The Mark Rabinowitz Times

Volume 6, Number 17: New Food Discoveries

2011-12-28T02:25:00.000-05:00

Here are a few food-related discoveries I made earlier this month (the first two of which, I admit, I should have realized sooner except that some stupid and/or lazy thinking got in the way):

Pre-sweetened cereals aren't such a good deal. Three weeks ago, Kroger had selected varieties of Kellogg's cereals on sale for $1.99, and two of those varities were the 17-oz. box of Frosted Flakes and the 12-oz. box of Corn Flakes. A few years ago, I would have snatched up the Frosted Flakes, based off of the belief that I would be getting 5 more ounces for the same price. But it dawned on me, part of that 17 ounces of Frosted Flakes has got to be sugar. And I need to cut pre-sweetened cereals out of my diet. So I went about figuring out how much cereal I would really be getting, by reading the Nutrition Facts box (seen here.) The math goes like this:

A 30-gram serving of Frosted Flakes contains 11 grams of sugar--so it stands to reason that a little over a third of a box of Frosted Flakes is sugar.
Considering the entire 17-ounce box, that box has 6.23 ounces of sugar and just 10.77 ounces of actual cereal.

Now I understood why my parents always thought pre-sweetened cereals were expensive (as well as unhealthy): They did the math. At long last, I picked the 12-ounce box of Corn Flakes over the ~~17-ounce~~ 10.77-ounce box of Frosted Flakes.

Just because something comes in a mix doesn't mean it's hard to make! Evidently, when it comes to cooking, I have been depending way too much on mixes. Brownies are a prime example--for the last ten years, the only way I ever made them was out of a mix (with Duncan Hines being my personal favorite). How ignorant I was. Earlier this month, I found out that brownies are easy to make--I already had all the ingredients for this simple recipe in the house, including a few I had hardly been using:

Cocoa: Last year, I bought a canister of unsweetened cocoa with the idea that I could use it to make hot cocoa in the wintertime, only to find that I'm not in the mood for cocoa nearly as much as I was in my childhood. So it had been sitting in my cupboard for a while (thank goodness it doesn't expire until 2014). Then I saw the recipe linked above on the back of the canister.
Flour (I bought it for making bread in my breadmaker, but it's something I don't do very often--not when I can get a loaf of bread for a buck most of the time)
Sugar (I bought it for making Kool-Aid, but I had given up Kool-Aid when I switched to diet drinks, so I wasn't using that as much)
Vanilla extract (I bought it eight years ago to use in a granola bar mix my mother gave me, but between then and a few weeks ago, I had not used it)

Imagine brownies suddenly appearing out of nowhere. That's what this "discovery" felt like to me. Making them without a mix could be cheaper than those boxed mixes, too (it's not often that the Duncan Hines mix goes on sale). I've already made the above recipe a few times.

Steak sauce gives a kick to one flavor of Hamburger Helper: I used to consider the Beef Pasta version of Hamburger Helper to be one of the more boring varieties, one I'd have "once in a while". That is, until I had the idea of stirring in a little A-1 Steak Sauce. That makes all the difference in the world to be because I bleeping LOVE the taste of A-1.

Volume 6, Number 16: Diet Soda Reviews, Part VII (and a Coke Freestyle Update)

2011-12-06T13:11:00.001-05:00

Diet Barq's Root Beer: Thumbs up. It's a different root beer flavor than Diet A&W--my guess is, Barq's is sharper (hence the slogan "Barq's got bite"), while A&W is creamier and not quite as strong. Bottom line, Diet Barq's is chug-worthy. There's only one reason why it took so long for me to try this soda: My local grocery stores only make certain sodas available in cans but not in bottles, which sucks because the per-ounce price for soda in cans tends to be much more expensive than soda in bottles***. Diet Barq's Root Beer is one of those sodas.

Diet Sierra Mist Ruby Splash: Thumbs WAY up. I like this a lot, partly because I like grapefruit-flavored sodas like Squirt and Fresca, and adding some grapefruit to Diet Sierra Mist is a home run for PepsiCo. The lemon-lime Diet Sierra Mist is available in both 2-liter bottles and cans, but for some reason, like Diet Barq's Root Beer, I have only ever found the Ruby Splash version in cans.

Kroger Diet Big K Citrus Drop Xtreme: On the fence (but only because, as I mentioned back in Volume 6, Number 9, I was never a big fan of Mountain Dew in the days when I drank "regular" sodas). I would drink it if there was nothing else in my fridge, but I can name 20 diet sodas I like better. That said, I suspect that if you like Diet Mountain Dew, you'd like Diet Big K Citrus Drop or Diet Big K Citrus Drop Xtreme.

Walmart Diet Dr. Thunder - On the fence. At least it didn't insult Dr Pepper the way Walmart's diet root beer offering insulted Diet A&W and Diet Barq's. But for what it's worth, it's not often that I go to Walmart for anything, so there isn't much point in buying a soda when the only place where you can return the bottle is a store you don't often go to.

Dr Pepper Ten - Thumbs up. This tastes even more like regular Dr Pepper than Diet Dr Pepper does. Maybe a tiny little bit of high fructose corn syrup (10 calories per 12 oz. serving) makes a big difference. I wonder what Cherry Vanilla, Cherry Chocolate or Raspberry Creme versions of Dr Pepper Ten would taste like if they existed (these are all varieties of Diet Dr Pepper than used to exist but no longer do).

Diet Coke with Cherry - On the fence. Not to be confused with Coke Cherry Zero (which I like). I liked it, but not quite as much as Coke Cherry Zero.

Coming soon: Diet Mountain Dew Code Red. I bought a 12-pack of this at the same time that I bought the 12-pack of the Diet Sierra Mist Ruby Splash (it's yet another soda that I can only find in cans but not 2-liter bottles).

One more thing: I mentioned the Coca-Cola Freestyle Machine over a year ago. Now it's available in many more locations, including several in Michigan, the closest of which is a burger restaurant in Auburn Hills (about 20 miles north of me). And earlier today, Coca-Cola announced that it would install the machines at over 800 Burger King restaurants (note: that's only restaurants owned by BK, not those franchised by BK). The dream of tasting Coke Orange Zero, Coke Raspberry Zero, Coke Lemon Zero, Diet Barq's Vanilla, the various flavors of Sprite Zero, and a 50/50 mix of Fanta Cherry Zero and Fanta Lime Zero may come true in 2012!

*** For example, you might be able to find a 2-liter bottle of your favorite soda on sale for $1, which is 1.48 cents per ounce; you're lucky if you can get a 12-pack of cans of that same soda for $3, in which case it would run you 2.08 cents per ounce, which is over 40% more expensive.

Volume 6, Number 15: Introducing the XBA

2011-11-15T13:43:00.001-05:00

OK, let me get this straight about the labor situation in the NBA... you've got greedy owners saying they're losing money, players making ridiculous amounts of money to play a game that's cheaper to play than baseball, football or hockey, and a commish who's been known to talk about expanding his league overseas when there are a dozen TV markets in North America that would be thrilled to have NBA teams. No wonder more people like college basketball better (never mind for the moment that a lot of its players are "overpaid" in that they get full scholarships to play when their grades suck).

Here's my question: Why hasn't someone tried to create a new league to fill the void? After all, basketball is a cheaper in terms of expenses (virtually no equipment such as pads, helmets, gloves or sticks; 12-man rosters, smaller than the other 3 "big league" sports; just a wood floor, which is cheaper to maintain than grass or ice; and a couple of hoops).

The fictitious teams listed below represent twelve markets that are larger than Memphis (the 48th largest TV market) but DON'T have NBA teams, and would constitute the equally fictitious XBA (a reference to Vince McMahon's XFL, a football league that fizzled in 2001; I have sworn up and down that McMahon should have started up the XBA due to the aforementioned lower costs, plus you could have pyrotechnics going off after particularly dazzing dunks, long 3-point shots and game-winning shots).

MIDWEST
Cincinnati Scorch - OK, this is one I came up with back in 5th grade for a football league I dreamed up. I like names with alliteration in them (Pittsburgh Penguins, Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Drive, Denver Dynamite, Boston Braves, Miami Marlins, etc.). Cincinnati used to have an NBA team called the Royals; they are now known as the Sacramento Kings.
Pittsburgh Pisces - Named after the The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a 1979 film starring Julius Erving and Stockard Channing. It wouldn't be the first time a pro team named itself after a movie--remember the NHL's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim?
Kansas City Steers - Named for the local cattle ranching industry. Oddly enough, there used to be a professional basketball team in Kansas City in the early 1960s called the Steers. Another thing, too, KC has a relatively new arena now (the Sprint Center) to lure NBA and NHL teams.
St. Louis Rhinos - St. Louis is home to one pro team named after a horned animal that starts with "R" (the NFL's Rams). Why not another? Besides, this city very nearly got the NBA's Grizzlies from Vancouver: Bill Laurie offered to buy that team and move it to St. Louis but David Stern blocked the sale, citing his desire for the team to succeed in Vancouver. Stern subsequently approved the sale to a Chicago businessman named Michael Heisley, who promised to make every effort to make things work in Vancouver, and exactly one year later, he moved the team to Memphis. Now, the only difference I saw between Laurie's offer and Heisley's is that Laurie told the truth about what he planned to do with the team and Heisley made a promise he had no intention of keeping. Way to double-standardize St. Louis, David Stern. Bad enough you've stolen players from teams that sorely needed them via your Draft Lottery, but you stole the NBA from St. Louis as well.

SOUTH
Birmingham Maulers - Named after the local steel industry (another steel town, Pittsburgh, once had a USFL team called the Maulers). This city has hosted franchises in the World Football League, Canadian Football League, United States Football League and the XFL.
Jacksonville Jackals - Jacksonville's support for the USFL Bulls (1984-85) was the reason why it beat out St. Louis, Baltimore and Memphis for an NFL expansion franchise in 1995. It's also one of the bigger cities among those listed here. The Jackals nickname comes from the short-lived UPN action/adventure show Deadly Games, whose main villain, Sebastian Jackal, was a video game "big bad" come to life following a freak accident.
Nashville Hee-Haws - Named after the syndicated comedy show. The LA Lakers can keep Jack Nicholson. The Hee-Haws would love to give Reese Witherspoon free mid-court tickets for life.
Tampa Bay Barracudas - I don't know if barracudas are common in Tampa Bay, but they are got to be more common there than in Birmingham (the Canadian Football League once had a team called the Birmingham Barracudas). This team would have to compete with the NHL's Lightning for attention, but it's not like Tampa was ever a hockey hotbed.

