I’m afraid I didn’t get to see any of the films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but was able to view incredibly cheap, but wildly entertaining alternate versions of those big budget movies that deserve some recognition.
My roster:
1-A young student who is incredibly clumsy is given a chance to play the drums in the school jazz band. Indeed, the band is so bad the students call it the Spazz Band. Our young drummer fits right in and repeatedly misses the cymbals with his drumsticks and ends up with deep cuts on his hands. The film’s title: “Whipgash.”
2-A actual seal, adopted by the crew of an aircraft carrier, ends up to be an incredibly effective assailant, showing uncommon speed and accuracy in biting the butts of Naval officers targeted by put upon Navy seamen. When the carrier reaches its home port, the seal finds it cannot put the fight against uptight officers behind it and attempts to enlist on a destroyer bound for Sausalito to fight Marin County vegans. The film’s title: “American Flipper.”
3-A washed up actor attempts to revive his career with a risky plan to stage non-stop reenactments of the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. The film’s title: “Burr Man.”
4-The concierge of the most expensive hotel in Akron not only provides sexual services for the clientele, he kills them, then, in an act of extreme chivalry, embalms and buries his victims. The film’s title: “The Grand Put To Rest Hotel.”
5-The British intelligence agency hires a code breaker who speaks only in Morse Code. The man’s constant “dihs” and “dahs” get on everyone’s nerves even though he’s a genius at deciphering messages from the enemy. Sadly, he’s bounced from the service when it’s revealed he also knows all the words to “It’s a Small World After All” in Navajo. The film’s title: “The Irritation Game.”
You may not have heard of them…until this very moment. But I assure they’ll be on the film festival circuit in enlightened cities and towns around the world…that still have Blockbuster stores.
I have no affection at all for offices. A person trying to woo me to his firm promised me a corner office. It was a generous gesture but I told him that under no circumstances would I accept a corner, or any other office. I ended up not taking the job anyway because I was an out-of-work journalist and I wasn’t quite ready to switch to something new. I also despised offices of any sort but loved newsrooms, which are, in effect, offices with just the right proportion of chaos, collaboration and profanity.
A couple of years ago as a sign of a promotion, I was ordered to move from my open cube to a closed office. “If I’m being promoted,” I asked, “why am I being placed in solitary confinement?” Alas, I now view the general prison population through a glass window. Sometimes it’s fun to have one of my co-workers on the “outside” play the game of “prison visitor” and place their hand on my window and I place mine opposite from the inside..just like in “Birdman of Alcatraz.”
Thanks to the Chicago Auto Show last week, I hadn’t’ seen my office or desk in 6 days…until today. I jangled my keys like the “office warden,” opened my door and breathed in the squalid stale air that could only be neutralized by brewing coffee and inhaling a box of Altoids.
For a brief moment I thought about tidying up the mess on my desk I left behind, but why bother? That would only make room for a new mess and I was already quite familiar with the desk-tritus on display, including the Post-it note with my computer password from 2009. I keep forgetting it. Damn passwords!
The sad part is I’ve now grown used to spending my workday holed up in my human Habitrail. There are all sorts of places to hide stuff I should have tossed years ago, I can make phone calls in private and I can engage in the guilty pleasure of watching the YouTube video of Katy Perry in her skimpy jungle outfit singing “Roar,” uh… during my lunch break…of course.
In fact, I think that tomorrow I’ll start the process of reforming. I won’t toss used Keurig pods under my desk and tell curious visitors they’re my dead pet mice, or rationalize a pile of randomly ordered file folders by calling my system “Anarchic Alphabetizing.”
I might even take down the sign on my door that warns potential visitors, “Where productivity comes to die.”
My scalp is getting a little red from all the head scratching I’ve been doing this week. NBC suspends its main anchor for basically making up the details of a story and the anchor is lambasted as a journalistic pariah.
The host of a program that is a completely fictional “newscast” announces his impending retirement and that news is greeted in many quarters as the end of our current civilization.
