Last week just as I was wrapping up my column, the David Letterman scandal story broke, so instead of writing about it immediately, I decided… why not just wait a little while to see how the story plays out. Now that a week has passed, I figured I would take a closer look….
Before we get to Letterman, Yankee fans might not want to hear this.. but I had the strangest dream… involving Joe Mauer. In the dream the Twins were locked into a marathon extra inning game that was going about 19, 20 innings and the announcers kept talking about Mauer having an incredible 8 hits in the game…. However, in this dream the Twins were playing the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series! Incidentally Johnny Burnett went 9 for 11 in an 18 inning game in 1932… Perhaps this an omen.. lotsa hits and a Burnett in the same sentence…
Anyway, as the Letterman saga continues to unfold, there are certain developments that I find interesting and somewhat disturbing. Let’s start from the beginning.
1. How he came clean – Very interesting and not at all disturbing.
Dave felt that Joe Halderman was blackmailing him and he went to the cops. I speculated on Facebook if Letterman knew when he went to the cops that he would have to fess up in front of a grand jury. He initially consulted his lawyer when he was first contacted by Halderman.. would he have gone to the cops if he knew his grand jury testimony would be made public? Nonetheless, it was smart that he announced it on his show… I have seen some attorneys on Larry King say that these shakedowns happen all the time among their rich clients and most of the time the issue gets resolved and nobody knows any different. That is a great selling point for those lawyers’ potential future clients who might be blackmailed and want to keep it quiet… Nonetheless, in this day and age of SmokingGun.com and TMZ, it made sense for Letterman to fess up on his show on his terms.
2. The woman he had his affair with – Very interesting and a little disturbing…
I don’t watch Letterman as much as I used to, but through the years I have seen Stephanie Birkitt on the show many times and all I can say is… huh?? Shes ok looking, a little goofy…and a bit funny with her little Letterman nicknames (double entendre, perhaps?) I always wondered how she was able to get so much airtime when she would bring those gift envelopes to Letterman when people in the audience won prizes. By the way, those contests are exactly what Johnny Carson used to do when he gave out free dinner passes inside envelopes to audience members who played “Stump the Band”. And so far a week into the story we haven’t heard any disgruntled former female staffers step up to say that Birkett got special treatment because of their affair. Frankly, I am kind of surprised by his choice and curious about his other ladies.
3. The story on the 2nd, and 3rd day, etc. Not so interesting and increasingly disturbing…
As the week has gone on, we have heard more about this bizarre triangle between Birkitt, Letterman, and Halderman. Only Letterman and Birkitt know the real timeline but she apparently started with Dave, went to Halderman, and then some say went back to Dave. Are they still together? I would assume not, although I do worry about a video of them surfacing showing a threesome with the Jay Leno 10 pm show playing in the background.
Is Dave a hypocrite for making wisecracks about philandering politicians? Truthfully I have different expectations when it comes to politicians and celebrities who attract a large following with the younger more impressionable audience. But, Letterman is JUST a late night talk show host,…not a man aspiring to lead thousands or millions of people in government, or a pop singer whose posters adorn the bedroom walls of teenagers across America. Do young kids really aspire to be another 1130 pm talk show host?
And is it more wrong to cheat on your wife or your girlfriend of 20 years? If the cheating went on before the wedding, is the 20 year factor more “relevant” morality-wise than if it were a relationship of 20 weeks?
But even though he is just a talk show host, he is a very powerful guy despite his tendencies to downplay his status in the Show Business stratosphere. .I have seen some old late 70s early 80s game shows on GSN featuring Letterman when he was hyping his NBC daytime show and his personality is almost the same as it is now. But beneath that persona, people appearing on Dave’s show know how much a late night appearance on that show helps their careers. The women he encounters appreciate that power, and apparently he had no trouble hooking up with them.
And since I don’t read the tabloids, I don’t know if anybody ever speculated on what Dave was up to after hours.. He seems to shun the spotlight, he never appears at movie premieres or any of that Hollywood stuff and everyone seemed to assume he hopped in his car after taping his show and sped home even though some reports speculate he had a little “love pad” in the Ed Sullivan Theater.
One other story I just found is on the KIRO TV website in Seattle. There is a woman named Sherry Jackson who was featured on a 48 hours segment produced by Halderman, and oddly enough she was the victim of a blackmail scheme. Jackson’s brother was murdered in the Phillipines and somebody was blackmailing her asking for cash in exchange for the poor guys ashes. She worked closely with Halderman on that story, and Jackson told KIRO that the two spoke often about the case. After she heard about his arrest… here was her quote (from KIRO’ s website)
"We would have conversations like that: What an idiot who would do something so dumb?" Jackson said.
4. Halderman’s lawyer’s reaction – Not so interesting… but incredibly disturbing.
Y’know America is a wonderful country and we have a terrific constitution… including the concept of innocent until proven guilty. This has led to some very creative lawyers who will bust their humps to get their clients acquitted. I appreciate that.. the right to a strong defense is spelled right out in the Constitution.. but sometimes these defense lawyers walk a fine line and don’t always know when to keep their mouths shut. As much as I appreciate their attempts to keep prosecutors on their toes.. sometimes they go from brilliant legal maneuverings to advocates of ridiculous causes. If you ever heard Ron Kuby’s radio show that used to be on WABC, you know exactly what I mean.
Now I see Halderman’s lawyer on the talk show and I start to wonder who is the victim here. He is spinning these stories about how there is more to the story, etc, etc. I have seen reports that Letterman included Birkitt and NOT Halderman in his social circle but are we third graders who have to all be invited to every birthday party? I get tired of hearing about “poor” Halderman, when in reality he was the one who demanded money for silence in what appears to be an open and shut case. His threats were caught on tape... the Manhattan DA has a copy of it and he tried to cash the corresponding check.
And what does the lawyer say?? “I can’t wait to cross examine David Letterman”. In other words, let’s threaten to embarrass Letterman so that maybe the prosecution will back down from pushing this issue so a trial can be avoided, and his client can get a favorable plea bargain. But he does dangle the carrot out there that if there is a trial. let’s destroy as much as Letterman’s reputation as we possibly can… all because he had the audacity to get blackmailed..
Doesn’t this stuff sound like the lawyers who defend rapists and lick their chops when the victim gets on the stand?? He “can’t wait” to cross examine the victim, while the defendant doesn’t even have to take the stand!
I am actually somewhat surprised and also impressed that Letterman is such a stud. I feel bad for his wife if she didn’t know about it, and of course he was morally wrong. But the guy is a talk show host whose show promotes movies filled with all kinds of performers who cheat on their spouses on a daily basis. I just hope a lot of participants in these affairs are not badly hurt by Halderman’s path of self destruction.
And wouldn't it be funny if Dave Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants (now there's a pun!) produced a movie about the arrest of a producer who was blackmailing a talk show host about his affairs??
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK:
Last week Pumpy went wrong with his Detroit Lions pick to even his record at 2-2. This week we go to Indianapolis, the hometown of David Letterman as the Colts travel to Tennesee to take on the Titans. The Colts are 4 point faves. Sayeth the Pump: I have been fighting this nasty rash all week so I say take the Titans... because their linebacker Colin is like my skin - Allred!
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICKS OF THE WEEK:
We went 2-1 (Im not even sure why I went with the Jet game instead of the Redskins) for a year to date record of 5-7.
Oakland 15 doggies over GIANTS - These 2 TD+ spreads make me nervous. Maybe not the week to cover.
CHIEFS 9 doggies to Dallas – Big spread again, but I’d love to see the Chiefs steal this one.
Tampa 15 doggies to PHILADELPHIA – I get the feeling that Sunday Night the NFC East will look very strong and I’m gonna be 0-3.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Friday, October 02, 2009
5770 in Middlesex County
To paraphrase Bill Maher - it is time for New Rules at NWOW. There is no hate allowed here... except if it is directed at an unreliable vehicle that strands you!
Last Friday afternoon I had to run an errand and I ended up parking my Saturn across the street from a synagogue. When I returned to my car, I was greeted with a trend that a lot of Saturn owners suffer from – the freaking car would not start. That cockamamie car is very temperamental about starting.. but sometimes if it doesn’t kick in right away, it might start up if I try again 15 – 20 minutes later. Nobody seems to know what is going on with it and thanks to Google I see that I am not the only Saturn owner with this problem.
On that particular Friday, I needed to get to my office to pick up a package so I called Trophy Wife to pick me up and I decided to deal with the car later. However, because it was Friday afternoon, observant Jews do not drive on the Sabbath, and non observant Jews do not advertise their Sabbath driving in front of a synagogue. I discovered this at a very young age on Yom Kippur 1973 – the day the Yom Kippur War broke out. My parents took me home for lunch in the middle of the day…(I was way too young to fast) and after we walked a few blocks from the synagogue we discovered a line of parked cars with passengers sitting in the drivers seats, all of them listening to 1010 WINS to hear what was going on with Israel’s newest war. That was when I realized that Jews who drive to synagogue when they are not supposed to…. park a few blocks away!!
So my solution to the sticky situation was to arrange to have the Triple A tow truck come after Friday night services were completed. I went back to where my car was parked later that evening and while I waited outside for the tow truck, I discovered how incredibly peaceful the street was. People would occasionally stroll by and cars were coming up and down the street… and I also took note that the exterior of the synagogue was so well lit that it almost looked like it was the middle of the day... even though it was really late in the evening.
Unfortunately, in Edison on Monday night, nobody’s unreliable Saturn got stuck on Jefferson Street in front of Temple Beth-El, since nobody sat outside after Yom Kippur waiting for a tow. It was not until early Tuesday that somebody discovered that some thugs had spray painted swastikas on that synagogue. The Rabbi of that synagogue - Rabbi Rosenberg has been very vocal about anti Semitism in the area and he speculated to the media that he might have been targeted by a group of Jew hating teenagers.
The week before, on Rosh Hashana,. A Jewish Yeshiva student in Edison was walking down the street when he was attacked in what is being called a bias incident, since the word “Jew” was apparently used during the attack. This story was not mentioned on the news at first until Rabbi Rosenberg spread the word to the local Jewish community and the news media about this crime. A teenager under the age of 18 was subsequently arrested…. but because he is a minor his identity has not been revealed by law enforcement authorities.
I don’t recall if I have ever met Rabbi Rosenberg… but I do admire his guts to stand up against anti- semites and I did write about him here on NWOW a few years ago. (See January 29, 2006) Back then, a local resident wrote a silly letter to a local Jewish paper criticizing the Rabbi’s wisecrack during a public Menorah lighting ceremony about a prayer that Iran’s Ahmadinejad would drop dead. I thought complaining about it was silly… and even though I agree with the Rabbi, perhaps an event with so many little pishers might not have been the right forum for that comment. But for a Jew to write a letter to a Jewish paper about wishing death on a Hitler loving Holocaust denier? I found that to be quite bizarre..
Nonetheless, even though I might not always agree with Rosenberg. I appreciate that he stands up against Anti semitism… (For many years he had a dispute with another Rabbi who I greatly admired, and I'm not sure Rabbi Rosenberg was 100% right about that issue) Rosenberg also said that he seems to think that his actions pertaining to the Rosh Hashana incident motivated the post Yom Kippur vandalism… plus he feels there is some spillover from the anti Semitism brought on by Ahmedinejad during his UN visit last week. Sadly the Rabbi’s December 2005 wish did not come true.
But anti Semitism has also reared its head in another ugly way recently. Last month we followed the news story about the young lab tech from Connecticut who disappeared the week before her wedding. The cynic in me thought she was just getting cold feet like the woman in Atlanta a few years ago who became known as “The Runaway Bride”. Sadly, she was not a runaway bride and police discovered her body on the day that she was to be married.
Since that time there have been numerous memorial services and one incident caught my attention. The woman was engaged to a Jewish man, and his synagogue was the target of some Jew hating wackos the day after her recent memorial service. The craziness was organized by the loonie kazoonies at the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. This crazy church’s website’s cover page declares that “God hates Fags!” Some of the pre printed picket signs at their “demonstrations” say such nuggets such as “Thank God For AIDS” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”. They also protested at the funeral for Matthew Shepard who the website refers to as an “impeninent Sodomite”. The site also talks about how they hate Jews because Jews killed Jesus and on and on it goes.
And in an article I found online on northshoreoflongisland.com, Arlene Gross wrote about the anti Semitic protest outside Temple Beth El in Huntington, that took place the day after Annie Le's memorial service was held there. But the protest was held during Hebrew school lessons, so young students who study there were forced to be exposed to this trash. Gross’s article contained this fascinating piece of information. Here is the actual quote:
“Among the picketers on Park Avenue was a boy wearing an anti-gay T-shirt that matched his mother's. When asked what he was doing there, he replied: "Picketing."
When asked if he knew why, the 7-year-old replied, "No."
So when Rabbi Rosenberg wonders why teenage minors paint swastikas on his synagogue…. take a look at the parents of these kids. If 7 yr olds walk around with anti gay shirts that their parents force them to wear you really need to wonder what kind of homes are these hate filled teens coming from? And how likely is it that the Anti Semitic rhetoric that is drilled into these kids by their Jew hating parents manifests itself into the next generation when those kids line up in front of a synagogue with their spray paint bottles?
I’ve always said that these Jew haters should be banned from taking any medicines or vaccines discovered by Jews… but of course as sensible as that sounds, the ACLU would say that that is too harsh. But the next time you hear a story about kids being arrested for this mischief… you should question what is going on behind the closed doors of those homes that would let a kid think that desecrating a house of worship or attacking a person just because he is Jewish or black or gay or all 3 is a proper way to conduct oneself.
And because arrested minors' names are not released to the public, the hate filled parents also get to retain their anonymity enabling them to continue the cycle. Maybe it's time to release the names of juveniles who are arrested for bias crimes?
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK: Last week Pumpy hit on the Colt (Nidre) Yom Kippur night game... This weekend as we begin to celebrate Sukkot, we go to Detroit where it was announced this week that Saturn will officially cease production. The Bears are 10 1/2 point faves. Sayeth the Pump: "Take Detroit... because at night I will be "lion" down and sleeping in the sukkah"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICKS OF THE WEEK: Last week we went 0-3 for a season to date record of 3-6.
Giants 9 point faves at KANSAS CITY - Double digit road faves? After last weeks game... I'll take the Giants.
DENVER 3 point doggies over Dallas - I think John Elway was a better Joe Buck HBO guest than Jerry Jones...(and I loved the opening where Artie Lange started chasing Joe on the street!)
Jets 7 point doggies to NEW ORLEANS - J-E-T-S... have you ever seen a 3-0 team as such an underdog??
Last Friday afternoon I had to run an errand and I ended up parking my Saturn across the street from a synagogue. When I returned to my car, I was greeted with a trend that a lot of Saturn owners suffer from – the freaking car would not start. That cockamamie car is very temperamental about starting.. but sometimes if it doesn’t kick in right away, it might start up if I try again 15 – 20 minutes later. Nobody seems to know what is going on with it and thanks to Google I see that I am not the only Saturn owner with this problem.
On that particular Friday, I needed to get to my office to pick up a package so I called Trophy Wife to pick me up and I decided to deal with the car later. However, because it was Friday afternoon, observant Jews do not drive on the Sabbath, and non observant Jews do not advertise their Sabbath driving in front of a synagogue. I discovered this at a very young age on Yom Kippur 1973 – the day the Yom Kippur War broke out. My parents took me home for lunch in the middle of the day…(I was way too young to fast) and after we walked a few blocks from the synagogue we discovered a line of parked cars with passengers sitting in the drivers seats, all of them listening to 1010 WINS to hear what was going on with Israel’s newest war. That was when I realized that Jews who drive to synagogue when they are not supposed to…. park a few blocks away!!
So my solution to the sticky situation was to arrange to have the Triple A tow truck come after Friday night services were completed. I went back to where my car was parked later that evening and while I waited outside for the tow truck, I discovered how incredibly peaceful the street was. People would occasionally stroll by and cars were coming up and down the street… and I also took note that the exterior of the synagogue was so well lit that it almost looked like it was the middle of the day... even though it was really late in the evening.
Unfortunately, in Edison on Monday night, nobody’s unreliable Saturn got stuck on Jefferson Street in front of Temple Beth-El, since nobody sat outside after Yom Kippur waiting for a tow. It was not until early Tuesday that somebody discovered that some thugs had spray painted swastikas on that synagogue. The Rabbi of that synagogue - Rabbi Rosenberg has been very vocal about anti Semitism in the area and he speculated to the media that he might have been targeted by a group of Jew hating teenagers.
The week before, on Rosh Hashana,. A Jewish Yeshiva student in Edison was walking down the street when he was attacked in what is being called a bias incident, since the word “Jew” was apparently used during the attack. This story was not mentioned on the news at first until Rabbi Rosenberg spread the word to the local Jewish community and the news media about this crime. A teenager under the age of 18 was subsequently arrested…. but because he is a minor his identity has not been revealed by law enforcement authorities.
I don’t recall if I have ever met Rabbi Rosenberg… but I do admire his guts to stand up against anti- semites and I did write about him here on NWOW a few years ago. (See January 29, 2006) Back then, a local resident wrote a silly letter to a local Jewish paper criticizing the Rabbi’s wisecrack during a public Menorah lighting ceremony about a prayer that Iran’s Ahmadinejad would drop dead. I thought complaining about it was silly… and even though I agree with the Rabbi, perhaps an event with so many little pishers might not have been the right forum for that comment. But for a Jew to write a letter to a Jewish paper about wishing death on a Hitler loving Holocaust denier? I found that to be quite bizarre..
Nonetheless, even though I might not always agree with Rosenberg. I appreciate that he stands up against Anti semitism… (For many years he had a dispute with another Rabbi who I greatly admired, and I'm not sure Rabbi Rosenberg was 100% right about that issue) Rosenberg also said that he seems to think that his actions pertaining to the Rosh Hashana incident motivated the post Yom Kippur vandalism… plus he feels there is some spillover from the anti Semitism brought on by Ahmedinejad during his UN visit last week. Sadly the Rabbi’s December 2005 wish did not come true.