PACIFIC
Las Vegas High Rollers - A high risk--"Due in part to perceived risks with legal sports betting, no major professional sports league has ever had a team in Las Vegas" according to this Wikipedia article. But it is one of the largest cities in the United States without a major league sports team and it has been a candidate to get a relocated NBA team in the past (the Seattle SuperSonics, for example, talked to ownership groups from Las Vegas and Kansas City before deciding to sell to Clay Bennett, who moved the franchise to Oklahoma City).
San Diego Avispas - "Avispas" is Spanish for wasps. Having a Spanish nickname would appeal to basketball fans just south of the border. No, the jerseys would NOT say "Los Avispas," just "Avispas" or "San Diego."
Seattle Cyberpunks - Hey, Microsoft isn't far from here, and remember, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen helped save the NFL's Seahawks from moving to Los Angeles back in the '90s. I considered naming this team after the local music scene (which brought us Jimi Hendrix in the late '60s and the grunge bands of the early '90s) but "Rock Stars" and "Grunge" just didn't resonate with me. This team could enjoy a Pacific Northwest regional rivalry with the team listed right below it...
Vancouver Beachcombers - Named for those who travel coastlines to track down and salvage logs that have broken away from barges and/or logging booms, as well as a long-running Canadian TV series about two men who did just that.

Well, there you have it... a 12-team league. Now, I realize this league doesn't have teams in many major TV markets and therefore would have a hard time competing with a healthy, fully operational NBA, but hey, if things keep going the way they've been going, maybe a number of NBA teams would "secede" and join the XBA. We can dream, can't we?

Volume 6, Number 14: I'm Not the One with My Face on Some Wack-Ass Cap'n Crunch

2011-11-11T11:10:00.001-05:00

I haven't made a blog entry in a while so here are a bunch of quick updates:

The Penn State football child sexual abuse scandal: Truth be told, I didn't know a thing about it until Saturday when that sicko, Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator, got arrested and charged with 40 counts of molesting young boys. From there, in just a few days, what looked like one sick man being arrested morphed into one exemplary and clean program (high graduation rate, no gifts or money like USC several years back or SMU in the early '80s, no "Pro Combat" uniforms or even helmet logos) has been reduced to a tarnished, corroded shell. Head coach Joe Paterno was fired and president Graham Spanier were fired Wednesday night by the Penn State Board of Trustees. Two other things that shocked me right off the bat: First, this isn't the first time that a charity was set up to help wayward boys, then used for the sexual abuse of those boys. Father Bruce Ritter set up Covenant House in 1972 and at least four men later said that Fr. Ritter engaged in sexual activities with them. Sandusky set up a charity called The Second Mile in 1999 and it was through that charity that he molested those boys (most of whom are now young men, and all of whom will have to deal with damaged, violated lives for the rest of their lives). Scandals like these really hurt charities that do help young boys. Second, the rioting in the wake of Paterno's firing (including turning over a TV news satellite van)--does it occur to these schmucks that there are more important things in life than college football?

The Tigers: I was amazed by them this past season. Despite having to patch up a bunch of holes with players that would never have been drafted in my fantasy league in a million parallel universes (Andy Dirks? Al Albuquerque? Danny Worth?), they won their first division title since 1987. Hats off to Tigers manager Jim Leyland and team president Dave Dombrowski. A couple of days after they lost to the Texas Rangers in the AL Championship Series, some idiot posted on freep.com: ""No team finds more ways to LOSE than the Leyland/Dumbrowski Tigers." My response to this stupid comment: "We all need to be grateful for the work that Leyland and Dombrowski have put together in making the Tigers what they are today. Before Leyland took over as their manager, the Tigers had exactly TWO winning seasons between 1989 and 2005--a 17-season span that included four seasons of 100 losses or more and Randy Smith's near-destruction of the team. They have had five winning seasons since. Mitch Albom once said that Sparky Anderson was great at getting the best out of his team no matter what, "folding the rag for every drop," and Leyland has been great at that as well. The rag just came up dry in the ALCS against the Rangers, that's all. Dave Dombrowski has drafted or traded for many of the Tigers' key players since taking over as the team's GM in 2002. It's no surprise they have been so successful here; after all, they succeeded elsewhere (Leyland with the Pirates and Marlins; Dombrowski with the Expos and Marlins, and incidentally, the Pirates and Expos/Nationals haven't seen much success since they left)."

The Lions: After a 5-0 start (their first since 1956), they are now 6-2. Again, I give serious props to Lions head coach Jim Schwartz and GM Martin Mayhew. The Lions have done a much better job of drafting under Mayhew than I had expected (especially considering that Mayhew made very different decisions than I would have made at key points in the 2009 draft--he took TE Brandon Pettigrew with the 20th overall pick when I would have gone with OT Michael Oher, and FS Louis Delmas at #33 when I would have opted for a linebacker, either James Laurinaitis or Rey Maualuga). Matthew Stafford is healthy--knock on wood--and when they can run the ball, they can win. All in all, it's a 180-degree turnaround from the Hell of the Matt Millen years.

Funniest video in recent months: Epic Rap Battles of History #13: Mr. T vs. Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers absolutely pwned Mr. T in this one in my opinion. Epic Rap Battles of History is a series of short videos featuring rap battles between historical and/or fictitious figures (Darth Vader vs. Adolf Hitler, Dr. Seuss vs. Shakespeare, etc.)

I don't know if I've ever said it before, but I still consider the greatest acting performance I've ever seen to be Martin Landau's Academy Award-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the 1994 Tim Burton biopic, Ed Wood. (Here's a clip from the film--warning for you little kids out there, there's some swearing in this one.) Landau, for me, defined what it meant to disappear into a character to the point that you wouldn't recognize the actor, and keep in mind, Lugosi was both a real person and an actor himself. His performance was so good that if anyone wanted to remake a film Lugosi had made during the final years of his life, I would hope that Landau would play whatever character Lugosi played. It would be as if Lugosi had come back to life.

One more thing--I wish that Daylight Savings Time would go back to starting on the final Sunday in April and ending on the final Sunday in October. (It changed in 2005 in the Energy Policy Act so that it now starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November; this, among other things, means kids trick-or-treating in broad daylight when it should be "dusk".) Never mind that I really wish we were in the Central Time Zone (all TV shows start/end an hour earlier--yippee).

Volume 6, Number 13: Another Do-It-Yourself Win

2011-09-30T13:04:00.000-04:00

For well over a decade, I have hated certain things about brand-name computers that you and I find at our favorite electronics and office supply stores.

They come with software loaded on it that I don't need. Four years ago, I bought a Dell computer that had Microsoft Money and Microsoft Works loaded on it. Works is fine if you just need basic word processing or spreadsheet software, but for an experienced Word and Excel user like me, Works is like trying to eat dinner with a Swiss Army knife. Microsoft Money is a finance software program that I just never had a use for. I keep tabs on my budget with an Excel spreadsheet. That's all I need.
They also come with hardware that you don't need. Every new computer, it seems, absolutely has to come with a matching keyboard and mouse, when chances are, the keyboard and mouse on your current computer are working just fine.
Finally, there's the brand name. In most cases, the brand can say a lot about the quality of the product and the company that made it that product, and it makes perfect sense for someone who doesn't take apart, fix or maintain anything to "go with a brand you trust." But if you were to take apart a PC, you would find that the components inside it come from various companies. The hard drive could be from Seagate or Western Digital. The optical disc drive may be from Sony, Samsung or LG. The motherboard may have been made by MSI, ASUS or Gigabyte. And that's on top of the fact that the CPU chip--the brain of the computer--is from Intel or AMD. The point is, when you buy a branded PC like HP or Compaq or Acer, you're buying a lie. They didn't make most of the key components; all they did was put them together in a factory and slap their name on a stylish case.

I always wanted get a PC that had just what I needed (a better CPU, more memory, a bigger hard drive, etc.) without having to pay the extra costs listed above.

In 2007, I went to a local custom builder and asked him about building me a PC that re-used several components from the old PC I had been using (more details in this blog entry). This project proved impossible due in part to the time factor--it would have taken that custom builder extra time to put one together a PC that matched my specs--and because computer industry standards had changed significantly enough that the components I wanted to re-use were obsolete anyway. That's when he sold me that Dell I mentioned earlier.

Last Friday, I finally got my wish. I ordered a "build-it-yourself" kit from Tiger Direct that met most of the specs I had in mind (most notably, an Intel Core i5 processor and 8 GB of memory) and successfully put it together, and it cost me much less than what I would have paid at Best Buy for any computer that had that processor and that much memory in it (around $350). I didn't have to pay for any unneeded software or extra hardware. And most importantly, I was able to put the kit (case, motherboard, CPU, memory, drives) together successfully on the first try.

What were the differences between last Friday and what happened in 2007 that led me to finally ditch the "Custom Building Blues"?

I know computers a lot better. Back in 1998, I dropped $700 on a computer that crashed a lot and became obsolete in fairly short order. All I knew how to do with computers back then was things like put in modems or replace disk drives. A year later, much better computers were on the market for lower prices. In the past 13 or so years, a number of previous computer upgrade experiences helped prepare me for last week's project (a few successful memory upgrades, a successful CPU upgrade in 2009, a failed motherboard replacement attempt in 1999, a failed CPU upgrade attempt in 2001).
PCs are much easier to build today. Older computers were hard to build and easy to screw up; for example, it was easy for someone who didn't know what he was doing to get a critical cable on backwards (like the cord from the power supply to the motherboard). Older motherboards had dipswitches and jumpers on them that were easy to mess up, too. Today's computers have a lot of things that are "fool-proof," like SATA cables (which can't be put on backwards). CPUs are easier to insert and remove (not to mention that they have notches and things built into them to make it easier for people to put them in correctly and prevent them from putting them in wrong). (Note: Putting together a PC, like repairing a car, is not for everybody and is not something to be taken lightly. You still have to read the manuals that come with each component, especially the manual for the motherboard, to make sure you're doing everything right.)
Labor savings. When you're buying a "ready-made," "off-the-shelf" PC at a store like Best Buy or OfficeMax, part of the price you pay goes towards the time and effort spent at the factory to put the computer together. It works the same way with asking a "custom builder" to put one together--it takes time for him to put it together and he'll want to be paid for that time. Putting it together myself allowed me to keep those labor costs in my pocket.

I'm happy for another reason: Now that I have experience in successfully building a computer out of a "build-it-yourself" kit, it is very likely that when I get my next computer in 4 years or so, it, too, will be one I build myself.

So there you have it. Past personal experiences with computers, coupled with the willingness of the computer industry to make PCs easier to build, have led me to build a very good computer for less than half of what I spent in 1998.

Volume 6, Number 12: Stepping Into Google TV

2011-09-20T16:09:00.005-04:00

When Google TV came out just under a year ago, Logitech came out with a Google TV set-top box called the Revue, which caried a hefty $299 price tag. I did not even consider buying one at that price. But in late July, Logitech chopped the price down to $99, and last week, TigerDirect sold a limited quantity on eBay for $9 less than that.

Long story short, I went and took the Google TV plunge (thanks to the TigerDirect/eBay $90 offer). Why?

