Yesterday afternoon a friend offered me a ticket to the final taping of The Colbert Report in Philadelphia. It was the stunning conclusion of their “Dorito’s Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage From Chili-Delphia – The City of Brotherly Crunch!” It would be quite an evening.

We queued up on Walnut Street, outside of Penn’s Annenberg Center to first wait in line for half an hour, and then pack the lobby of the Zellerbach Theater for at least another hour. This was after being scanned and patted down by the Secret Service. This time, I was smart enough to leave home the wrench that the Secret Service had taken from me while entering the Obama rally at the Convention Center last week. Finally, the velvet rope parted and we hurried down to grab seats in the third row, perhaps 20 feet from the giant C that forms Stephen’s anchor desk.

Now despite the fact that after fast-forwarding through the commercials, the Colbert Report is only barely more than 20 minutes, it takes quite a bit more than that to record an entire show, especially in a different theater and with a much larger production than normal. For this was no standard Report.

After learning of Benjamin Franklin‘s invention of the toaster, Stephen began to introduce the segment on last night’s debate. Sadly his giant screen failed and who else showed up to fix it, but Sen. Hillary Clinton. She made a couple of jokes about how to fix it (none of which really landed in my opinion) before telling Stephen to call her any time he needed help. Her segment was actually edited down when broadcast to go a bit smoother.

With the screen fixed, next came a favorite of mine, Congressman Pat Murphy, a local boy, Iraq vet, and friend of DoubleSpeak. He mostly talked about Sen. Obama and the war in Iraq in his inimitable Philly accent. If you watch the clip below, you’ll see me right in the aisle reaching for Stephen’s hand during the segment intro in the bottom left of the screen.

The third act was even more of a surprise: John Edwards. He appeared on stage to a standing ovation and proceeded to take Colbert’s place with his version of the Word, the Ed-Words. Mostly jokes about jet skiis and two Americas. Though I never considered myself an Edwards supporter, I was somewhat sad to see him leave the race. His contributions in terms of pushing the debate to the left and focusing on important issues of health care and the environment were crucial to forming the agenda of the party in this cycle. In the midst of the joking, he still managed to hit on his issues, so crucial to the newly discovered “white male vote.”

And that I figured, was that. All that was left was a final thank you to Philly and a goodbye on the week. Except that as we waited for Act IV, a sound man came out and hooked up Stephen with an earpiece for a satellite hookup. Something big remained…Barack Obama himself. His segment was also not amazing (the satellite delay makes things tough) but concluded a pretty impressive show and week.

With the show over, Stephen threw Wrist Strong bracelets and spicy sweet Doritos into the crowd. Finally, he approached the edge of the stage and my hand touched Stephen’s hand. What a night.

All the clips after the jump:

Franklin and Toast:

HRC:

Pat Murphy:

John Edwards:

I’m glad to see Hasselhoff is still sharing the love. I can only assume he’s serious in this video.

Watch as conservative Casey, currently leading in the polls, tries to hone his oratory skills for his hoped-for debates next fall against incubent Neo-Con Sen. Rick Santorum. Pennacchio and Sandals, both liberals, have the debating skills but need to develop more name recognition.

Their positions on the issues are more in tune with those of most Pennsylvania voters. According to a Zogby poll late January, voters preferred Pennacchio and Sandals over either Casey or Santorum when presented with the candidates’ issue stances.

Pennacchio and Sandals face an ironic possibility: If they remain unknown to most voters, then Casey can win the primary based on name recognition alone, but if they manage to get their positions and names in front of the voters, they’ll likely split the liberal/centrist majority of Democrats, with Casey winning a plurality.

Pennacchio and Sandals have already met several times for debates. Each time, Casey declined his invitation to join them. His campaign manager cited the others’ purported lack of support in the polls and limited fundraising as proof that Casey doesn’t need to bother with debates.

As for the demise of “Arrested,” it comes just as the acclaimed comedy came back this week after a hiatus to make room for Fox’s baseball coverage. The two back-to-back episodes averaged a paltry 4 million viewers Monday, sending Fox to fifth place in the 8 p.m. hour and putting a dent on the ratings of its lead-out, the rookie drama “Prison Break.”