But anti Semitism has also reared its head in another ugly way recently. Last month we followed the news story about the young lab tech from Connecticut who disappeared the week before her wedding. The cynic in me thought she was just getting cold feet like the woman in Atlanta a few years ago who became known as “The Runaway Bride”. Sadly, she was not a runaway bride and police discovered her body on the day that she was to be married.
Since that time there have been numerous memorial services and one incident caught my attention. The woman was engaged to a Jewish man, and his synagogue was the target of some Jew hating wackos the day after her recent memorial service. The craziness was organized by the loonie kazoonies at the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. This crazy church’s website’s cover page declares that “God hates Fags!” Some of the pre printed picket signs at their “demonstrations” say such nuggets such as “Thank God For AIDS” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”. They also protested at the funeral for Matthew Shepard who the website refers to as an “impeninent Sodomite”. The site also talks about how they hate Jews because Jews killed Jesus and on and on it goes.
And in an article I found online on northshoreoflongisland.com, Arlene Gross wrote about the anti Semitic protest outside Temple Beth El in Huntington, that took place the day after Annie Le's memorial service was held there. But the protest was held during Hebrew school lessons, so young students who study there were forced to be exposed to this trash. Gross’s article contained this fascinating piece of information. Here is the actual quote:
“Among the picketers on Park Avenue was a boy wearing an anti-gay T-shirt that matched his mother's. When asked what he was doing there, he replied: "Picketing."
When asked if he knew why, the 7-year-old replied, "No."
So when Rabbi Rosenberg wonders why teenage minors paint swastikas on his synagogue…. take a look at the parents of these kids. If 7 yr olds walk around with anti gay shirts that their parents force them to wear you really need to wonder what kind of homes are these hate filled teens coming from? And how likely is it that the Anti Semitic rhetoric that is drilled into these kids by their Jew hating parents manifests itself into the next generation when those kids line up in front of a synagogue with their spray paint bottles?
I’ve always said that these Jew haters should be banned from taking any medicines or vaccines discovered by Jews… but of course as sensible as that sounds, the ACLU would say that that is too harsh. But the next time you hear a story about kids being arrested for this mischief… you should question what is going on behind the closed doors of those homes that would let a kid think that desecrating a house of worship or attacking a person just because he is Jewish or black or gay or all 3 is a proper way to conduct oneself.
And because arrested minors' names are not released to the public, the hate filled parents also get to retain their anonymity enabling them to continue the cycle. Maybe it's time to release the names of juveniles who are arrested for bias crimes?
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK: Last week Pumpy hit on the Colt (Nidre) Yom Kippur night game... This weekend as we begin to celebrate Sukkot, we go to Detroit where it was announced this week that Saturn will officially cease production. The Bears are 10 1/2 point faves. Sayeth the Pump: "Take Detroit... because at night I will be "lion" down and sleeping in the sukkah"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICKS OF THE WEEK: Last week we went 0-3 for a season to date record of 3-6.
Giants 9 point faves at KANSAS CITY - Double digit road faves? After last weeks game... I'll take the Giants.
DENVER 3 point doggies over Dallas - I think John Elway was a better Joe Buck HBO guest than Jerry Jones...(and I loved the opening where Artie Lange started chasing Joe on the street!)
Jets 7 point doggies to NEW ORLEANS - J-E-T-S... have you ever seen a 3-0 team as such an underdog??
Friday, September 25, 2009
Fall Preview Preview
Now that the summer is officially over… as I mentioned last week my summer officially ends with the onset of Rosh Hashana…its time for Fall and the new TV season.
Back in the old days, the first day of school always coincided with the arrival of the Fall Preview TV Guide… a nice little consolation prize to look forward to when I would come home from my first day back. But since TV Guide got rid of its small regional magazine and went to the current format, I stopped reading it, so nowadays I rely on Entertainment Weekly and whatever I can glean off the various TV blogs that I read.
In addition to that, I really don’t get into the TV (or NFL) season until after the World Series. That gives the networks the chance to cancel the really crummy shows before I get a chance to check them out, but leave the less crummy ones there for me to watch. This year the Mets have been so lousy and NBC has made a historic change to its prime time approach, I have actually taken a little sneak preview pre-November.. hence the Sneak Preview Preview. Incidentally, I still watch the Mets so their game has to be over before I watch another show. And even though our suffering ends when the season ends a week from Sunday, poor Howie Rose has to go from this fiasco to announcing a season of Islander games!
One of the biggest changes is NBC’s decision to run the same show every night at 10pm… a concept that had never been tried before as most prime time shows air once a week. But since syndicated game shows and talk shows and court shows run once a day all across the week, why not try it with a prime time show. By the way, speaking of talk shows, what local theater troupe lends its actors to Jerry Springer’s show? There is NO way these are real people… If you pay close attention, the “confrontations” appear rehearsed and scripted and the “guests” always stand in just the right spot leading to those “spontaneous” fights. Yet all is calm later in the show when all the “guests” are in the late segment when the audience members fire off wisecracks, and the hick “guests” tend of have uncharacteristically witty comebacks.
So with Jay Leno getting the 10 pm slot, I decided to check it out to see if NBC made a brilliant decision or a colossal mistake. The network gets some ratings leeway for this show since the program is relatively cheap to produce compared to the usual stuff that airs at 10pm such as Law and Order. Its kind of odd having the 10pm shows moved up an hour, but I guess this is what East Coasters who relocate to Central Time go through.
Along the way, I caught a season premiere and a new show. I haven’t really been much of a fan of “The Office”…. I need a laugh track to watch a sitcom, so I can tell what the producers expect to be funny so I can laugh along accordingly. These laugh track less shows are hard to watch because I can’t take points off for missed jokes. And why don’t the cameramen ever laugh?? Are they required to keep a straight face? Do they reshoot a scene if the cameraman laughs? I guess the Office is ok… although Im not sure why its reruns bounced off Seinfeld from the coveted 730 and 11pm slot on Channel 5. I even caught the British version on Cartoon Network the other day, but I only watched 10 minutes of it. I would need to see more to give it a fair shot.
One new show that caught my attention was “Community” which got a rave review from Allen Sepinwall in the Star Ledger. I actually have found it to be somewhat amusing. Its about a guy who had a fraudulent college degree who has to go back to college and how he befriends a bunch of goofy characters in school including one blonde chic who he has the hots for. Its right out of the ensemble comedy formula of Taxi or Cheers, etc.
This past week’s show introduced us to the Spanish professor who is actually Asian who does a very funny shtick about why the students should ignore the fact that he teaches Spanish instead of Chinese or martial arts. But those of us who saw “The Hangover” during the summer might have been distracted by the actor since he is the same guy who was the naked guy in the trunk. You gotta give him credit… the guy has a iddy biddy teeny weeny little shmeckle yet had the guts to display it in the movie! Hopefully I’ll forget this fact one day and be able to focus more on his acting chops.
Chevy Chase is also in the show, and I am not sure if NBC would want the host of one of the worst talk show flops this side of the Wilton North Report to lead into Leno. And just to get this out of the way early, I am NOT a Leno fan, but I try to watch his new show with a fair attitude. I used to think Jay was hysterical in the 1980s when he would appear as a guest on Letterman’s 1230 NBC show. He also was a regular guest host filling in for Johnny Carson back then, although I tended to prefer Joan Rivers and Garry Shandling. But once Jay got the job, I started to like him less and less.
I recall watching the first episode when he took over the Tonight Show and Billy Crystal walked out as his first guest and went to shake “Ed’s” hand only to discover that there was no sidekick. And you have to give Leno credit for stepping into the shoes of a legend. However, when Bill Carter’s book came out detailing the lengths Leno went to screw Letterman out of the slot, I started to think NBC made a mistake. And when I realized that the Tonight Show Leno was a much more toned down version than the 1230 Letterman version of Leno, I really felt that the more talented Letterman really got the shaft and I was very happy when Letterman got the 1130 slot on CBS.
Leno’s ratings victories are well documented… and even though it started when Hugh Grant went on as a guest after he got caught in an embarrassing situation, one guest does not lead to more than a decade of ratings domination. I guess you can’t account for taste. The only reason I would ever watch a segment of Leno would be if he had a guest I really liked. For example, I remember a show with George Carlin where he was on the couch while Ann Coulter was as guest and you could just see that Carlin was keeping his mouth shut because he knew he could easily tear Coulter apart.
But Leno himself also got a raw deal at first when NBC pushed him out for Conan who I like but still really don’t watch. Once I discovered the incredibly witty Craig Ferguson I moved my late night attention to CBS. Nonetheless, NBC came up with a reasonable compromise by moving Leno up to 10 and probably saved themselves a lot of money in the process.
I have caught some of Leno’s early shows and I must admit I have laughed out loud a few times. I am hoping that now that he is not “Johnny’s replacement” but instead is “Law and Order; SVU”;s replacement that some of his late 80s early 90s edge would come back. The open of the show is similar to the Tonight Show.. Stuttering John is not the announcer any more.. but the band looks to be the same and the set is similarly laid out except there is no desk. Jay comes out and does his monologue and then the show steers away from the traditional talk show format.
I have noticed he has a revolving roster of comedians who prepare pre taped pieces. The first show featured the wedding singer from “The Hangover” and had him do a lengthy bit about a car wash that went just a little too long. Also, the other day a black woman did a bit about Harlem that also went a bit too long although it was sort of funny especially the way the black women were making fun of the new hoity toity white hairdresser who had set up shop nearby.
Having these guys are a good safety play for Leno.. if they bomb he just gets rid of ‘em and ultimately I think those pieces will be cut. Nightly news anchorman Brian Williams is also supposed to be doing a regular feature, but I haven’t seen it yet and Williams who I thought was so boring on Channel 2 many years back is actually quite witty in real life.
The talk segments are similar.. guests don’t sit on couches with Jay at a desk but instead sit next to each other on chairs. Jerry Seinfeld was on the first show and he was his usual funny self poking fun at Lenos “farewell” show compared to Seinfeld’s farewell show on NBC where Leno came right back to TV while Seinfeld did not. The segment also featured a funny appearance by Oprah. By the way, Seinfeld and crew will be on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season a show whose season premiere I also caught, although it was quite disturbing to see Jeff do the ol hoochy mcscoochy with Funkhouser’s crazy sister, and then deny it claiming she was crazy.
Leno also interviewed that moron Kanye West the day after his crazy appearance on the MTV Music Awards and really got tough with him, asking him what his dead mother would think about what he did the night before. Thursday night’s show featured Rush Limbaugh which was also a well done interview.. good to see Rush lost 80 pounds… his radio success has never translated to TV so you never really get to see him too often. Having him drive an electric car which had a cardboard AL Gore on a race course was quite amusing too.
But some of the segments don’t do as well. Pee Wee Herman was on earlier this week and a bit he did just was not as funny. And when Herman (who looks the same as he did 20 years ago even though he is 57) told Leno he had a new abstinence ring I was waiting for Leno to tie it in with a movie theater masturbating abstinence question.. but the question never materialized. And besides that happened in the early 1990s when Leno was doing funny shtick on Letterman and anybody under 25 probably doesn’t remember seeing Pee Wee’s Playhouse... nor do they remember x rated movie theaters... (how bizarre... there was no internet porn back then!)
So will I watch Leno? I will IF nothing better is on. I am not yet 100% well versed with the new Fall schedule. But what will happen if a CSI or Mentalist is on at 10? Will I watch Leno? Will I flip over to Wendy Williams on Channel 9? And will Leno return to his old edgy self? And more importantly, will this show be a colossal flop>? Or… will it turn into a brilliant programming strategy that will result in other talk/variety shows popping up on other networks? It looks like it could be an interesting season and kudos to NBC for at least trying to do something original and different.
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy lost last week to drop to 1-1. This week its the Indianapolis Colts Arizona Cardinals matchup on Sunday Night... the rare game that Pumpy will see as much as I will since our Jewish friends will be at Temple Sunday night for Yom Kippur and not watching the game. The Cards are 2 1/2 point faves. Sayeth the Pump: "Take Indianapolis since I will be chanting Colt Nidre"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICK OF THE WEEK:
Last week we were 3-0 to even our record at 3-3.
TAMPA 7 point doggies over The Giants - Don't worry Giants fans... Big Blue will win the game.. this just strikes me as a tad too high a spread for a road game.
Chiefs 9 doggies over PHILLY - Are the Eagles really that good to deserve a double digit spread this early in the season?
Carolina 9 doggies over DALLAS - After Rosh Hashana, I watched the Cowboys lose at home... now I plan to do so after Yom Kippur. Big spread here... and Im talking about all the lox and bagels that Trophy Wife will serve!
Back in the old days, the first day of school always coincided with the arrival of the Fall Preview TV Guide… a nice little consolation prize to look forward to when I would come home from my first day back. But since TV Guide got rid of its small regional magazine and went to the current format, I stopped reading it, so nowadays I rely on Entertainment Weekly and whatever I can glean off the various TV blogs that I read.
In addition to that, I really don’t get into the TV (or NFL) season until after the World Series. That gives the networks the chance to cancel the really crummy shows before I get a chance to check them out, but leave the less crummy ones there for me to watch. This year the Mets have been so lousy and NBC has made a historic change to its prime time approach, I have actually taken a little sneak preview pre-November.. hence the Sneak Preview Preview. Incidentally, I still watch the Mets so their game has to be over before I watch another show. And even though our suffering ends when the season ends a week from Sunday, poor Howie Rose has to go from this fiasco to announcing a season of Islander games!
One of the biggest changes is NBC’s decision to run the same show every night at 10pm… a concept that had never been tried before as most prime time shows air once a week. But since syndicated game shows and talk shows and court shows run once a day all across the week, why not try it with a prime time show. By the way, speaking of talk shows, what local theater troupe lends its actors to Jerry Springer’s show? There is NO way these are real people… If you pay close attention, the “confrontations” appear rehearsed and scripted and the “guests” always stand in just the right spot leading to those “spontaneous” fights. Yet all is calm later in the show when all the “guests” are in the late segment when the audience members fire off wisecracks, and the hick “guests” tend of have uncharacteristically witty comebacks.
So with Jay Leno getting the 10 pm slot, I decided to check it out to see if NBC made a brilliant decision or a colossal mistake. The network gets some ratings leeway for this show since the program is relatively cheap to produce compared to the usual stuff that airs at 10pm such as Law and Order. Its kind of odd having the 10pm shows moved up an hour, but I guess this is what East Coasters who relocate to Central Time go through.
Along the way, I caught a season premiere and a new show. I haven’t really been much of a fan of “The Office”…. I need a laugh track to watch a sitcom, so I can tell what the producers expect to be funny so I can laugh along accordingly. These laugh track less shows are hard to watch because I can’t take points off for missed jokes. And why don’t the cameramen ever laugh?? Are they required to keep a straight face? Do they reshoot a scene if the cameraman laughs? I guess the Office is ok… although Im not sure why its reruns bounced off Seinfeld from the coveted 730 and 11pm slot on Channel 5. I even caught the British version on Cartoon Network the other day, but I only watched 10 minutes of it. I would need to see more to give it a fair shot.
One new show that caught my attention was “Community” which got a rave review from Allen Sepinwall in the Star Ledger. I actually have found it to be somewhat amusing. Its about a guy who had a fraudulent college degree who has to go back to college and how he befriends a bunch of goofy characters in school including one blonde chic who he has the hots for. Its right out of the ensemble comedy formula of Taxi or Cheers, etc.
This past week’s show introduced us to the Spanish professor who is actually Asian who does a very funny shtick about why the students should ignore the fact that he teaches Spanish instead of Chinese or martial arts. But those of us who saw “The Hangover” during the summer might have been distracted by the actor since he is the same guy who was the naked guy in the trunk. You gotta give him credit… the guy has a iddy biddy teeny weeny little shmeckle yet had the guts to display it in the movie! Hopefully I’ll forget this fact one day and be able to focus more on his acting chops.
Chevy Chase is also in the show, and I am not sure if NBC would want the host of one of the worst talk show flops this side of the Wilton North Report to lead into Leno. And just to get this out of the way early, I am NOT a Leno fan, but I try to watch his new show with a fair attitude. I used to think Jay was hysterical in the 1980s when he would appear as a guest on Letterman’s 1230 NBC show. He also was a regular guest host filling in for Johnny Carson back then, although I tended to prefer Joan Rivers and Garry Shandling. But once Jay got the job, I started to like him less and less.
I recall watching the first episode when he took over the Tonight Show and Billy Crystal walked out as his first guest and went to shake “Ed’s” hand only to discover that there was no sidekick. And you have to give Leno credit for stepping into the shoes of a legend. However, when Bill Carter’s book came out detailing the lengths Leno went to screw Letterman out of the slot, I started to think NBC made a mistake. And when I realized that the Tonight Show Leno was a much more toned down version than the 1230 Letterman version of Leno, I really felt that the more talented Letterman really got the shaft and I was very happy when Letterman got the 1130 slot on CBS.
Leno’s ratings victories are well documented… and even though it started when Hugh Grant went on as a guest after he got caught in an embarrassing situation, one guest does not lead to more than a decade of ratings domination. I guess you can’t account for taste. The only reason I would ever watch a segment of Leno would be if he had a guest I really liked. For example, I remember a show with George Carlin where he was on the couch while Ann Coulter was as guest and you could just see that Carlin was keeping his mouth shut because he knew he could easily tear Coulter apart.
But Leno himself also got a raw deal at first when NBC pushed him out for Conan who I like but still really don’t watch. Once I discovered the incredibly witty Craig Ferguson I moved my late night attention to CBS. Nonetheless, NBC came up with a reasonable compromise by moving Leno up to 10 and probably saved themselves a lot of money in the process.
