Welcome to the '07

Happy New Year, everybody! Couple of minor pieces of business before TV gets back to normal (relatively) starting tomorrow.

First, David Mills -- who you might remember from his writing for such shows as "NYPD Blue," "Homicide," "ER," "The Corner" and "The Wire," not to mention his own creation, "Kingpin" -- has joined the blogosphere under his nom de guerre, Undercover Black Man. A heavy emphasis on his love of funk music, and a lot of the early entries deal with the death of James Brown.

Second, what say you all on Dick Clark's continued involvement as an on-camera presence on "New Year's Rockin' Eve"? I'm torn. On the one hand, he invented the thing, his ability to keep appearing on it has been the prime motivator in his rehab, and in general I find it shameful the way Hollywood treats the old and infirm. On the other hand, the stroke has eliminated the smoothness that was the bulk of his appeal as a TV personality. (His canniness as a producer was his greatest asset overall, though.) Given my own experience with stroke victims, his speech isn't likely to improve much past where it is now, and his rhythms overall were so off that he was 3 or 4 seconds behind both the graphics and the crowd on the countdown to New Year's.

Ah, to hell with it. It's not like he's a Supreme Court Justice trying to hang on into his late 80s; this is a New Year's Eve countdown show, and it's his thing. As long as he wants to do it, I say let him.

What say the rest of you?