I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his time. (You never hear about someone dying at his time.)

Still, I cringed at the excessiveness of his obsequies. Journalism has a long, and appealingly human, tradition of providing a little nicer send-off to colleagues than someone in another business might receive. That's why newspapers give their own printers and truck drivers suspiciously long obituaries. The over-the-top eulogies for Russert were a species of this phenomenon, but that didn't make them less bizarre. I like to think that Russert, looking down, would want to interrupt his media mourners in mid-gush just the way he called politicians on their prevarications.

But at least that's over now -- except that it isn't. Tomorrow the Newseum (I know, it's a goofy name for an interesting resource) will unveil a new exhibit: a re-creation of Russert's office at NBC News, complete with his desk "stacked high with research material, books and handwritten notes, illustrating the rigorous preparation Russert put into each show" and "mementos of his beloved Buffalo Bills." What, no Rolodex?

This has just a whiff of the medieval Catholic practice of venerating relics of the saints, which probably would amuse Russert -- and, I hope, embarrass him.

I'd deliberately stopped watching the news late Thursday evening after being overwhelmed by the horror out of Ft. Hood and the daylong tsunami of news in general. Sometimes, you've got to switch brain hemispheres.

I thought comedy and fashion would do that for me. So I skipped over to ''Project Runway,'' now with extra added fun in the sighting of L.A. landmarks, inasmuch as this season was shot here.

Lo and behold, there on the Lifetime channel was one landmark I didn't expect to see. Beaming bright in the sunshine, on a hillside above the 405 freeway -- yes, that was indeed the Getty Center, But it was also Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, immaculately suited, with a smile measurable in lumens, welcoming the designers to Los Angeles. Then, boom, faster than you could say ''auf wiedersehen,'' he was gone. As cameos go, though, it was probably more air time than he's used to getting on the six o'clock news..

And then, on Comedy Central, a little more than 90 minutes later, William Bratton, who just left the job of L.A. police chief on Saturday, was in the ejector seat on the "Colbert Report." He was a bit more subdued than we're used to seeing him here, maybe because Colbert only really asked about policing New York, a city Bratton characterized as ''a hellhole'' of broken-window offenders like squeegee pests and turnstile jumpers before he was able to work his police chiefly way on the Big Apple. I'm sorry Colbert didn't ask him anything about L.A.; I already miss Bratton's pungent observations about the sundry scofflaw ''knuckleheads'' and ''loony tunes'' of California.

And then I turned off the television and went to bed. I don't think I could have handled the surprise of seeing Sheriff Lee Baca in a guest spot on the SyFy channel.

-- Patt Morrison

Just when you thought the era of bigger-is-always-better was over, the Oasis of the Seas heads on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic to Florida.

This isn't just a really, really, really big cruise ship -- 40% larger than the previous title holder. It looks like my grandparents' Bronx apartment building perched on a barge and topped with a flying saucer. The $1.5-billion ship has entire neighborhoods, seven of them, and no wonder. With capacity for 6,300 passengers and more than 2,000 crew members, this isn't exactly the setting for an intimate cruise. By lowering its smokestacks, the 20-story-high ship was barely able to squeak under a Danish bridge on its way from Finland. And for those who yearn for the biggest and newest in travel, its home port will be Fort Lauderdale, with passenger cruises scheduled to begin in December.

So far, cabins are selling well, reports Royal Caribbean, owner of oasis of the Seas, even with the ship's  urban-development design and curious name. An oasis is a wet, lush part of the desert, and even though it has come to mean a refuge of any sort, I can't help the picture of passengers' feet sloshing in puddles of water on deck in the midst of the Caribbean.

Photo credit: Johnny Holmen / EPA

-- Karin Klein

  In today's editorial and opinion pages, the Times editorial board gives former Assembly Speaker Fabuan Nuñez a shout-out for being cleared of ethics charges arising from his lavish spending, and then gives him a shout-down for the underlying actions. No, he's not a crook. But he still relied too heavily on the largesse of donors with issues to press in Sacramento.

And we pair a shout-down of Philadelphia Eagles player Michael Vick's dogfighting operation with a shout-out to Wayne Pacelle of the the Humane Society of the United States -- for going on a, pardon the expression, dog-and-pony tour with Vick to educate communities about stopping cruelty to animals.

And shoutouts and shout downs abound for the food industry's Smart Choices program.

Columnist Meghan Daum weighs in on farming-chic, and two folks sack Sacramento's recent move to waive environmental laws to hasten construction of a football stadium in Los Angeles or, rather, the City of Industry. Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) worries that the Legislature "opened the floodgates" to future exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act. And sports author Dave Zirin sees just the latest in a series of sweetheart deals between unwitting taxpayers and tycoon team owners.