I have caught some of Leno’s early shows and I must admit I have laughed out loud a few times. I am hoping that now that he is not “Johnny’s replacement” but instead is “Law and Order; SVU”;s replacement that some of his late 80s early 90s edge would come back. The open of the show is similar to the Tonight Show.. Stuttering John is not the announcer any more.. but the band looks to be the same and the set is similarly laid out except there is no desk. Jay comes out and does his monologue and then the show steers away from the traditional talk show format.
I have noticed he has a revolving roster of comedians who prepare pre taped pieces. The first show featured the wedding singer from “The Hangover” and had him do a lengthy bit about a car wash that went just a little too long. Also, the other day a black woman did a bit about Harlem that also went a bit too long although it was sort of funny especially the way the black women were making fun of the new hoity toity white hairdresser who had set up shop nearby.
Having these guys are a good safety play for Leno.. if they bomb he just gets rid of ‘em and ultimately I think those pieces will be cut. Nightly news anchorman Brian Williams is also supposed to be doing a regular feature, but I haven’t seen it yet and Williams who I thought was so boring on Channel 2 many years back is actually quite witty in real life.
The talk segments are similar.. guests don’t sit on couches with Jay at a desk but instead sit next to each other on chairs. Jerry Seinfeld was on the first show and he was his usual funny self poking fun at Lenos “farewell” show compared to Seinfeld’s farewell show on NBC where Leno came right back to TV while Seinfeld did not. The segment also featured a funny appearance by Oprah. By the way, Seinfeld and crew will be on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season a show whose season premiere I also caught, although it was quite disturbing to see Jeff do the ol hoochy mcscoochy with Funkhouser’s crazy sister, and then deny it claiming she was crazy.
Leno also interviewed that moron Kanye West the day after his crazy appearance on the MTV Music Awards and really got tough with him, asking him what his dead mother would think about what he did the night before. Thursday night’s show featured Rush Limbaugh which was also a well done interview.. good to see Rush lost 80 pounds… his radio success has never translated to TV so you never really get to see him too often. Having him drive an electric car which had a cardboard AL Gore on a race course was quite amusing too.
But some of the segments don’t do as well. Pee Wee Herman was on earlier this week and a bit he did just was not as funny. And when Herman (who looks the same as he did 20 years ago even though he is 57) told Leno he had a new abstinence ring I was waiting for Leno to tie it in with a movie theater masturbating abstinence question.. but the question never materialized. And besides that happened in the early 1990s when Leno was doing funny shtick on Letterman and anybody under 25 probably doesn’t remember seeing Pee Wee’s Playhouse... nor do they remember x rated movie theaters... (how bizarre... there was no internet porn back then!)
So will I watch Leno? I will IF nothing better is on. I am not yet 100% well versed with the new Fall schedule. But what will happen if a CSI or Mentalist is on at 10? Will I watch Leno? Will I flip over to Wendy Williams on Channel 9? And will Leno return to his old edgy self? And more importantly, will this show be a colossal flop>? Or… will it turn into a brilliant programming strategy that will result in other talk/variety shows popping up on other networks? It looks like it could be an interesting season and kudos to NBC for at least trying to do something original and different.
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy lost last week to drop to 1-1. This week its the Indianapolis Colts Arizona Cardinals matchup on Sunday Night... the rare game that Pumpy will see as much as I will since our Jewish friends will be at Temple Sunday night for Yom Kippur and not watching the game. The Cards are 2 1/2 point faves. Sayeth the Pump: "Take Indianapolis since I will be chanting Colt Nidre"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICK OF THE WEEK:
Last week we were 3-0 to even our record at 3-3.
TAMPA 7 point doggies over The Giants - Don't worry Giants fans... Big Blue will win the game.. this just strikes me as a tad too high a spread for a road game.
Chiefs 9 doggies over PHILLY - Are the Eagles really that good to deserve a double digit spread this early in the season?
Carolina 9 doggies over DALLAS - After Rosh Hashana, I watched the Cowboys lose at home... now I plan to do so after Yom Kippur. Big spread here... and Im talking about all the lox and bagels that Trophy Wife will serve!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thoughts for 5770 - Revisiting "Diary of A Crummy Day"
Hey today is my birthday!
So when does the summer really end? Is it Labor Day? Is it September 22? For me, summer really ends when things get "serious" and I guess being Jewish that would mean the arrival of Rosh Hashana..... (although in the rare years that it comes out before 9-17, we still get a last gasp of summer at the shore on my birthday) And there have been some years that Rosh Hashana came out in October… and in those years my summer continued into October… I even recall the infamous 1994 RH which started the night of Labor Day! My mother was in the hospital that weekend and I remember walking quite a few miles from Linden to Rahway Hospital in brand new shoes. I had blisters on my feet till Thanksgiving!
But the solemnity of Rosh Hashana is where everything gets serious again.. It launches 10 days of repentance, and it also marks the first time that I start wearing a tie and jacket to synagogue again. The Jewish New Year also starts off a few weeks of religious holidays that ends with my favorite holiday of Simchat Torah. (It also marks 3 wks of coworkers asking “There’s another Jewish Holiday?”) Simchat Torah always wraps up with my annual proclamation of “Oh well, no more holidays till Thanksgiving”. I actually stole that line from the Cantor at my old synagogue in Linden; he said it off the cuff to me one year and I have used it every year since!
When looking back at classic columns in NWOW, one that stands out in my mind appeared here on 8/24/06… the day The Highland Park Conservative Temple and Center was damaged in a fire. I kept a diary of my thoughts for that day and decided to post a column that night with a narrative of the events of that day… unlike other columns that I work on for a few days… That particular column was one that I wanted to post at the end of the day to effectively capture my emotions. I remember attempting to upload that column…”Diary of a Crummy Day”… (see the August 2006 archives) to blogspot that night and got increasingly frustrated because I couldn’t get on the internet, and I very impatiently continued to log on until after what seemed like an eternity when I finally got the signal... I recommend you check it out if you had never seen it before.
In retrospect, the Crummy Factor of the day has diminished. Unbeknownst to me that day, a little baby was born in a nearby hospital that day… and now 3 years later Trophy Wife and I have become friends with that kid’s parents… And how crummy a day could it be if a little baby arrived that day? And also unbeknownst to me on that very day, a new family moved to town just 6 houses away from where we live now. That family had a baby this summer… but not in the hospital.. but actually at their house! The night the baby was born there was a nasty thunderstorm and I watched the rain coming down hoping that the loud noises weren’t scaring the newest member of our community. Over the last year, Trophy Wife and I have also became friendly with that family… and again, how crummy a day could it be if this nice new family moved here??
And this weekend, the Crummy factor will diminish yet again with the arrival of 5770. For the first few months after that August 2006 fire, the Temple building was totally unusable. The sanctuary wing needed to be rebuilt and the rest of the building had to be cleaned out from smoke damage. The office staff moved their operation to an office building that was kindly donated by a Temple member. Services were split up between that office building, The Y and the High School. After about 10 months, one side of the Temple was usable again and we moved everything into what was once the gym, a gym that was reinvented for 2 years as a repainted temporary sanctuary and general all purpose room. It is also the same room where I met Trophy Wife on December 29, 2001.
Now 3 years later as we begin the New Year, we will finally have the Grand Re-opening of the Temple’s sanctuary that was destroyed by that fire. If you saw the 2006 column, the very night of the fire, officials of the Temple held a meeting at the local Y (which has since been torn down) and announced that the rebuilding process would start immediately and a fundraising campaign was launched. That money has now gone towards a nice new addition that has resulted in a redesigned building featuring an even bigger sanctuary so the overflow crowd can sit in pews and not on temporary chairs. There are many other new features but they are a mystery to me because I haven’t seen them yet. The new Sanctuary wing has been kept under lock and key from curiosity seekers like myself, and until the New Year begins, nobody will be allowed in there, except for the Temple Officers who have been posting pictures regularly on Facebook. And I gotta tell you… these pictures really look fantastic!
This Saturday Morning as I wake up and wipe the cobwebs from my eyes… I’ll run downstairs to get some caffeine and I plan to tie my tie a little quicker; I’ll already have the jacket picked out and I plan to scamper off to synagogue with a little spring in my step. (Hopefully I wont step on any cracks or potholes like I did on Rosh Hashana 1999 when I sprained my ankle on my way to Temple!) And I plan to set aside a little extra time on my arrival to oooo and aaaaah as I check out the brand new sanctuary… hopefully I won’t sound too much like Merv Griffin because belting out "Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" at Temple would be highly inappropriate! But after those first few minutes Saturday as I reintroduce myself to the new Temple, I will also take some time to further downgrade that Crummy factor from 3 yrs ago.
And this should be the theme for 5770 - downgrade the Crummy Factor. And single people and ventriloquists should also rethink their dating habits and downgrade the Dummy Factor. Life is tough right now.. the economy has tanked, 401k's and wallets are hurting and everybody is sniping. Congressmen heckle the President… Serena Williams yells at referees… and Kanye West kvetches because his friend didn’t win an award.
Believe me, as a mortgage broker I see firsthand that people are having problems! But before you sit at services reflecting on all the problems from last year… remember the old Monty Python song…: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”… Instead of spending time worrying about things, take the bull by the horns like our Temple crew did that August 24th and look to the future and see what you need to do to improve your situation. Nothing would be better if over the next several months we are all able to downgrade our Crummy Factors. And as tough as it might look right now, we don’t have the foresight to look into the future… so even though life might be crummy now, things have a way of working out… just like August 24, 2006.
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy is 1-0 after hitting it with the Jets last wk. This week we go to Georgia, the home state of Former President Jimmy Carter who may have started a firestorm this week by saying Obama critics are prejudiced against blacks. The Falcons are 6 point faves over the Panthers. Sayeth The Pump:
“First I want to correct the column’s last paragraph that we don’t have foresight to see the future… Second.. I too had a daughter this summer that you didn’t mention. As for the pick,. Let’s take the Panthers because my son "Little Pumpstradamus" likes The Pink Panther.
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICKS OF THE WEEK; Last week we were 0-3. Home teams are in caps.
Giants 3 point doggies over DALLAS - Looking forward to this one after 2 days of Rosh Hashana.
Saints pick 'em over PHILLY - The Cheese Steaks have some serious QB problems.
Rams 9 1/2 point doggies over WASHINGTON - The Skins didn't look that impressive last week even though the Rams looked that bad. Double digit spreads are a little dangerous this early in the season.
So when does the summer really end? Is it Labor Day? Is it September 22? For me, summer really ends when things get "serious" and I guess being Jewish that would mean the arrival of Rosh Hashana..... (although in the rare years that it comes out before 9-17, we still get a last gasp of summer at the shore on my birthday) And there have been some years that Rosh Hashana came out in October… and in those years my summer continued into October… I even recall the infamous 1994 RH which started the night of Labor Day! My mother was in the hospital that weekend and I remember walking quite a few miles from Linden to Rahway Hospital in brand new shoes. I had blisters on my feet till Thanksgiving!
But the solemnity of Rosh Hashana is where everything gets serious again.. It launches 10 days of repentance, and it also marks the first time that I start wearing a tie and jacket to synagogue again. The Jewish New Year also starts off a few weeks of religious holidays that ends with my favorite holiday of Simchat Torah. (It also marks 3 wks of coworkers asking “There’s another Jewish Holiday?”) Simchat Torah always wraps up with my annual proclamation of “Oh well, no more holidays till Thanksgiving”. I actually stole that line from the Cantor at my old synagogue in Linden; he said it off the cuff to me one year and I have used it every year since!
When looking back at classic columns in NWOW, one that stands out in my mind appeared here on 8/24/06… the day The Highland Park Conservative Temple and Center was damaged in a fire. I kept a diary of my thoughts for that day and decided to post a column that night with a narrative of the events of that day… unlike other columns that I work on for a few days… That particular column was one that I wanted to post at the end of the day to effectively capture my emotions. I remember attempting to upload that column…”Diary of a Crummy Day”… (see the August 2006 archives) to blogspot that night and got increasingly frustrated because I couldn’t get on the internet, and I very impatiently continued to log on until after what seemed like an eternity when I finally got the signal... I recommend you check it out if you had never seen it before.
In retrospect, the Crummy Factor of the day has diminished. Unbeknownst to me that day, a little baby was born in a nearby hospital that day… and now 3 years later Trophy Wife and I have become friends with that kid’s parents… And how crummy a day could it be if a little baby arrived that day? And also unbeknownst to me on that very day, a new family moved to town just 6 houses away from where we live now. That family had a baby this summer… but not in the hospital.. but actually at their house! The night the baby was born there was a nasty thunderstorm and I watched the rain coming down hoping that the loud noises weren’t scaring the newest member of our community. Over the last year, Trophy Wife and I have also became friendly with that family… and again, how crummy a day could it be if this nice new family moved here??
And this weekend, the Crummy factor will diminish yet again with the arrival of 5770. For the first few months after that August 2006 fire, the Temple building was totally unusable. The sanctuary wing needed to be rebuilt and the rest of the building had to be cleaned out from smoke damage. The office staff moved their operation to an office building that was kindly donated by a Temple member. Services were split up between that office building, The Y and the High School. After about 10 months, one side of the Temple was usable again and we moved everything into what was once the gym, a gym that was reinvented for 2 years as a repainted temporary sanctuary and general all purpose room. It is also the same room where I met Trophy Wife on December 29, 2001.
Now 3 years later as we begin the New Year, we will finally have the Grand Re-opening of the Temple’s sanctuary that was destroyed by that fire. If you saw the 2006 column, the very night of the fire, officials of the Temple held a meeting at the local Y (which has since been torn down) and announced that the rebuilding process would start immediately and a fundraising campaign was launched. That money has now gone towards a nice new addition that has resulted in a redesigned building featuring an even bigger sanctuary so the overflow crowd can sit in pews and not on temporary chairs. There are many other new features but they are a mystery to me because I haven’t seen them yet. The new Sanctuary wing has been kept under lock and key from curiosity seekers like myself, and until the New Year begins, nobody will be allowed in there, except for the Temple Officers who have been posting pictures regularly on Facebook. And I gotta tell you… these pictures really look fantastic!
This Saturday Morning as I wake up and wipe the cobwebs from my eyes… I’ll run downstairs to get some caffeine and I plan to tie my tie a little quicker; I’ll already have the jacket picked out and I plan to scamper off to synagogue with a little spring in my step. (Hopefully I wont step on any cracks or potholes like I did on Rosh Hashana 1999 when I sprained my ankle on my way to Temple!) And I plan to set aside a little extra time on my arrival to oooo and aaaaah as I check out the brand new sanctuary… hopefully I won’t sound too much like Merv Griffin because belting out "Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" at Temple would be highly inappropriate! But after those first few minutes Saturday as I reintroduce myself to the new Temple, I will also take some time to further downgrade that Crummy factor from 3 yrs ago.
And this should be the theme for 5770 - downgrade the Crummy Factor. And single people and ventriloquists should also rethink their dating habits and downgrade the Dummy Factor. Life is tough right now.. the economy has tanked, 401k's and wallets are hurting and everybody is sniping. Congressmen heckle the President… Serena Williams yells at referees… and Kanye West kvetches because his friend didn’t win an award.
Believe me, as a mortgage broker I see firsthand that people are having problems! But before you sit at services reflecting on all the problems from last year… remember the old Monty Python song…: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”… Instead of spending time worrying about things, take the bull by the horns like our Temple crew did that August 24th and look to the future and see what you need to do to improve your situation. Nothing would be better if over the next several months we are all able to downgrade our Crummy Factors. And as tough as it might look right now, we don’t have the foresight to look into the future… so even though life might be crummy now, things have a way of working out… just like August 24, 2006.
PUMPSTRADAMUS PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy is 1-0 after hitting it with the Jets last wk. This week we go to Georgia, the home state of Former President Jimmy Carter who may have started a firestorm this week by saying Obama critics are prejudiced against blacks. The Falcons are 6 point faves over the Panthers. Sayeth The Pump:
“First I want to correct the column’s last paragraph that we don’t have foresight to see the future… Second.. I too had a daughter this summer that you didn’t mention. As for the pick,. Let’s take the Panthers because my son "Little Pumpstradamus" likes The Pink Panther.
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICKS OF THE WEEK; Last week we were 0-3. Home teams are in caps.
Giants 3 point doggies over DALLAS - Looking forward to this one after 2 days of Rosh Hashana.
Saints pick 'em over PHILLY - The Cheese Steaks have some serious QB problems.
Rams 9 1/2 point doggies over WASHINGTON - The Skins didn't look that impressive last week even though the Rams looked that bad. Double digit spreads are a little dangerous this early in the season.
Friday, September 11, 2009
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Well for one thing, I was not blogging as I discovered while going through the August 2009 archives. But it’s good to be back.. and today is September 11th… and while there is a call for a national Holiday to remember 9/11 – which would be hard to do so soon after Labor Day - here is my proposal:
Flip flop Labor Day and Memorial Day and move Memorial Day to September 11th, although I am not quite sure how that would affect The Jerry Lewis Telethon…. I think it’s a great tribute that they read all the names of those who lost their lives and maybe something like this should also be done on Holocaust Remembrance Day too.
I Summer Baseball
I was busy during the summer doing some volunteering and spending too much time playing Typing Maniac on Facebook. I have also been working on a project that I will elaborate on in a future column. We didn’t do a Baseball Quarterly Report column at the 120 game mark, because for the first time since we started NWOW back in November of 2005, the Mets are having a pretty lame season so my attention to baseball has drifted off as the Met losses continue to pile up. My buddy Walter announced as the Mets dropped under .500 earlier this summer that he would grow a beard until the Mets were back to the break even point. Unfortunately that won’t happen until April’s 0-0 record… but Walter refused to give up and now looks like ZZ Top.
