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Like death, taxes and Web surfers with strong opinions about The View, negative campaign ads are an inevitable force. Shortly before the midterm elections, NPR's All Things Considered spoke with two of the men (Dennis Steele and Scott Sanders) who lend their dark, ominous voices to those attack ads, and you can listen to the interview here. I know what you're thinking: if I can't stand those ads, why the heck would I want to listen to the voiceover artists talk about them?

Tell you what: skip to about three minutes into the interview and you'll see why. They asked the men to read nursery rhymes using their "attack ad" voice, and the result is not only pretty damn funny, it also shows how silly these ads can be, and that slapping a spooky voice and some foreboding music over something can make just about anything seem scary. Most of us probably roll our eyes when these negative ads flash across out TV screens, but listening to someone attack the likes of Humpty Dumpty with the same venom as they would someone running for congress proves that these ads are actually much more ludicrous than we thought.

Completely unrelated, but interesting to me, nonetheless: in the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," Humpty is never once referred to as an egg.

Yes, it was! Brian Unger, former correspondent on The Daily Show, actor, comedian, essayist on NPR, and co-host of Extra and O2Be, filled in for Keith Olbermann tonight on Countdown. I didn't recognize him at first, except I had an "oh, that guy has been anchoring in the afternoons on MSNBC too" moment. And then one of his guests called him "Brian" and then I slapped my head and said "doh!"

Anyway, interesting to see a Daily Show alum anchoring a news program, even if it is one that's not just a straight news show but an all-around news show that mixes humor with the hard-hitting questions. (The show is repeated at midnight, Eastern time, if you want to catch it.)

Have you ever wondered what Teller (of Penn and Teller, of course) sounds like? He's the silent one and doesn't usually speak that often. I heard him a few years ago, and now you can catch audio of him on NPR reviewing The Glorious Deception, a book about magician Chung Lee Soo, written by Jim Steinmeyer.

[via TV Barn]