eh_notsomuch

...MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who owns three $850 Legends Suite season tickets, was unhappy prices were cut only for those with front-row seats while others will be given additional tickets.

"If they're offering only selective refunds, depend upon it: There are going to be lawsuits," he said. "Great, more tickets nobody wants. The silver lining here is that even more charities are going to be getting even more tickets from me."

The phrase - well, the "palace" part - is Derek Jeter's. It's unoriginal, cornball, and entirely accurate. In managing to transplant the history of Yankee Stadium, and amplify the grandeur of the old place, and wrap the whole thing up in state-of-the-art hi-tech bells-and-whistles, the Yankees have created a landmark.

I'm a traditionalist, as pro-past as anybody watching the game. Since my first tour of the shell of the ballpark a year ago this month, I have been waiting to be disappointed. At every turn, I have instead been overwhelmed.

The ballpark is deliberately outsized, to recreate for an adult the awestruck feeling of walking into the old place, for the first time, as a kid, when you might've gotten the impression that the people who built Yankee Stadium were the same ones who had done The Grand Canyon.

* HANNIGAN'S BIRTHDAY BABY
AMERICAN PIE star ALYSON HANNIGAN was given a special gift on her 35th birthday -- her first-born child.

The actress and husband Alexis Denisof welcomed baby Satyana into the world on 24 March (09) - meaning mother and daughter will share the special anniversary.

A spokesperson for the star tells People.com, "They're very excited, and mom and baby are doing great."

And Hannigan, who kept the sex of her baby a secret throughout the pregnancy, will be glad she has given birth - because she lost the ability to concentrate while she was with child.

She told TV host Ellen DeGeneres in February (09), "I get tired a lot and I have pregnancy brain, which I never realised was a thing but it is. I sort of feel like a Koala bear where I'm slightly stoned all the time and I'll say the wrong word."

Hannigan and Denisof met on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2000 and married in California in 2003. (MJ//LR)

WASHINGTON - MARCH 05: U.S. first lady Michelle Obama serves lunch at Miriam's Kitchen which provides meals, case management services and housing support to nearly 250 homeless men and women March 5, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The visit was a part of the first lady's effort to connect with the Washington, D.C. community and also highlight the city's best practices. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

AVC: What is your understanding of what a cult film is?

BC: There’s various degrees of cultishness. You’ve got your Rocky Horror Picture Show,which is the A-number-one kind of cult movie. Then you’ve got your American Pie kind of deal, which is a giant in DVD and all that. I liken it this way: In a mainstream movie, 100,000 people will see it once. One person will see a cult movie 100,000 times. Sometimes, like with Evil Dead 2, people have seen it a hundred times. If they’re feeling bad, they pop it in. It becomes their personal opiate.

AVC: What makes a movie a cult classic? Sometimes it seems like a backhanded compliment, because the film tanked.

BC: I disagree. A cult classic is one that has been fully embraced by an alternative audience, not the popular audience. There are two different audiences. One is a very specific sci-fi lover or a horror lover. The difference between my fans and Tom Cruise’s fans is that no one is tattooing Risky Business on their back. Yet I’ve seen the poster for Army Of Darkness on a guy’s back—his whole back. It was beautiful.

...Rachel Maddow - in her own words a mannish lesbian policy wonk who doesn't own a television set - is not your average anchorwoman in America, or indeed on this side of the Atlantic. Later today when she goes live on air she must swap her Red Sox T-shirt and baggy Levi's jeans for what she calls "lady clothes" - a bland slate-grey trouser suit. (She won't say who it's by for fear of insulting the designer.) Her chunky Eric Morecambe glasses will be exchanged for contact lenses (which she's still getting used to). Reluctantly, there will be the merest smear of lipstick and blusher. She will, however, cling on to her trainers, safely out of sight under the desk. (The stylists at American Vogue recently offered her an array of extravagantly high-heeled Louboutin shoes for a photo shoot. She insisted on a pair of Converse boots.)