Google TV has a few advantages over its competitors (Roku, Boxee and Apple TV), such as integration with my existing cable service and the fact that it has the Google Chrome web browser as one of its built-in apps. (Chrome supports Flash, so I could watch YouTube videos, and if I so desired, play Facebook games like Madden NFL Superstars on this device as well.)
As I let slip in the previous bullet point, the Revue's got apps built into it. It's got about a dozen right now, including the Logitech Media Player (more on that later) and the Pandora Internet music service as well as Google Chrome. Now, down the road, I wouldn't be satisfied with just a dozen apps; however, an upcoming operating system upgrade is supposed to change all that--the new Google TV OS would have tons of new apps available that aren't compatible with the current OS. And anyway, TVs with wireless Internet connectivity and built-in apps are becoming more common nowadays, and my HDTV (a 32" Toshiba set I bought two years ago) wouldn't have those features otherwise. Buying a new TV with those features would have been much more expensive.
No going back and forth between the living room and the office anytime I want to do something on the computer that's related to something I'm watching on TV. A fine example was last year's Harrison High School state football championship game, when I went between watching the game in my living room and giving Facebook and Twitter status updates in the office. (For those of you who say I could have done that with a smartphone, yes, I could have if I wanted to pay out the nose for one, and I have no plans to do so.) Or if I'm watching a TV show and seeing an actor or actress that I couldn't quite place where I've seen him or her, I can just switch to Google TV and run the Chrome web browser (I should mention that the Revue Google TV box has a picture-in-picture feature so I can continue to see the TV show while searching IMDB for the actor). And of course, I could check e-mail or surf the Web to kill time during commercial breaks.
The ability to play, on the TV in my living room, content from the PC in my office using the Logitech Media Player app--this functionality wasn't the easiest thing in the world to set up, but once I figured it out, wow, was I happy. Basically, the Revue has Wi-Fi, so not only can it access the Internet through my wireless router, but as long as my PC is on, it can also access and play content from the PC. It rocks being able to play videos on a 32" HDTV while laying on my couch instead of on a 20" monitor while sitting in my office chair.

Bottom line, I'm happy with the Revue already. I'm really looking forward to the aforementioned OS upgrade. There are two categories of apps that might interest me: Apps to improve my TV viewing experience (either in the form of cable TV content I wouldn't enjoy otherwise, or an app that lets me search the next two weeks' worth of TV listings by keyword instead of just by category), and certain kinds of games (I'd love to see a Google TV pinball game, for example, as it it might be more fun to play one of those on a 32" TV instead of a 20" monitor).

Volume 6, Number 11: Another Fall, Another New TV Season

2011-08-30T23:51:00.004-04:00

In an entry I wrote a year ago, I mentioned that one reason that fall is my favorite season is that a lot of new TV shows start in the fall. At that time, I mentioned that there were four new shows that had my interest--No Ordinary Family, Detroit 1-8-7, Outsourced and S*#! My Dad Says, all of which didn't keep my interest long (those last two were shitcoms that didn't even keep my interest for one episode), and incidentally, all have long since been cancelled.

This season offers six new shows that could potentially grab my interest. These are ordered by the day on which they premiere.

Ringer (The CW, Tuesdays at 9 starting September 13)

Synopsis: This is the story of two twin sisters. One, Siobhan, is a socialite who is on the run from a would-be killer. The other, Bridget, is an ex-prostitute on the run from a mobster, and thinking that Siobhan really is dead (following a suspicious boat accident), she assumes Siobhan's identity, hoping this helps her hide from that mobster, but not knowing that Siobhan was also being hunted.

Why I'm interested: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) plays Siobhan and Bridget in a dual role. Triple if you include Bridget-posing-as-Siobhan. Gellar has been terribly underused in recent years, and considering she already had an Emmy Award to her credit when she was still in her teens, and how dedicated she is to her craft, it's a crime that in the last 20 years, the only memorable major motion picture roles she's had were Cruel Intentions, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scooby-Doo and The Grudge.**

The Playboy Club (NBC, Mondays at 10 starting September 19)

Synopsis: Set in 1963, this series centers around the Bunnies at the first Playboy Club in Chicago.

Why I'm interested: Two words: Eye candy. There is also the potential to examine how women in American society saw themselves at the time and how this self-image evolved over the course of the next few years, but there's one show further down this list (ABC's Pan Am) that I figure will work with this context better, and as a result, last longer as a series. Anyway, the early '60s were a very interesting time for me--it was as though the country still wore a veneer of prosperity, perfection and innocence, but that veneer was starting to wear thin and crack due to the turbulence and trouble that lay beneath (the ongoing fight against sexism and racism, the Cold War, and the JFK assassination, and later on in the '60s, the MLK and RFK assassinations and a general increase in civil unrest).

The X Factor (Fox, starting September 21)

Synopsis: Simon Cowell brings this singing competition to the USA from the UK. (Why another singing competition, you ask? Well, back in his native UK, Cowell wanted to have a singing competition in which he owned part of the TV rights, whereas with Pop Idol--the show on which American Idol is based--he did not. In the UK, Pop Idol was cancelled after just two seasons and replaced by X Factor, but here in the US, both American Idol and X Factor will exist, on the condition that only one show can air at any time; X Factor will air in the fall and American Idol will air in the winter and spring.)

Why I'm interested: I enjoyed Cowell's criticism of various auditions on American Idol, especially the bad ones. I stopped watching American Idol after he left that show.***

Pan Am (ABC, Sundays at 10 starting September 25)

Synopsis: Like The Playboy Club, this series is also set in 1963. This series revolves around the flight attendants working for the now-defunct Pan Am Airways.

Why I'm interested: Christina Ricci, another actress that you wondered where she had been lately, was hot in Sleepy Hollow (you know, the 1999 Tim Burton film that starred Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane), and she looks just as delectable in that Pan Am stewardess'--oh, excuse me, flight attendant's--uniform.

Terra Nova (FOX, Mondays at 8 starting September 26)

Synopsis: A group of people in the 22nd century, threatened with extinction in their own time, travel back to prehistoric times to begin civilization anew.

Why I'm interested: I like the idea of using time travel to correct mistakes, and Terra Nova takes it to the extreme. Also, Jason O'Mara, who plays a cop trying to bring his family back together in this series, played a cop who found himself in 1973 after a car accident in a series that ABC cancelled way too soon (Life On Mars).

Grimm (NBC, Fridays at 9 starting October 21)

Synopsis: A modern-day homicide cop fights supernatural creatures infiltrating the real world.

Why I'm interested: The juxtaposition of fantasy and real worlds has always interested me (I recall a miniseries called The 10th Kingdom in which a young woman and her father find their world colliding with a magical fairytale world). As long as it stays closer to the modern world side--a few years ago, the fairy tale-style narration in ABC's Pushing Daisies just turned me off. Also, the pilot was co-written by David Greenwalt, who worked with all-time great creative genius Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. Sadly, given that this series gets a relatively late start, was placed on a crappy night, will likely be on against a baseball playoff game or two, and its network (NBC) has fared poorly on Friday nights in recent years, I suspect that this series may not last long.

So there you have it. Out of this group, I am looking forward to Ringer and Pan Am the most; The X Factor, I'll watch the audition stage but (as with American Idol) may not watch the competition proper; the other three shows, I'll take a wait-and-see approach (meaning that as much as I like the premises for these three, they better tell good, riveting stories or they'll lose my interest quickly).

** You know, if I had been casting the movie Charlie's Angels back in 2000, I would have cast Gellar as the athletic, tae kwon do butt-kicking one; Reese Witherspoon as the "street-smart" one who had "been around" (you ought to check out Witherspoon's performance in the 1996 film Freeway if you don't buy into that particular casting decision); and Kellie Martin (yet another criminally underemployed actress) as the more intellectual, "book-smart" one.

*** I wished the producers of American Idol had brought in British TV critic Charlie Brooker, who like Cowell uses awesomely acerbic wit, just to find out if he could skewer bad auditions the way he skewers bad TV shows and disconcerting TV trends in the UK. in Screenwipe and Newswipe).

Volume 6, Number 10: Assorted Idle Thoughts

2011-06-25T02:33:00.003-04:00

If adversity is the mother of invention, then desperation must be the father.

Has anyone asked a "where" question on Jeopardy!? By that, I mean, whenever I watch that show, I've noticed that every answer on that show is responded to by a "Who is..." or a "What is..." question. I've never heard anyone use a "Where..." question, like "The answer is: 'This state is bordered by Canada to the north and Idaho to the west'" and a contestant responds, "Where is Montana?"

Why in the heck do Iowa and New Hampshire dictate what happens in every U.S. Presidential campaign? At the very least, the states in the primary/caucus system should be shuffled (never mind that I would prefer to trash that whole system in favor of a national primary--the primary/caucus system dates back to the 19th century, when the fastest way to send and receive information was by telegraph, and railroad trains were the fastest way to travel).

The names of those Vietnam veterans who died from Agent Orange exposure should be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It's the same thing as dying from friendly fire, isn't it?

You know how some designer eyeglasses come with optional "clip-on" sunglasses? Are any eyeglass designers doing something similar with 3-D, making 3-D clip-ons that match the frame so I wouldn't have to use these? (I'd rather have the former--if it exists--because I imagine that, if you were to see a 3-D movie with the latter, the clip would get in the way, diminishing my enjoyment of the 3-D movie.)

Volume 6, Number 9: Diet Soda Reviews, Part VI

2011-06-12T02:16:00.002-04:00

Before I go into my latest batch of reviews, a few quick notes:

A quick shout out to Scott Miller in Texas, who really likes Diet Mountain Dew and has been asking me to try it out. I will review it someday, but the thing is, I was never crazy about Mountain Dew or similar sodas (Mello Yello, Vault) even when I drank regular sodas. I do know that there is a Diet Mountain Dew Code Red (with cherry flavoring) and they recently came out with Diet Mountain Dew Supernova (strawberry/melon flavored) and Diet Mountain Dew Voltage (citrus-flavored). As soon as I get my hands on those, I'll share my opinions on them. It's a shame I don't see them in 2-liter bottles (which stinks because, frankly, when I want to try something that I don't know whether I'll like it or not, I'd rather get the smallest quantity available, so I'd rather buy the 2-liter bottle than the 12-pack of cans).
I didn't get any response from Faygo back in April when I posted on their Facebook wall asking them to consider switching their artificial sweetener from aspartame to the aspartame/acesulfame potassium blend most diet sodas use nowadays (and that includes all four of the diet sodas I review below). So I reposted that request, adding the note, "Wake up--it's not 1982 anymore!" I'd be so happy to have a Diet Faygo Rock & Rye or a Diet Faygo Redpop if it didn't have the dreaded aspartame aftertaste I got when I tried it last year. Their diet Creme Soda and their diet 60/40 (grapefruit/lime soda) were both OK but I'd bet they'd be even better with the aspartame/ace-K blend. In my estimation, Faygo is really missing the bus on a chance to make some gains in the diet soda market.
I find that diet sodas, when they go flat, actually taste worse than when regular sodas go flat. By that, I mean not only is the taste not as good, but the aftertaste is even worse. This means I may have to start buying diet sodas in cans instead of 2-liter bottles to minimize the chance of the soda going flat before I finish it. It sucks because 12-ounce soda cans usually have a higher per-ounce cost than 2-liter bottles. For example, most times I can get a 2-liter bottle for $1 (1.48 cents per ounce), but supposing a 12-pack of cans of the same soda was on sale for $3, the per-ounce cost for those cans would be 40% higher (2.08 cents per ounce).