My fantasy baseball team is as lame as usual… but this year our league has a new rule that players can only be protected for 3 seasons, and the team that finishes 5th gets the first pick… which will most likely be Albert Pujols. My team actually rallied over the last month or so led by my nice Jewish boy pitching staff of Jason Marquis and Scott Feldman and pulled within 20 points of that #5 spot. That spot by the way is held by my Fantasy Baseball nemesis Bob Salvo who came from behind to knock me off the top spot in 2007…. Perhaps this year, revenge will be mine!!
Anyway, the Mets tsuris has been covered ad infinitum… and any team whose offense is centered around Jose Reyes and Carloses Delgado and Beltran would run into trouble if the heart of their lineup went down with injury. David Wright’s microscopic home run total didn’t help matters either… I bought new glasses a couple of weeks ago to get a better view of the box scores because I was squinting to see David Wright’s nonexistent home runs. The Mets recently announced that they are not planning to bring the fences in for 2010… maybe its too expensive after they lost so much money to Bernard in his Madoff scheme? Perhaps they should just keep the fences where they are, but just move home plate closer to the fences??
One interesting baseball story caught my eye recently when Reds 2nd basemen Brandon Phillips corrected the media about the status of his broken/fractured hand. Here is how he “clarified” his status:
"My wrist is not broken. I didn't mean to say broken, I know I didn't say 'broken.' I said 'fracture.' I didn't know 'fracture' and 'broken' meant the same thing. My wrist feels like it's fractured. Yeah. That right there.
"The last time I took an X-ray, it said there's nothing broke. Broken and fractured are the same thing. It feels like it's broken, fractured, or broken -- it's the same thing. But my wrist really does bother me."
And to his credit Phillips continues to play every day despite the injury even though his team is totally done for this season.
As for my preseason picks from back in April… memo to the Yankee fans..the team with the best regular season record does not always win the Series. I missed on my preseason pick of Tampa and Chicago going to the post season, but I was right on my Boston-LA Angels post season prediction. I took the safe route predicting the same AL playoff teams from 2008… but, if the Red Sox don’t get their stuff together soon, Texas could very well grab the Wild Card!
In the NL, the Dodgers and Phillies are playoff bound while the Mets and Cubbies are staying home… I think that an LA – Philly NLCS could be quite exciting and I will pick LA as my Mets replacement to advance to the Fall Classic because Philly’s bullpen is not quite doing the job and Brad Lidge has been quite crummy compared to his flawless 2008 performance. And if LA makes the World Series…. Wouldn’t it be cool for Joe Torre to face the Yankees?? Nonetheless, I am sticking to my preseason pick of the Red Sox going to the Series….
Here were my awards picks from the All Star Game…
MVP – Albert Pujols and Joe Mauer
Cy Young – Tim Lincecum and Josh Beckett
Rookie of the Year –Tommy Hanson and Andrew Bailey
I think the only one wrong here is the AL Cy Young…where many think it will go to Zach Greinke… But y’know what?? I’m going on a limb and picking Feldman for the Cy Young and in a different year, you could go with an all Yiddish Cy Young (or Sigh, I’m not so Young and my grandchildren never call me) but Marquis’ excellent season is no comparison to Lincecum or the Cardinals tandem of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright.
II Where do you get your news revisited??
Some interesting news media trends this past summer… First, one newspaper I have stopped buying is The NY Post!! Their coverage of the Erin Andrews story was just hideous. The entire point of the Andrews story was how terrible it was that a peeping Tom snapped some nudie shots of her in a hotel room and posted them on the internet. The Post’s coverage include still shots of her naked tuchis that were taken from that video.
And isn’t it interesting how Phil Mushnick, the sports media columnist for the Post criticizes every media outlet when their employees don’t say anything about other less kosher aspects of their company? For years he has ripped into Mike Francesa for not publicly criticizing WFAN for running commercials for betting services as has been the case with a lot of others who have found themselves on the wrong end of his poison pen including competing newspapers. As much as he may want to criticize sports wagering ads, those are much less worse than the Post’s Andrews pictorial. And what did the high and mighty Mushnick, the self proclaimed King of all Morals say about those pictures in his paper? Absolutely nothing. What a hypocritical windbag.
By the way, there are some oddities about the story. Why did Andrews lawyer announce those pictures were of his client? It’s very easy to deny it’s her since there is really nothing on her body that would give it away that it’s definitely Erin Andrews. It’s not like she has an old ESPN tattoo of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann on her tuchis. Some skeptics think it’s a publicity stunt. I am still waiting for the announcement of an arrest of this culprit; you wonder if Charles Kushner might want to hire that cameraman next time he has a relative to screw over?
As I have discussed in the past, most of my News comes from Channel 4 and The Star Ledger but both of their days are numbered as my source for news. I have already switched to channel 7 Eyewitness News on weekends since Channel 4 got rid of Carol Anne Riddell… and now I will also watch Channel 7 at 5pm now that Channel 4 is getting rid of its 5 o’clock news hour in favor of some dreck-y magazine show. Channel 11 is also adding a 6:30 pm newscast (My former radio intern is a producer for that newscast!) competing against the network newscasts. How original… why didn’t anybody think of that sooner? Actually for a long time the “6:30” network news used to air at 7pm and the 6 o’clock news used to run for a full hour back in the days of Dan, Tom and Peter airing at 7 after an hour of Jensen, Scarborough and Beutel.
And the Ledger… I’ve read it since childhood but the quality continues to drop… They got rid of their beat reporters for all the sports teams except the Giants, Jets, Nets and Devils… and pick up the other teams reports from the Daily News and Associated Press. They have no more Sunday sports columnists yet oddly have a Tuesday Soccer column. And worst of all they destroyed the comics over the summer getting rid of several decent ones and then breaking them into regular comics and “Classic” comics… the “classic” comics consisting of the older strips and they are usually tossed in somewhere in the auto classified section… (although for the last wk they have been easier to find in the Today section) They also dropped Frazz when they did this silly move, but then they quickly came to their senses and reinstated it 2 wks later. Frazz happens to be a very clever strip about a guy who is very rich yet works as a school Janitor and has amusing exchanges with the students and teachers at his school…. usually consisting of incredibly clever word play.
And finally, a few weeks ago CBS broke into Craig Ferguson’s show to announce the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. I flipped channels to see how the other networks were covering this breaking story. CNN had its usual post 1AM breaking story blues as the CNN International Team again struggled to cover an American story… However I flipped to Fox News… and nothing!! They were running a repeat of that evening’s Greta van Sustern show and didn’t say a measly peep about Kennedy.
I was never a big fan of Ted Kennedy’s… but I admire his longevity in the US Senate. I am also too young to understand the popularity of JFK and the rest of the Kennedys… but there is one important fact about them – here is this family that is rich beyond comprehension, and they decided that they would dedicate their lives to public service! Yet here we have Republicans who politicize a simple “Welcome Back to School” speech by President Obama… and sneer at any kind of health care reform that would dare take their money and give to the poor in some kind of Robin Hood scheme.
Republicans like to talk about how much they hate the idea of giving their money to able bodied people who are lazy and refuse to work. Even liberals like DAS don’t believe in subsidizing that lifestyle, but the reality of life is that there are more people who are less fortunate due to circumstances beyond their control. And when Facebookers put up a status about nobody being without health care, it’s the Republicans who point out that they want no part of funding illegal Mexicans… as if Illegal Mexicans are the only people who are going to benefit from this.
Perhaps Kennedy’s legacy will be that he ended up richer than all these other Republicans, yet he makes them look bad because he decided to dedicate his life to using his power and money to help make others lives better who are less fortunate.
I was talking to Trophy Wife about the idea of segregating ourselves from the Republicans and having them take half the country and we take the other half… Then they can live their happy lives and figure out ways to keep from paying reasonable taxes and buy their expensive cars and drive to work in them…. But be careful of the bridges, (and no this is not a Chappaquidick cheap shot) as Minnesotans discovered when Governor Pawlenty’s severe tax cut affected budget left them without enough tax revenue money for important bridge repairs!
PUMPSTRADAMUS NFL PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy is back for another year of pigskin picks. Last year he went 11-6 and once again despite his total lack of knowledge about anything related to sports, his uncanny picks are usually right on especially early in the season. This year we go with our Met fan Walter's favorite team - The Jets who are at Houston to play the Texans. The Jets are 4 1/2 point doggies. Sayeth the Pump:
"I'm going against the Texans because most of them were so wacky this week when they kept their kids home from school so they couldn't see the Presidents speech about staying in school. Take the Jets!"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICK OF THE WEEK
Last yr we went 31-19-1... definitely our best season picking games on NWOW.
GIANTS 6 1/2 faves over the Redskins - You gotta love how the Skins sued some fans who ran into money trouble and couldn't pay for their PSLs.
PANTHERS 2 1/2 doggies over Philadelphia - I don't like using the word doggies in a sentence involving the Eagles new QB Michael Vick.
BUCS 6 doggies over Dallas - I am really liking the home team cooking this week.
Flip flop Labor Day and Memorial Day and move Memorial Day to September 11th, although I am not quite sure how that would affect The Jerry Lewis Telethon…. I think it’s a great tribute that they read all the names of those who lost their lives and maybe something like this should also be done on Holocaust Remembrance Day too.
I Summer Baseball
I was busy during the summer doing some volunteering and spending too much time playing Typing Maniac on Facebook. I have also been working on a project that I will elaborate on in a future column. We didn’t do a Baseball Quarterly Report column at the 120 game mark, because for the first time since we started NWOW back in November of 2005, the Mets are having a pretty lame season so my attention to baseball has drifted off as the Met losses continue to pile up. My buddy Walter announced as the Mets dropped under .500 earlier this summer that he would grow a beard until the Mets were back to the break even point. Unfortunately that won’t happen until April’s 0-0 record… but Walter refused to give up and now looks like ZZ Top.
My fantasy baseball team is as lame as usual… but this year our league has a new rule that players can only be protected for 3 seasons, and the team that finishes 5th gets the first pick… which will most likely be Albert Pujols. My team actually rallied over the last month or so led by my nice Jewish boy pitching staff of Jason Marquis and Scott Feldman and pulled within 20 points of that #5 spot. That spot by the way is held by my Fantasy Baseball nemesis Bob Salvo who came from behind to knock me off the top spot in 2007…. Perhaps this year, revenge will be mine!!
Anyway, the Mets tsuris has been covered ad infinitum… and any team whose offense is centered around Jose Reyes and Carloses Delgado and Beltran would run into trouble if the heart of their lineup went down with injury. David Wright’s microscopic home run total didn’t help matters either… I bought new glasses a couple of weeks ago to get a better view of the box scores because I was squinting to see David Wright’s nonexistent home runs. The Mets recently announced that they are not planning to bring the fences in for 2010… maybe its too expensive after they lost so much money to Bernard in his Madoff scheme? Perhaps they should just keep the fences where they are, but just move home plate closer to the fences??
One interesting baseball story caught my eye recently when Reds 2nd basemen Brandon Phillips corrected the media about the status of his broken/fractured hand. Here is how he “clarified” his status:
"My wrist is not broken. I didn't mean to say broken, I know I didn't say 'broken.' I said 'fracture.' I didn't know 'fracture' and 'broken' meant the same thing. My wrist feels like it's fractured. Yeah. That right there.
"The last time I took an X-ray, it said there's nothing broke. Broken and fractured are the same thing. It feels like it's broken, fractured, or broken -- it's the same thing. But my wrist really does bother me."
And to his credit Phillips continues to play every day despite the injury even though his team is totally done for this season.
As for my preseason picks from back in April… memo to the Yankee fans..the team with the best regular season record does not always win the Series. I missed on my preseason pick of Tampa and Chicago going to the post season, but I was right on my Boston-LA Angels post season prediction. I took the safe route predicting the same AL playoff teams from 2008… but, if the Red Sox don’t get their stuff together soon, Texas could very well grab the Wild Card!
In the NL, the Dodgers and Phillies are playoff bound while the Mets and Cubbies are staying home… I think that an LA – Philly NLCS could be quite exciting and I will pick LA as my Mets replacement to advance to the Fall Classic because Philly’s bullpen is not quite doing the job and Brad Lidge has been quite crummy compared to his flawless 2008 performance. And if LA makes the World Series…. Wouldn’t it be cool for Joe Torre to face the Yankees?? Nonetheless, I am sticking to my preseason pick of the Red Sox going to the Series….
Here were my awards picks from the All Star Game…
MVP – Albert Pujols and Joe Mauer
Cy Young – Tim Lincecum and Josh Beckett
Rookie of the Year –Tommy Hanson and Andrew Bailey
I think the only one wrong here is the AL Cy Young…where many think it will go to Zach Greinke… But y’know what?? I’m going on a limb and picking Feldman for the Cy Young and in a different year, you could go with an all Yiddish Cy Young (or Sigh, I’m not so Young and my grandchildren never call me) but Marquis’ excellent season is no comparison to Lincecum or the Cardinals tandem of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright.
II Where do you get your news revisited??
Some interesting news media trends this past summer… First, one newspaper I have stopped buying is The NY Post!! Their coverage of the Erin Andrews story was just hideous. The entire point of the Andrews story was how terrible it was that a peeping Tom snapped some nudie shots of her in a hotel room and posted them on the internet. The Post’s coverage include still shots of her naked tuchis that were taken from that video.
And isn’t it interesting how Phil Mushnick, the sports media columnist for the Post criticizes every media outlet when their employees don’t say anything about other less kosher aspects of their company? For years he has ripped into Mike Francesa for not publicly criticizing WFAN for running commercials for betting services as has been the case with a lot of others who have found themselves on the wrong end of his poison pen including competing newspapers. As much as he may want to criticize sports wagering ads, those are much less worse than the Post’s Andrews pictorial. And what did the high and mighty Mushnick, the self proclaimed King of all Morals say about those pictures in his paper? Absolutely nothing. What a hypocritical windbag.
By the way, there are some oddities about the story. Why did Andrews lawyer announce those pictures were of his client? It’s very easy to deny it’s her since there is really nothing on her body that would give it away that it’s definitely Erin Andrews. It’s not like she has an old ESPN tattoo of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann on her tuchis. Some skeptics think it’s a publicity stunt. I am still waiting for the announcement of an arrest of this culprit; you wonder if Charles Kushner might want to hire that cameraman next time he has a relative to screw over?
As I have discussed in the past, most of my News comes from Channel 4 and The Star Ledger but both of their days are numbered as my source for news. I have already switched to channel 7 Eyewitness News on weekends since Channel 4 got rid of Carol Anne Riddell… and now I will also watch Channel 7 at 5pm now that Channel 4 is getting rid of its 5 o’clock news hour in favor of some dreck-y magazine show. Channel 11 is also adding a 6:30 pm newscast (My former radio intern is a producer for that newscast!) competing against the network newscasts. How original… why didn’t anybody think of that sooner? Actually for a long time the “6:30” network news used to air at 7pm and the 6 o’clock news used to run for a full hour back in the days of Dan, Tom and Peter airing at 7 after an hour of Jensen, Scarborough and Beutel.
And the Ledger… I’ve read it since childhood but the quality continues to drop… They got rid of their beat reporters for all the sports teams except the Giants, Jets, Nets and Devils… and pick up the other teams reports from the Daily News and Associated Press. They have no more Sunday sports columnists yet oddly have a Tuesday Soccer column. And worst of all they destroyed the comics over the summer getting rid of several decent ones and then breaking them into regular comics and “Classic” comics… the “classic” comics consisting of the older strips and they are usually tossed in somewhere in the auto classified section… (although for the last wk they have been easier to find in the Today section) They also dropped Frazz when they did this silly move, but then they quickly came to their senses and reinstated it 2 wks later. Frazz happens to be a very clever strip about a guy who is very rich yet works as a school Janitor and has amusing exchanges with the students and teachers at his school…. usually consisting of incredibly clever word play.
And finally, a few weeks ago CBS broke into Craig Ferguson’s show to announce the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. I flipped channels to see how the other networks were covering this breaking story. CNN had its usual post 1AM breaking story blues as the CNN International Team again struggled to cover an American story… However I flipped to Fox News… and nothing!! They were running a repeat of that evening’s Greta van Sustern show and didn’t say a measly peep about Kennedy.
I was never a big fan of Ted Kennedy’s… but I admire his longevity in the US Senate. I am also too young to understand the popularity of JFK and the rest of the Kennedys… but there is one important fact about them – here is this family that is rich beyond comprehension, and they decided that they would dedicate their lives to public service! Yet here we have Republicans who politicize a simple “Welcome Back to School” speech by President Obama… and sneer at any kind of health care reform that would dare take their money and give to the poor in some kind of Robin Hood scheme.
Republicans like to talk about how much they hate the idea of giving their money to able bodied people who are lazy and refuse to work. Even liberals like DAS don’t believe in subsidizing that lifestyle, but the reality of life is that there are more people who are less fortunate due to circumstances beyond their control. And when Facebookers put up a status about nobody being without health care, it’s the Republicans who point out that they want no part of funding illegal Mexicans… as if Illegal Mexicans are the only people who are going to benefit from this.
Perhaps Kennedy’s legacy will be that he ended up richer than all these other Republicans, yet he makes them look bad because he decided to dedicate his life to using his power and money to help make others lives better who are less fortunate.
I was talking to Trophy Wife about the idea of segregating ourselves from the Republicans and having them take half the country and we take the other half… Then they can live their happy lives and figure out ways to keep from paying reasonable taxes and buy their expensive cars and drive to work in them…. But be careful of the bridges, (and no this is not a Chappaquidick cheap shot) as Minnesotans discovered when Governor Pawlenty’s severe tax cut affected budget left them without enough tax revenue money for important bridge repairs!