So let’s think about that. Real newsguy lies: bad. Fake newsguy announces retirement: worse
Now Brian Williams has been a very successful guest on a number of comedy programs exhibiting a sharp sense of humor. But is has to stick in his craw that among a certain segment of the population, Jon Stewart’s fake newscast is their main source of news.
Maybe, just maybe, the funny, suspended NBC anchorman was simply attempting to swim in Jon Stewart’s pool figuring fake news is the way to go to build an audience.
Apparently, his employer didn’t see the humor, or the irony.
Of course neither Jon Stewart nor Brian Williams cannot even begin to compare their volume of fake news with the utter fiction spewed regularly, for the past 20 years, by Fox. It always remains in my memory that moron ex-weatherman Steve Douch-ey once declared ex Michigan Congressman David Bonior was bounced from office because of his liberal policies, when in fact, Bonior chose not to run for re-election.
It doesn’t matter, really. America has decided that fake news is much more palatable and believable than actual news.
So why jump on Brian Williams when he was simply tailoring his product to the prevailing winds of public preference?
Can it be too long before CBS decides to upgrade its long-running program to “60 Made-up Minutes”?
Perhaps ABC will change its Sunday morning talker to “This Imagined Week.”
I can even see my alma mater, CNN, put the execrable Don Lemon at the helm of “Altered States of the Union.”
Personally, I’m going to relax about the whole thing. I haven’t actually watched a television newscast in ages, mainly because I can glean fake news much more quickly on Twitter and Facebook or the Onion. Afterall, when you want fake news, you want it right away..and that’s the truth.
The person I ever interviewed for a job sashayed into my office, put on a really bad Marilyn Monroe voice and purred, “you KNOW I’m the one for you.” I explained as gently as I could that while we paid by the hour we required our employees to work an entire day, not one hour at a time.
This was at a small radio station in upstate New York where the AM side was live with a DJ, and the FM side was dentist office music. The position we were hiring for was for the FM side. The duties included spinning very boring music and answering the phone. There wasn’t even a microphone in the studio. No, this person could not speak on the air. All the announcements were pre-recorded.
Choosing the right candidate was very important because we needed someone who not only could tell the difference between Montovani and Percy Faith, but could answer the phone without swearing at the listeners. This didn’t always work out. One job candidate who slipped through the cracks charmed us during the interview, then horrified us when a listener asked if school had been cancelled due to a snow storm. “Aren’t you listening to the effin’ station you idiot! No, your damn kid has to go to school!”
Of course, she was quite beautiful, and this being 1977, our standards were as low as our morals.
Many years later, as the CNN Detroit Bureau Chief, I received many more resumes and job inquiries from less than ideal candidates.
There was the brazen babe who barked on the phone to our assignment manager, “Git me personnel honey and make it snappy!” Our assignment manager was a rather tough young lady who barked back, “The only place I’m GITTIN’ you is off this phone!”
I always appreciate creativity, but not when it’s idiotic. For instance the gentleman who sent a cover letter that resembled the “Sock it to me” wall from the 60’s show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.” It actually had little doors you had to open to read about this guy’s attributes. He forgot to include, “time waster.” I quickly closed the door on his chance of being hired.
Then there was the guy who thought life wasn’t tough enough for me, so his resume was a multiple guess quiz about his experience and qualifications. I decided he was “none of the above” for me.
Which brings me to the current crop of hopefuls—the blessed Millenials, or, as I like to call them, the Mal-lennials because they’re just bad news.
Work your way up by doing your time in the sticks making bupkus while gaining valuable experience and making beginner’s mistakes? NFW! One might tweet.
No, they come into a job interview to basically find out if you’re worthy of their talents.
Don’t get me wrong, every generation had its share of cocky, egotistical jerks who think the world owes them a living. But the current version of genetic Texas Hold ‘em is no river and all flop. Just once, I’d like a kid to come into my office, say he/she would like to start at the bottom, learn the ropes and develop to become a valuable employee. I get dealt one of those…I’m all in.
I have traveled around the sun one more time. The custom is to celebrate this feat of survival and centrifugal force with parties, presents, cakes, candles and a card.