On to a few more reviews:

Kroger Big K Diet Black Cherry Soda: A big thumbs up--a rare occasion where I actually liked the house brand better than the national brand (in this case, the "national brand" was Diet Rite Black Cherry). Even more rare, I liked this WAY better than the Diet Rite version. Big K Diet Black Cherry Soda actually has some significant cherry flavor to it, whereas the Diet Rite version tasted more like something made by the Original New York Seltzer Company back in the '80s. I like both the taste and the aftertaste of the Big K version.

Kroger Big K Diet Lime Cola: On the fence. I was hoping for a hit here given the surprise home run I got from Diet Coke with Lime. I like the lime flavoring in this Kroger offering but it almost overpowers the cola flavor and it's also more acidic than Diet Coke with Lime. (Incidentally, "on the fence" just means I neither give it thumbs up or thumbs down; I'd drink it if it was the only diet soda to be found at some party or barbecue, and I might buy it over my preferred brand if it was at a ridiculously low price, but I wouldn't go out of my way to buy it again given that I do prefer a similar product.)

Bubba Zero Cola: On the fence. I recently bought a 2-liter bottle of Bubba Zero at Save-A-Lot because, well, I want to try just about every diet soda on the planet. It's part me being a mad scientist (I wanted to be one when I was seven years old) and part me embracing the spice of life that is variety (as a kid, I made my mother buy every peanut butter on the planet because I was bored with Jif, only to realize many years later that Jif really is the best). It goes down well, and the aftertaste gave me no problem whatsoever, but it still has the undistinctive "generic cola" flavor. I know I really enjoy a soda when I'm able to finish off a 2-liter bottle before any of it goes flat. That didn't quite happen with Bubba Zero. All things considered equal, I'd still rather have Diet Coke with Lime, Coke Vanilla Zero or Coke Cherry Zero.

Diet Sierra Mist: Thumbs up. I like it as much as Diet 7-Up, but I still think Sprite Zero is the most crisp and refreshing of the diet lemon-limes I've had.

Kroger Big K Cola Oh: On the fence. This is the Kroger imitation of Coke Zero, complete with a black label (because men apparently like black packaging, especially where diet sodas are concerned). I tried this back in December but never put in a formal review. I seem to recall the taste being a little on the acidic side (which I'd rather it wasn't; the acidity factor is why, when I drank regular colas, I preferred Coke over Pepsi). In the end, if it doesn't land among my favorite diet sodas, it lands in the group where I'd drink it, but would only buy it again under certain circumstances.

Volume 6, Number 8: The Death of the XFL: 10 Years Later

2011-05-10T12:40:00.002-04:00

Exactly 10 years ago today, the XFL, a professional football league created as the result of a joint venture between the National Broadcasting Company and World Wrestling Entertainment, folded after little more than three months. It had a number of things going for it that the United States Football League (1983-85) and the World League of American Football (1991-92) did not:

Prime-time coverage on a major TV network. NBC, which had broadcast AFC games for years prior to being outbid by CBS for that package in 1998, gave the XFL the entire 8pm-11pm Saturday night block.
Vince McMahon's slick packaging. WWE was at the height of its success, having crushed its competition, World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling. And the main reason was that Vince McMahon had transformed pro wrestling from lowbrow television to mainstream entertainment. At the time, WWF Monday Night RAW was actually beating out ABC's Monday Night Football in the Nielsen ratings.
A hold on the Los Angeles market. Los Angeles lost both its National Football League teams in 1995. In 2001, LA's only other pro football team was the Arena Football League's Los Angeles Avengers.
A perception that the NFL was becoming too rigid, especially regarding on-field celebrations by players.
A salary structure that ensured that player salaries would not escalate out of control (as they did in the USFL). The league owned all ten teams, which meant teams could not outbid one another for players (the way USFL teams did for players like QB Steve Young).

The short story is that the XFL failed miserably, both at being professional football and at being entertaining. It only lasted one season, folding after no TV network--not even the struggling United Paramount Network--wanted to carry any of its games in what would have been its second season.

But I don't do 10-second editorials. I go into detail. And beneath the failure of the XFL laid a catalog of errors:

1. No exhibition games (to allow for players on each team to get on the same page with one another to minimize mistakes and poor play, as well as give the XFL a chance to try out the various new rules prior to going on TV). In a new league like the XFL, each team basically functions like an expansion team because each player is playing with teammates he hasn't worked with before. The XFL should have scheduled some preseason games--non-televised, of course--in an effort to improve the initial quality of the "regular season" games, for two reasons: First, there were a series of rule changes made during the regular season, all of which helped destroy the XFL's credibility as a professional football league (as Adam Hofstetter pointed out in this column about failures in sports), and that whole rule change mess could have been avoided without a single fan even knowing about it. Also, the initial quality of the play reared its ugly head in the XFL's very first game, the Las Vegas Outlaws against the New York-New Jersey Hitmen. That game could have been a lot better if the teams involved played a preseason game or two to iron out any problems they had.

2. Teams in only eight markets. The XFL had a team in Los Angeles, but the Midwest--home to some of the NFL's oldest teams--only had one team (the Chicago Enforcers). Did Vince McMahon expect people from Detroit, Green Bay, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Cleveland to root for the Enforcers? Did McMahon expect people in Philadelphia and Boston--cities whose sports teams enjoy great rivalries with their New York counterparts--to give a darn about a league that had a team in the Big Apple, but none in Philly or Beantown? (By contrast, when the USFL began operations in 1983, it had teams in Boston and Philadelphia.) And at a time when Texas had emerged as a football hotbed, the XFL had no teams in that state. Dumb thinking.

3. Failure to do one single thing well. The XFL was the spork of professional sports. It attempted to do two things--to entertain and to present hard-hitting, exciting football--but it was a jack of both, and far from a master of either. As entertainment, it was cheesy; as football, it had no credibility.

4. Lack of unity between NBC and WWE. The XFL was supposed to be a joint venture these two companies, but the two parties seemed to distance themselves away from each other just as often as not. A telling example was this March 2001 interview between Bob Costas and Vince McMahon on Costas' HBO show, Off the Record:

Bob Costas: The XFL doesn't go anywhere near where the WWF goes but it is still considered a low rent form of television.
Vince McMahon: Have you seen any of the games? Tell me what is low rent about the games.
BC: Not so much within the games. The pregame show in week 1 was one of the most mindless things I've ever seen.
VM: We don't have any pregame shows.
BC: Week 1, there was a pregame show.
VM: We don't have any pregame shows, which is one of our problems.
BC: Anymore?
VM: No, we've never had a pregame show!
BC: What was the pregame show--
VM: Dammit Bob, we don't have any pregame shows!
BC: --the thing that aired in Los Angeles, New York and other markets prior to the first game?
VM: A local thing that the NBC O&Os put together of which we had nothing to do with.

Oh, so when McMahon said "we," he meant WWE, not the XFL. It got me thinking, "Hey, wait a minute, I thought WWE and NBC were supposed to be in this together."

5. A great lack of professionalism. McMahon spoke often about creating a more exciting football league, but he forgot that the XFL's would-be fans still wanted it to be professional football. What they got instead were garish uniforms (the Orlando Rage and Memphis Maniax are fine examples), nicknames on the backs of jerseys, a scoop of sleaze, a dollop of raunch, and oh yeah, players demonstrating why they couldn't cut it in the NFL.

One only wonders how the XFL would have fared over the past ten years if not for all the errors they made, if only WWE and NBC had properly taken advantage of the opportunities that they had then. Might it have developed players who failed the first time around in the NFL? After all, today's NFL teams crave players who can contribute as soon as their rookie year and are more likely to cut unproductive players after just a few years; by contrast, some 30 years ago, New York Giants QB Phil Simms did not get cut after his first five years in the league (1979-83) and went on to win two Super Bowls. And what advantage might it have taken of the NFL's current labor situation?

Volume 6, Number 7: A Draft Like No Other

2011-04-28T02:22:00.002-04:00

Well, here we are... the NFL Draft begins tonight.

But due to the labor impasse, it is unlike any that we, the professional football fans, have ever seen. That's because teams will have to draft for needs that they could have filled through trades or free agency in previous seasons.

Presently, teams cannot sign free agents, because without a new collective bargaining agreement in place, there is no way of knowing exactly who is a free agent. Carolina Panthers running back DeAngelo Williams and San Diego Chargers wide receiver Vincent Jackson are two examples of players who would be restricted free agents if the old CBA was still in effect, but could become unrestricted (and thus free to sign with any team) if a new CBA says they can. With respect to the Draft, teams now have to spend draft picks to fill needs that they might have been able to fill via free agency. For example, an NFL team (such as the Miami Dolphins or New England Patriots) might have to draft a running back early on because Williams is presently not able to sign with that or any other team.

Teams also cannot trade for veteran players. Trading comes into play in the weeks leading up to the draft and during the draft, when players are traded for draft picks (examples from last year included Donovan McNabb, Santonio Holmes and Leon Washington). Again, NFL teams are going to have to draft to fill needs in situations where trading a lower draft pick for a veteran might have worked.

Once the draft is completed, teams cannot sign undrafted players (as they become free agents after the draft).

Finally, teams cannot sign the players they did draft to contracts (particularly because the owners and players have not yet agreed on a new rookie wage scale--it makes perfect sense because no team should ever have to pay millions in guaranteed money to unproven players like JaMarcus Russell, but the players have wanted the owners to reallocate the money they save under such a new wage scale to a pension fund, and that has been a sticking point).

Things I'd love to see happen:

For the game: Darnit, owners, you've lost. When ESPN--a network that just gave you a ton of money to keep Monday Night Football--keeps saying stuff along those lines (as in this column by Gene Wojciechowski), Commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners had better listen. Basically, get back to the table and be prepared to make some concessions to the players. You and the players both have way too much to lose here.
For my Detroit Lions: I hope that either CB Prince Amukamara (Nebraska) or OT Tyron Smith (USC) fall to #13 and the Lions take whichever of the two they can get (Amukamara's my first choice). Their secondary, while improved over what we had a few years ago, still needs a shutdown corner and I still look back on when they passed on CB Quentin Jammer in 2002 in favor of QB Joey Harrington. Smith would be an upgrade for an offensive line that sorely needs it. I still contend that the Lions should have drafted OT Michael Oher with the 20th overall pick in 2009, mainly because they had just spent $42 million in guaranteed money on Matthew Stafford and owed it to him and the team to protect that investment and Jeff Backus is not, and has never been, a franchise tackle. The O-line and the secondary have both been needs for this team for years and I'll be happy if the Lions can satisfy either one.

Volume 6, Number 6: Diet Soda Reviews, Part V

2011-04-23T17:51:00.002-04:00

Here I go again, trying a few different diet sodas and letting you know what I think:

Diet 7-Up: Thumbs up because I liked it, but it just wasn't as chug-worthy as Sprite Zero was. Back in the days when I drank regular sodas (1982-2010), I liked 7-Up better than Sprite, so I thought maybe I would like Diet 7-Up better than Sprite Zero. Nope--I guess certain flavors work better with certain artificial sweeteners.

