I watched a few tributes to Roone Arledge last night.

For more than a generation, Arledge was the guiding force in the way television covered the world of sports. He was the father of the Wide World of Sports program that dominated weekend programming on ABC for as long as I can remember. He was the father of Monday Night Football – vaulting Dandy Don, Howard and Frank into America's living rooms as household names.

What got me thinking, though, was the way two key phrases Arledge coined have become part of the American lexicon: The Thrill of Victory; The Agony of Defeat – the catch phrase for Wide World of Sports; and Up Close and Personal, a phrase that permeates Olympic coverage.

As a writer, you dream of delivering a phrase like that into the world vocabulary – and I'm not even beginning to consider lines from movies that have made their way into our language. I think of the people who can be identified with a simple phrase, and it runs quite a gamut.

Do you believe in miracles? Yes! – Al Michaels

Tell it like it is – Howard Cosell

Whoa Nellie – Keith Jackson

Only in America – Don King

That's just my opinion. I could be wrong – Dennis Miller

Elvis has left the building – David Letterman

He was spinnin' like the handle on the outhouse door – Jim Walden.

Okay, I cheated with that last one. Walden was the football coach at Washington State University and now does color commentary for the school's football game. He used that line during a recent game, referring to the way a receiver beat a cornerback.

But you know what? I don't aspire to that kind of remembrance. I just hope that what I write about an event captures, in some way, the magic of the event itself.

I have a few lines that I'm especially proud of.

There was the time I wrote about a girls basketball team from a tiny, tiny town in the armpit of the state came out of nowhere to win a state championship. They were the definition of a Cinderella story, and on deadline after they earned the championship, I came up with what I thought was the perfect lead:

``Welcome to the ball, Cinderella.''

And then there was the time, recently as a matter of fact, that I covered a professional boxing card that boasted a nationally televised main event between a former champion and an up-and-comer named John Walker. Unfortunately, John Walker was knocked out after two punches to his glass jaw in the opening seconds of the fight. My lead for the next day:

``Two shots and Johnny Walker was done.''

I don't rest on whatever laurels I may have garnered over the year. I keep remembering a comment a prospective editor made when I was interviewing for a job with his paper (I didn't get the job).

He called my writing pithy.

To this day, I pray he didn't lisp.

More soon.

You can certainly tell that the November Sweeps are over. It's my sad duty to announce that we are officially into the annual December television doldrums.

What's puzzling is the timing. It's perfectly understandable that television rolls out its red carpet and throws open its creative vault (well, some times it's more of a cupboard than a vault, but we won't quibble about that right now) and puts its best foot forward while Nielsen takes its bi-annual ratings.

Thus you get events like the very special Will & Grace wedding. The very special Sopranos murder of a central character. And the very special departure of Rob Lowe from The West Wing.

But change the calendar over to December and what do you get?

You get those wonderful reruns of episodes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the story line on any of the shows you regularly watch – which throws cold water on any enthusiasm you might have built up from week to week.

But that's not all!

You also get all those old Christmas specials.

I'm 45 years old. Do you have any idea how many times I've had to sit through Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life? I love the movie. I think it's a classic. But there were years when it was on a dozen times a day for the two months leading up to Christmas!

And then there's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and his adventures with Yukon Cornelius. I remember when that kind of animation was actually new! And Santa Claus is Coming to Town starring the voice of an actor who's been dead longer than its current audience is alive.

My point is this: why, when everyone and his sister is ready to buy advertising time to sell the latest crap from Ron Popeil, does the tv fare become the stuff that makes infomercials alternative viewing?

Maybe it's as simple as the fact that people will buy the time no matter what the program.

And you want to know what's depressing about all this?

My complaint makes me sound more like someone from my parents generation. And that's scary.

More soon

It's funny, the things you think about when you're on a liquid diet. A cold liquid diet, too, for that matter.

Now, I'm someone who enjoys a good cup of coffee – particularly a Venti Vanilla Latte from the local Starbucks (it was just yesterday in my neighborhood where the mention of the name Starbuck conjured images of Dirk Benedict on Battlestar Gallactica). Or a nice, hot cup of English Breakfast tea, with a dollop of honey and a splash of cream. Or even a nice, hot cup of soup.

So, on a cold December day that left a chill all the way to my bones – as Decembers in the part of the Pacific Northwest that do not border Puget Sound can – I was without anything to drink that was warmer than my own body temperature.

I quickly abandoned thoughts of raising my body temperature. There's no way I could make myself hot enough to qualify for that latte, anyway.

Have you ever noticed that, when you go into a theater, you can smell everyone else's popcorn? How it makes you hungry – how you can almost taste the salt and butter on each kernel in the guy's bag in the next aisle? You almost have to buy yourself some popcorn just out of self-defense.

