The fifth season of Mad Men got off to a fast start, and although a lot was happening, the episode will likely go down as the `Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo’ episode, after the song that Jessica, Don’s young wife, performed for him at the birthday party she threw for him.

As Lauren Streib reports in The Daily Beast, the song is actually called `Zou Bisou Bisou’. “The original version was recorded by Gillian Hills, a Brigitte Bardot lookalike who found fame as a French yé-yé girl—one of a handful of young, female European singers who catapulted yé-yé music into an international movement, popular among teens during the era. (“Yé-yé” refers to exclamations of “yeah yeah!” during rock and roll.) Roughly translated, “zou” is a casual exclamation and “bisou” is a sweet kiss—a peck on the cheek to say hello and goodbye. So the lyrics hash out to: Oh! Kiss kiss / My God, they are sweet! / …Oh! Kiss kiss / the sound of kisses /…Oh! Kiss kiss /…That means, I confess / But yes, I love only you!”

The song was performed by Sophia Loren in the 1960 film The Millionairess, co-starring Peter Sellers. “Loren sang an English version, Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo. Loren’s version uses the same tune, but the lyrics and delivery swell with a bit more sophistication. The movie was a hit in the U.K., though the American response was lukewarm.”

I was sorry to see that on Wednesday The New York Times Op-Ed page turned over a third of its precious acreage to Bill Maher so that he could offer some self-serving drivel about how America needs to be more accepting of dumb, vaguely insulting jokes.

At least that what he seemed to be saying. He led off referring to a lame joke that Robert DeNiro made at an Obama fundraiser about whether America is ready for a white First Lady, which caused professional mischief-maker Newt Gingrich to pause in his brilliant parody of a political campaign to demand that President Obama offer an apology. DeNiro tugged his forelock and everything was set to be forgotten when Maher chose to spotlight the event as Exhibit A in his campaign against Excessive Touchiness.

“When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up? ‘’

Surely I can’t; I wouldn’t pass the final if these questions were on Intro to Contretemps 101. But this appeal to reason was hardly Maher’s true agenda. Maher was camouflauing himself amid these minor offenders because just a couple of weeks ago, after Rush Limbaugh was roundly and soundly rebuked for his nasty and misogynistic vilification of the Georgetown Law school student Sandra Fluke, Maher found himself dragged up on similar charges. In the Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers cataloged the painfully large number of insults that supposedly liberal commentators used against women who happened to hold views different than their own. Among those she cited: Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut” on MSNBC ; Keith Olbermann saying on MSNBC that Michelle Malkin was “a mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick’’; Chris Matthews, again on MSNBC, calling Hilary Clinton at various times a “she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” “Madame Defarge”, “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity”; and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who wrote in his blog, “When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth.”

“But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny,’’ wrote Powers, “is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC. Maher has called Sarh Palin a “dumb twat” and “a cunt.’’ He called Palin and Michelle Bachmann “MILFs’’–“Morons I’d Like to Forget.’’

As is now all too obvious, Maher didn’t write the article because he was concerned about people being too insensitive; it’s because being a pig and a boor is a big part of his act, and he’s probably worried that if too many people start to call him on it, he’ll lose his HBO gig and find himself back in front of a brick wall at Mr. Laffs saying “Hey, tell me—what’s with chicks and shoes?’’

“I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone,’’ writes Maher. “If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything. . . ‘’

Is that what Maher is doing when he calls Palin a cunt? Being a little rough-edged? Supplying a little color? Emotion? I know it’s not spontaneity. Every one of those witless insults is measured for effect, calculated to get the meatheads in the audience to go “Woooooo!’’

These remarks are not clever, or witty, or even very entertaining, and certainly not brave. They’re just markers, a way Maher tells the audience that he and they are alike because none of them likes Palin, except that he’s a bigger truth-teller, because he’s willing to be bolder, more irreverent, and more obscene.

In fact, all he’s doing is being a pig. He may as well oink at his audience, and let them squeal at him in return. He may as well run as advertisement that says “I can’t help it if I’m not as smart as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.”