Boylan Diet Root Beer: I found this at a local Big Lots store and thought I'd try it because this brand is a) one I don't see at local chains like Meijer and Kroger, and b) is a brand that goes for about $4 a bottle on amazon.com--and "more expensive" is supposed to mean "better" right? Another point of note is that unlike the other root beers I've tried, this brand uses a blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. Sadly, this one tasted like someone spiked it with some sort of medicine (Sucrets, maybe?). Thumbs down to this particular variety (note: I have never tried Boylan's regular sodas so I cannot say as to how good those would taste, and my thumbs down review is not meant to discourage people from buying Boylan products).

Diet Dad's Root Beer: I also found this at a local Big Lots and it also uses a blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. Diet Dad's tasted better than Boylan, but it left behind an aftertaste I didn't like, so thumbs down to this one, too. (Again, it's possible that the regular Dad's tastes way better, but I am not reviewing regular sodas here. My previous experience with Dad's Root Beer was--drumroll, please--those little barrel-shaped hard candies you see in that Halloween candy mix, the one that also has the Smarties and the Dubble Bubble bubble gum.)

Meijer Diet Encore Cherry Cola: Thumbs down. I really disliked this one. It tasted like someone had spiked Cherry Coke Zero with sawdust. It ranks right down there with Walmart's Diet Root Beer among the worst diet sodas I've had. I don't think anything with cherry flavoring in it is supposed to have "hints of wood". (Note: Meijer is a chain of hypermarkets that is based in my home state of Michigan, but also has locations in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.)

Meijer Diet Cream Soda: Thumbs up. Yes, I said up, even though Meijer's store-branded food and drink products have had a mostly bad track record with me. Meijer has themselves a very good imitation of Diet A&W Cream Soda--I liked the taste and found the aftertaste very easy to live with (because, as with Diet A&W Cream Soda, the flavor goes well with the aspartame/ace-K artificial sweetener).

I just asked Faygo (via their Facebook page) if they could look into using an aspartame/ace-K blend. Their diet sodas currently use aspartame, which, in my book, puts them a decade behind many of the other diet soda makers.

Volume 6, Number 5: Clean Plates

2011-04-21T01:29:00.002-04:00

Have you ever heard that phrase, "You could lose weight if you left some food on your plate?" A number of weight loss web sites, such as this one, or this one, will say that. But I usually disagree with that statement.

Cooking at home as much as I do, it seems to me that if, at the point that my hunger was satisfied, I still had "extra" food on my plate, then I cooked too much for that one meal.

Don't get me wrong--it's always good to stop eating when your hunger is satisfied. And there are circumstances where cooking less is not possible--you can't exactly tell a restaurant to cut back on the amount they make. It's generally one size for one price, and I suppose you could always "doggy bag" whatever's left over.

But at home, I prefer to get what I pay for and that's why leaving food on my plate never enters into the equation. If I can save it for leftovers, fine--I always have leftovers from frozen 12" pizzas and Hamburger/Chicken/Tuna Helpers--but there is no way anything gets left on my plate. My retort to that age-old saying about leaving a little on your plate is this: it would be less wasteful to cook less food than to leave "extra" food on the plate. A few less rotini in the boiling water here and a few less tater tots in the oven there would surely stretch your food dollar farther.

Or better yet, buy a little less food to begin with!

Volume 6, Number 4: Diet Soda Reviews, Part IV

2011-03-28T13:27:00.005-04:00

Gosh, two months without a blog entry? I guess I've just been really busy, especially with a draft in a fantasy baseball league I run. Anyway, I've been drinking a few different diet sodas over that time, and here are my reviews of each one:

Diet Coke with Lime: More than seven months ago, when I began reviewing diet sodas, I gave Diet Coke a scathing review, but it was terribly biased, based on the experience I had with it when I was a kid. Recently, however, I was at a restaurant where the only diet soda available was Diet Coke, so I ordered one. And you know what? It didn't taste bad at all. Maybe drinking other diet sodas has had that effect on me. So I figured, if Diet Coke tastes OK, I'll give Diet Coke with Lime a try (because there is no Coke Lime Zero). Guess what--the lime flavoring actually made this chug-worthy and a serious contender for the Diet Soda Federation Inter-cola-nental Championship. Thumbs up.

Sam's Choice (Walmart) Diet Root Beer: Thumbs down--this crap gives root beer a bad name

Diet Citrus Blast (new from the makers of Pepsi): formula similar to Diet Squirt but I like Diet Squirt better): On the fence (it's OK but I like Diet Squirt a lot better)

Diet Ruby Red Squirt: Thumbs Up (I would have tried this sooner if it wasn't so hard to find)

Fanta Zero (orange soda): On the fence. It's better than Diet Orange Crush, but it just doesn't measure up to Diet Sunkist.

After seven months, here are the diet sodas I swear by (meaning I'd buy them again and again, and I wish they were available at restaurants):

Colas: Coke Vanilla Zero, Coke Cherry Zero, Diet Coke with Lime, Pepsi Max

Orange: Diet Sunkist

Root Beer: Diet A&W

Ginger Ale: Diet Canada Dry

Lemon-lime: Sprite Zero (note: I haven't tried Diet 7-Up or Diet Sierra Mist yet)

Other citrus: Diet Squirt, Diet Ruby Red Squirt, Fresca, Diet Faygo 60/40

Cream soda: Diet A&W Cream Soda

Others: Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Dr Pepper Cherry

Volume 6, Number 3: Challenger, 25 Years Later

2011-01-28T13:22:00.002-05:00

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.

Obviously, I will never forget that day. For many in my generation, it marked "the end of the innocence," just as the 1963 Kennedy assassination did for the Baby Boomers and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing did for Generation Y. I was in eighth grade at the time. I didn't actually see it live--I was having my lunch in the cafeteria at my middle school, and to the best of my knowledge, that school didn't have a cable TV connection. And CNN was the only network carrying live coverage of the launch.

The first class after lunch--5th hour--was American History with Mr. Sutherland. Another student in that class said to me, "Did you hear that the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up?" I took it as a sick hoax and quipped back to him in a sarcastic tone of voice, "Oh, whoa, (Libyan dictator Muammar) Khadafy must have sabotaged the launch pad." Basically, I felt insulted--he didn't know this, but I secretly dreamed about living on a space station--and that Khadafy thing was my way of insulting him back.

Over the course of that hour, the news spread around the school, but in retrospect, it was obviously not in as organized a fashion as I would have liked--I didn't know the story was true until well over an hour after the disaster. When 6th hour--Science with Mr. Van Horn--rolled around, I still didn't believe what I was hearing until Mr. Van Horn set me straight. We spent the last two hours of the day in silence, sitting at our desks and doing nothing except reflect on what had happened and contemplate the fates of the men and women that President Reagan called heroes that "broke the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God." I remember as I headed home, I hoped that the crew, which included teacher Christa McAuliffe, survived the explosion.

A side note: As it happened, a film called SpaceCamp was being made in which a bunch of kids and their instructor are accidentally launched into space aboard a space shuttle. Even after the Challenger tragedy, I was still interested in seeing that movie. I confess that I once dreamed of living in space, on a space station where everything was within walking distance--food, entertainment, friends, everything in a self-contained community. (A number of years later, I finally did see SpaceCamp on the SciFi Channel. I liked the story, I liked most of the human characters, but that damn robot ruined it for me. You're going to have me suspend my belief so much that I would buy into a sentient robot existing in the 1980s, much less one that would put the interests of one kid ahead of everyone else? A computer malfunction would have made more sense--heck, even an error on the part of one of the kids could have been somewhat believable.)

Note: For a related blog entry I made about CNN's news coverage of the launch and the tragedy that ensued, and how that tragedy affected the world of TV news reporting, go here.

Volume 6, Number 2: The Great Zodiac Shakeup

2011-01-14T09:15:00.002-05:00

Just yesterday, Time magazine posted this article about the Minnesota Planetarium Society and its research on the 13-sign zodiac--yes, that's right, 13. Apparently the Babylonians wanted a 12-sign zodiac and threw out Ophiuchus, the snake holder, a few thousand years ago. Something about wanting to balance "yin and yang" and an odd number wasn't going to cut it. (In retrospect, I'd love to call out across space and time to those ancient Babylonians, "Every sign has their good and bad, there's your balance right there.")

What's more, the signs are off by anywhere from a week to a month (it varies from one sign to the next), so people who were born under one sign in the 12-sign zodiac belong to another sign in the 13-sign one.

It's not exactly new information. Stories about the 13-sign zodiac had been floating around the Internet for a few years. It actually goes all the way back to 1977, when Dr. Lee Shapiro of the University of North Carolina published a paper about the 13 constellations, but anyway, I didn't know about it until Time.com came out with it.

The Great Zodiac Shakeup affects me. Almost every 12-sign Cancer is a 13-sign Gemini. Now, I don't read horoscopes every day, but there are certain parts of me that led me to easily identify with Cancer. The self-reliance, frugality, being security-oriented, letting emotions get the better of me at times, those are all Cancer things.

But there are parts of Gemini in me, too: Geminis are intellectual, living in a world of logic and science, and can experience two sides of things at the same time. I listen to songs from a whole bunch of different genres (pop, rock, metal, rap, classical, jazz, etc.), which fits in with Gemini's willingness to try varied experiences to gain knowledge. I'll bet they talk to themselves a lot (I do that as well). Even when playing fantasy sports games, I'll compile and process data (for example, in a dynasty fantasy football league I'm in, I'm trying to get an idea of which players could possibly fall to my pick in Round 2 so I've compiled a list of players who will be taken in next year's NFL Draft, that league's labor situation notwithstanding). Geminis like variety (so do I--growing up, my favorite cereal was those variety packs where you got to have a different cereal every day) and get bored easily. They also reportedly have a very short span of concentration and tend to get distracted very easily--that's me, too!

After I read the article, I imagined myself battling a giant crab (Cancer) in my bedroom, ultimately breaking its shell to reveal my long-lost twin (Gemini). I further imagined the twin had mistaken me for an enemy for years and is now ready to be my best friend.

So bottom line, I don't reject the 13-sign zodiac at all. To the contrary--I'm living the first full day of my life as a Gemini in a world where my mind has better control of my emotions. Hopefully I don't lose much of my self-reliance in the bargain.

Volume 6, Number 1: Janus Strikes Again

2011-01-04T00:33:00.002-05:00

It's time to take a look back and a look ahead (the title of this blog entry refers to the Roman god of beginnings and endings).

