Full disclosure: the Townes Van Zandt film advertised to your right was directed by a friend of mine and produced by another. That aside, it is a compelling movie with a strange staying power. You don’t have to be a country music fan or a Townes aficionado to appreciate this one.

So do me a favor, give them a click thru.

Personal aside: as some of you will probably remember, I was introduced to the music and story of Townes Van Zandt by one Mr. Steve Earle, who played songs like Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold as we sat in the back of a bare-bones tour bus driving from New Mexico to Colorado one fine afternoon. Which was, in retrospect, not a bad way to do it.

I’ll be on tour the week of March 27, hitting New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley and Seattle. I should have specific appearance information for each city soon.

I apologize in advance for flogging the book to the extent that I probably will — I know how tedious that sort of thing can be. But as I’ve mentioned before, this one is particularly important. If this one doesn’t do well, I’m really not entirely sure that there’ll be another. There sure won’t be another in full color, I can guarantee you.

(I’m also feeling a bit edgy because the publicist I’ve been working with for the past few months was just let go. It’s not quite as bad as losing your editor three weeks before pub date, but it’s not an ideal situation.)

Right now, the best way to support the site, the cartoonist, the whole shebang, is to buy the damn book. Ad’s over to your left.

(And if you want to send a note to, say, The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, suggesting a guest you’d like to see on, well, who am I to discourage you?)

A friend of mine forwards the article about which O’Reilly was whining, and provides some context about the paper. First, the context:

“East Valley” refers to its coverage area, a set of bizarrely different suburban enclaves east of Phoenix itself — Mormon Mesa, Boob-job Scottsdale, Pleasantville Chandler, etc — and when I lived there, it was owned by Thompsen, a famously tight-fisted company that paid reporters little more than fast-food workers. Nearly everyone I met who worked there was seriously demoralized, and the product itself was a pandering mess that sucked up to Mormon leaders in particular. In 2000 it was sold to Freedom Communications, the conservative-libertarian group based in Irvine (the OC Register is its flagship).

As for the actual article, which my friend dug up via Lexis (hence, no link), it’s a longish pre-Oscar rundown which only mentions O’Reilly in passing:

To say the least, the 2006 Oscar field will not be remembered as a paragon of populism. In terms of box office, all five best picture nominees together wouldn’t add up to one “Lord of the Rings” or “Saving Private Ryan.” The Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” — a solid critical and financial success — failed to make the cut.

Commercial disadvantages or no, the nominees have generated robust storms of chatter and controversy in the media. Last week, Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly blasted director Ang Lee’s limpid cowboy romance for “humanizing” homosexuality. After seeing “Munich,” Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated tale of Israeli revenge killings in the wake of the massacre of Olympic athletes, author Jack Engelhard (”Indecent Proposal”) chided the Jewish filmmaker for being “no friend of Israel . . . no friend of truth.”

That’s it. That’s the only mention of O’Reilly’s name.

Note that the author doesn’t specifically mention whether he is quoting O’Reilly’s column, or something that O’Reilly said on either his nightly television program or his daily radio broadcast. (The quoted word “humanizing” does not appear in O’Reilly’s column.)

In conclusion: an obscure columnist in a small newspaper in suburban Phoenix mentions O’Reilly in passing — and O’Reilly devotes an entire segment of his show to denouncing the guy, cherry-picking his own quotes to do so.

Extraordinary.