Maker may contend that he treats men just as harshly as women, but he’s smart enough to recognize the weakness of that argument. Men are not laboring under the effects of centuries of discrimination and worse. He wouldn’t use words like nigger and kike, and for the same reasons, he shouldn’t use cunt or slut or twat. These words cut more deeply than we can see. A 2010 study showed that calling a female candidate such sexist names as “ice queen” and “mean girl” significantly undercut her political standing, and did much more harm than gender-neutral criticism based solely on her policy positions and actions. “Harder-edged attacks, such as referring to her as a prostitute, were equally damaging among voters,’’ reported USA Today. “The female candidate lost twice as much support when even the mild sexist language was added to the attack. Support for her initially measured at 43% fell to 33% after the policy-based attacks but to 21% after the sexist taunts.’’ The study showed that the drop was significant among both men and women, those under 50 and over 50, and those with college educations and without. “The sexist language undermined favorable perceptions of the female candidate, leading voters to view her as less empathetic, trustworthy and effective.’’

Maher says he doesn’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. I don’t think he’s in any real danger of that. What I don’t want is to live in a country where my wife or my daughters or my friends could stand up and speak their minds, and be slagged as a slut or a cunt by nitwits like Limbaugh or Maher. This isn’t Afghanistan or Iran. Women shouldn’t be ridiculed and degraded for speaking their minds.

Maher’s on HBO, so his piggery can’t cost him advertisers. But what it ought to cost him is the approval of free-thinking people. So here’s my question. It’s for Charles Blow Arianna Huffington Alexandra Pelosi, Andrew Sullivan, Russ Feingold, James Carville, Ross Douthat, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Heilemann ,Eliot Spitzer, Al Sharpton Bill Moyers, Jennifer Granholm, Chris Matthews and all the other leaders who have been on guests on Maher’s program. Is whatever you’re selling so important that you will perfume Maher’s stench with your presence on his stage?

In The Atlantic, Jared Keller has assembled a rather brainy slide show–a collection of literary references in The Simpsons. Many of my favorites are here, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chambon, George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Robert Caro, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe, The Economist, and William L. Shirer.Somehow Keller missed the episde in which Lisa mentioned the end of Spy.

JMal CBC from Kenneth B Smith on Vimeo.

The streets and parts and sidewalks of London are home to some 800,000 closed circuit TV cameras, a huge number of which are mounted on walls of public buildings. The cameras capture the comings and goings of vast numbers of people, scarcely any of whom feel that the cameras constitute an intrusion on their privacy. The general feeling is, “We’re out in public, we’re behaving normally, we’re assuming that we’re being observed by many other individuals–what difference does it make if we are also being seen on camera?” A very common-sensical conclusion, even if my inner civil libertarian remains uneasy.

But what’s fascinating, and weird, is that the when the tables are turned, and the buildings are being photographed, there is great anxiety, at least among the security officers representing the companies that own or take space in the buildings. This video was created earlier this summer, when the London Street Photography Festival assigned six photographers to shoot various locations in the city–all on public ground. But as you can see from this video, which was shot by videographers accompanying the photographers, all six shooters drew the attention of private security guards. In three cases, police were summoned, although in each case, the police sided with the photographers. None of them bought the idea that security was being compromised. Another small victory for common sense.

But it’s odd, isn’t it? Apparently people can be observed and filmed, but in the minds of corporate security, not even the edifices that house the corporations, which are in plain view 24 hours a day, cannot be photographed. It does show that at least in the minds of the corporations, they are a state unto themselves.

. . .the party is over for Friday Night Lights, a terrific television series based on an excellent Peter Berg movie based ona very good Buzz Bissinger book. The story of a high school football coach and his wife, his players, their families, and the culture of small town football, Friday Night Lights did an excellent job of creating characters and situating them not just in a cultural milieu, but an emotional one as well. Never has a series worked as hard to show all the social strata in a town that is thrown together in a high school. The actors were terrific: anchored by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, the cast seemed exceptionally real. Other standouts over the years included Adrianne Palicki, Taylor Kitsch, Brad Leland, Aimee Teegarden, Michael B. Jordan, and many many more.

