"Go balloons! Go balloons!"

Gotta give a tip of the ostentatious fedora to ol' Matt Drudge. It appears he got it right at least as Missus Koko and I recall. We wanted to catch Kerry's speech and flipped the tube on to CNN. Kerry does his thing. The music comes up. Kerry starts making the rounds (wisely avoided the "white man dance-that-isn't-a-dance" routine) The balloons trickle down. And we hear this voice of a guy who seems to be in charge of the production. "Go balloons. Go balloons," he says. "Balloons balloons balloons." He's composing a Ginsbergesque ode to political hoopla and he doesn't seem to realize his mike is hot. Missus Koko and yours truly are laughing. As surely as you know that a wedding cake in any Fox Family movie will be destroyed by the dog chasing the cat, we knew that this guy was on his way to a serious FCC violation. And sure enough, within seconds of CNN identifying the voice as that of Don Mischer, DNC Convention Director, he starts to loose it. "Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddammit." Finally culminating with "All balloons, what the hell! There's nothing falling! What the fuck are you guys doing up there?" Oh, the beauty of live television. (Drudge has a tiny mp3 audio file of the incident)

As you can imagine, very shortly afterwards, Mr. Mischer's audio feed was cut and Wolf and Judy offered their tittering apologies. But when the cameras finally pulled back and pointed up to the ceiling from where the balloons were supposed to fall, you could see literally thousands of unreleased balloons. My God, I told Missus Koko, what the f--- are those guys doing up there? I had complete and utter sympathy for Mr. "Balloons" Mischer. No need to apologize, Don.