Personal accomplishments in 2010:
6. Another fantasy football title! My San Francisco Slobberknockers--the team that got me my first such title back in 2004--won the BDFL championship for the second time Sunday. (Yes, I know Sunday was the second day of 2011, but the way I see it, the NFL season started a week late and should have ended on December 26.)
5. New gas range - This was item number one on my Shopping List for the Near Future. I had been wanting to ditch the 43-year-old pile-of-crap Montgomery Ward Signature range that had a series of problems (burners didn't always ignite off the pilot light, the oven usually took two minutes or more to turn on, the handle on the oven door was broken, no oven light). Back in July, I finally did. I got a Hotpoint range with sealed burners, electronic ignition, an oven light, a window you can see through pretty well, and an electronic timer for about $340. (On a related note, I also took care of items 7 and 10 on that list: I got a better digital camera and replaced my tires.)
4. Low-cost alternator replacement - Back in February, the alternator in my 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix went on the blink. My mechanic, a very trustworthy guy who I entrust to fix whatever I can't fix, offered to replace it for $300 or so. Thing is, I knew beforehand that the alternator is easy to access and replace. So I did some research and found the step-by-step instructions I needed in order to replace it myself, then bought a rebuilt alternator and installed it myself. Final cost: $65.
3. Low-cost body work: On that same car, a piece of plastic molding on the passenger side had been sagging. The reason: A piece of metal railing under the plastic had turned to rust; the only things keeping the molding attached to the car were four screws--two on the front of the rear wheel well and two at the back of the front wheel well. So in July, I bought a replacement molding rail on eBay (from Ed Morad, a parts dealer in Cleveland specializing in parts for late-model front-wheel-drive GM cars) for $68, and was able to install it myself. Final cost: $74 (I also bought a can of spray paint to repaint the molding). Heaven knows how much Maaco would have charged to get that fixed.
2. Finally, a vacation: The week of Labor Day, I went to St. Louis to cross one item off my "bucket list": Going to the top of the Gateway Arch.
1. Weight loss: You all know about this one because I've been harping on it for a while now. The first year that I started living on my own, my weight shot up as I ate more freely than I did previously. From July 2001 to July 2010, my weight had slowly been creeping up at the rate of roughly a pound a year. (Before that, I was overweight at about 180.) On July 31, 2010, I weighed 191 pounds. Not even my mirror would tell me how wrong that was. It took a picture someone else took of me at a friend's barbecue to shock me into making two changes to my diet: I switched from regular soda to diet soda--a change that, for years, I found inconceivable--and stopped buying junk food (because every time I bought and ate it, however much I liked it, it amounted to turning money into flab). This morning, I weighed 174. My hope is that I can lose a pound a month over the winter, then go back to losing a few pounds a month in warmer months. (On a related note, I've saved at least $38 since August by avoiding junk food items that my younger, not-so-careful self would have bought.)

Resolutions for 2011:
1. Exercise. A year ago, I figured all I'd have to do to get rid of my excess weight was exercise. But then I'd have a hard time running without feeling tired just a 1/4-mile. I was caught in a Catch-22 I created: I couldn't exercise due to the excess weight, even though I needed to exercise to lose that weight. Now that regular sodas and junk food are no longer a regular part of my diet, that Catch-22 is broken. I need to use my aerobic rider more now, and need to run more in the summer.
2. Knock another item or two off my bucket list. I still haven't been to a Lions football game, a Red Wings hockey game, or been on a rollercoaster. (Quick question: Anyone know of a theme park where you can pay for each ride instead of paying a larger amount up front for admission to the whole park?)
3. Take care of another home improvement project or two. Last year, I replaced the range; two years ago, it was the hot water heater; in 2007, it was the fridge. This year, projects I need to tackle include the garage door, the driveway and the steps to my front porch (items 2, 4 and 8 on that "Shopping List For the Near Future").
4. See my younger brother in Texas. He moved to Austin, TX in 2006 and I have not been down there.
5. Lose more weight. I'm still a little "out of shape" at 174. 170 should be no problem. Getting my neck size down to 15.5 and my waist size to 34 seem possible as well; after years of being stuck at 16.5 and 36, respectively, I am now at 16 and 35.
6. Be more organized. I have let my clutter get out of control at times.
7. Keep the house clean more often. I need to act like I have people over more often, even though I almost never do.
8. Look for new meals to cook. My "menu" is seriously limited--Hamburger/Chicken/Tuna Helper, chicken chimichitos, that kielbasa/potatoes/sauerkraut dish, frozen pizzas (Freschetta/DiGiorno/Red Baron only), pasta, canned soups, frozen dinners... and I have a half-dozen cookbooks sitting on top of my fridge! It's time I went through them.

9. Read more books. I've bought a number of books over the past few years with the intent of reading them, but end up failing to make the time to do so.

Volume 5, Number 32: Randy Smith, Bud Selig and the Ken Caminiti trade

2010-12-26T12:45:00.004-05:00

With baseball's offseason now in full swing with winter meetings, trades and free agent signings, I thought I'd look back at one blockbuster trade, one made almost exactly 16 years ago, and analyze the unusual circumstances that led to it. It sort of ties in with Christmas in that, not only did said trade take place around Christmas, to one team, it sure felt like one heck of a present.

On December 23, 1994, about four months after Major League Baseball's 1994 playoffs and World Series were cancelled due to a labor impasse, and with its players still on strike, acting commissioner Bud Selig and baseball's other 27 team owners decided to implement a salary cap (that was one of the issues over which the players had gone on strike in the first place).

Once that cap was in place, the Houston Astros were well over it and needed to cut back in its payroll. Enter the San Diego Padres, a team that had slashed salaries under the ownership of TV producer Tom Werner. Randy Smith, the Padres' general manager at that time, was regarding as an up-and-coming executive in baseball and was also the youngest GM in baseball. Soon, Smith would become one of the luckiest executives in the history of sports management.

First, the condition that led the Astros and Padres to talk about a trade--the salary cap--turned out not to be a permanent condition. The cap was, not surprisingly, rejected by the players, and after a few more months of talks, they agreed to the "luxury tax"-based revenue sharing system that still is in effect today.
Second, it also worked to Randy's benefit that the Astros' president was Tal Smith--his father!

In the end, 3B Ken Caminiti, OF Steve Finley, SS Andujar Cedeno and three other players went to the Padres. Caminiti would win a National League MVP award, appear in two All-Star Games, and win three Gold Gloves and a Silver Slugger award with San Diego. Finley would be a productive outfielder for well over a decade, earning two All-Star Game appearances, a few Gold Gloves and a World Series ring (with the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks). Both Caminiti (may he rest in peace) and Finley were key players on the 1998 National League Champion Padres.

If you were in charge of the Astros, you might have been expecting a passel of prospects. That wasn't the case here, though. In return, the Astros got OF Derek Bell, OF Phil Plantier, SS Craig Shipley, IF Ricky Gutierrez, and a couple of relief pitchers. Shipley and Gutierrez were supposed to replace Caminiti and Cedeno in Houston but didn't; Bell, while a productive everyday hitter, simply wasn't as good a hitter as Finley (and his career didn't last as long, either); and Plantier was dealt back to the Padres for two minor league pitchers in 1995. Basically, the Astros got some inferior, lower-salaried players in order to get under the "salary cap."

Thanks to the trade, the Pads went from 47-70 in the strike-shortened 1994 season to 70-74 in the lockout-shortened 1995 season. The Detroit Tigers must have seen how they had gone from 61-101 (Smith's first season as Padres' GM) to 70-74 and concluded that Randy Smith had done all the work behind the improved winning percentage, when in reality, Bud Selig (as the executive responsible for implementing the salary cap) had as much to do with it as Smith did. So in October 1995, the Detroit Tigers hired Randy Smith as their new general manager.

Thing is, the resurgence the Padres were undergoing at the time was not entirely Smith's handiwork. I have just argued here and now that Bud Selig had more of a hand in building the '98 Padres than Smith did.

As the Tigers' GM, Smith...

Oversaw a series of bad drafts (the best player he took turned out to be starting pitcher Jeff Weaver)
In two separate trades, traded away both 1B Cecil Fielder and 3B Travis Fryman to get a starting pitching prospect (Matt Drews) who never pitched in the majors (Drews rewarded Smith by going 2-14 with an 8.27 ERA in 1999, his final year in the Tigers' system)
Traded away a group of players and cash (most notably OF Gabe Kapler and SP Justin Thompson) for just one season of Juan Gonzalez
Offered Gonzalez a monstrous 8-year, $140 million contract (thank goodness that Gonzalez didn't sign it, otherwise the Tigers might have gone bankrupt)
Traded veteran outfielder Luis Gonzalez to the Arizona Diamondbacks for a younger outfield prospect named Karim Garcia--a trade that backfired as Gonzalez played on a high level for several years afterwards, while Garcia wasn't even worthy of a starting job in baseball, and
Signed a group of players (Weaver, 3B Dean Palmer, 2B Damion Easley, OF Bobby Higginson) to long-term lucrative contracts that quickly became albatrosses around the Tigers' necks.

In four of Smith's six full seasons as Tigers GM, they had lost 92 or more games; when owner Mike Ilitch fired him just six games into the 2002 season, Detroit was on its way to a 55-106 season. Smith has not been a GM of any other baseball team since. In 2003, the Tigers would rack up the worst record in American League history (43-119).

(Note: This blog entry also talks about the trade in more detail, and does mention that the trade appeared "to be a straight salary dump" by Houston, but does not mention the fact that just five days earlier, Selig had attempted to implement the salary cap. I just posted a comment on there mentioning just that.)

Volume 5, Number 31: Facebook Comments in Review

2010-12-21T23:15:00.002-05:00

I don't just put my commentary on this blog. Sometimes I come across things on Facebook that I "like," and then sometimes the things I like go and post stuff that provokes a thought or two out of me. With that in mind, here are highlights from the last seven months' worth of deep thoughts, wisecracks and other comments I've contributed to the Facebook universe, on subjects ranging from sports and entertainment to food and education:

June 3: Kellie Martin, one of my favorite actresses, posted on her blog about making ravioli. (She doesn't act much now and spends more time gardening, cooking and raising her daughter Maggie, age 4.) I said, "If Gordon Ramsay ever does a celebrity Hell's Kitchen (the UK version of HK is just that--all celebs), you'd have a leg up on your competition." KM replied, "I'd be way into that! Love that adorable Gordon Ramsay!"

June 29: The producers of Food Inc. (the Oscar-nominated documentary about the food industry) posted an article on "crop mobs"--groups of people who help independent farmers--and that very term reminded me of the Facebook game Mob Wars, which in turn led me to make this wisecrack: "FarmVille meets Mob Wars! 'You get any of those Round-Up resistant seeds anywhere near my crop, I swear I'll whack you so bad you'll be eating soft food for 3 months!'" 6 people liked that little remark--a personal record up until today. The bit about "Round-Up resistant seeds" refers to a part of the Food, Inc. documentary in which Monsanto, the makers of Roundup, had developed a soybean seed that was resistant to that herbicide, and subsequently won the right to get a patent for that seed, then proceeded to put farmers who used those seeds without paying Monsanto out of business.

July 29: Rotten Tomatoes (a great film review web site) posted the trailer for Resident Evil: Afterlife. I said, "I wish film studios would have realized already what a waste of time it is to make bad movies. Story comes first, guys, not special effects, guns or explosions!!!" 2 people liked that.

August 12: Chunky Soup asked me which flavor I would choose when I'm hungry for it: "Look for a time machine to go back to '83 so I can get some Campbell's Chunky Fisherman's Chowder!" Eight hours later, they responded back: "A 'hot soup time machine'?" (Fisherman's Chowder is one of a few Chunky Soup varities that Campbell's Soup no longer makes; I mentioned it in this blog entry from 11 months ago.)