When I was a kid growing up in Queens, NY, the place to be was a family restaurant on Union Turnpike called Sandy’s. My best recollection was the specialty of the house at Sandy’s was some sort of hamburger and fries, but since no one really ate at Sandy’s intentionally, its menu has long ago faded from my memory.
A Sandy’s birthday party was pretty much the same. You invited 10, 12 kids, one of whom was designated to exhibit the violent effects of nausea precisely when you were opening the biggest, and presumably, best present in the pile.
There were party favors that included one of those noisemakers that unrolls when you blow on it. It was always fun to blow the thing in a kid’s face at the precise time he or she was about to place a forkful of fries in their mouth. It resulted in proving over and over again, to the birthday boy’s delight, that french fries are definitely not aerodynamic. Either is ketchup.
Opening presents was always fun. Back in the 60’s you mainly received from your friends board games, a football or a high-caliber faux firearm you could use to pretend you were either a war hero or cowboy ridding the American West of indigenous people who still regret selling Manhattan to those nasty Dutch boys for 24 bucks in bangles and beads.
The tension would build as you unwrapped each gift. If you received a sweet air rifle the kids yelled “yay!!!!.” If you received the board game “Park and Shop” you might hear one of the kids quietly mutter, “I have that game. It sucks. Actually, that IS my game. Couldn’t wait to dump it on someone.” Receiving a football or anything else that could be construed as a projectile brought horror to the host parents as a spontaneous game of catch would break out in the restaurant. If you were accurate you nailed a busboy with a full load of dirty dishes. The noise they made when they crashed to the tile floor was the best birthday present of all.
Sandy’s closed in the mid-60’s and was followed in its space by restaurants called Sands and Pancake Island, which finally gave way at the end of the decade to the slot car craze evolving into Sebring Raceway, where we blew hours and our allowances on racing our slot cars. I lost track of it after that when I went away to college.
We’ll go out to eat again for my birthday, but it won’t be like Sandy’s. For one, it’ll just be our family and no one will be bringing presents, since to make their lives easier, I find a few things online, buy them and let the gang wrap them. When they hand them to me I act totally surprised when I rip off the paper and they give me a look that says, “whatever keeps him awake.”
Make no mistake, I appreciate the chance to take another trip around the sun, even though by now I know all the rest stops and bars and space junk. You never know how many of those trips you’re granted, but I know one thing. I won’t waste a minute playing Park and Shop. That game sucks!
Long before I ever set foot in a Radio Shack there was a small chain of stores in the New York metro area called Electronic City. They were dark, musty places with an entry way and a counter and guys in plaid shirts who wanted to know, very quickly, what the hell you wanted. A resistor, a capacitor, a switch, a battery, whatever, you had to pretty well damned know what you wanted because they’d have to retreat to the back room to find it for you.
Then I discovered my first Radio Shack some time in the early 1970’s. They were bright. You could browse. Oh, the nerdy salespeople might hover a bit and were almost too anxious to help you but they were fine. The only counter was the long glass one where you paid and might see little electronic games displayed that made it possible to play poker or Blackjack against yourself. Calculators were still new and quite expensive and soon they became available at Radio Shack.
When I had a science project that was my go-to place. I simply brought my list of parts and the salesperson cheerfully scrounged up every last switch and circuit board. Sometimes they were just a little too cheerful and if you needed a D battery, they might show you 5 different brands and want to explain the advantages and disadvantages of all of them. Honestly, I just needed a battery that would put the light in my flashlight.
They also seemed somewhat conservative in temperament. I had a rather coarse electronics instructor in college named Harry Hawkins who attempted to make learning the order of the colored bands on a resistor easier to learn with a totally inappropriate mnemonic device (I apologize in advane) “Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly.” Which, as I remember it, stood for: blue, black, red, orange, yellow, green, brown, violet, grey, white. There I stood in the middle of a Radio Shack checking out the resistors attempting to remember those values and unconsciously muttered my teacher’s “helpful” device. The horrified clerk quickly came over and offered his assistance while shushing me with the hand that wasn’t carrying the latest “electronic slide rule.”