PUMPSTRADAMUS NFL PICK OF THE WEEK
Pumpy is back for another year of pigskin picks. Last year he went 11-6 and once again despite his total lack of knowledge about anything related to sports, his uncanny picks are usually right on especially early in the season. This year we go with our Met fan Walter's favorite team - The Jets who are at Houston to play the Texans. The Jets are 4 1/2 point doggies. Sayeth the Pump:
"I'm going against the Texans because most of them were so wacky this week when they kept their kids home from school so they couldn't see the Presidents speech about staying in school. Take the Jets!"
UNBIASED GIANTS FAN PICK OF THE WEEK
Last yr we went 31-19-1... definitely our best season picking games on NWOW.
GIANTS 6 1/2 faves over the Redskins - You gotta love how the Skins sued some fans who ran into money trouble and couldn't pay for their PSLs.
PANTHERS 2 1/2 doggies over Philadelphia - I don't like using the word doggies in a sentence involving the Eagles new QB Michael Vick.
BUCS 6 doggies over Dallas - I am really liking the home team cooking this week.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Baseball Quarterly Report - Healthy Met Wishes and 20 year old Knishes
Well here we are folks.. at the official midway point of the 2009 season. After last years Yankee Stadium extra inning marathon that ran until close to 2 in the morning, this year's All Star Game was a much shorter contest. It was close, but sadly for us National League fans, we lost again, and thanks to that silly rule imposed after the infamous 2002 tie, it means that the AL will get home field advantage for the World Series, not that this really should be an issue for my fellow Met fans!
Once again we also survived the boredom of All Star Week… I checked in for a few minutes of the Home Run Derby and Wednesday’s day of no sports was definitely bailed out by an incredible Letterman with Paul McCartney delivering an outdoor concert from the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater, the same building where he and the rest of the Beatles took America by storm in the mid 1960s. McCartney did 2 songs for the TV show and apparently 5 more for the hundreds of people who watched from the street. If you watched closely, the street was not closed and occasionally a cab would try to maneuver itself down Broadway.
The McCartney performance was a great warm up act for his appearance this weekend at CitiField. The concerts there this weekend send the Mets off to the road which is not necessarily such a bad thing because they have been hitting quite poorly at their home ballpark.
This year the NY teams have new stadiums and each team is going in a rather different direction. The New Yankee Stadium has become a hitter’s paradise with balls leaving the stadium as often as personnel used to exit the building during George Steinbrenner's heyday. CitiField on the other hand while just miles away from that crazy Yankee ballpark, is NOT conducive to the long ball.
David Wright who hit 33 home runs last season, has only hit a measly 5 during the first half, although he also has not been hitting 'em on the road either so maybe its not entirely due to the ballpark. While Wright has lost his power stroke, he has improved his speed game and has been stealing a ton o' bases bringing back memories of Lenny Dykstra.
It was 20 years ago that the Mets acquired their new centerfielder - Juan Samuel... after we traded away that sparkplug in one of the sillier trades in Mets history. Nowadays the terms Lenny Dykstra and trading take on a murkier meaning. Dykstra fancied himself as a post baseball stock expert touting his success on various financial shows... But now that the market has taken a dive, so has Lenny's reputation. He recently filed for bankruptcy and a recent episode of Real Sports with Bryant (Gumbel to) Gumbel showed a very dark side.
The reporter on the piece interviewed several people who had recently worked for him and each person talked about how Lenny had stiffed them out of thousands of dollars. All of them had filed suit against the former ballplayer. The reporter went back to Lenny's unlocked and barely furnished mansion, and finally found Dykstra wandering around the house. Lenny spoke to the reporter with both eyes on some computer screens as if he had something more important going on than that interview, and when the reporter mentioned the numerous lawsuits and asked Lenny if he had anything to say to the people who claim he owes them money…. Dykstra's words were "Fudge ‘em all" except to paraphrase Ralphie in A Christmas Story... he did not say "Fudge".
Maybe I should have compared David Wright to Mookie Wilson instead.
Today, we’ll pick apart my preseason predictions.. but first an amusing anecdote.
With all this talk swirling around about Facebook wisecracks coming back to haunt you years down the road, I was sitting at my office Tuesday afternoon when I got a call from a lady who asked me if I had been involved in a knish eating contest in 1988. She was right… I had participated in one, and the woman on the phone informed me that she is a knish expert and is doing research on the History of the Knish… possibly for an upcoming book.. It turns out the contest was held back in March of 1988 at the Carnegie Deli in honor of the newest member of its well stocked artery clogging menu – The Knish.
I actually wrote about that event right here in NWOW in a column from last July 7th . Here is what I wrote:
“I ran into this guy I knew from college a few years ago and he told me that he had launched a side career as a competitive eater. I actually did the Carnegie Deli Knish Eating Contest approximately 20 years ago and after meeting Henny Youngman and hearing him say “Take My Knish Please” and having Vic Miles stand over me as I took an early lead… I knew this type of craziness was not for me. I blew my lead, but not my lunch… lost to a skinny guy and finished in the middle of the pack. This other guy from college subsequently won a knish eating contest on Jewish Night at a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league game.”
And here I was on the phone 20 years later with a knish expert facing down my sordid past! I was most curious how she got my work number and figured out that I had been in that crazy contest… surely she didn’t read it here on NWOW. As it turned out, she had obtained info about the results of the ’88 contest and tracked down the winner. When she interviewed him, he showed her an article in the Star Ledger which showed my cute punim… ( and clean shaven!) and she googled my name. But instead of snagging my phone number off my podcast… she took the longer route… found me on Linked In and got my number from there… I guess leaving my work number on my Linked In profile really does generate calls to my office!
We chatted briefly about that fateful day… I corrected an error in the Ledger article that said prior to that day, I had never eaten a knish, when in reality I had said I had never eaten a “Carnegie Deli” knish. She also asked me if I still eat knishes… I’m trying to lose poundage so I rarely eat them.. and there was a long disapproving silence on the other side of the telephone. She then asked if I was thinking of getting into competitive eating, I laughed… telling her that the Knish Eating Contest was a one shot deal. I mentioned my college friend Joel who does the competitive eating circuit,…. and it turns out she knows him!! And wouldja believe.. exactly one year to the day that I mentioned college chum Joel in last July 7th’s column….he was at the Knish Eating Contest for the Brooklyn Cyclones Jewish Heritage Night…. And he won!!
Contrary to my preseason picks…this year's World Series will probably not include the Mets.. .Too many injuries have done them in for '09 and it looks like they might just have to compete for 2nd or 3rd place in the NL East as the much improved Giants continue to chug along towards the Wild Card with the excellent rotation led by Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain. Even non descript Jonathan Sanchez made baseball history on the late West Coast game last Friday, when he tossed a rather improbable no hitter. He actually had a perfect game going to the 8th but his shortstop made an error and when Sanchez retired the remaining batters, he achieved the oddity of throwing a no hitter with the only baserunner reaching due to an error.
As for my 14 most relevant teams from the spring – I picked 6 from the National League and with mediocre teams still contending in both the East and Central Division…. It looks like all 6 (The Mets, Phils, Reds, Cubs. Cards and Dodgers) are all in contention. But the Mets are ready to drop into a 4th place no mans land due to the injuries to 5 key players.. Reyes, Delgadio, Betraaaaaaaan, Putz, and Maine. But all of the other teams still have a decent shot.
This year we also started a “Player to Watch” feature for each team.. the Mets player was Brian Schneider for catching the pitching staff including the improved bullpen. I said Hong Chih Kuo would be the player to watch on the Dodgers… but honestly who east of the Mississippi pays attention to Dodgers other than the ones you have on your fantasy team? I just looked it up.. he has pitched 5 innings in 2009… and hasn’t been in a game since April 29 and is on the 60 day DL with an elbow injury. Yet despite that, the Dodgers have a big lead in the division.
My four playoff teams in the NL were the Mets, Phils, Dodgers and Cubbies so I have a decent shot at getting 3 outta 4.
In the AL, I picked 8 relevant teams and with the exception of those dud Indians and A’s, we seemed to be going in the right direction. My 2 laughable “Players to Watch” were David Price of Tampa Bay who has not been able to duplicate his 2008 post season heroics… and Carlos Quentin of the White Sox who has been sidelined by injury for most of the season. My Rays, Red Sox, White Sox, Angels playoff predictions could be on the money.. even though Yankee fans may beg to differ, but after a slow start the Rays look very strong and the Yankee pitching looks very suspect. Has anyone thought of flip flopping Joba and Hughes from their current starter-8th inning roles??
Here are my midseason post season award predictions:
MVP – Albert Pujols and Joe Mauer
Cy Young – Tim Lincecum and Josh Beckett
Rookie of the Year –Tommy Hanson and Andrew Bailey
And there you have it… I wont change my Mets pick for the World Series although the Dodgers look pretty worthy of being their replacement, but for now I will just stick to my guns that people will be leaving Citi Field with happy memories,… and Im not just talking about the ones who get to attend the Paul McCartney concert!
CLIP OF THE WEEK:
Here is Paul McCartney from Letterman – and this clip also explains how he got up there too!!
Once again we also survived the boredom of All Star Week… I checked in for a few minutes of the Home Run Derby and Wednesday’s day of no sports was definitely bailed out by an incredible Letterman with Paul McCartney delivering an outdoor concert from the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater, the same building where he and the rest of the Beatles took America by storm in the mid 1960s. McCartney did 2 songs for the TV show and apparently 5 more for the hundreds of people who watched from the street. If you watched closely, the street was not closed and occasionally a cab would try to maneuver itself down Broadway.
The McCartney performance was a great warm up act for his appearance this weekend at CitiField. The concerts there this weekend send the Mets off to the road which is not necessarily such a bad thing because they have been hitting quite poorly at their home ballpark.
This year the NY teams have new stadiums and each team is going in a rather different direction. The New Yankee Stadium has become a hitter’s paradise with balls leaving the stadium as often as personnel used to exit the building during George Steinbrenner's heyday. CitiField on the other hand while just miles away from that crazy Yankee ballpark, is NOT conducive to the long ball.
David Wright who hit 33 home runs last season, has only hit a measly 5 during the first half, although he also has not been hitting 'em on the road either so maybe its not entirely due to the ballpark. While Wright has lost his power stroke, he has improved his speed game and has been stealing a ton o' bases bringing back memories of Lenny Dykstra.
It was 20 years ago that the Mets acquired their new centerfielder - Juan Samuel... after we traded away that sparkplug in one of the sillier trades in Mets history. Nowadays the terms Lenny Dykstra and trading take on a murkier meaning. Dykstra fancied himself as a post baseball stock expert touting his success on various financial shows... But now that the market has taken a dive, so has Lenny's reputation. He recently filed for bankruptcy and a recent episode of Real Sports with Bryant (Gumbel to) Gumbel showed a very dark side.
The reporter on the piece interviewed several people who had recently worked for him and each person talked about how Lenny had stiffed them out of thousands of dollars. All of them had filed suit against the former ballplayer. The reporter went back to Lenny's unlocked and barely furnished mansion, and finally found Dykstra wandering around the house. Lenny spoke to the reporter with both eyes on some computer screens as if he had something more important going on than that interview, and when the reporter mentioned the numerous lawsuits and asked Lenny if he had anything to say to the people who claim he owes them money…. Dykstra's words were "Fudge ‘em all" except to paraphrase Ralphie in A Christmas Story... he did not say "Fudge".
Maybe I should have compared David Wright to Mookie Wilson instead.
Today, we’ll pick apart my preseason predictions.. but first an amusing anecdote.
With all this talk swirling around about Facebook wisecracks coming back to haunt you years down the road, I was sitting at my office Tuesday afternoon when I got a call from a lady who asked me if I had been involved in a knish eating contest in 1988. She was right… I had participated in one, and the woman on the phone informed me that she is a knish expert and is doing research on the History of the Knish… possibly for an upcoming book.. It turns out the contest was held back in March of 1988 at the Carnegie Deli in honor of the newest member of its well stocked artery clogging menu – The Knish.
I actually wrote about that event right here in NWOW in a column from last July 7th . Here is what I wrote:
“I ran into this guy I knew from college a few years ago and he told me that he had launched a side career as a competitive eater. I actually did the Carnegie Deli Knish Eating Contest approximately 20 years ago and after meeting Henny Youngman and hearing him say “Take My Knish Please” and having Vic Miles stand over me as I took an early lead… I knew this type of craziness was not for me. I blew my lead, but not my lunch… lost to a skinny guy and finished in the middle of the pack. This other guy from college subsequently won a knish eating contest on Jewish Night at a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league game.”
And here I was on the phone 20 years later with a knish expert facing down my sordid past! I was most curious how she got my work number and figured out that I had been in that crazy contest… surely she didn’t read it here on NWOW. As it turned out, she had obtained info about the results of the ’88 contest and tracked down the winner. When she interviewed him, he showed her an article in the Star Ledger which showed my cute punim… ( and clean shaven!) and she googled my name. But instead of snagging my phone number off my podcast… she took the longer route… found me on Linked In and got my number from there… I guess leaving my work number on my Linked In profile really does generate calls to my office!
We chatted briefly about that fateful day… I corrected an error in the Ledger article that said prior to that day, I had never eaten a knish, when in reality I had said I had never eaten a “Carnegie Deli” knish. She also asked me if I still eat knishes… I’m trying to lose poundage so I rarely eat them.. and there was a long disapproving silence on the other side of the telephone. She then asked if I was thinking of getting into competitive eating, I laughed… telling her that the Knish Eating Contest was a one shot deal. I mentioned my college friend Joel who does the competitive eating circuit,…. and it turns out she knows him!! And wouldja believe.. exactly one year to the day that I mentioned college chum Joel in last July 7th’s column….he was at the Knish Eating Contest for the Brooklyn Cyclones Jewish Heritage Night…. And he won!!
Contrary to my preseason picks…this year's World Series will probably not include the Mets.. .Too many injuries have done them in for '09 and it looks like they might just have to compete for 2nd or 3rd place in the NL East as the much improved Giants continue to chug along towards the Wild Card with the excellent rotation led by Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain. Even non descript Jonathan Sanchez made baseball history on the late West Coast game last Friday, when he tossed a rather improbable no hitter. He actually had a perfect game going to the 8th but his shortstop made an error and when Sanchez retired the remaining batters, he achieved the oddity of throwing a no hitter with the only baserunner reaching due to an error.
As for my 14 most relevant teams from the spring – I picked 6 from the National League and with mediocre teams still contending in both the East and Central Division…. It looks like all 6 (The Mets, Phils, Reds, Cubs. Cards and Dodgers) are all in contention. But the Mets are ready to drop into a 4th place no mans land due to the injuries to 5 key players.. Reyes, Delgadio, Betraaaaaaaan, Putz, and Maine. But all of the other teams still have a decent shot.
This year we also started a “Player to Watch” feature for each team.. the Mets player was Brian Schneider for catching the pitching staff including the improved bullpen. I said Hong Chih Kuo would be the player to watch on the Dodgers… but honestly who east of the Mississippi pays attention to Dodgers other than the ones you have on your fantasy team? I just looked it up.. he has pitched 5 innings in 2009… and hasn’t been in a game since April 29 and is on the 60 day DL with an elbow injury. Yet despite that, the Dodgers have a big lead in the division.
My four playoff teams in the NL were the Mets, Phils, Dodgers and Cubbies so I have a decent shot at getting 3 outta 4.
In the AL, I picked 8 relevant teams and with the exception of those dud Indians and A’s, we seemed to be going in the right direction. My 2 laughable “Players to Watch” were David Price of Tampa Bay who has not been able to duplicate his 2008 post season heroics… and Carlos Quentin of the White Sox who has been sidelined by injury for most of the season. My Rays, Red Sox, White Sox, Angels playoff predictions could be on the money.. even though Yankee fans may beg to differ, but after a slow start the Rays look very strong and the Yankee pitching looks very suspect. Has anyone thought of flip flopping Joba and Hughes from their current starter-8th inning roles??
Here are my midseason post season award predictions:
MVP – Albert Pujols and Joe Mauer
Cy Young – Tim Lincecum and Josh Beckett
Rookie of the Year –Tommy Hanson and Andrew Bailey
And there you have it… I wont change my Mets pick for the World Series although the Dodgers look pretty worthy of being their replacement, but for now I will just stick to my guns that people will be leaving Citi Field with happy memories,… and Im not just talking about the ones who get to attend the Paul McCartney concert!
CLIP OF THE WEEK:
Here is Paul McCartney from Letterman – and this clip also explains how he got up there too!!
Friday, June 26, 2009
The Day the Nets Traded Vince Carter - Recapping a Wild Show Biz News Day
May 16th 1990…. Shortly before Noon.
I was working in radio at the time and as I was gearing up for a Noon newscast, I looked at my script and realized I was about to do yet another exciting newscast about local nonsense that only the cows and chickens cared about in rural Sussex County. Then just a few minutes before airtime, my AP machine started beeping wildly which meant an urgent story was coming over the wires… It was then that I saw the shocking news that Jim Henson the creator of The Muppets had died! Wow, I thought…. the local police report has just been relegated to back burner status…and I get to lead with the death of a celebrity. I quickly did a little paper shuffle and prepared to go on the air with the lead story announcing the death of the voice of Kermit the Frog.
And just moments later, as I was about to stroll to the news studio to deliver my news cast….the AP machine started beeping and humming again… I figured it was just more follow up to Henson’s death, but I went back to the machine just to make sure. It was then that I saw the news that Sammy Davis Jr. had died too! Sammy's death was less of a shocker... his suffering from cancer had been well chronicled over the prior year. But with the clock ticking away and with just seconds to spare, I had to figure out how to lead off the newscast!
Ultimately, I “split the lead”… proclaiming that “2 Show Biz legends have just died… we’ll have more on Jim Henson’s death in a moment, but first we have just gotten word that former Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr. has just died!”. The DJ was shocked to hear about Henson and Davis when I announced it, so at the end of my newscast as I recapped the top stories, she popped on her mike, and we had some newscaster-DJ “small talk” about the 2 deaths. She even opened the phone lines so listeners could call in to speak of the show biz legends. One call came in from the young psychic Pumpstradamus who noted the oddity that 2 famous people died on the same day, and proclaimed that we should watch out for June 25, 2009.
