I managed to get into his site just now, here's today's blog.
July 25, 2006
Sense of humor, meet Michael Starr
I woke up to this New York Post piece this morning. If you don’t want to read it, I can sum up for you: I’m ungrateful to be snarkily ripping on Jeopardy! in my blog entry of last week. How dare I? They made me!
I’ve met Michael Starr a couple times, and he always seemed like a nice enough guy. Which leaves me wondering: does he know how asinine this non-story is? Despite working for the Post, I’m sure his reading comprehension is just fine. He knows there’s no way I was genuinely calling for angry bees and ventriloquist’s dummies to be added to the Jeopardy! format. It’s a humor piece, and one which gets its laughs from the outrageous non sequiturs it proposes, not the ripeness of its target for criticism. For the record: I’ve loved Jeopardy! since I was a kid, as anyone who talks to me for about five minutes knows*. Making goofy jokes about TV shows isn’t “bashing.” I believe it’s the whole reason Al Gore invented the Internet**.
I am grateful to Michael for the extra web traffic this morning***, but not for the humor-impaired sock puppet users who showed up on the message board this morning to either defend Jeopardy! or make trouble, I can’t tell which. In any case, they’ve (he’s?) violated several of our posting guidelines, and the threads will be removed shortly. I welcome reasoned disagreement on a blog entry’s strengths and flaws, but this wasn’t it.
*This is in fact made explicit in the 'offending' blog in question.
**See, he really does have a well developed sense of humor.
***But not so grateful that he didn't edit this blog entry in the meantime. The faux-correction bit, noted in the AP wire, about Trebek being a cyborg, not a robot, along with a few other sentences, are notably absent now.