Radio Shack always stayed about the same, even when it started selling mobile phones and computers but eventually seemed provincial in the face of big box stores and online commerce.
I haven’t been in one in years, and I know that’s part of what killed the chain. But it’s a bit sad to know when you need a crazy part, a connector, a cable, there won’t be a nerdy guy and convenient place to go. Yes, I can order the stuff online, but sometimes you just don’t want to. Sometimes you just want the security of in-person handholding, and a place to buy a battery-powered toy you can try to beat at Texas Hold ‘em.
RIP Radio Shack. In your memory I promise never to invoke the words of Harry Hawkins.
What do men find so fascinating about toast being made? I admit it. I’m a man and I, like others of my gender, am spellbound by the utter stationary madness of a member of the bread family being heated until brown by red-hot metal strings. The toasting process involves just two dynamic acts: pushing the toast down, and the toast popping up when the toaster is good and ready to do so.
It is the period between pushing down and popping up that appear to capture the total attention of Y-chromosomal beings. Nowhere is this more apparent than at a hotel breakfast buffet or company cafeteria. Today, for example, a gentleman roughly the size of Nantucket Island quietly lowered two slices of whole wheat into the toaster, then planted himself in front of it with his Neptune-sized noggin’ and its nose and eyes bowed over the appliance close enough to also toast his flesh and liquify his retinas. Unfortunately, the display of not yet toasted breads was positioned above the toaster, meaning this oversized parcel of protoplasm posed an insurmountable obstacle for those hoping to grab a couple of slices to toast.
I attempted to lunge through the small space to his left that afforded me a slim shot at a bran muffin. I even tried a half-hearted, “excuse me” in hopes he’d break his deathstare into the bread-burning abyss to take a half a step to his right, but the spell was just too great.
By now the line behind him was growing with three more men desiring hot, browned bread waiting impatiently for their opportunity to remove themselves from the immediate world for four minutes as they slip into the trance provided by heat rising from their scorched rye.
Undaunted, I muttered in a stage whisper, “asshole!” which seemed to strike a chord, or at least a moment of self-awareness, causing the Human Haystack to break concentration just long enough for me to make my move and capture the muffin of my desire and quickly head for the cashier to make my escape.
But before I could get through the door, I heard the telltale “pop” of the beast’s bread emerging from the toaster. Unable to turn away I witnessed a grown man gently grab the wooden tongs, use them to extract his slices and place them on a styrofoam plate and put on a smile generally generated by an especially effective honeymoon or well-made muscatel. The other men waiting their turns eyed him with a combination of jealousy and respect, but knowing they were only a few four-minute cycles from their own crisp crust climax.
There’s no place I’d rather not be than in attendance at a Super Bowl. However, I have no qualms at all about being close enough to the big game to create and embellish any number of anecdotes to unsuspecting victims. This is one of them.
The 2002 National Automobile Dealers Association’s annual convention was held in New Orleans at the precise moment when the highest number of drunks would be in the Crescent City–the confluence of Mardis Gras and Super Bowl week. Being the national auto writer for the Associated Press at the time, I was assigned to cover the NADA for the next four days.
I love New Orleans, but one must admit, it operates in its own universe. For instance, after my cab navigated through the French Quarter and was almost upended by revelers, I was deposited at my hotel on Royal Street. I still had an unrelated story to finish to make the morning deadline and thought it would be good to call room service for a burger and beer. I wasn’t particular about the beer and just asked for a “Bud.” The young lady taking my order paused, and in an embarrassed voice, apologized they didn’t have “Bud” but did have something called “Bud-weiser.” She was sweet so I agreed to try that. Tasted quite similar to “Bud.”
After a couple of days my editors tired of stories about car dealers and told me to cut my trip short. With 5 hours to kill before leaving for my flight I decided to walk the mile or so up Poydras Street to the Super Dome where the Super Bowl would be played the following Sunday. I figured there would be some sort of souvenir shop where I could buy some overpriced tchockes with “Super Bowl” printed on it, allowing me to boast I had “been” there.