June 25, 2009… Shortly after 1pm
I worked from my home office this morning… and meandered to the office at approximately 1pm. The second I got there… my coworker John (Facebook followers will know we nicknamed our office John and Nate plus low rates) told me that he just saw on the internet that Farrah Fawcett had died.
It was not really a shocker.. she has been sick for awhile and frankly I was growing increasingly disgusted by how she had been exploited during her illness. I liked Farrah.. not a huge fan.. but liked her. She was the perfect looking woman during my early teenage years… but as she got older… not only did she age quite well… but she also turned into a dynamite actress… see The Burning Bed if you don’t believe me that she was more than just a pretty face. Granted she had her ditzy moments on Letterman, but she seemed to be a special part of those late 70s in that Suzanne Somers, Cheryl Tiegs kind of way,
But these last few months, I have grown increasingly disturbed by the media coverage of her illness. The NBC documentary was very well done.. but I was growing a little tired of the Swayze-esque coverage that always seemed to have some kind of connection to Ryan O’Neill. This week he was supposed to appear on 20/20 to announce that he would marry Farrah as long as she could mumble a yes to his proposal. Why do I find this absolutely sickening.
Hearing about Farrah’s death meant the end of that hyped ABC interview and also a moment to ponder whatever happened to Lee Majors? As I started making some business calls, I started to think about news I had read earlier in the day (I think it was in Linda Stasi’s column) that a relative of Walter Cronkite’s had confirmed that not only was the newsman seriously ill as was reported last week, but the 92 year old news legend was not expected to recover.
This raised an interesting topic of discussion during most of the afternoon. I remember that in the late 1990s when Princess Diana and Mother Teresa both died within a few days of each other. The Diana coverage was wall to wall and over the top… and once Mother Teresa’s death was announced, the media realized that they had painted themselves into a corner and there was no way they could air tons of Diana coverage without dedicating a lot of time to Mother Teresa too. Which made me wonder…
Even though I hope he lives to be 120, if Walter Cronkite were to die Thursday…. would his death bump Farrah out of the lead story? And so began the debate.. I thought for sure Cronkite was more important historically and would take the lead…. But my coworkers didn’t necessarily agree… which led to a long drawn out debate about what would have to happen news-wise for Farrah to be bumped off the lead off spot.
June 25, 2009 - Around 5’ish
I was gearing up for a typical Thursday evening of calling my mortgage clients. It had been a somewhat quiet day and as usual I was periodically getting my news fix by checking out CNN.com, and grumbling that the NJ Nets had traded away Vince Carter. I must have seen a “Breaking News” flash that Michael Jackson was in cardiac arrest and really didn’t think much of it. Then I started seeing people mention it on the recently restored Facebook live feed.
It was shortly thereafter when I saw that one of my FB friends had posted word that Perez Hilton’s Twitter was announcing that Michael Jackson was dead! Huh? Nobody else had this story and why oh why would one of my FB friends even bother caring to subscribe to his twits or whatever they are called… I am so sick of Perez Hilton. His stupid irrelevant question cost Miss California her title… who cares what a beauty queen who agrees with President Obama thinks anyway…. But his pathetic cries for help when one of Will.i.am’s entourage beat his sorry little ass after he dared use a gay epithet towards Mr. i.am! And now it appears Hilton didn’t make the comment to Will.i.am but it was actually directed to his CNN hologram…
Nonetheless, that update about the Hilton twit prompted this wishful thinking response:
Nate Kean at 6:15pm June 25
Hopefully this inaccurate irresponsible reporting by Hilton will end his absurd career once and for all.
And then moments later, I noticed after many more refresh hits on my browser that the LA Times was also reporting that Michael Jackson had died… Some facebook friends were updating his cardiac arrest.. some said coma... and a buddy who was at work at Channel 11 was confirming that the story was true. CNN held out official confirmation for about another hour... even asking a family lawyer who himself said he could not confirm it although he slipped in some eerie comments that Jackson's lack of care was reminding him of Anna Nicole Smith.
Jackson was the topic of conversation the other day. A friend of mine bought a new house and told me that a prior owner of that house was a Michael Jackson CPA! However, after a few minutes of Three’s Company-esque confusion, I realized that I had wrongly assumed that my friend had been talking about the LA talk show host!
I really don’t know what to say about Michael Jackson… I always thought of him as one of the most incredibly talented musical artists of my generation…and it seems like we know his whole family. I grew up watching the Jackson 5. And Michael's sister Janet was part of a huge controversy several years ago at the Super Bowl when she bared the same body part that Farrah winkingly teased us with in that bathing suit in that infamous mid 1970's poster. And Michael Jackson's Thriller was an incredible piece of work… and I was impressed that my friend in Clark lived so close to me in the mid 1980’s that I could drive to his house door to door to coincide with the start and end of that song. It’s an odd memory that always stuck in my head
I only saw him in person one time.. as I wrote in a previous column I worked at the 1988 Grammys and got to see the rehearsals and live performance of Michael performing my favorite of his songs… Man in the Mirror. The rehearsals were incredible… he would stop mid song and make small talk just to tweak a little detail so it would be just right. That phenomenal performance is Today’s Clip of the Week.
And yet I felt that he too had been exploited when he was a kid and was really deprived of a childhood. I don’t know if these child abuse allegations were true but it’s troubling to again see replays of the tv interviews where he says there is nothing wrong with an adult sharing a bed with a child. Yet this child in an adult’s body was just really crying for help to regain something he never seemed to have – youthful innocence. Up until recently, he stopped parading his kids around in those crazy surgical masks... now I hope their mom Debbie Rowe is able to get custody before they end up in South America with that crazy Brazilian family that stole David Goldman's poor little kid.
And oddly enough the moment we were informed that Michael Jackson’s heart had stopped beating, Ryan O’Neill’s 15 minutes of fame came to an abrupt end…. And like that day in May 1990, we once again lost 2 incredibly famous show biz legends during one crazy afternoon.
CLIP OF THE WEEK;
I was working in radio at the time and as I was gearing up for a Noon newscast, I looked at my script and realized I was about to do yet another exciting newscast about local nonsense that only the cows and chickens cared about in rural Sussex County. Then just a few minutes before airtime, my AP machine started beeping wildly which meant an urgent story was coming over the wires… It was then that I saw the shocking news that Jim Henson the creator of The Muppets had died! Wow, I thought…. the local police report has just been relegated to back burner status…and I get to lead with the death of a celebrity. I quickly did a little paper shuffle and prepared to go on the air with the lead story announcing the death of the voice of Kermit the Frog.
And just moments later, as I was about to stroll to the news studio to deliver my news cast….the AP machine started beeping and humming again… I figured it was just more follow up to Henson’s death, but I went back to the machine just to make sure. It was then that I saw the news that Sammy Davis Jr. had died too! Sammy's death was less of a shocker... his suffering from cancer had been well chronicled over the prior year. But with the clock ticking away and with just seconds to spare, I had to figure out how to lead off the newscast!
Ultimately, I “split the lead”… proclaiming that “2 Show Biz legends have just died… we’ll have more on Jim Henson’s death in a moment, but first we have just gotten word that former Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr. has just died!”. The DJ was shocked to hear about Henson and Davis when I announced it, so at the end of my newscast as I recapped the top stories, she popped on her mike, and we had some newscaster-DJ “small talk” about the 2 deaths. She even opened the phone lines so listeners could call in to speak of the show biz legends. One call came in from the young psychic Pumpstradamus who noted the oddity that 2 famous people died on the same day, and proclaimed that we should watch out for June 25, 2009.
June 25, 2009… Shortly after 1pm
I worked from my home office this morning… and meandered to the office at approximately 1pm. The second I got there… my coworker John (Facebook followers will know we nicknamed our office John and Nate plus low rates) told me that he just saw on the internet that Farrah Fawcett had died.
It was not really a shocker.. she has been sick for awhile and frankly I was growing increasingly disgusted by how she had been exploited during her illness. I liked Farrah.. not a huge fan.. but liked her. She was the perfect looking woman during my early teenage years… but as she got older… not only did she age quite well… but she also turned into a dynamite actress… see The Burning Bed if you don’t believe me that she was more than just a pretty face. Granted she had her ditzy moments on Letterman, but she seemed to be a special part of those late 70s in that Suzanne Somers, Cheryl Tiegs kind of way,
But these last few months, I have grown increasingly disturbed by the media coverage of her illness. The NBC documentary was very well done.. but I was growing a little tired of the Swayze-esque coverage that always seemed to have some kind of connection to Ryan O’Neill. This week he was supposed to appear on 20/20 to announce that he would marry Farrah as long as she could mumble a yes to his proposal. Why do I find this absolutely sickening.
Hearing about Farrah’s death meant the end of that hyped ABC interview and also a moment to ponder whatever happened to Lee Majors? As I started making some business calls, I started to think about news I had read earlier in the day (I think it was in Linda Stasi’s column) that a relative of Walter Cronkite’s had confirmed that not only was the newsman seriously ill as was reported last week, but the 92 year old news legend was not expected to recover.
This raised an interesting topic of discussion during most of the afternoon. I remember that in the late 1990s when Princess Diana and Mother Teresa both died within a few days of each other. The Diana coverage was wall to wall and over the top… and once Mother Teresa’s death was announced, the media realized that they had painted themselves into a corner and there was no way they could air tons of Diana coverage without dedicating a lot of time to Mother Teresa too. Which made me wonder…
Even though I hope he lives to be 120, if Walter Cronkite were to die Thursday…. would his death bump Farrah out of the lead story? And so began the debate.. I thought for sure Cronkite was more important historically and would take the lead…. But my coworkers didn’t necessarily agree… which led to a long drawn out debate about what would have to happen news-wise for Farrah to be bumped off the lead off spot.
June 25, 2009 - Around 5’ish
I was gearing up for a typical Thursday evening of calling my mortgage clients. It had been a somewhat quiet day and as usual I was periodically getting my news fix by checking out CNN.com, and grumbling that the NJ Nets had traded away Vince Carter. I must have seen a “Breaking News” flash that Michael Jackson was in cardiac arrest and really didn’t think much of it. Then I started seeing people mention it on the recently restored Facebook live feed.
It was shortly thereafter when I saw that one of my FB friends had posted word that Perez Hilton’s Twitter was announcing that Michael Jackson was dead! Huh? Nobody else had this story and why oh why would one of my FB friends even bother caring to subscribe to his twits or whatever they are called… I am so sick of Perez Hilton. His stupid irrelevant question cost Miss California her title… who cares what a beauty queen who agrees with President Obama thinks anyway…. But his pathetic cries for help when one of Will.i.am’s entourage beat his sorry little ass after he dared use a gay epithet towards Mr. i.am! And now it appears Hilton didn’t make the comment to Will.i.am but it was actually directed to his CNN hologram…
Nonetheless, that update about the Hilton twit prompted this wishful thinking response:
Nate Kean at 6:15pm June 25
Hopefully this inaccurate irresponsible reporting by Hilton will end his absurd career once and for all.
And then moments later, I noticed after many more refresh hits on my browser that the LA Times was also reporting that Michael Jackson had died… Some facebook friends were updating his cardiac arrest.. some said coma... and a buddy who was at work at Channel 11 was confirming that the story was true. CNN held out official confirmation for about another hour... even asking a family lawyer who himself said he could not confirm it although he slipped in some eerie comments that Jackson's lack of care was reminding him of Anna Nicole Smith.
Jackson was the topic of conversation the other day. A friend of mine bought a new house and told me that a prior owner of that house was a Michael Jackson CPA! However, after a few minutes of Three’s Company-esque confusion, I realized that I had wrongly assumed that my friend had been talking about the LA talk show host!
I really don’t know what to say about Michael Jackson… I always thought of him as one of the most incredibly talented musical artists of my generation…and it seems like we know his whole family. I grew up watching the Jackson 5. And Michael's sister Janet was part of a huge controversy several years ago at the Super Bowl when she bared the same body part that Farrah winkingly teased us with in that bathing suit in that infamous mid 1970's poster. And Michael Jackson's Thriller was an incredible piece of work… and I was impressed that my friend in Clark lived so close to me in the mid 1980’s that I could drive to his house door to door to coincide with the start and end of that song. It’s an odd memory that always stuck in my head
I only saw him in person one time.. as I wrote in a previous column I worked at the 1988 Grammys and got to see the rehearsals and live performance of Michael performing my favorite of his songs… Man in the Mirror. The rehearsals were incredible… he would stop mid song and make small talk just to tweak a little detail so it would be just right. That phenomenal performance is Today’s Clip of the Week.
And yet I felt that he too had been exploited when he was a kid and was really deprived of a childhood. I don’t know if these child abuse allegations were true but it’s troubling to again see replays of the tv interviews where he says there is nothing wrong with an adult sharing a bed with a child. Yet this child in an adult’s body was just really crying for help to regain something he never seemed to have – youthful innocence. Up until recently, he stopped parading his kids around in those crazy surgical masks... now I hope their mom Debbie Rowe is able to get custody before they end up in South America with that crazy Brazilian family that stole David Goldman's poor little kid.
And oddly enough the moment we were informed that Michael Jackson’s heart had stopped beating, Ryan O’Neill’s 15 minutes of fame came to an abrupt end…. And like that day in May 1990, we once again lost 2 incredibly famous show biz legends during one crazy afternoon.
CLIP OF THE WEEK;
Sunday, June 21, 2009
A Father's Day Column about.... Mother's Day!
Happy Father’s Day to all you baby daddies out there! Once again the ol’ blog seems to have inadvertently been relegated to Back Burner Status. Work seems a tad busier lately… plus I have a lot of other stuff going on in my spare time that has decreased my computer time including a lot of walking around town, and I am also helping our synagogue recruit Torah readers for the summer! One other activity taking up my time is my fantasy baseball team which oddly this year consists of many west coast players including my 2 stoppers which means ol’ Nate has been spending many late night hours watching the last outs of otherwise insignificant Seattle Mariners and Oakland As games. Just last night I finally finished watching my season finales when I caught the Heroes episode.
Even though the critics have been ripping into it...I was actually impressed with how Heroes wrapped up its season with the "demise of Sylar"… It also further showed that the Petrelli family really is one kooky family with dead relatives being resurrected and other dead ones living on through other wacky methods! Just in case you don’t watch Heroes… Sylar is a shifter who can assume the persona of another person and grab his memories too… Matt Parkman has hypnotic powers, and Nathan Petrelli is a US Senator. Petrelli gets killed and his family decides to cover it up, so they have Parkman force Sylar to shift to Petrelli’s persona and then hypnotizes him so he thinks he really is Nathan Petrelli. Sounds like a plot from a soap opera?
Last month on Mothers Day, I made my inaugural trip to CitiField. My friend Steve K. who lives in town has a season ticket plan and arranged to sell ducats to games to several people. Trophy Wife and I picked out Mother’s Day’s game against the Pirates… plus at the time I had 3 Pirates on my fantasy team although one of ‘em has since been traded (Nate McLovin’ McLouth) and Ryan Doumit is injured.
Nonetheless, we got a terrific deal… the tickets were only 15 bucks each and Sunday morning we were on our way. We went to the Edison train station to grab the train to Penn Station, and then caught the subway to the 7 Train. In the old days, we knew that we were at Shea because you can see the stadium approaching from the above ground train… But now that Shea is gone, we had to just wait for the Willets Point stop to arrive… and watch other Met fans eagerly wait for the train doors to open so they too could take their first trip to CitiField.
However… whereas in the old days you had to shlep off the train and walk down to the park and then around half the stadium to your entrance… now all you do is walk off the subway and there it is… in all its majestic beauty… CitiField! A sparkling new, clean stadium with sinks that have not been pished in!
As soon as you walk in, you see that the park has set up a main grand entrance that includes a pavilion dedicated to Jackie Robinson. It’s a nice touch, even though Robinson never played for the Mets, but I think its important that minority ballplayers (and fans) appreciate the sacrifices that Robinson made and enabled future generations of ballplayers to get paid millions and millions of dollars. Included in that area is a giant #42…. which on my facebook contains the caption… “Here I am getting ready to watch 24 with the dyslexics club!” Yeah yeah.. I know.. I shared this stuff on facebook before my blog readers.
By the way, to go off on a tangent… is Facebook inadvertently killing off blogs? The New York Times had an interesting article about this topic recently that was emailed to me by Pumpstradamus… (with a sidenote that he predicted this…). It could be somewhat true. Back in the pre FB days, if I thought of something funny, I would just write it down and incorporate it into my blog… now I just put it in my status update..but a few days later I forget about it. At least with the blog, there is some sense of permanence to these wisecracks… For example, a FB friend put a status update recently…: “I should have listened to warnings against opening videos – I opened the American Idol Box Set, and now I’m stuck with it”.. I think that’s very clever.. but it gets forgotten pretty quick when its lost in the shuffle with other FB silliness such as quizzes and How Bitchy Are You questionnaires.
Getting back to the trip to Citi… Trophy Wife and I walked around a little bit… on this inaugural trip the game was secondary to the actual adventure of seeing the park for the very first time.. because like losing one’s virginity it is something that happens only once… and stadiums are built to last for approximately 30 years, so it will be until 2039 before I have another first trip to see the Mets play in a new home stadium.
Our seats were way up….. check out this pic to see how close I am to the top… By the way, I actually took this pic on my cellphone.
However getting there was another story. Finding a seat at Shea was like finding the beer at your house.. you know where you keep ‘em and you know where to go to get ‘em. However, like most of the other fans there, we walked around like zombies.. not knowing our way around our new ballpark. The ushers were extremely helpful to point us in the right direction… but most of these guys were in the concourse guiding all the lost souls and there were few of them at each section to show you to your exact seat as we discovered when we found someone else in our seats. Instead of tossing them out… we decided to sit elsewhere in the somewhat vacant section and after being kicked out a couple of times, we finally settled on some other seats around the 4th inning.
