Alex Trebek may be a lot of things, but punk rocker is not one of them. On yesterday’s episode of Jeopardy, one of the contestants was discussing the classic rock songs he sings as lullabies to his children.

“Which song do you find has worked the best?” asked Alex.

“I Wanna Be Sedated,” said the guest, after a moment’s thought.

And then a funny look crossed Trebek’s face, like he’d just wandered in off the street into the crazy throngs of Obscure-Songville, and he said, “Uh, I don’t think I even remember that one.”

Alex Trebec: apparently not a big fan of the Ramones.

On paper, Blockbuster’s new no-late-fees policy sounds great. (Or reads great. Paper usually doesn’t talk.) But the thing is, people will now have even less incentive to return the movies that are almost never available. Shelves will stay barren for much longer. Unless the stores simultaneously increase inventory, this will effectively make renting the movie you want from Blockbuster even more difficult — albeit cheaper for the lucky few who find something to rent before you do.

I give Blockbuster props for implementing this — yes, I said props — but my chief complaint about the store has never been the late fees. Five days to a week seems like an ample rental period to me. What I’ve always found annoying was the fact that the films I want never seem to be in, and that the shelves are stocked primarily with empty display cases. I’m not just talking about any particular month’s most popular movie, or about the most obscure esoteric art film. My tastes run a wide enough gamut, I think. I’m talking across the board here. If Blockbuster can do a better job of keeping its shelves full, maybe then I’ll have more reason to browse there.

This new policy, though, sounds like it may wind up doing more harm than good.

There’s an interesting article in this Sunday’s New York Times (you know the drill, registration-wise) about Saturday Night Live‘s tendency to pull its punches:

Tina Fey, one of two head writers for “S.N.L.”…said that the show’s sensibility was simply too immediate and its production schedule too chaotic for a formula to dictate its contents. Writers may draw their material from celebrity tabloids scattered around their offices. (“They’re like pornography,” she joked. “That’s how disgusting you feel.”) But more than anything, they are inspired by a fundamental, Darwinian desire to get their material onto the air. “Everyone’s trying to figure out their road to job security,” Ms. Fey said. “It’s almost like one of those experiments with pigeons pecking at things to get food, and if you peck at something and get food, you’re going to keep pecking at it.”

That’s definitely the sense I got from watching A&E’s biography of the show a year or two back, and it’s a large part of why I cut the show some slack when it fails to be funny or relies too heavily on recurring characters. There’s very little turn-around time for the writers, and they are, as Fey says, desperate to get material on the air. When you have less than a week in which to work, you don’t often have the luxury of creating smart comedy or sharp satire. I only worked on a rinky-dink college sketch comedy show, with two weeks turn-around time, and even I can tell you that. Recurring characters, sophomoric humor, and pulled punches are just par for the course.

Of course, it would be nice if they tried just a little harder.