joegratz.net

Two items:

• First, Salon has an excerpt from Al Franken’s new book, about which Fox News brought a particularly silly trademark suit recently. Incidentally, does anyone else see it as a bad sign that the sponsor of Salon Premium’s Day Pass is … Salon Premium?
• Second, the author of Bat Boy has written a play titled Fair and Balanced. The whole play is available via the “preview” link on that page. Vicious, but not that good. It’s a little bit like a Jacobean court masque written by a high school boy obsessed with Beckett who’s trying to win over one of the girls on the lit mag. If you can imagine that.

Update, 29 August 2003: Brian Flemming, the playwright, has a response. And I will temper my review thus (because I left some things out before; I was in a hurry): First, I thought Bat Boy was brilliant; this was pretty clearly tossed off and probably unrepresentative. Second, O’Reilly’s monologue was hilarious and slightly scary. It’s all the things you can tell he wants to say every night on the show, but can’t. For antagonistic Factor viewers, the play is worth a read just for the monologue.