Was this the best conservative television series ever? Quite possibly. The fundamental values of the series were family, work, self-sacrifice, teamwork,and submission to authority. Individualism was accepted, but it had its place (indeed, one of the faults is that if you were successful in upholding one of these values, like teamwork, dysfunctional individualism was overlooked.) How I wish conservatives would promote these values, rather than the causes of big business and religious fundamentalism they instead espouse. Coach Taylor was a benign dictator; often intolerant, unreasonable, and close-minded when presented with a problem, he would often enlarge his views after receiving the good counsel of his wife, which he valued. He was not unchanging, but he was always firm, which is a pretty good combo for a leader.

Three cheers for Craig Ferguson, who explained on his program why he wasn’t going to make jokes about Charlie Sheen anymore, which is because the dud is mentally ill. (This isn’t my armchair diagnosis, but that of my fried Dr. Howard Samuels, the noted therapist. “Charlie Sheen is a hardcore drug addict,” he said last week. “What’s been going on is typical of someone who smokes a lot of crack. For the first three to six months that the drug is leaving the system people are extremely grandiose, arrogant, entitled and angry.”

Anyway, Ferguson offered an historical parallel. “There was a mental hospital in London,” the brilliant Scots TV host said. “It’s been there for a very long time. It started as a priory in I think the 12th or 13th century. Anyway, it’s called Bedlam. And what happened was, in the 18th century, people used to go along and pay money — they would pay a penny — and they would look through the peepholes of the cells. And they would look at the lunatics and they would laugh at them. …So I’m looking at the Charlie Sheen thing unfold, and I’m thinking “Aw, man!” Naturally, his remarks drew a laugh, though rather less at Sheen’s expense than out of a shock of recognition.

One interesting thing about Sheen in this past week is how he has become a model of the new 21st century content provider–famous, followed, entertaining, news-breaking, brand-building–and free. Sheen is unemployed. He continues to make money from residuals, but the terms of that deal have been set. All the radio and TV programs whose ratings he has been boosting pay him nothing. He reached a million followers on Twitter faster than anyone, but this pays him nothing (reportedly he might tout products, which would earn him some money.) But on the whole, he has joined the bloggers at The Huffington Post and rabid YouTubers and everyone who posts comments and clips about Charlie Sheen on Facebook. We’re paying our pennies to Bedlam, and the lunatic ain’t getting paid.

Let’s see how long the goddesses roll with that arrangement.

And now–right after I praise Darrow‘s fab illustration in New York magazine–I join Craig Ferguson in establishing my blog as a Sheen-free sanctuary.

One of the hardest things to do is to explain to a young person what it was like when something that has become established and famous was brand new. This clip of Mel Brooks appearing on The Dick Cavett Show offers a small bit of what it was like when he was first rolling out The Producers. Brooks is his usual frantic, funny self, but his best line comes near the very end of the clip: “Tito had the car.”

The very sexy Anne Francis, a native of Ossining, died yesterday at the age of 80. Many know her best for her portrayal of Altaira in the sci fi classic Forbidden Planet (“Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet” goes the line in “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She also had roles in Bad Day at Black Rock and Blackboard Jungle. I know her better for her television work: appearances on The Twilight Zone, The Virginian, The Fugitive (with Charles Bronson and of course David Janssen), The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and Burke’s Law, where she introduced her signature character, Honey West. The curvy private eye with the pet ocelot was the creation of Gloria and Forest Fickling, who, writing under the pseudonym G.G. Fickling, featured her in a series of eleven mystery novels. Honey West then became a TV series that ran on ABC for 30 episodes during the 1965-66. I was 12 years old when the show ran on the air, even though it was a pretty awful show with a terrible opening sequence and theme music, it made an enormous impression on me. I can’t imagine why. Rest in peace, Ms. Francis.