Show Host

AT ABOUT 2 o'clock yesterday, in front of 3,000 shouting, hooting people at the Baltimore Arena, an otherwise untortured 10-year-old from Upper Marlboro named Winfred Wills III saw his childhood innocence end.The cable television game show "Double Dare" -- or "Super Sloppy Double Dare" to its fans -- was taking its brand of LTC high-camp silliness through Baltimore near the beginning of a 25-city tour. Young Wills and his parents, freshly plucked from the audience, were listening to host Marc Summers explain that Winfred II and Renee Wills were about to have a milk chug-a-lug contest.

Juan Williams commands two very different, very prominent public pulpits. Four days a week, he is the host of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," a two-hour sanctuary for thoughtful, sometimes provocative discussion of issues in the public eye. Sundays, he is a pundit on the weekly political talk show "Fox News Sunday," on which he has appeared almost since the first show. (It is celebrating its five-year anniversary this Sunday.) During the week, Williams acts as the reasonable arbiter, led by common sense to tease out greater truths.

The Fonz as Rush Limbaugh.Who but those wacky folks at Fox -- the ones who brought us Chevy Chase as a comatose late-night host -- could have come up with this concept?"

NEW YORK Susan Lucci, always an Emmy nominee but never a winner, remained that Thursday for a record 12th time. Finola Hughes of ABC's "General Hospital" won the season's best actress daytime Emmy.It was Peter Bergman who was near tears as he accepted his best-actor Emmy for his work in CBS' "The Young and the Restless." He praised what he called "my conscience, my best friend" --his wife.CBS' venerable "As the World Turns" won as best soap opera at Thursday's Daytime Emmy Awards ceremonies, broadcast by CBS in prime time for the first time in the show's history.

Update 2 p.m. Monday: Preliminary Nielsen ratings say 3.5 million viewers watched Winfrey's interviews Sunday night. That is more than twice the previous high of 1.6 million for any program ever on her OWN channel. And she rated highest with the target demo of women 25 to 54. Read on for my overnight rave of Winfrey's interviewing performance. There is no reason to whine about missing Oprah's syndicated show when she is doing work like this on OWN. Oprah Winfrey 's OWN cable channel might still be underperforming, but the legendary talk TV host showed in an interview with members of Whitney Houston's family Sunday night that she can still bring it like few others on television.

COMPULSIVE channel surfers are occasionally rewarded by unexpected entertainment in their endless quest to thumb their remote control through the entire span of cable TV offerings at least once every 15 minutes.The restless spirit that once conquered the American West is now redirected toward finding the latest kitchen-gadget "infomercial" and the newest version of the psychics' telephone hot line. Avoiding any episode of "Star Trek", old or new series, is a constant challenge.One of these occasionally rewarding strikes has been an amusing program on E!

Single people sometimes spend hours each day looking for -- and thinking about -- that special someone. But a Columbia woman recently had the process eased a bit by America's most popular talk show host -- Oprah Winfrey.Sharon DeHaney of east Columbia was selected last week from a group of hundreds of women from around the country to go on a date with one of 10 unmarried television anchormen featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" April 29.DeHaney is to fly to Chicago today to tape a segment tomorrow.

Though neither is known for joking around, beleagured restaraunteur Denise Whiting and former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele will be among those competing for the title of Baltimore's Funniest Celebrity. The Cafe Hon owner and the former face of the Republican party will vie for the title against musician Deanna Bogart, one-time city council candidate De'von Brown,  meteorologist Steve Fertig, news anchor Jeff Barnd and Baltimore Sun sports columnist Peter Schmuck.  If most of those folks don't strike you as particularly funny, that's exactly the point, says Richard Siegel, the founder of the event, which will happen for the second time in Baltimore on June 27. The contest has been running for 18 years in D.C. "I think people that are serious are funny because people don't expect it -- which is funny," says Siegel, a long-time stand-up comedy performer.

The partisan media madness started early Tuesday on the "Fox & Friends" morning show with host Steve Doocy somehow turning a report on midnight voting in Dixville Notch, N.H., into an attack on President Barack Obama for his handling of the September attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. "Appalling" was the word U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) used to describe the president's behavior. And, with Doocy priming the pump of vitriol, she was only warming up. Meanwhile, on the other side, former Democratic National Party chair Howard Dean was on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" minutes after the polls opened in Pennsylvania, already alleging voter suppression in Philadelphia based on hearsay.

There are some things people who haven't served this country in the military should be real careful about. And one of them is opening their mouths on a national holiday dedicated to those who died serving this country to offer a freshman-level, introduction-to-cultural-studies deconstruction of an alleged link between the word "hero" and "justifications for more war. " Here is the statement MSNBC show host Chris Hayes made Sunday night on the...