Press Tour + 15-Inning All-Star Game = 166% Of Normal Beer Intake. Also: "Mad Men," Seth MacFarlane, Karl Rove And The Death of Journalism As We Know It. (It's A Lot For One Post, Huh?)

You may have noticed a gap in the blogging. I actually got more than an arm's length from my computer yesterday for the first time in a week and a half. Several dozen TCA members spent the afternoon on a field trip to the "Mad Men" sets in downtown Los Angeles. We toured the Sterling Cooper offices, Don Draper's house and the costume department. Between last week's press conference and that, I now have three solid hours of "Mad Men" jibber jabber in my recorder from "MM" creator Matthew Weiner and stars Jon Hamm, Vincent Kartheiser and Elisabeth Moss. That's maybe five hours of transcribing ahead of me. But the season premiere isn't until the 27th, so I've got time. I'm thinking about penning a "Mad Men" series all next week, so brace yourselves.

By the time the bus got us back to the Beverly Hilton yesterday, the All-Star Game was starting, and my friend Walt and I decided to settle in at the lobby bar and watch. It was either that or board another bus to watch a video game championship in an airport hangar in Santa Monica, which attracted the likes of Kim Kardashian. Not a hard decision. But six extra innings meant that we spent roughly twice the gross national product of Haiti on beer and pizza, so I'm a little groggy this morning. And I was still back in my room before the game ended.

This is not a gossip blog, but apparently I've failed to share essential news about which celebrities are knocking boots out here. A couple of you queried me about "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane (right). Yes, he did bring former Disney Channel pixie Amanda Bynes as his date to the Fox party Tuesday night. And yes, she is all growed up, looking about 80 percent legs in a tiny little minidress. There's nothing like $100 million to make a guy look hot to younger women.

This is not a political blog either, and I didn't find much newsworthy in Karl Rove's appearance here on a Fox news panel Tuesday, but it did give MacFarlane an opening to make the most buzzed-about wisecrack of the tour.

A significant portion of our group grumbled about Rove's appearance, but we failed to dent his armor-of-evil during the session. Perhaps that had something to do with the absurdity of a bunch of television critics raising Constitutional questions about contempt of Congress and whatnot. The next session in the ballroom was a Fox animation panel with MacFarlane, "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening and others. MacFarlane started to sit in one of the directors chairs lined up onstage, then popped back up. "Is this where Karl Rove sat?" he asked the room in alarm. "I don't want to get AIDS." It was tasteless and crude but also a far more effective demonstration of outrage that anything we'd mustered during the Q'n'A. Being critics, of course, several of us felt obligated to kick him for it in print.

This isn't a journalism blog either, so I've spared you description of the gloom-and-doom atmosphere among the print critics at TCA, most of whom arise every morning and check their email to see if they or any of their friends have been laid off by their papers. The ongoing financial problems in the ink-on-pulp business have been exacerbated by the recent economic slump, and every bus ride and buffet breakfast is filled with nervous chatter about downsizing, restructuring and the burdens of this newfangled blogging thing.

On top of all that, there's been a big cutback in network hospitality, too. If you didn't know that bitching has always consumed about 30 percent of the average newspaper scribe's workday - I used to be an ink-stained wretch myself, big surprise, right? - then you'd expect the critics to start leaping off their hotel balconies any moment. If you wish to read more on the topic, I'd commend to you blogger James Hibberd's post "Beach Boys, layoffs and tiny burgers," which rather deftly uses the Lilliputian grub at last weekend's dispiriting GSN party as a metaphor for the malaise that has settled over our group.

Well, it's time for a swim, then back into the fray. Today we're visited by ABC, including dinner with the "Dancing With The Stars" pros. Eeek.