I'm dreaming of a blurry Christmas.

Here's a picture I took on December 4 during Chicago's first big snow of the winter. Happy holidays, 3.6 readers!

These Carpenters never performed any miracles.

I'm listening to the Carpenters' second album, Close to You (1970), right now, which I checked out from the library. (By the by, why isn't the RIAA taking on libraries in court? They're music-pirating enablers. But only if you can get your computer to actually recognize and load their scratched CDs, of course.) You know what? The Carpenters are no Bread.

Bread has songs like "Baby I'm-a Want You," "Make It With You," and "Sweet Surrender" that make me nostalgic for a time I never knew: the early '70s. And Beatlesque songs like "Daughter" make me realize how smart and reliable David Gates, James Griffin, and company were as musical craftsmen, while tracks like "Fancy Dancer" show that Bread could eliminate the soft from soft rock on occasion and deliver on that front as well. It's not their fault the heavier numbers didn't make it onto the radio. They were studio musicians, songwriters for hire, and producers before they came together to form Bread in the late '60s, and their experience and earned confidence come through in their music. You're in good hands with Bread.

Just as the Carpenters are no Bread, Chicago is no Bread, either, although Chicago would probably be offended by that statement, because I bet they think they rock much harder than they actually do. "Hard Habit to Break" almost rocks at one point, but that's because Bill Champlin sounds like he's popping a few capillaries when he sings "I'm addicted to you, baby!!!!" From what I've heard, most of the guys in Chicago were addicted to something that resembles baby powder. But not Peter Cetera. He was too mellow and blond for that. But if he was surrounded by cokeheads on endless tours throughout the late '60s, all of the '70s, and the early '80s, can you blame him for finally leaving after 18 years to pursue "The Glory of Love" and the glory of a paycheck that didn't have to be split a dozen ways? Children generally leave home at 18. Cetera had earned the right to grow up, move away, and pursue an adult (contemporary) education.

The Carpenters didn't do themselves any favors on Close to You covering songs like "Help!" and "Baby It's You" in the most Muzak-y way possible. The songs on the 1994 tribute album If I Were a Carpenter, which my ex-girlfriend had in college, are ten times better than any song on Close to You, especially Matthew Sweet's cover of "Let Me Be the One." Actually, I do like "(They Long to Be) Close to You," but that's partly because singing the waaaaaah-ah-ah-ah-aaaaahs in the song with a complete lack of subtlety is too much fun to pass up.

I'm not going to make an anorexia joke here, but I do think it's safe to say that both Karen and Richard Carpenter would've been wise to add Bread to their musical diet.

why my favorite TV show died

A radio station in Charleston, South Carolina, claimed that Moonlighting, my favorite show when I was younger, never recovered after the writers' strike that delayed the beginning of the 1988 fall season. Or so my friend Beau told me, as his wife, Kristen, had told him. But those Charleston DJs were only half right. Here's what I wrote to Beau and Kristen ...

Moonlighting was hurt by a lot of things. As one person who worked on the show said, the show's slow demise came about because "Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and Bruce Willis got rich." Shepherd got pregnant in early '87, during the show's third season, although her pregnancy wasn't worked into the show until that fall, during the fourth season. Glenn Gordon Caron, the show's creator, said he couldn't see any way around the pregnancy—avoiding the issue would've prevented Shepherd from being shot below chest level, and that would've made scenes with her very static and confined to desks or tables.

Long story short, the first part of the fourth season involved Maddie in Chicago staying with her parents while trying to figure out whether she should go back to David and the detective agency and let him know she was pregnant (the audience, not to mention David, didn't know if it was his baby or third-season guest star Mark Harmon's). Because Maddie was in Chicago, David solved cases with Herbert Viola, a.k.a. "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds. Not as much fun as Maddie and David solving crimes together, but by that point they'd "done it," which took all of the sexual tension away. It's a slippery slope once the romantic leads on a TV show get together, of course, and unlike Cheers, Moonlighting didn't have a bunch of supporting characters to fall back on in case viewers got sick of the main characters bickering back and forth. All you had were Herbert and Ms. DiPesto, who were funny in small doses, yet they ended up having two episodes to themselves during the fourth season while Shepherd and Willis were indisposed. Two whole episodes—and only 14 were produced that season.

The fourth season was cut short due to the writers' strike, but during the previous season Moonlighting had only produced 15 episodes, and the one before that produced just 18. It was supposed to deliver 22 episodes a season just like any other show, but it never did, partly due to Glenn Gordon Caron being such a perfectionist and delivering script rewrites at the last minute. (I've read that production on his current show, NBC's Medium, is somewhat disorganized, but he's managed to produce 22 episodes per season so far, as he did for the one and only season of his 1999-2000 CBS series, Now and Again.)

I do like Ms. DiPesto and Herbert Viola more now that I'm older. But when I was in grade school I just wanted to see Maddie and David flirt and watch Bruce Willis be cool and funny. He hasn't been all that funny since Moonlighting, and he wasn't even that funny during the last two seasons. He looked a bit bored, to be honest.

By the way, I lied when I said "long story short." 

Willis was in those early fourth-season episodes much more than Shepherd, and he was reportedly angry that he had to carry the show while shooting Die Hard at the same time. By the tail end of the season Maddie had returned to Los Angeles, but she got married to a stranger on a train on her way back from Chicago, which made almost every fan groan (the grade-school ones anyway). She called it off the day of the "official" wedding, realizing she still loved David, and then the season ended one episode later, with the quickie annulment of Maddie's quickie marriage and a comment on the writers' strike in the last segment. Like other Moonlighting episodes, this one had ended up a few minutes short, so an extra scene was filmed with Maddie and David talking to the audience about how the writers were on strike and they didn't know how to fill the extra time. They ended up making Herbert dance to "Wooly Bully."

When the show returned in December of '88 along with other network shows, Maddie had a miscarriage, which made more fans groan, but at least that concluded the show's soap-opera aspects for the most part. Then it was back to Maddie and David solving crimes together, which I was happy to see when I was in seventh grade, but once I got older I realized it was ridiculous—as Willis said in an interview after the show ended, there was no way those two would've continued to work together after having gone through such a long, stormy affair.

Moonlighting was put on hiatus by ABC in February of '89 because its ratings had fallen so far (those ratings probably wouldn't look so bad today, though, compared to what a normal low-ranking network show generates in 2007); it returned two months later, but on Sundays at 8 instead of Tuesdays at 9. The fifth season consisted of 13 episodes, and the last six were cranked out quickly in order to get Moonlighting up to the bare minimum needed for syndication on a cable network—Lifetime showed it in the early '90s, and Bravo aired it earlier this decade, but it never reached regular syndication like, say, Magnum, P.I. or NYPD Blue, which produced more episodes per season over longer runs.

So yeah, the writers' strike didn't help Moonlighting get its momentum back, but it was already in serious trouble before that.