There is a possibility that the show will be shopped around, but its high cost is expected to be prohibitive for a cable network.

I’ve always enjoyed Arrested and I’ve thought this season has been simply brilliant. Yes, it’s strange and at times cold, but the writing is so sharp and the acting is hysterical. I will never get tired of David Cross’ unending homoerotic double entendres, George Michael’s quiet innocence, or Gob’s simple desire for his father’s approval of his “magic.” Much like Sports Night or Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Arrested was simply too good to survive amongst the dreck of primetime network television.

C’mon F/X, do the right thing and produce the show that your big brother won’t. It sure would go well alongside one of my new favorites, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I love my Powerbook.

I love my iPod.

I’ve got lots of other computers and electronic devices that I really enjoy using as well, but there is something about Apple’s products that brings out another level of joy and yes, techno-lust. Yeah, a Dell laptop or a Creative Zen may do the job, but a 12″ Powerbook is just so darn purty. Whether it’s the attention to the little details, like the the LED on the laptop charger that lets you instantaneously see the status of the battery, or the organic touches of the pulsing lid latch and that smooth fade-in/fade-out on the iPod, Apple in the past 5 years has upped the bar on consumer design and really left everyone else in the dust.

So while trying to not be too much of a fanboy, last week’s announcement of the new ever-sleeker iPod – now with video playback – and the announcement of new G5s and Powerbooks, totally got me excited. But try as I might, I couldn’t really figure out Steve Jobs’ “angle” with this new device. It still seemed a bit half-baked considering the screen is only 2.5″ and the battery life for watching video is only a few hours. Well Sam Sugar, over at SugarBank, an adult industry blog, seems to have hit the nail on the head IMHO:

Apple is selling cheap (just about) video capable iPods, for exactly the same price as its old audio only players, to lock-in market domination of video players. People who just want an iPod, now have to buy an iPod with video. Apple don’t have to sell the machines any differently and they don’t need video content to be a huge success – sales of iPods with video playback are guaranteed.

Then, when their lead is established, Apple will release a ‘true’ iPod video with a bigger screen, sell consumers on a ‘widescreen’ experience and use the extra bulk to hide a bigger hard drive and a lot more battery. That device will appear at the same time as a full-blown downloadable movie service. The studios will have been sold on the idea of ‘Eleventy Billion video capable iPods in circulation’ and Apple will make a lot of money from people upgrading the iPods they already have, because they don’t want to watch Toy Story on a square, two and a half inch screen. That might also be when all those engineers Apple’s hired to work on putting wireless capability into the iPod demonstrate what they’ve come up with.

In a nutshell, Apple’s solved the chicken and egg problem for selling video, by working out how to get people who want to listen to music, to buy video players anyway. They’re going to force old (clueless, greedy) industries to negotiate reasonable terms, because soon the iPod will be the majority platform for mobile video, and Apple will have total control of the hardware and online distribution. In doing so they’ve created a format which all companies selling video online (like us pornographers) need to prepare for.

As an interesting sidenote, Tuesday night on the Colbert Report, Leslie Stahl said that this week’s 60 Minutes will be fairly devoid of commercials. There will only be one sponsor and they are making every attempt to keep the commercial time as short as possible. The old broadcast television advertising model is dying. Will video podcasting – vodcasting (naturally built into the new version of iTunes) – replace it?

Give us this day our daily bread. Oh sure.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those wh trespass against us.
Nobody better trespass against me. I’ll tell you that.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are the merciful. You mean we can’t use torture?

Blessed are the peacemakers. Jane Fonda?

Love your enemies – Arabs?

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. The hell I can’t! Look at the Reverand Pat Robertson. And He is as happy as a pig in shit.

And how incredible was that monkey?

Rent it on DVD or check it out on your OnDemand and watch this season. HBO at 9 pm tonight.

At 4:30 today, what comes on but Crossfire. Now, I may be wrong, but didn’t CNN cancel this show? I could never stand Begala so I don’t miss him, and at this point Robert “Douchebag of Freedom” Novak is just water off my back. But even Ralph Nader is pimping himself out on this show now. I’ve never been a Nader supporter though I generally agreed with his policies and politics. I thought he completely compromised himself in the 2004 race and it’s just sad to see him continuing on the same path now.