The stadium is designed so you can see almost the entire park except for the corner of left field right under where those seats are. This was similar to the location where I saw Tom Seaver win #300 at Yankee Stadium in 1985… I couldn’t see the last out… but it didn’t take away from my enjoyment! Likewise I was at an odd angle to the out of town scoreboard.. but nowadays with smart phones, it was very easy for me to look up any out of town scores that I wasn’t able to see. Also, the upper deck doesn’t appear to be as high up as the upper deck at Shea… you don’t talk a loooong escalator all the way up.. but actually ascend a series of shorter staircases to get to the top of the park.
I don’t remember much else about the game other than the Mets won by a pretty decent margin. The kosher food guy was right near out seats so it was convenient to grab a hot dog. I found it kind of odd that some religious guys approached me at the kosher concession during the 8th inning to ask to join for Afternoon prayers… I asked them why don’t we wait a few minutes till the game ends since those prayers can be said up until around 745 and it was only approx. 3:30 at that point.
Here are some more pics from our upper deck seats…
Steve was also at the game with his teenage son… they had box seats for the game and as the 5th inning rolled around he came up to visit us. I thought that was very nice of him… but even nicer than that… he offered to switch seats with us for an inning or two. Trophy Wife and I took a nearby elevator down to field level… the elevators are (wo)manned by leggy young women sitting on stools wearing little miniskirts that press the buttons for you. As we got down to the field level, we were quite impressed by the incredible view.. as you can see from these pics.
We thought it would be funny to stay down there the rest of the game.. nah just kidding.. we stayed for an inning and then meandered up to our seats. We sat there the rest of the game just soaking it all up…. And even though the Mets were winning, I was hoping the Pirates would tie it up so the game could go extra innings so I could spend even more time at the park on this incredibly special day. The game actually ended after the traditional 9 as the usually reliable K-Rod recorded the last out. Here is the end of the game..
After the game, we lingered at the park for a little while.. checking out a gift shop.. not the main one but one in the upper levels of the park near a nice outdoor plaza.. I’m not a big souvenir guy, but for this one day I decided to spring for a scorecard, and some other stuff like a CitiField keychain and a CitiField baseball hat along with a banner, a bumper sticker and a free All Star ballot which I forgot to vote with. We actually met a nice family from Pittsburgh outside the gift shop who were traveling with a handicapped child, so we took the elevator down to the exits with them so I don't know if they have the traditional exit down the ramps like they did at Shea with the traditional chants of "Let's Go Mets... Yankees suck!" Incidentally the elevators exit is right near the main one and it looks like the park has a lot of the accomodations necessary for people who use a wheelchair.
Overall it was a day I will never forget.. and hopefully there will be many more happy memories there.. and hopefully the sinks won’t get pished in.
By the way, I have never done a column with so many pictures... Gosh is it a pain in the neck to upload all this stuff... I don't know how the amateur porn bloggers do it.. not that I would know about those types of sites. Here is one last shot of Shea taken there during our last game there in 2008.
Even though the critics have been ripping into it...I was actually impressed with how Heroes wrapped up its season with the "demise of Sylar"… It also further showed that the Petrelli family really is one kooky family with dead relatives being resurrected and other dead ones living on through other wacky methods! Just in case you don’t watch Heroes… Sylar is a shifter who can assume the persona of another person and grab his memories too… Matt Parkman has hypnotic powers, and Nathan Petrelli is a US Senator. Petrelli gets killed and his family decides to cover it up, so they have Parkman force Sylar to shift to Petrelli’s persona and then hypnotizes him so he thinks he really is Nathan Petrelli. Sounds like a plot from a soap opera?
Last month on Mothers Day, I made my inaugural trip to CitiField. My friend Steve K. who lives in town has a season ticket plan and arranged to sell ducats to games to several people. Trophy Wife and I picked out Mother’s Day’s game against the Pirates… plus at the time I had 3 Pirates on my fantasy team although one of ‘em has since been traded (Nate McLovin’ McLouth) and Ryan Doumit is injured.
Nonetheless, we got a terrific deal… the tickets were only 15 bucks each and Sunday morning we were on our way. We went to the Edison train station to grab the train to Penn Station, and then caught the subway to the 7 Train. In the old days, we knew that we were at Shea because you can see the stadium approaching from the above ground train… But now that Shea is gone, we had to just wait for the Willets Point stop to arrive… and watch other Met fans eagerly wait for the train doors to open so they too could take their first trip to CitiField.
However… whereas in the old days you had to shlep off the train and walk down to the park and then around half the stadium to your entrance… now all you do is walk off the subway and there it is… in all its majestic beauty… CitiField! A sparkling new, clean stadium with sinks that have not been pished in!
As soon as you walk in, you see that the park has set up a main grand entrance that includes a pavilion dedicated to Jackie Robinson. It’s a nice touch, even though Robinson never played for the Mets, but I think its important that minority ballplayers (and fans) appreciate the sacrifices that Robinson made and enabled future generations of ballplayers to get paid millions and millions of dollars. Included in that area is a giant #42…. which on my facebook contains the caption… “Here I am getting ready to watch 24 with the dyslexics club!” Yeah yeah.. I know.. I shared this stuff on facebook before my blog readers.
By the way, to go off on a tangent… is Facebook inadvertently killing off blogs? The New York Times had an interesting article about this topic recently that was emailed to me by Pumpstradamus… (with a sidenote that he predicted this…). It could be somewhat true. Back in the pre FB days, if I thought of something funny, I would just write it down and incorporate it into my blog… now I just put it in my status update..but a few days later I forget about it. At least with the blog, there is some sense of permanence to these wisecracks… For example, a FB friend put a status update recently…: “I should have listened to warnings against opening videos – I opened the American Idol Box Set, and now I’m stuck with it”.. I think that’s very clever.. but it gets forgotten pretty quick when its lost in the shuffle with other FB silliness such as quizzes and How Bitchy Are You questionnaires.
Getting back to the trip to Citi… Trophy Wife and I walked around a little bit… on this inaugural trip the game was secondary to the actual adventure of seeing the park for the very first time.. because like losing one’s virginity it is something that happens only once… and stadiums are built to last for approximately 30 years, so it will be until 2039 before I have another first trip to see the Mets play in a new home stadium.
Our seats were way up….. check out this pic to see how close I am to the top… By the way, I actually took this pic on my cellphone.
However getting there was another story. Finding a seat at Shea was like finding the beer at your house.. you know where you keep ‘em and you know where to go to get ‘em. However, like most of the other fans there, we walked around like zombies.. not knowing our way around our new ballpark. The ushers were extremely helpful to point us in the right direction… but most of these guys were in the concourse guiding all the lost souls and there were few of them at each section to show you to your exact seat as we discovered when we found someone else in our seats. Instead of tossing them out… we decided to sit elsewhere in the somewhat vacant section and after being kicked out a couple of times, we finally settled on some other seats around the 4th inning.
The stadium is designed so you can see almost the entire park except for the corner of left field right under where those seats are. This was similar to the location where I saw Tom Seaver win #300 at Yankee Stadium in 1985… I couldn’t see the last out… but it didn’t take away from my enjoyment! Likewise I was at an odd angle to the out of town scoreboard.. but nowadays with smart phones, it was very easy for me to look up any out of town scores that I wasn’t able to see. Also, the upper deck doesn’t appear to be as high up as the upper deck at Shea… you don’t talk a loooong escalator all the way up.. but actually ascend a series of shorter staircases to get to the top of the park.
I don’t remember much else about the game other than the Mets won by a pretty decent margin. The kosher food guy was right near out seats so it was convenient to grab a hot dog. I found it kind of odd that some religious guys approached me at the kosher concession during the 8th inning to ask to join for Afternoon prayers… I asked them why don’t we wait a few minutes till the game ends since those prayers can be said up until around 745 and it was only approx. 3:30 at that point.
Here are some more pics from our upper deck seats…
Steve was also at the game with his teenage son… they had box seats for the game and as the 5th inning rolled around he came up to visit us. I thought that was very nice of him… but even nicer than that… he offered to switch seats with us for an inning or two. Trophy Wife and I took a nearby elevator down to field level… the elevators are (wo)manned by leggy young women sitting on stools wearing little miniskirts that press the buttons for you. As we got down to the field level, we were quite impressed by the incredible view.. as you can see from these pics.
We thought it would be funny to stay down there the rest of the game.. nah just kidding.. we stayed for an inning and then meandered up to our seats. We sat there the rest of the game just soaking it all up…. And even though the Mets were winning, I was hoping the Pirates would tie it up so the game could go extra innings so I could spend even more time at the park on this incredibly special day. The game actually ended after the traditional 9 as the usually reliable K-Rod recorded the last out. Here is the end of the game..
After the game, we lingered at the park for a little while.. checking out a gift shop.. not the main one but one in the upper levels of the park near a nice outdoor plaza.. I’m not a big souvenir guy, but for this one day I decided to spring for a scorecard, and some other stuff like a CitiField keychain and a CitiField baseball hat along with a banner, a bumper sticker and a free All Star ballot which I forgot to vote with. We actually met a nice family from Pittsburgh outside the gift shop who were traveling with a handicapped child, so we took the elevator down to the exits with them so I don't know if they have the traditional exit down the ramps like they did at Shea with the traditional chants of "Let's Go Mets... Yankees suck!" Incidentally the elevators exit is right near the main one and it looks like the park has a lot of the accomodations necessary for people who use a wheelchair.
Overall it was a day I will never forget.. and hopefully there will be many more happy memories there.. and hopefully the sinks won’t get pished in.
By the way, I have never done a column with so many pictures... Gosh is it a pain in the neck to upload all this stuff... I don't know how the amateur porn bloggers do it.. not that I would know about those types of sites. Here is one last shot of Shea taken there during our last game there in 2008.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Rivers, Islands and Sun
In the 1st few years of NWOW, every 3 months we did a “TV Quarterly Report”. This year I decided to do away with that format.. (although the baseball quarterly reports will continue) and just write about TV whenever I am in the mood to do so. Now that we are into the final week of the 08-09 season, I realize there is no way that I could maintain that format even if I wanted to… I still haven’t watched the last 2 hours of 24, the last 2 hours of Desperate Housewives and the last 2 hours of Heroes. Somehow if we get some rain during the Memorial Day wknd, I may just sneak on the computer and get me some Hulu.
This season I only followed one reality show – The Celebrity Apprentice. There was something about watching these celebs show up at a job and bust their chops to win the competition. All of these competitive reality shows are really game shows anyway, but the crazy feuding that went on during Celeb Apprentice was quite amusing. First it was Joan Rivers battling with Clint Black… then she was friendly with him. Did she really like him… or did she find him to be such a douchebag that she decided to help him get into the finals so she would have an easier victory? This has always been the popular strategy on Survivor… the mother of all competitive reality shows.
One aspect I noticed was the comedians playing the game are very smart. There really is no such thing as a dumb comedian because you need a brain to observe the nuances of life that is written into a comedy routine. Tom Green's comments to the camera during the final episode were incredibly astute and he was right on the money when it came to analyzing the game play. Likewise, Andrew Dice Clay played his strategy of staying in character as "Dice"... letting people know that he is still out there and available for weddings and bar mitzvahs!
Ultimately it came down to Joan Rivers vs. poker player Annie Duke and when it was all said and done a wk ago Sunday Joan was declared the winner, I couldn’t have been more pleased… even though I was born the same week as Duke… (she was born on Monday preceding my Friday arrival) I wonder if a 75 year old Apprentice winner is expected to show up for work the following Monday to participate in one of the projects within Donald Trump’s constantly bankrupting empire. Now I see Trump is suing a journalist for calling him a millionaire because he says he is actually... a billionaire. The thing with Trump is I really don't like him, yet he is such a media whore, I actually find him amusing.
I have always liked Joan Rivers and career-wise she probably would have been better off not taking the late night Fox show in the mid 1980s because she seemed destined to take over The Tonight Show after she became Johnny’s permanent guest host. (Remember the days of guest hosts on talk shows? Is there such a thing anymore?) I still think Joan Rivers is very funny, but I am not exactly thrilled with how she has reinvented herself with all those crazy plastic surgeries.
But as much as I like Joan…. I have never liked her daughter Melissa. She is a poor man’s Paris Hilton/Kardashian sister... achieving fame for no reason in particular. Melissa doesn’t tell jokes, act, sing or dance.. but she is a celebrity because she is her mother’s daughter and as far as I know only acted in that one horrible TV movie about her father’s tragic suicide. And when Melissa was hired to be on the Celebrity Apprentice this season… all I could wonder was… Why?
And ultimately Melissa’s time ran out… she was fired after she ran into a strong alliance between Playboy model Brandy Broderick and Poker player Annie Duke. That is how the game is played… but young Ms. Rivers took offense that she had been outplayed and went ballistic after she was fired. Joan, who has a skin as thick as Don Rickles seemed to get quite upset by the rough treatment of her precious Melissa, even though the younger Ms. Rivers is a grown woman in her early 40s.
As soon as Joan saw that Melissa got fired, she stormed into the room where Duke was sitting and in one of the most incredible “real” tirades I have ever seen…started berating Duke because she is a poker player… Earlier in the episode Joan had a great line about Duke.. (and thanks to Poker NewsDaily.com for the quotes)… “She’s so duplicitous. I can’t wait for her to get her first facelift….. because she’s going to need two doctors.” Ultimately, Joan launched the best line of the TV season,.. when she looked at Duke with fire in her eyes and proclaimed…“Your people give money with blood on it. I met your people in Las Vegas. None of them have last names. You’re a poker player. A POKER PLAYER!!!”
And Donald then realized that in order to continue his typical publicity hungry way of life… the only way to crown this season’s champion would be to get rid of everybody else and pave the way for Joan and Annie to battle it out. And so the stage was set for last Sunday capping off a wonderful day that started off with my first ever trip to CitiField…. (I’ll write about the trip next week!) Joan was the winner and here is why…
The task they had to do was this complicated multi marketing project where both Annie and Joan had to use a professional designer to decorate a room where a silent auction was to be held. Joan however did not like the company that the producers had chosen for her, and apparently ticked off the owner of the company. When Duke’s team wanted to speak with their assigned designer, they realized that their phone calls were not being returned…. and with the deadline quickly approaching, Annie was in deep trouble.
Duke decided to go directly to the office only to find out that the cameras were not allowed into the building. The people at that company allowed Annie to talk with them off camera. Once Annie came out she told her teammates that the designers were quitting their involvement with The Apprentice due to problems working with Joan. Now the Poker playing Annie was screwed due to Rivers and had no river to bail her out.
Once she got to the boardroom. Annie proved to Trump why she did not have what it takes to be “The Apprentice”. As soon as she brought up the fact that Joan’s big mouth caused her to lose her designer at the 11th hour… Joan clinched the victory by shooting off more venom in Duke’s direction… Duke was distracted by Joan’s anger, and complained to Donald that Rivers had compared her to Hitler.. to which Joan barked back…”No darling … Hitler never had PMS….”
And so it went…even though Donald likely knew why the designer's departure was Joan’s fault, he kept asking Annie to explain why... but Joan had gotten under her skin and Annie couldn’t shake off the distraction of Joan’s mouth.… And when Annie couldn’t stay on topic with Joan constantly barking at her, her lack of focus, made for a convincing argument that if Annie can’t stay on topic in an Apprentice boardroom, how can she focus when dealing with adversarial conditions in a business setting? And even though it seemed to be Joan’s fault, a corporate faux pas pales in comparison to allowing an enemy to distract you during the heat of battle.
By the way, next Halloween I am dressing up as Joan Rivers and I am going to go to the poker room at a Trump Atlantic City Hotel and yell out..."You're a POKER PLAYER!"
It really amazes me how popular the TV show LOST has become. As the show enters its final season, its ratings may not be American Idol-esque.. but its loyal followers continue to stand behind it and debate it and debate it and then debate it some more. It’s almost like the Talmud based on how many different experts weigh in on this show. Every post Lost Thursday, I go through the same routine. I read the blog posted by Star Ledger TV critic Allen Sepinwall, followed by the recaps posted on TV Squad, TVGuide.com and Jeff Jensen’s remarkably popular column on EW.com. His recaps elicit approximately 2000 comments on Thursdays! Even the ESPN Thursday Fantasy Baseball Q and A’s have people posting questions as Lost characters!
Last weeks season finale was as amazing as always… but an incident near the end of the episode distracted me and I had to spend the next few days finding the answer to one plot point that puzzled me. I also wondered how Rose and Bernard knew they went back 30 years since they chose to retire as hermits on that wacky island, but I decided to suspend my disbelief. To figure out the other plot hole, I went to ABC.com and started watching the last few episodes, but I eventually got my answer when I visited TVGuide.com to reread an early April episode recap.
Just to recap.. aside from the mashugas about blowing up a bomb to change history to keep the plane from ever crashing… the other plot involved “Locke” getting Ben to kill the mysterious Jacob. Jacob had been established as the Wizard of Id or Oz on this particular island.. and until the last episode he had never been shown. He actually looked like the guy from The Journeyman… and during the episode we discovered how he traveled freely through time to interact with various Lost characters at key turning points of their off island lives.
In the beginning of the episode we see Jacob at the shore of the island talking to another guy in a time that looked to be very very long ago. The "other guy" tells Jacob that he wishes he could kill him and one day he will find a loophole to do so. Meanwhile in present day Lost, Locke has dragged ol’ beaten up Ben…(he really should have just pursued a career in plastics Benjamin, plastics) to kill Jacob in Jacob’s little hideaway. Just before Ben stabs him, Locke mentions a loophole…. And outside the little murder scene the survivors of plane crash #2 are stunned to discover that a corpse has been discovered inside a box that is the body of…. John Locke.