I did find a store in an office building that was attached to the stadium by a footbridge. I purchased a couple of the t-shirts, one of which is pictured here. The other stuff was either ridiculously expensive or just stupid. I could see no need to spend over 100 bucks on a leather cowboy hat with the Super Bowl and NFL logos on it, or night light, match book or any number of glass and plastic containers with the sole purpose of conveying beer into one’s gullet. A t-shirt always works and at 20 bucks each I was fine with it.
From there I attempted to get closer to the dome and perhaps be lucky enough to get inside to sneak a peek at the field. However, despite being 6 days before the actual game, the super silver spaceship of a stadium had more security than Vladimir Putin’s bare chest. Concrete barriers, armed police, fences, cameras, signs warning you to not even entertain thoughts of breaching the imaginary line between “Super” and a life sentence in Super Max.
I quickly surmised instead of being appalled at the pop-up warzone created to protect a football game from being invaded by an enemy force of ball deflaters, I would embrace the experience, take it all in and delude myself into believing I had, in some way, wormed my way into close proximity to the big game for the mere price of two t-shirts.
And so, each Super Sunday I wear my now threadbare souvenir of Super Bowl XXXVI and each Super Sunday, just as members of my Tribe are encouraged when reading the story of Passover each year, I tell this tale, embellish it, enlarge it, make up a few details and embrace it, and toast my brush with Super-ness…with a Bud, or Budweiser, whichever is available.
Almost every Friday our team goes out to lunch and we eat mostly things that will reduce the amount of time we spend on Earth. Big, fat, burgers with bacon and cheese on them, Philly cheesesteaks, gooey pizza with every meat that can find a seat on the greasy circle of mozzarella and marinara, all accompanied by the dynamic duo of duodenal distress: onion rings and fries.
The result is packing on the pounds until one’s pants pop in a desperate act of surrender, and the blood pressure cuff doesn’t bother to inflate as a show of contempt for our disgusting dietary habits.
But this week I began an earnest attempt to reverse the growth of my gross gut and strain on my bathroom scale by bringing a healthy lunch to work each day and avoiding the vending machine and any contents within called Kit Kat, Snickers or Twix. The real test would be this Friday’s lunch out with the gang, and I passed…but I’m here to tell you it came at a price.
I chose “Sesame Ginger Chicken Lettuce Wraps” from the restaurant’s “healthy choices” menu. I now realize that’s a euphemism for “disgusting and sloppy foods less desperate people avoid.”
My meal came with a little crock of something resembling, uh, nothing I’ve ever seen before. There were little stringy things, tiny chunks of chicken, shredded carrots, some tiny red squares that may either be red peppers, tomatoes or the scab from the server’s pimples, all swimming in what I’m guessing is a soy sauce the color of a palomino’s pubis. I only know that color because I grew up near Belmont Racetrack and rode my bike around the paddocks.
Accompanying this mess was another little crock with six tiny lettuce leaves. Ostensibly the idea was to spoon the gook in the first crock into a lettuce leaf, fold it up and eat it. Nice idea. Poor execution. The lettuce leaves were about the size of a Spanish doubloon and could not possibly be folded once they were stuffed with a spoonful of chickenstringystuffcarrotredsquaressoysaucemush. I folded it as much as I could and attempted to quickly push the thing into my mouth only to have half the stuffing leak out the other side causing a tributary of the River of Soy to run down my arm.
Annoyed, but hungry as hell, I shoved the leaf and whatever contents were left within, into my pie hole. I tried this again with the next lettuce leaf and again, the stuff squirted out the other end, threatening to emblazon my lunch partner to my right with the Brown Badge of Bad Luck. He was not amused and threatened to shove the remains of his absolutely delicious looking burger up my personal lettuce wrap.
When I had exhausted all six lettuce leaves, I still had half a crock of crap left and nothing to stuff it in. You can imagine my relief when my only alternative was to finish it with an actual fork, but by then the idea of eating healthy had completely lost its charm.
