WHAT A COUNTRY!

I didn't watch the Grammies last night (didn't the Doobie Brothers get back together or something?), but earlier in the day I watched an interview on CNN with a Russian country band called -- and if I was a Russian country musician, this is exactly what I'd call my band -- Berring Straits, who had apparently been nominated for something somewhere.

Here's how you can tell I spent way too much of the '80s listening to tragically bad standup comedy: As I was watching these perfectly nice Russian musicans field various softballs from the CNN anchor, the only thing I could think of was one sentence: "In Russia, the Grammies watch YOU!"

Okay, okay. Try coming up with your own wacky post-glastnost Soviet country music humor. Attempting to do so drove the greatest Russian thinker of our time, one Mssr. Yakoff Smirnoff, to madness, so clearly I never stood a chance. Though I got an even bigger, and equally unintentional, laugh out of CNN minutes later when the same anchor, over a bed of dramatic War in Iraq Deux(tm) music, somehow managed to blurt out this sentence with a straight face: "We'll look at how the media in other countries are reporting on the Iraq crisis. Are they reporting the news, or just grandstanding their own countries' political positions?"

In Russia, CNN watches--oh, never mind.