With their ironed hair and shrink-wrapped foreheads, women on American television news programmes all too often come across as shrill harpies or eye candy. Maddow seems to have both types on the run. She goes on air as if she's got nothing to prove, this despite the fact that she'll have done hours of preparation: a cheerful and clever geek, fluent in irony, alternately idealistic and sceptical, who doesn't believe in talking down to the viewers. Her aim? To raise the level of debate in America so that the right kind of decisions are made in the future....

NOW that Adam Baldwin has figured out how to make it look easy — this surly, deadpan, tough-guy thing he does every Monday night on NBC as the monosyllabic secret-agent sidekick on the action-comedy series “Chuck” — he doesn’t mind admitting how hard it used to be.

He was 18 when he got his first taste of movie-star limelight as the title character in the 1980 film, “My Bodyguard,” then roles in summer comedies like “D.C. Cab” in 1983 and smaller parts in prestige films like “Ordinary People” despite not having a clue about what he was doing.

“I was horrible,” he said of some of his early performances, particularly the one in “D.C. Cab” (in which his co-stars included Bill Maher, Gary Busey and Mr. T). “I didn’t know how to work. I didn’t know how to process a character, and, certainly, I wasn’t as funny as I should have been.

“But I did learn a lot of technical stuff, how to be on a set, where to stand, how to do a fight scene, things like that,” he said during a recent interview in a high-end Santa Monica coffee shop, one of those mad-scientist places where they grind the coffee in front of you and serve it in vacuum-sealed flasks on a silver tray. “But then I had to learn how to act. And that just takes some people longer than others. I’m no Leonardo DiCaprio....”

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there....”

He reads several papers, eats breakfast with his family and helps pack his daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, off to school before making the 30-second commute downstairs — a definite perk for a man trying to balance work and family life. He eats dinner with his family, then often returns to work; aides have seen him in the Oval Office as late as 10 p.m., reading briefing papers for the next day.

“Even as he is sober about these challenges, I have never seen him happier,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The chance to be under the same roof with his kids, essentially to live over the store, to be able to see them whenever he wants, to wake up with them, have breakfast and dinner with them — that has made him a very happy man.”

In the West Wing, Mr. Obama is a bit of a wanderer. When Mr. Bush wanted to see a member of his staff, the aide was summoned to the Oval Office. But Mr. Obama tends to roam the halls; one day last week, he turned up in the office of his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who was in the unfortunate position of having his feet up on the desk when the boss walked in.

“Wow, Gibbs,” the press secretary recalls the president saying. “Just got here and you already have your feet up.” Mr. Gibbs scrambled to stand up, surprising Mr. Obama, who is not yet accustomed to having people rise when he enters a room.

If there is one thing Mr. Obama has not gotten around to changing, it is the Oval Office décor.

When Mr. Bush moved in, he exercised his presidential decorating prerogatives and asked his wife, Laura, to supervise the design of a new rug. Mr. Bush loved to regale visitors with the story of the rug, whose sunburst design, he liked to say, was intended to evoke a feeling of optimism.

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye.

“He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’”

Twas the night before Festivus, when all through the blog
Not a creature was stirring, not even a frog.
The photos were hung by the bloggers with care,
In hopes that Keith Olbermann soon would be there.

The bloggers were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of Keithiness danced in their heads.
And CLL in her snuggies, and caul in his cap
Had just settled their brains for a two week nap.

When out on the blogosphere there arose such a clatter,
to a man they hit keyboards to see what was the matter.
Away to the terminal I flew like a flash,
Opened the window and threw up the cache.

The brightness and constrast of the just opened screen
Gave the brilliance of kodachrome to objects then seen,
When, what to my wondering eyes did appear
But Countdown himself and his guests very near.

With this merry person, someone also in tow
I knew in a moment it was Rachel Maddow....

Who was 2008's leading personality in the media world? Who left a lasting imprint on the industry — for good or ill? Cast your vote in I Want Media's seventh annual online election to name the Media Person of the Year.

Readers of I Want Media have again suggested an eclectic crew of candidates to be considered for recognition as the year's biggest mover and shaker in the mediasphere.

The voting is open until 12 midnight ET this Sunday, Dec. 7, with the winner to be announced the following morning.

While maybe not as prestigious as Time magazine's Person of the Year, I Want Media's Media Person of the Year is "still a big deal," according to Rupert Murdoch (er, actually his New York Post).