Finding the corpse is a true watcha talking about Willis moment for the islanders… How can Locke be a dead corpse and alive on the island simultaneously? The viewers then realize that living Locke is not the same as dead Locke! And Dead Locke was supposed to have had a great mission but in reality maybe he didn’t. After all, we saw how Locke was told by Richard that he would have to die to save everybody… but Richard was told to say that to Locke a few moments earlier by the Time Traveling Lockelganger. So now instead of seeing events of the past affecting the present, we are seeing events from future time travelers affecting the present. And the Lockelganger used Richard to convince Locke he had to ultimately die…even though his Shawshank Redemption hanging was stopped by Ben who ended up killing him anyway.
So now we see that the guy who was after Jacob discovered he could use some kind of Sylaresque technique to take over Locke’s body… but only if Locke was dead. But that whole scenario raised one big question for me…
If Sun was on the 2nd plane with dead Locke… why was she so surprised to see his dead body? She knew he was dead. And it was then that I realized that I could not recall her reunion with “Locke” (the Lockelganger) and how it was explained to her that Locke was alive. So after my long journey through old episodes online… I finally found this in the TV Guide.com recap from an episode in early April…
“Along the way, Locke lets Ben know that he knows why Ben wants to be judged: for his role in Alex's murder. Ben is clearly irritated by Locke's newfound omniscience. Arriving at Casa de Linus, they discover that someone, a silhouetted woman, is in Alex's old room. Obviously, it's Sun and Lapidus. They show Ben the picture of the Oceanic 6 in the 1977 Dharma photo, and tell them that a man named Christian told them if Sun ever wanted to see Jin again, she was to wait for John Locke. It's then that Born-Again Locke makes his entrance, without much fanfare, for now anyway.”
Hmmmm… Christian was on the original flight in a body bag and yet he has “lived on” the same way as The Lockelganger. And here is Christian going to Sun and telling her that if she wants to see her husband alive she should wait for Locke… even though Sun thinks he is dead… and she actually later second guesses Jack’s assertion that Locke’s body was really on the plane. Then when she sees Locke.. she is so concerned with reuniting with her husband that she doesn’t really think twice when she sees a man she thought was dead..
And so it goes with the latest theory… is the show a battle between Jacob and The Other guy? And is the other guy trying to defeat Jacob through the use of time travel and possessing bodies?. Locke who was supposed to be such a big character… was really just a pawn whose death had to happen in order for the Lockelganger to assume the persona because it seems he can only do that when the person is dead.
That raises a theory that if Locke was "possessed" by the Lockelganger because he arrived on the island after his death... perhaps that is the way The Other Guy possesses a body... the person has to be DOA when they get to the island. If that is the case, then he must have assumed Christians ID because Christian was also lying dead in a coffin when the plane crashed in the very first episode. And who showed Locke how to get off the island so he could die and come back? Christian... possibly aka the other guy.
And then lets go back to Day 1… did the plane crash so Locke would become the leader who would bring Ben in to stab Jacob? Would anyone really listen to Christian if he tried to recruit someone to do the dirty deed? People would say "Hey who's that guy?" and Jack would say... "Oh that's my dead dad." And if that is the case, then the other guy was motivated to see that plane crash,… but wait a minute.. the Losties are blowing up a bomb in the 70s to prevent the plane crash… and if the plane doesn’t crash… then Locke is never told he has to die and Ben doesn’t kill Jacob. So doesn't that give Jacob a motivation to prevent that first episode plane crash?
And so it appears that Jacob is somehow involved in manipulating the Lostaways to change history in the other storyline. Jack’s decision to prevent the crash by detonating the bomb is inspired by an idea pitched to him by Daniel Faraday. And its his mom who was in cahoots with Charles Widmore who controlled Daniel’s life so he would grow up to travel back in time so he would be shot by his own mother. But then again his mother also encouraged the gang to bring the Locke corpse on the 2nd flight. But wouldn’t the older version of the mother want to prevent her son’s death and do everything in her power to keep him from fulfilling that destiny?
If Faraday is the guy who planted the thought, he was recruited to the island by Charles Widmore. Does that mean Widmore is actually... a good guy since he is engineering the events to prevent the plane crash? Is that why he is so obsessed with finding that island? To save Jacob? Is he Jacob? Could it be that one of these characters was killed off the island and was possessed by Jacob who knew he had to change history to save his life? Some think that Charlie is a young Charles Widmore.... and Charlie died off the island when he drowned... could he have floated back to be possessed by Jacob who is setting up a series of events to keep the other guy from stabbing him? The damage may have been done but in the world of Lost, it can be un-done with a little time travel switcheroo. Perhaps they could do likewise with Monday night's Met game and this time around make sure Ryan Church touches 3rd base.
And how is it that it took us to the final episode of Season #5 for us to realize that the show is really about a chess match between 2 supernatural characters and all these so called main characters in the plot appear to be just mere pawns in a much bigger contest?
And why the heck do we have to wait till January for this craziness to start again. Actually my buddy Albert had a very good idea.. Lost should take an example from 24’s playbook and show a 2 hour movie in the fall so we don’t have to wait so long for more! Now if you will excuse me I need to go to Hulu to watch the season finale of 24… Last time I checked Kim Bauer was at the airport… hey look behind Kim… Isn’t that Sawyer and Kate getting ready to board a plane?
This season I only followed one reality show – The Celebrity Apprentice. There was something about watching these celebs show up at a job and bust their chops to win the competition. All of these competitive reality shows are really game shows anyway, but the crazy feuding that went on during Celeb Apprentice was quite amusing. First it was Joan Rivers battling with Clint Black… then she was friendly with him. Did she really like him… or did she find him to be such a douchebag that she decided to help him get into the finals so she would have an easier victory? This has always been the popular strategy on Survivor… the mother of all competitive reality shows.
One aspect I noticed was the comedians playing the game are very smart. There really is no such thing as a dumb comedian because you need a brain to observe the nuances of life that is written into a comedy routine. Tom Green's comments to the camera during the final episode were incredibly astute and he was right on the money when it came to analyzing the game play. Likewise, Andrew Dice Clay played his strategy of staying in character as "Dice"... letting people know that he is still out there and available for weddings and bar mitzvahs!
Ultimately it came down to Joan Rivers vs. poker player Annie Duke and when it was all said and done a wk ago Sunday Joan was declared the winner, I couldn’t have been more pleased… even though I was born the same week as Duke… (she was born on Monday preceding my Friday arrival) I wonder if a 75 year old Apprentice winner is expected to show up for work the following Monday to participate in one of the projects within Donald Trump’s constantly bankrupting empire. Now I see Trump is suing a journalist for calling him a millionaire because he says he is actually... a billionaire. The thing with Trump is I really don't like him, yet he is such a media whore, I actually find him amusing.
I have always liked Joan Rivers and career-wise she probably would have been better off not taking the late night Fox show in the mid 1980s because she seemed destined to take over The Tonight Show after she became Johnny’s permanent guest host. (Remember the days of guest hosts on talk shows? Is there such a thing anymore?) I still think Joan Rivers is very funny, but I am not exactly thrilled with how she has reinvented herself with all those crazy plastic surgeries.
But as much as I like Joan…. I have never liked her daughter Melissa. She is a poor man’s Paris Hilton/Kardashian sister... achieving fame for no reason in particular. Melissa doesn’t tell jokes, act, sing or dance.. but she is a celebrity because she is her mother’s daughter and as far as I know only acted in that one horrible TV movie about her father’s tragic suicide. And when Melissa was hired to be on the Celebrity Apprentice this season… all I could wonder was… Why?
And ultimately Melissa’s time ran out… she was fired after she ran into a strong alliance between Playboy model Brandy Broderick and Poker player Annie Duke. That is how the game is played… but young Ms. Rivers took offense that she had been outplayed and went ballistic after she was fired. Joan, who has a skin as thick as Don Rickles seemed to get quite upset by the rough treatment of her precious Melissa, even though the younger Ms. Rivers is a grown woman in her early 40s.
As soon as Joan saw that Melissa got fired, she stormed into the room where Duke was sitting and in one of the most incredible “real” tirades I have ever seen…started berating Duke because she is a poker player… Earlier in the episode Joan had a great line about Duke.. (and thanks to Poker NewsDaily.com for the quotes)… “She’s so duplicitous. I can’t wait for her to get her first facelift….. because she’s going to need two doctors.” Ultimately, Joan launched the best line of the TV season,.. when she looked at Duke with fire in her eyes and proclaimed…“Your people give money with blood on it. I met your people in Las Vegas. None of them have last names. You’re a poker player. A POKER PLAYER!!!”
And Donald then realized that in order to continue his typical publicity hungry way of life… the only way to crown this season’s champion would be to get rid of everybody else and pave the way for Joan and Annie to battle it out. And so the stage was set for last Sunday capping off a wonderful day that started off with my first ever trip to CitiField…. (I’ll write about the trip next week!) Joan was the winner and here is why…
The task they had to do was this complicated multi marketing project where both Annie and Joan had to use a professional designer to decorate a room where a silent auction was to be held. Joan however did not like the company that the producers had chosen for her, and apparently ticked off the owner of the company. When Duke’s team wanted to speak with their assigned designer, they realized that their phone calls were not being returned…. and with the deadline quickly approaching, Annie was in deep trouble.
Duke decided to go directly to the office only to find out that the cameras were not allowed into the building. The people at that company allowed Annie to talk with them off camera. Once Annie came out she told her teammates that the designers were quitting their involvement with The Apprentice due to problems working with Joan. Now the Poker playing Annie was screwed due to Rivers and had no river to bail her out.
Once she got to the boardroom. Annie proved to Trump why she did not have what it takes to be “The Apprentice”. As soon as she brought up the fact that Joan’s big mouth caused her to lose her designer at the 11th hour… Joan clinched the victory by shooting off more venom in Duke’s direction… Duke was distracted by Joan’s anger, and complained to Donald that Rivers had compared her to Hitler.. to which Joan barked back…”No darling … Hitler never had PMS….”
And so it went…even though Donald likely knew why the designer's departure was Joan’s fault, he kept asking Annie to explain why... but Joan had gotten under her skin and Annie couldn’t shake off the distraction of Joan’s mouth.… And when Annie couldn’t stay on topic with Joan constantly barking at her, her lack of focus, made for a convincing argument that if Annie can’t stay on topic in an Apprentice boardroom, how can she focus when dealing with adversarial conditions in a business setting? And even though it seemed to be Joan’s fault, a corporate faux pas pales in comparison to allowing an enemy to distract you during the heat of battle.
By the way, next Halloween I am dressing up as Joan Rivers and I am going to go to the poker room at a Trump Atlantic City Hotel and yell out..."You're a POKER PLAYER!"
It really amazes me how popular the TV show LOST has become. As the show enters its final season, its ratings may not be American Idol-esque.. but its loyal followers continue to stand behind it and debate it and debate it and then debate it some more. It’s almost like the Talmud based on how many different experts weigh in on this show. Every post Lost Thursday, I go through the same routine. I read the blog posted by Star Ledger TV critic Allen Sepinwall, followed by the recaps posted on TV Squad, TVGuide.com and Jeff Jensen’s remarkably popular column on EW.com. His recaps elicit approximately 2000 comments on Thursdays! Even the ESPN Thursday Fantasy Baseball Q and A’s have people posting questions as Lost characters!
Last weeks season finale was as amazing as always… but an incident near the end of the episode distracted me and I had to spend the next few days finding the answer to one plot point that puzzled me. I also wondered how Rose and Bernard knew they went back 30 years since they chose to retire as hermits on that wacky island, but I decided to suspend my disbelief. To figure out the other plot hole, I went to ABC.com and started watching the last few episodes, but I eventually got my answer when I visited TVGuide.com to reread an early April episode recap.
Just to recap.. aside from the mashugas about blowing up a bomb to change history to keep the plane from ever crashing… the other plot involved “Locke” getting Ben to kill the mysterious Jacob. Jacob had been established as the Wizard of Id or Oz on this particular island.. and until the last episode he had never been shown. He actually looked like the guy from The Journeyman… and during the episode we discovered how he traveled freely through time to interact with various Lost characters at key turning points of their off island lives.
In the beginning of the episode we see Jacob at the shore of the island talking to another guy in a time that looked to be very very long ago. The "other guy" tells Jacob that he wishes he could kill him and one day he will find a loophole to do so. Meanwhile in present day Lost, Locke has dragged ol’ beaten up Ben…(he really should have just pursued a career in plastics Benjamin, plastics) to kill Jacob in Jacob’s little hideaway. Just before Ben stabs him, Locke mentions a loophole…. And outside the little murder scene the survivors of plane crash #2 are stunned to discover that a corpse has been discovered inside a box that is the body of…. John Locke.
Finding the corpse is a true watcha talking about Willis moment for the islanders… How can Locke be a dead corpse and alive on the island simultaneously? The viewers then realize that living Locke is not the same as dead Locke! And Dead Locke was supposed to have had a great mission but in reality maybe he didn’t. After all, we saw how Locke was told by Richard that he would have to die to save everybody… but Richard was told to say that to Locke a few moments earlier by the Time Traveling Lockelganger. So now instead of seeing events of the past affecting the present, we are seeing events from future time travelers affecting the present. And the Lockelganger used Richard to convince Locke he had to ultimately die…even though his Shawshank Redemption hanging was stopped by Ben who ended up killing him anyway.
So now we see that the guy who was after Jacob discovered he could use some kind of Sylaresque technique to take over Locke’s body… but only if Locke was dead. But that whole scenario raised one big question for me…
If Sun was on the 2nd plane with dead Locke… why was she so surprised to see his dead body? She knew he was dead. And it was then that I realized that I could not recall her reunion with “Locke” (the Lockelganger) and how it was explained to her that Locke was alive. So after my long journey through old episodes online… I finally found this in the TV Guide.com recap from an episode in early April…
“Along the way, Locke lets Ben know that he knows why Ben wants to be judged: for his role in Alex's murder. Ben is clearly irritated by Locke's newfound omniscience. Arriving at Casa de Linus, they discover that someone, a silhouetted woman, is in Alex's old room. Obviously, it's Sun and Lapidus. They show Ben the picture of the Oceanic 6 in the 1977 Dharma photo, and tell them that a man named Christian told them if Sun ever wanted to see Jin again, she was to wait for John Locke. It's then that Born-Again Locke makes his entrance, without much fanfare, for now anyway.”
Hmmmm… Christian was on the original flight in a body bag and yet he has “lived on” the same way as The Lockelganger. And here is Christian going to Sun and telling her that if she wants to see her husband alive she should wait for Locke… even though Sun thinks he is dead… and she actually later second guesses Jack’s assertion that Locke’s body was really on the plane. Then when she sees Locke.. she is so concerned with reuniting with her husband that she doesn’t really think twice when she sees a man she thought was dead..
And so it goes with the latest theory… is the show a battle between Jacob and The Other guy? And is the other guy trying to defeat Jacob through the use of time travel and possessing bodies?. Locke who was supposed to be such a big character… was really just a pawn whose death had to happen in order for the Lockelganger to assume the persona because it seems he can only do that when the person is dead.
That raises a theory that if Locke was "possessed" by the Lockelganger because he arrived on the island after his death... perhaps that is the way The Other Guy possesses a body... the person has to be DOA when they get to the island. If that is the case, then he must have assumed Christians ID because Christian was also lying dead in a coffin when the plane crashed in the very first episode. And who showed Locke how to get off the island so he could die and come back? Christian... possibly aka the other guy.
And then lets go back to Day 1… did the plane crash so Locke would become the leader who would bring Ben in to stab Jacob? Would anyone really listen to Christian if he tried to recruit someone to do the dirty deed? People would say "Hey who's that guy?" and Jack would say... "Oh that's my dead dad." And if that is the case, then the other guy was motivated to see that plane crash,… but wait a minute.. the Losties are blowing up a bomb in the 70s to prevent the plane crash… and if the plane doesn’t crash… then Locke is never told he has to die and Ben doesn’t kill Jacob. So doesn't that give Jacob a motivation to prevent that first episode plane crash?
And so it appears that Jacob is somehow involved in manipulating the Lostaways to change history in the other storyline. Jack’s decision to prevent the crash by detonating the bomb is inspired by an idea pitched to him by Daniel Faraday. And its his mom who was in cahoots with Charles Widmore who controlled Daniel’s life so he would grow up to travel back in time so he would be shot by his own mother. But then again his mother also encouraged the gang to bring the Locke corpse on the 2nd flight. But wouldn’t the older version of the mother want to prevent her son’s death and do everything in her power to keep him from fulfilling that destiny?
If Faraday is the guy who planted the thought, he was recruited to the island by Charles Widmore. Does that mean Widmore is actually... a good guy since he is engineering the events to prevent the plane crash? Is that why he is so obsessed with finding that island? To save Jacob? Is he Jacob? Could it be that one of these characters was killed off the island and was possessed by Jacob who knew he had to change history to save his life? Some think that Charlie is a young Charles Widmore.... and Charlie died off the island when he drowned... could he have floated back to be possessed by Jacob who is setting up a series of events to keep the other guy from stabbing him? The damage may have been done but in the world of Lost, it can be un-done with a little time travel switcheroo. Perhaps they could do likewise with Monday night's Met game and this time around make sure Ryan Church touches 3rd base.
And how is it that it took us to the final episode of Season #5 for us to realize that the show is really about a chess match between 2 supernatural characters and all these so called main characters in the plot appear to be just mere pawns in a much bigger contest?
And why the heck do we have to wait till January for this craziness to start again. Actually my buddy Albert had a very good idea.. Lost should take an example from 24’s playbook and show a 2 hour movie in the fall so we don’t have to wait so long for more! Now if you will excuse me I need to go to Hulu to watch the season finale of 24… Last time I checked Kim Bauer was at the airport… hey look behind Kim… Isn’t that Sawyer and Kate getting ready to board a plane?
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