I was tempted to order a nice, big plate of tater tots and wash it down with a pint of Guinness. But I resisted. I’d come this far in a week, there was no way I was gonna blow it. Afterall, there’s always next Friday. .at Steak n’ Shake…they have a very nice salad menu. I think I just made myself laugh.
Weathercasters take a beating all the time for screwing it up. They said it wouldn’t rain on the weekend, and there was a hurricane. They said the East Coast would be buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa in an historic snowfall.OK, some got buried, New York City didn’t, but they bitched about it anyway. “Hey! You said we were screwed and we didn’t get screwed! You screwed up!”
Many years ago I was, in fact, a TV weather guy and I’m here now to reveal some secrets of how this whole thing really works.
The first thing you have to know is that I knew nothing about the weather. To get the job as the weekend weather guy at KGUN in Tucson, Arizona, I took out at weather book from the library and memorized a few facts such as what those lines on a weather map that have either bumps or triangles on them mean. Hint. It doesn’t matter to the viewer.
For my audition, the news director told me to use the same map as the real weather guy. The problem was, the real weather guy was 6’2” and I was roughly two-thirds his size. That’s an issue when you’re using a 7-foot tall physical weather map made of aluminum. After acing the audition, I got the job, but I was so short, the station built me a platform so I could reach Montana at the top of the map.
My background was spinning records as a morning drivetime radio announcer, but I was told I landed the job because news directors thought radio guys were “good bullshitters who could ad lib, working without scripts.”
So how did I come up with my profound prognostications? Simple. We had a weather wire that spat out the weather map features and forecasts. All I had to do was get that all in my head and act like I made it all up once I got on the air.
Oh, I had no fancy graphics or satellite map or Doppler Radar, or even a weather vane. Just little magnetic raindrops and sunshines and L’s for low pressure systems and H’s for high pressure systems. The weather wire told me where to toss them on the metal map. I also had magnetic numbers for the various temperatures. One night, between the early and late shows, the studio crew got stoned and when I returned, I found all the temps changed. For example, the map now showed the temperature in Chicago at 32,271 degrees. Wow! Windy AND warm!
We had a Native American cameraman who carried a hunting knife. When I predicted rain for the weekend he flashed the blade at me with threatening eyes while I was on the air. OK, well, maybe it’s only a 10 percent chance of rain. Put the damn knife away!
My big and tall predecessor who had been a TV weather guy for 25 years and was about to retire, gave me some important advice. “Make the shit look convincing and toss in a technical term every once in awhile to make them think you know what you’re talkin’ about.” His favorite was the acronym, CAVU, which stood for “ceiling and visibility unlimited.” Fancy pants for clear skies. I did toss it in a few times but after that I was outta bullets.
If you look at this video of one of my weathercasts, at the very top you’ll see “Associate Member of the American Meteorological Society” on the screen below my name. How did I earn that lofty title? I tossed a check for 25 bucks in the mail and sent it to the AMS and that bought me the right to stick that instant credibility on the screen.
Sometimes I got it wrong. Very wrong. Maybe I read the weather wire wrong. One day a guy from a local sub shop called and said my 6-foot sub was ready. I told him I didn’t order one. He insisted the giant sandwich was ordered in my name. Turns out it was a pissed off viewer who didn’t like the fact that I said it would be nice on Sunday and it rained on his family picnic.Nice prank. I lost two viewers. The wet picnicker and the PO’d sub guy.
So you see, weather’s a tough game. Not everyone is up to the task. Indeed, we decided to audition some lovely aspiring actresses to do the weather on the weekends. One flustered babe looked at the map during her auditioned and proclaimed, “Well..Looks like there are L’s! Those indicate the Left side of the map!” When the director asked what the H’s stood for, she proudly announced, “Hot, silly!” Maybe she’s the one who predicted NYC would be buried.
I’m afraid I didn’t get to see any of the films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but was able to view incredibly cheap, but wildly entertaining alternate versions of those big budget movies that deserve some recognition.
edLINES 