But it's worse when it's the smell of coffee, and you can't touch a drop. That coffee aroma latches onto your nostrils and physically pulls you toward the waiting carafe. I thought for a while there that I was going to have to wear a straight jacket. Not that there aren't people who think I should be wearing one of those on a daily basis.

So here I am, on a Wednesday evening, walking down memory lane while watching a documentary on The Smothers Brothers and their battle with CBS censors, without having a single, solitary thing to warm my chilled bones.

I will now pause while everyone says – awwwwwwwwww.

More soon.

Why do they call them wisdom teeth, anyway?

Oh, I know. They come in when you're an adult, when you've supposedly gathered a modicum of wisdom. But whoever came up with that idea never met the adults who answer those Jay Walking questions on The Tonight Show. Or that syndicated game show -- Street Smarts. Makes you wonder if IQ doesn't stand for Idiocy Quotient.

Maybe these teeth should get a new name. Superfluous Teeth, comes to mind. Molars-that-are-probably-going-to-be-pulled-later is probably a little unwieldly.

Makes me wonder about some of these other human parts that are expendable. Like the speen. The tonsils. Or for that matter, the appendix. Did the Great Spirit have a physicians lobby help design the human form? You know, build in some automatic fees?

I won't begin to discuss my ex-wife, who figured testicles were superfluous -- in anyone but her, of course. Since she had them in the large, brass variety. But I digress.

These are the kinds of things you think about while you're waiting for the dentist to stick that big Novocain needle into your mouth a half dozen times before he puts an even bigger pair of pliers in and yanks out a tooth.

The good news is that you learn a valuable lesson: if you were to, tragically, lose both of your legs, you could still walk on your butt cheeks. Especially when you hear that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard sound of the drill. My butt wants to walk me right out of the chair and back to my car as soon as I hear that.

So I am off to an hour of ADA-sanctioned oral torture and an evening of pain-dulling drugs, embarrassing drool from a mouth I can't feel and an extended period where enunciation is just another word I can't say properly.

Update:

For starters, they don't use a big old pair of pliers any more. Must have been a John Wayne movie I saw somewhere along the line.

For another thing, if it really WERE a wisdom tooth, it would have known when to just give up and go along quietly.

The dentist had trouble extracting the tooth. Seems my wisdom teeth have a nice, twisty root that makes staying in my jaw a much more pain-free option. In fact, it seems, the ends on the root are still embedded in my jaw, which he hopes will not be a probolem later. However, there were a few moments during this two-hour ordeal where I would have given you even odds that my jaw would break before the tooth did.

So I'm off solid foods for a couple days -- not that my jaw is interested in opening wide enough for anything larger than a spoon. Oh, I'm off anything hot, too. Don't want to do anything that will interfere with this hole in the back of my mouth from clotting and healing. So I can eat ice cream. Frozen Yogurt. Damn. If this had happened 40 years ago, it would have almost been worth it!

More soon.

Upon further reflection, I have changed my mind about my earlier prediction.

I now doubt that Sir Ian McKellen will be cast to replace Richard Harris in the Harry Potter series. That realization has me feeling rather sad, actually. Not sad in a teary sense, but rather, sad about the state of human development represented by that realization.

My reasoning is simple: it would cause more problems than it will solve. Sir Ian is a wonderful actor. He is, however, openly gay (and I loved his star turn on Saturday Night Live – including his stolen kiss from Jimmy Fallon). Can you imagine the outrage from our Religious Right? I mean, these are people who thought Tinky Winky of the Tele-Tubbies was gay.

These people – the Pat Robertson's and the Jerry Falwell's of the world – would go directly into apoplexy over sending children to see an openly gay actor portray the kindly, grandfatherly headmaster of a school for children. Never mind that there is absolutely nothing sexual about the character. Never mind that seeing a movie about wizards and magic requires at least some level of a suspension of disbelief.

Not that this moral outrage from the Religious Right regularly offers me solace.

These are the same types who insisted, in the days after September 11, that homosexuality, among other things, was the reason the death and destruction had been visited upon New York City.

They're the same men who now are condemning Islam as an evil religion and Mohammad as a terrorist. Never mind that their Right Wing rhetoric shows them to be, no more and no less, as radical in their religion as the Taliban was in theirs.

And in these days of heightened tension around the world, at a time when this country is thinking about attacking a sovereign Islamic nation, these men are the equivalent of a football player who can't keep his mouth shut before the game – they give terrorist bulletin board fodder.

Okay, stepping off the soapbox.

I do have another prediction for the role. Came to me in the shower, oddly enough. Well, maybe not so odd, considering his name.

Christopher Plumber. No. Wait. Christopher Plummer. Captain Von Trapp from Sound of Music. One of a string of actors to play Sir Charles Litton, the notorious Phantom in the Pink Panther movies. A former Sherlock Holmes. Father of Amanda Plummer. It's the voice. The voice, soft and resonant. Especially when he speaks softly.

More soon.