whole idea was a failure. Wow. source

• Is Skiff the future of the news? As with any of these e-Reader devices, it’s too early to call, but it’s closer than most. TechCrunch says it’s an attempt to put the genie in the bottle again. We like the fact that it does nice newspaper layout. source

• Empire State of Mind, indeed. During last night’s NFL playoff game, a preview for SNL – featuring Charles Barkley as host and Alicia Keys as the musical guest, hit. And oh man, is it something. Barkley, with that drunk driving incident well behind him, did his best Alicia Keys, and wow, was it something. Never do this again, Sir Charles.