August 17: The makers of the Back to the Future films asked its fans to tell them what I was doing in 1985: "25 years ago... I was 13 in the summer of '85, and oddly enough, I was writing a series of short stories about a mad scientist and two teenage assistants and each story involved some weird invention the mad scientist had made up (including stuff that didn't make sense, like synthetic bread dough and a potion that would allow trees to keep their leaves forever--the first story involved a time machine and was called 'That Was Now, This Is Then')."

August 24: Kellie Martin asked, "Do you guys think early reading is good or bad for young kids?" and I said, "To me, the key is to let kids read what they want to read when they're ready to read it. Sounds simple but not really--too many teachers and school administrators prescribe certain books for certain grades even if not all the kids in that grade are ready, and some kids may grow up thinking that reading is just another chore, no different than cleaning up their room or taking out the garbage." Five minutes later, KM responded, "Right, hopefully it's never a chore."

September 5: Footballguys.com notes that former Chicago Bear defensive lineman and Pro Football Weekly commentator Dan Hampton made the terribly insensitive comment, "The Vikings need to go down there and hit (New Orleans) like (Hurricane) Katrina." I commented, "Absolutely terrible. Stick him in a house that floods all the way to the attic and let's see how he feels about that choice of words then."

September 29: The group "Republicans Are Idiots And Arguing With Them Is A Waste Of Time!" mentioned how Republicans are big proponents of deregulation. My bottom line on the matter: "Every time anyone expects Corporate America to be able to 'police itself,' we end up with ValuJet, the Peanut Corporation of America, Bernie Madoff, and so on. I'm not saying deregulation sucks, just that it only works when Corporate America demonstrates that it really *is* able to police itself. Which is why I'm firmly in the corner of what the roody poo GOP calls 'Big Government.'" 4 people liked that.

October 15: Food Inc. had a poll about who people thought was "food's greatest enemy." I said, "I want to cast a write-in vote for Stewart Parnell, the owner of the Peanut Corporation of America, who cared more about profits than people to the extent that he ordered salmonella-tainted peanut products to be retested until they tested negative, then shipped them out. The toxic peanut products he sold killed at least 9 people. Then PCA filed for bankruptcy protection to avoid having to pay any money. Slimy bastard." 5 people liked this comment.

October 26: Parade magazine interviewed Rupert Grint on life after the Harry Potter films. My two cents: "Rupert should get plenty of opportunities in the UK. Besides, if worse comes to worst, Rupert will just tour the world for the rest of his life with the J.O.P. (James and Oliver Phelps) doing Harry Potter and other fantasy-genre conventions (not unlike certain Star Trek actors who went on to do those Creation conventions)." 3 people liked it. (For those not familiar with the Harry Potter films, Grint played Harry's best friend, Ron Weasley; James and Oliver Phelps played Ron's mischievous older twin brothers, Fred and George.)

November 8: KFFL.com reported that the Dallas Cowboys fired head coach Wade Phillips, one day after getting shellacked by the Green Bay Packers, 45-7. My comment: "Phillips looked like a man who had already lost his job the last two weeks. It was no longer a question of 'if,' but a question of 'when.'" 2 people agreed and must have also been watching the Cowboys-Packers game.

November 17: Food, Inc. asked, "What do you think is the worst food in America?" The question was related to this article, but I decided to answer the question directly: "To answer the question, what do I think is the worst food in America, anything that's tainted with E. coli, salmonella, listeria, or other pathogen due to poor food hygiene and/or food inspection programs. I know it's got nothing to do with the article, but I'm not going to answer the question any differently." 2 people liked that answer.

November 24: On Thanksgiving Day, KFFL.com asked, "Who have been the biggest fantasy football and NFL turkeys this year?" My response was creative because it addressed players who aren't used in fantasy football, but have an influence on how their teammates perform, the offensive line: "How about the Carolina Panthers' offensive line (as it as hurt the production and/or health of a lot of the Panthers' skill players)? Already 2 QBs and 3 RBs are banged up and that's hurt WR Steve Smith's production. RBs DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart are having their worst seasons due to injuries, and DeLo is on the IR. And I thought my Detroit Lions had a bad O-line..." What prompted me to make that remark was, I own Williams and rookie QB Jimmy Clausen in a very deep (16 teams), very competitive dynasty football league.

December 21: Paula Apsell, senior Executive Producer of NOVA (a very good documentary series that has run on PBS since 1974), commented that Spider-Man had too many "mad scientist" villains. My response (liked by 8 people, my new personal record): "For a moment there, I thought I was reading an Onion article. Anyway, mad scientist characters don't make people think that science is bad... they remind us that as long as there are people who strive for great power or personal gain, there will be people who misuse and abuse science to accomplish such ends."

For those of you wondering about whether I've tried any different diet sodas: I finally have; I like Diet Dr. Pepper Cherry and Kroger Diet Dr. K and I especially like Sprite Zero. I also have some Kroger Big K Cola Oh, but I haven't decided whether to go "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," and anyway, I'm starting to think that the only diet colas I really like are the ones with the extra flavoring in them (Diet Pepsi Lime, Coke Vanilla Zero, Coke Cherry Zero).

Volume 5, Number 30: The Fox-New World Deal

2010-12-18T17:17:00.003-05:00

Note: I originally posted this entry a week ago on my brother's Journal of Historical TV, Radio and Communications blog.

On December 11, 1994, WJBK (Channel 2 in Detroit, my local TV market) switched its affiliation from CBS to Fox as the result of a deal struck more than six months earlier between the News Corporation (parent company of the Fox Broadcasting Network) and New World Communications. On that same day, CBS began broadcasting shows on low-powered WGPR (Channel 62).

WJBK and stations in eleven other markets were recently acquired or about to be acquired by New World Communications. Eight of those stations were CBS affiliates, including WJBK. It led to a rash of affiliation deals and switches affecting many markets across the country, as outlined in this Wikipedia article.

I hated that deal at the start, mainly because it was one of those deals where a few rich guys made a deal and didn't give a crap that it affected so many people, consumers and TV station employees alike. WJBK found itself with large time gaps after losing its CBS affiliation, and CBS had to broadcast on a low-powered UHF station. I especially hated the latter part because I did watch one CBS show on a regular basis (Christy, starring my favorite actress, Kellie Martin) and picking up that show on Channel 62 was a pain in the neck without cable. If you were to travel back in time to 1995, I doubt you would have found a single TV viewer who found anything good in the shake-up that resulted from the deal.

I've read on a number of sources (including Wikipedia) that Fox's acquisition of NFL broadcast rights in 1993 (the NFC portion thereof, that is) was a compelling factor in the deal. That is baloney, simply put. If NFL football--sports programming that only airs a few games a week on weekends for just a few months a year--was such a strong driver for affiliation switches, then CBS would have lost even more affiliates to Fox in 1994, and NBC would then have lost affiliates to CBS in 1998 when the latter began carrying the AFC package.

The deal was, simply put, a bona fide case of corporate money controlling what people watch--usually, it's a network cancelling a show because the advertisers sponsoring the show don't want to pay for that sponsorship anymore, but this deal was corporate control on a much higher level. Following the deal, Detroit very nearly had no CBS affiliate at all.

First, the former Fox affiliate (WKBD, Channel 50) was owned by Paramount Stations Group and thus bound to become affiliated with the new United Paramount Network in January 1995;
The owners and management at NBC-affiliated WDIV (Channel 4) were not about to switch affiliations, as NBC was doing very well in the Nielsen ratings (and would be the dominant network of the late 1990s);
WXYZ (Channel 7) stayed with ABC after its owners, Scripps-Howard, agreed to affiliate all of its stations with ABC--a deal that led to repercussions in other markets.
Finally, the owners of WXON (Channel 20) and WADL (Channel 38)--both independent stations at that time--refused to sell their stations to CBS. The former subsequently affiliated itself with the fledgling WB Network, while the latter simply made unreasonable demands to CBS.

The only option CBS had left was low-powered religious independent station WGPR (Channel 62). It had only been operating for 19 years and was generally regarded as a low-budget station that aired lots of religious and shopping programs. It aired CBS programs that WJBK declined to air (most notably CBS This Morning, the weak sister among the "Big Three's" 7am-9am morning shows; WJBK dumped it in 1992 in favor of producing its own morning show). CBS had a problem promoting its new Detroit affiliation: it aired TV spots about the change on Channel 62; the problem was that hardly anyone was watching, so CBS had to rely on print media to promote its new station. By contrast, WJBK was allowed to promote its switch to Fox even when it was still affiliated with CBS. Its weak signal discouraged viewers from tuning in, especially older ones who lived without cable TV and were frustrated over no longer being able to get CBS' soap operas with just "the rabbit ears." In the months that followed, CBS' ratings in Detroit suffered terribly, as did its ratings in Atlanta and Milwaukee (markets where CBS also had to work out eleventh-hour deals with high-numbered UHF stations after losing affiliates to Fox). The ratings decline was especially evident with The CBS Evening News, because WGPR did not have a 6pm newscast, whereas WJBK always did.

The sale of Channel 62 from the International Free and Accepted Modern Masons to CBS was not smooth, either. Two ethnic groups protested the sale--African-Americans because WGPR was the only African-American-owned station in Detroit (and the first such station in the United States), and Arab-Americans (because WGPR aired a locally-produced two-hour Middle Eastern variety program called Arab Voice of Detroit, and that show left the air upon WGPR's agreement to become CBS' Detroit outlet). After much legal wrangling, the sale to CBS was approved in July 1995. At that time, WGPR has changed its call letters to WWJ-TV, in an effort to enhance its brand image by tying itself to the far better-known all-news radio station, WWJ-AM 950, which CBS bought in 1989.

One thing that surprised me about the Fox-New World Deal was a lack of intervention by either the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). For one thing, Fox had deliberately avoided being regulated by the FCC by programming just under the number of hours to be legally considered a network (in particular, Fox has still never aired a non-sports program at 10pm Eastern time on any day of the week). If Fox didn't want to be regulated by the FCC, why should it have been allowed to gain high-profile stations at the expense of those networks that did comply with FCC regulations? Surely one of these commissions would say that this deal was not in the best interests of viewers in various markets, including Detroit, Atlanta and Milwaukee.

One immediate effect of the affiliation changes was that both WJBK and WGPR had large time gaps to fill in their schedules--the former because it no longer carried CBS programming, and the latter because (other than CBS network programs) it had virtually no programming. WJBK filled the time once occupied by the CBS soaps with reruns of Night Court, Amen and Top Cops, and curiously, also reruns of the Canadian-produced legal drama, Street Legal. WGPR went to the bottom of the rerun barrel with 21 Jump Street (a Fox show, for Pete's sake), Knight Rider, Night Heat, Rescue 911 and a cancelled talk show, The Jane Whitney Show. You read correctly--at 5pm, instead of news, CBS' new affiliate was showing reruns of a cancelled talk show.

In an ideal world--OK, the Mark Rabinowitz version of an ideal world--the Fox-New World deal would never have taken place. Instead, 16 years ago, CBS would have remained on Channel 2, and Fox would have moved to Channel 20 in January 1995 (after WKBD moved from Fox to UPN at the same time). However, I have come to realize that if the Fox-New World deal had not taken place, then surely, another deal would have shaken the local TV landscape in Detroit. An example is the CBS-Viacom merger in 1999. If CBS was still affiliated with WJBK at that time (instead of owning and operating WWJ-TV), might CBS have moved their affiliation to Viacom-owned WKBD as part of that merger? And if so, would Fox have moved from WXON Channel 20 to WJBK, even though it would have meant moving to its third different Detroit affiliate in five years?

