The Hole In The Pop Culture Layer

• What I'm Watching/Listening To/Reading:
• Not going out on a limb to say that Tom Wolfe is brilliant, but I've been kicking myself for days for not having read The Bonfire of the Vanities until now.
• On the topic of the most underrated movies that nobody wants to admit are underrated, I've already written about how Drumline belongs on the list. Add Bloodsport, which aired on Vs. tonight. I can't easily flip past that movie when it's on.
• Random Thoughts/Links:
• For my fellow GW Band-ers, this is pretty cool. I may disagree with him politically, but Mark is a really good guy and I hope he wasn't badgered too badly.
• Hard to get angry over what Charlie Black said because it's so incredibly stupid. Of course, the last line in that article, where McCain sort of agrees with the Bhutto sentiment is a little troubling.
• This is a great one. The New York Post bashes Griffey for saying his favorite memory is "leaving" the Stadium. Care to guess what the baseball player slang for hitting a homer is? Griffey apparently spoke with Keith Olbermann and explained how stupid the whole thing was.
• In Memory:
• I love politics and I love sports, but I probably love pop culture as much as or more than either of the other two. Last night, we lost one of the giants of American pop culture of the last fifty years when George Carlin passed away at the age of 71. We use the word "genius" so often to describe various artists that to call Carlin a genius does him a disservice. He had a comedy routine that led to a Supreme Court ruling. He hosted the first episode of "Saturday Night Live". There's no surprise that one of the greatest recent comedy movies, The Aristocrats, opened with Carlin. His social and political observations remained biting and pinpoint accurate even into recent years. We'll miss Tim Russert this year, but I'm going to miss so much more what George Carlin might have said about the upcoming election, about global warming, about gas prices, about anything. Following in my beliefs on celebrity deaths, I'm not saddened (versus, say, the torture and deaths of countless Zimbabweans at the hands of Mugabe's government), I'm just noting the hole in our culture. It's not often that a nation loses one of its greatest cultural figures and Carlin is one of those who helped define post-Camelot America.