The television screenwriters strike has been a welcome sideshow to this dreary winter of TV viewing. In fact coverage of bearded, over-weight picketers lining up outside network studios has been more entertaining then anything which the writers themselves have created in two decades.

It's a gift that keeps on giving too with news that the four-hour long Golden Globe Awards have been cancelled because actors refuse to cross picket lines. Now Hollywood's most beautiful faces will be forced to while away another week in Aspen or the French Riviera. The sacrifices which must be made to keep solidarity with the workingman.

We can all pray the strike lasts long enough to cancel the Emmys, Grammy Awards and Oscars.

The more advertising revenue that network television companies lose and the more time no-talent writers spend away from the set the better life is for Americans and humanity in general. Not to mention whatever extraterrestrial civilizations wind up viewing episodes of "30 Rock", "Desperate Housewives" "CSI: Miami" after the television signals travel across light-years of space. I'm imagining that when "Cavemen" or the new "Bionic Woman" reaches the first civilization capable of interstellar travel it will instigate the formation of a galactic coalition of space-faring peoples bent on exterminating the human race.

There has been some sacrifices with the strike. I'm actually a fan of the series "Heroes" and since my Monday nights are free, this usually meant sticking around an extra hour to watch former "Rome" leading actor Kevin McKidd time-travel on "Journeyman".

Other than that there has not been a single network television series that I've missed. Thank you ESPN, TCM, Sci-Fi, History and Military Channels.

Part of the animosity comes from the sacrilege being committed against one of canon works of the 1980s. What slur against everything that is pure and sacred do I speak of?

The new "Knight Rider" series. NBC is turning KITT into a Shelby Mustang. How could they?!?

I dig Stangs and own a Fox-body GT convertible. My brother and I will begin restoring a '67 fastback in the summer. Historically the pony cars are American icons - sans the Mustang II of course - and there are few car designers who possess the creative talents of Carroll Shelby.

But the Knight Industries Two Thousand is not a Mustang. KITT is a GM. He'll forever be that sleek, black, hydrogen-powered, 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans-am with the red Cylon-like scanner in the hood and voiced by William Daniels.

Sadly, the Firebird has gone the way of the dodo and the White Snake extinct forever no thanks to CAFE standards, emission controls and a gutless 305 cubic inch power plant (cough, cough).

Why couldn't the series producers use the new concept Camaro? A Corvette would be even an adequate substitute. Yeah, I know, advertising is more important than artistic integrity.

Along with the "A-Team", "Magnum PI" and the "Dukes of Hazzard", "Knight Rider" ranked as one of my favorite live-action series of the mid-80s. Was there any better way to mold a young impressionable mind than watching the Hoff fight crime and driving through walls while thwarting the plots of evil twins and industrialists? Oak Harbor native Patricia McPherson wasn't bad to look at either come to think of it...

The series was the grand-daddy of all of your classic vehicle-themed crime fighting shows; "Airwolf", "Viper", "Blue Thunder", great works of art all.

Somehow it just doesn't seem right to mess with childhood memories but at least they didn't turn KITT into a rice burner.

Credits: Speaking of TV flashbacks, there is a sick desire on my part to watch the new American Gladiators series hosted by Hulk Hogan. I can feel my mullet growing back already.