Your Late Night Links

- "Speechless" is drawing a lot of praise. Congrats to George, Alan and company on all the hard work. Here is a flattering piece in Time and one from the Associated Press (via CNN). The AP story also gives some journalistic love to Kristen and Peter, our fellow online activists at Hollywood Interrupted. Between their MySpace and Facebook squads, the Virtual Picket Line is approximately 6500 strong.

- Mark Lisanti at Defamer beat me to this (like Nikki, that guy blogs as if it's his job or something), but I still want to quote this line from Ben Stein's New York Times column:

To the bosses, I say, “We are not afraid.”

I like to imagine Ben Stein intoning, "Counter... Counter..." But then, it's getting kind of late.

- Catherine Butterfield, a picketer at Sony, sent in this quote from New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin:

"'Gossip Girl' has indeed become a hit, though not a megahit. It's now possible -- and necessary -- for Nielsen to count viewings of shows that people have recorded on their DVRs and watched within seven days, and 'Gossip Girl's ratings jump from not so hot to respectable when those figures are taken into account. It's also the top TV show on iTunes at the moment. It was on the basis of these two elements of our brave new multiplatform world that the CW decided recently to order a full season of 'Gossip Girl.' Advertisers being drawn to a show that sells well on iTunes wasn't even a concept until a couple of years ago. All the new ways of delivering shows to viewers are starting to pan out for the studios and the networks that own them. That they continue to balk at sharing a larger fraction of their stupendous wealth with writers -- the people who make that wealth possible -- is as mystifying as it is sensationally wrong."

Not just wrong, "sensationally wrong." Wow. Variety subscription: Cancel. New Yorker subscription: Renew.

- I'm guessing that in the time it took Nancy Franklin to type, "All the new ways of delivering shows," three new ways launched. The latest I've read about is SyncTV. Big thanks to Disney picketer David Simkins for sending me the announcement from MacWorld.com.

- More New Yorker content! Writer Dana Goodyear maintains a blog about Los Angeles. This week, she visited with Jerry Maren, "who, at eighty-seven, is the only remaining representative of the Lollipop Guild." And Jerry, a proud Republican, is no fan of big media.

[H]e was still bitter about his treatment at the hands of M-G-M, sixty-eight years ago: “They paid us fifty dollars a week. No residuals, no nothing. Midgets don’t grown on trees, you know.” Then he pointed out that “the dog” -- I guess he meant Toto -- had been making a hundred and twenty-five a week.

- WGA member Alan Shapiro has posted a round-up of strike coverage, and it's easy on the eyes.

- Yahoo!'s slideshow feature continues to add strike photos. And Eric Appel is the latest member to send us a Flickr pool.

- I found this parody protest song by Jill Sobule buried in the comments of a previous post. But she's right about what will happen without another season of "Mad Men." That's no joke. Back in September, Jill wrote an interesting essay about how digital delivery has changed the music business.

- I would go to sleep now if I weren't certain I'd have nightmares about Nick Counter's horrible robot minion.