Presented in the interest of equal time and completism, since we started the morning with one. This time from McCain again:

As Marc Ambinder (where I got the link) notes, it's hard to know how widely McCain means web videos like this to be picked up, or whom it's meant to persuade. But mocking the real-people testimonials is curious, to say the least. Isn't the message: If you really like Obama, you're stupid? (Obama did have his "they take pride in being ignorant" line, but that was about Republican operatives.) Does this sort of thing work?

More to the point, if someone produced a campaign video mocking voters for praising McCain's war service or Bush's faith... well, you complete the sentence.

The ratings—and/or the highly speculative guesswork—are in, and it turns out a billion people watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, over 34 million of them in the U.S. (That's a smaller percentage of our population, but to be fair, much of the rest of the world's population doesn't have Cartoon Network.)

Beyond that, the opening weekend of the Games is looking like an unqualified ratings success. So is it possible that all the hand-wringing about Internet live feeds of events like the Opening Ceremonies—and NBC's heavy-handed attempts to quash them—were misguided? I'll wager you that plenty of people who caught part or all of the ceremonies online (like me) tuned in Friday night anyway to see the spectacle on a big screen. Why not regard that as publicity for the flagship broadcast of the Games? Better yet, why wouldn't NBC just make the livecast available at its website, and monetize it with advertising as best as it could? I suspect it would be an easier sell to advertisers than The Office webisodes.

The networks had better accept change and figure out how to sell live webcasts of the Games eventually, because by the London Games in 2012 (Vancouver 2010 will at least be closer to American time zones), the holes in that dam are only going to get bigger.

Isaac Hayes, who died over the weekend, was famous as an R&B singer/songwriter, but was most familiar to TV fans as the voice of Chef on South Park. When Chef was killed off the show—after a famous falling out between Hayes and Parker-Stone for the show's making fun of Scientology, of which he was an adherent—it was a big loss: a character like Stan or Kyle may be the heart of South Park, but Chef was its soul. Its hot buttered soul.

It may seem inappropriate to link to that killing-off episode as a tribute to Hayes, but Parker and Stone made that final episode not revenge against him but a tribute to him. OK, they turned Chef into a brainwashed pedophile, mocked Scientology one more time and killed him off graphically: it's South Park, that's what they do. But they also made the point, as Chef's eulogy put plainly, of asking their fans to remember Hayes not for the last, ugly chapter in his association with the show, but for everything they loved about him and his character:

Hayes as Chef remains one of the most brilliant casting strokes in animation, and in TV in general. His character was a rare voice of adult reason in South Park's world, and channeling him through Hayes' lusty voice in that pudgy body—just imagining him saying "Children" brings a smile to my face—was genius, as was his delivery of the raunchiest recipe in musical history. Packed full of vitamins, and good for you.

In a new ad, the Obama campaign casts John McCain as "Washington's biggest celebrity" and reminds us of his numerous media and Hollywood appearances:

I dunno. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I've never been that convinced that the "Barack Obama is a celebrity" attack angle is damaging per se to Obama. (I'm with Jimmy Kimmel, who ran the McCain ad, cutting it off after the "He''s the biggest celebrity in the world" line, and concluded it with, "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message.") And to the extent that it is effective at all, it is probably so because—fair or not—it resonates with other criticisms that are specific to Obama.

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After liveblogging Friday's opening ceremonies, I took most of the weekend off from the Games, except for the occasional round of beach volleyball. (Actually, judging by the number of times it was on when I randomly turned NBC on this weekend, apparently beach volleyball is the most popular sport on Earth.) Any thoughts on NBC's Gamesmanship?

From Vesuvio to Lutece. / AMC

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, crack open a bag of Utz—may I recommend The Crab Chip—and watch Mad Men.

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