Photo: AP/Nick Ut

Hey parents, your little ones may posses stronger wills than a hardened Guantanamo Bay detainee. Some of the kid-friendly entertainment consumed on a mass scale by children, including Barney the Purple Dinosaur and the Sesame Street puppets, is being used for so-called enhanced interrogation of suspected terrorists:

Read the whole article by AP here.

Using G-rated jingles from childhood is a curious method to break suspected terrorists, not so much because the songs are meant to sooth and entertain children than because of the feeling that this practice doesn't come across as very surprising. There seems to be a point in our lives when our toddler-years immersion in kiddie media gives way to a wholesale rebuke of this entertainment, sometimes going so far as to result in a phobia. After all, who doesn't know at least one fully grown adult who suffers from coulrophobia? (Perhaps we can just chalk that one up to the clown scenes in the TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's "It.")

But I'd like to know: What's on your torture playlist? What list of songs, played repeatedly at high volume, would make you cry,"Stop!"? Would Barney and Big Bird break you? Post your list of songs as a comment below.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: AP

For any parents who are truly shocked and dismayed that propping their babies in front of a TV didn't result in child prodigies, the Walt Disney Company has good news: It is offering a $15.99 refund for Baby Einstein videos, up to four per customer.

The company says this is just its usual satisfaction-guaranteed sort of deal. Not exactly. The videos for this refund could have been purchased at any time and used till they wore out. Receipts not required.

The videos have been the subject of complaints and a threatened lawsuit by an advocacy group called Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, which contended that contrary to the company's early claims that Baby Einstein would enhance child development, watching TV is actually detrimental to children younger than 2. The campaign had more going for its argument than Baby Einstein did, with the American Academy of Pediatrics taking a dim view of the under-2 set as a TV audience and several studies to back that up. The pitch for the videos' benefits softened in the last couple of years. 

Personally, I don't think an occasional half hour here or there of watching colorful images on TV does major harm to a baby. In fact, I see the value of video babysitting. Let's face it, the pediatrics academy isn't spending the entire day with a fussy infant. Parents need a break now and then, and if Baby Einstein keep Mom and Dad from totally losing it, I'll chalk that up as helpful to a child's development, though human interaction, play and an occasional really good burp probably do more for an infant's well-being. If anyone believed Disney had cued into a magic, painless way to create babies guaranteed to test into the Gifted and Talented Education program by third grade, their children's bigger problem wasn't in how many videos they watched, it was in their parents' DNA.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

I don't usually consider Facebook posts to be worthy of transplanting to a (cough cough) professional blog like this one, but I'm making an exception for an FB thread about a Washington Post story.

The article focused on Georgetown University sophomore who has advertised for a personal assistant who would handle tasks "such as organizing his closet, dropping him off and picking him up from work, scheduling haircuts, putting gas in the car and taking it in for service, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry (although the assistant will be paid only for the time spent loading, unloading and folding clothes, not the entire laundry cycle)." The pay: $10-$12 an hour.

One response was whimsical: "Just this morning I told my mom I needed a PA. She laughed at me. Then [she] saw this article on Facebook and told me about it." (Oh, oh, Parent On Social Media Alert!) But the Facebooker who introduced the subject considered the student's quest  "the most egregious of all insults."

 I weighed in ...

Columnist Jonah Goldberg foresees clouds ahead for the Democrats -- in fact, a coming storm so severe that it could end Democratic control of Congress. It's building from the Tea Party movement, which Goldberg sees as an heir to the Ross Perot third-party movement of the 1990s. "If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can't even see."

Also on today's Op-Ed page, scholar Giles Dorronsoro explains why U.S. attempts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas in the south and east are probably doomed to fail. And ACLU National Security Project chief Jameel Jaffer decries an attempt by Congress to circumvent the courts by giving the secretary of Defense the power to withhold photographs of combatants "engaged, captured or detained" by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

On the Editorial page, The Times weighs in on Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's policy change on medical marijuana. Though we're happy that federal prosecutors will make marijuana cases a low priority in states like California that have passed laws approving its medicinal use, we think that's the wrong approach. The administration shouldn't be picking and choosing states in which to enforce federal law -- rather, it should de-emphasize medical marijuana cases in all 50.

We also note that the best place for local health departments to conduct swine flu vaccinations is at public schools -- yet that's not where the inoculations will take place in Los Angeles, thanks to a failure by the school district and the county to properly coordinate.

And we muse on the bizarre spectacle presented by Colorado's Heene family, accused of perpetrating the "balloon boy" hoax in an attempt to drum up publicity for a reality show. "As much as some people will do just about anything for a Hollywood contract, a good number of the rest will lap up the juicy story of their wrongdoing. In reality, perhaps we all get what we wanted."

Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times