16 years later, there is some consolation to be found in the deal.

WJBK's news programming has improved considerably since becoming a Fox O&O. When it was a CBS affiliate, it was owned by Storer Broadcasting--a company that was not willing to pay to keep its best talent--and Gillett Communications, a company built on debt and thus was too cash-strapped to possibly hold on to talent. Its newscasts were filled with unfunny banter and cheesy slogans. Not surprisingly, WJBK had a high turnover of on-air talent. By contrast, its current anchor team of Huel Perkins and Monica Gayle has been together since 1998 and Fox 2 News has won numerous local Emmy awards, perhaps because Fox is willing to pay to keep WJBK's best talent, whereas Storer and Gillett were not.
Furthermore, Channel 62's broadcast signal improved after the CBS-Viacom merger. In 2000, CBS moved Channel 62's operations to WKBD's studios in Southfield. Between the stronger signal, CBS' acquisition of the AFC portion of NFL broadcast rights in 1998, and a better slate of programs than it had in the mid-1990s, CBS' ratings in Detroit are much better than they were 15 years ago.
Finally, the old VHF and UHF channel positions have become increasingly irrelevant. Being Channel 62 on the UHF dial was horribly inconvenient in the days before remote controls (which was why TV networks prized VHF channels so much back then). However, between the rise of digital television in the late 2000s and the increasing use of cable TV before then, switching to a high-numbered channel is as easy as pressing a couple buttons on the remote.

Final analysis: Boy, I hated that deal then (I still consider it a minor factor in the untimely cancellation of Christy). I've gotten used to it, but I still think back to the days when the CBS station had local newscasts at 5, 6 and 11, the Fox station was on the UHF dial, and Arab-Americans could catch Arab Voice of Detroit on Saturday nights at 10 on Channel 62.

Volume 5, Number 29: The 176-Pound Wall

2010-11-19T02:29:00.002-05:00

After my initial success in losing weight, I've sort of hit a wall. I'm at 176 lb., and I've been around that weight for three weeks now.

Lately, I've been thinking about what someone else told me on Facebook: He told me that aspartame causes consumers to crave carbohydrates, thus defeating the whole purpose of aspartame (which is to reduce carbohydrate consumption). Bottom line, I don't believe that claim. Maybe it does cause people to crave more food, but specifically carbs? I'd like to find an actual study that makes that claim, and furthermore, I'd bet that the test subjects in a study like that are relatively poor and gravitate towards cheaper, carb-heavy foods. Why? I go back to what Michael Pollan said in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, about how carbohydrate-heavy foods are more affordable than healthier foods like fruits and vegetables (due to the fact that the government subsidizes corn, the source of high-fructose corn syrup and dozens of other ingredients found in lots of pre-packaged and "fast" foods).

I think the reason I've hit that wall has to do with that animal instinct to eat more in cold weather. Late in October, temperatures in my city fell below 50 and since then, my weight has fluctuated between 174 and 178--still way better than when I started, but it's not what I want, either. So now I have found a new challenge in my quest to lose weight, overcoming the cold weather-heightened temptation to have a late snack or even another meal (or as Taco Bell calls it, "fourthmeal"). What I really need to do now is exercise more--partly to warm up in this weather, but mainly to burn some more calories.

Volume 5, Number 28: Ramen Ramblings

2010-10-27T01:32:00.003-04:00

I discovered ramen noodles a little over 20 years ago. I don't remember for sure why I tried them, but I suspect the reason was that I was looking for something with microwave cooking directions on it (so I could cook it myself and thus not have to hassle my mother; also, I strongly preferred using the microwave for cooking back in those days).

I don't know what attracts me to them more--the texture of the noodles, or the fact that a package of ramen costs less than a postage stamp. Anyway, I like them so much that, for the past 10 years, I have had them every Saturday afternoon for lunch (long story short, it's become a personal tradition).

What really surprises me is that there isn't a great deal of variety in flavors for ramen noodles. The most commonplace flavors, by far, are "chicken" and "beef", followed by pork, shrimp and "oriental" (which is this sort of soy/gingery flavor I could never understand).

Maruchan (one of the top ramen noodle manufacturers in the world) makes several other flavors:

Lime Shrimp (my undisputed favorite, and not easy to come by)
Roast Chicken (I like it better than the regular chicken flavor)
Roast Beef (I also like this better than the regular beef flavor)
Mushroom (I hate mushrooms)
Creamy Chicken (tried it, didn't like it)
Curry Chicken (curry = too spicy)
Picante Beef (picante = too spicy)

OK, I just named 12 flavors. Why is that not a wide enough variety of flavors?

I'll tell you why: Because I've imagined ramen noodles in other flavors (especially "fast foods," which college students also like). Ideas:

Pizza (Maruchan could base this off their discontinued Tomato flavor; mix in some spices and some "cheese" and "beef" elements and you might have something)
Lemon chicken (hey, adding lime to the shrimp flavor worked so well for Maruchan, so adding lemon to either the Roast Chicken or regular Chicken flavor would rock)
Pepper steak (inspired by another discontinued soup, Campbell's Chunky Pepper Steak--use a "green pepper"-like flavoring instead of that ultra-spicy stuff they put in the Picante Beef flavor packet)
Cheeseburger (college students like burgers, too)
Roast Turkey (hey, it's poultry like chicken; they have chicken gravy and turkey gravy, and there's chicken-flavor ramen noodles but no turkey-flavor ramen)
Taco (I realize Maruchan does have a "Beef Taco" flavor in their Yakisoba noodle line--I've already tried it; the trouble is, it was too darn spicy--just cut back the spices and add a "cheddar cheese" flavoring to the flavor packet and that might be a winner, too)
Fried Chicken (I'd like ramen noodles that taste like either KFC's blend of herbs and spices, or Zehnder's--that's a fried chicken restaurant in Frankenmuth, Michigan that I haven't been to in 20 years)
Orange Chicken
Sweet & Sour Chicken
BBQ Chicken
Sweet & Sour Pork
BBQ Pork
BBQ Beef
Prawn cocktail (they have prawn cocktail-flavored potato chips in the United Kingdom, so prawn cocktail-flavored ramen noodles can't be that much of a stretch)
Lobster (Ty Ling used to make this flavor before withdrawing from the ramen noodle market several years ago)
Crab (another flavor Ty Ling made, but no longer)

A quick update on my previous blog entry: I'm starting to like Meijer's Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. M. I had given it the "thumbs down" because I thought it tasted like cough syrup, but the last 2-3 cans I've had tasted a lot better. Maybe I'm getting used to the taste, or maybe something was wrong with just the first 2 cans out of the 12-pack I bought. I don't know.

Volume 5, Number 27: Holy Crap--More Reviews!

2010-10-07T12:32:00.003-04:00

Following are diet soda reviews, followed by reviews of the TV shows I was looking forward to in an earlier entry:

Diet Faygo Chocolate Cream Pie: Thumbs down. I tried it because it's a flavor Coke and Pepsi don't make. I do see the appeal for dessert-flavored diet sodas--anytime you feel like a certain dessert, just take a swig of this stuff instead--but it just didn't blow me away as either a diet soda or a diet dessert. That means it lands alongside the spork and the XFL as things that are jacks of two trades, but masters of neither.
Diet Faygo 60/40: Thumbs up! Finally, a Faygo diet soda that I like! "60/40" is Faygo's version of Squirt, one of my all-time favorite sodas (and Faygo's regular version was also a favorite of mine). This time, the flavor blends well with the aspartame. (The "60/40" refers to the grapefruit/lime flavor--60% grapefruit, 40% lime.)
Diet Faygo Rock & Rye: Thumbs down. The regular version one of my favorite Faygo flavors. The aftertaste of the diet version, however, wasn't to my liking. (For those of you living outside Michigan who are asking just what "rock & rye" is--This blog does a decent job of explaining it. But I always say, "Like anything else, you have to taste it before you can decide whether or not you like it.")
Sam's Cola Zero Calorie: Thumbs up. You read correctly--I actually liked this better than Coke Zero (but I still like the Cherry and Vanilla Coke Zero's better than this one). I liked the taste, I liked how it went down, and most importantly, it didn't have much of an aftertaste. But it isn't going to win the Diet Soda Federation Inter-cola-nental Championship; that title belongs to Coke Vanilla Zero.
Diet Dr. Pepper: Thumbs up. Even though I wish they'd try the aspartame/acesulfame potassium blend instead of just aspartame, the aftertaste isn't bad at all and the taste is close enough to regular Dr. Pepper that I can buy this one again.
Diet Meijer Cherry Vanilla Dr. M: Thumbs down. I was hoping this one would be good because Dr. Pepper is among my favorite sodas; thing is, Dr. Pepper stopped making their Cherry Vanilla version in early 2009. So I was happy to see that Meijer (a local supermarket chain) was still making a Diet Cherry Vanilla version of their Dr. Pepper knockoff, in a rare case of the store brand making the "knockoff" even after the "national brand" stopped making the "original". I tried it, and while there wasn't much of an aftertaste, the taste reminded me... of cough medicine. Luden's Cough Drops is my guess. I'm going to try mixing it with Diet Dr Pepper and let you know what I find out in a future blog entry. But just on its own--sorry, no can do.
Diet Faygo Cream Soda: Thumbs up. The aftertaste from the aspartame is muted by the flavor of this cream soda (which, incidentally, is different from the flavor of A&W's Vanilla Cream Soda--not as strong, more refreshing taste).

Evidently, my favorite diet sodas have one of four flavors: Vanilla, grapefruit, Dr. Pepper-flavor (no cherry) or root beer.

Now. On to TV show reviews:

Detroit 1-8-7: Thumbs up. I still miss Life On Mars and like Michael Imperioli as Det. Ray Carling in that show better than as Det. Louis Fitch in Detroit 187, but I tend to agree with those who say it's the best cop show since Homicide: Life on the Street (an NBC series from the '90s).
S*#! My Dad Says: Thumbs down. It has its moments, but for the most part, it feels like "just another shitcom" with only one or two of the crankier and wiser pre-Baby Boom grandfather's wisecracks. I wanted more of him railing about the mess-ups of the Baby Boom and subsequent generations, especially those of his son; and furthermore, as much as William Shatner's improved over the years, when I read those wisecracks on Twitter, I always imagine either Christopher Lloyd or Harvey Keitel reading them, not Shatner.
Outsourced: Thumbs down. I made two mistakes: One was fearing that the writers, producers and directors of this show would make light of Corporate America outsourcing customer service jobs to India (thank goodness that didn't happen). The other was expecting them to not make the Indian characters look dumb (which, sadly, they did--the "no, this is Detroit, home of automobiles and black people" bit was one example, and the "Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me" bit just turned me off altogether). For Pete's sake, India has its share of engineers and doctors and I would have liked to have seen at least one Indian character who was only working in that customer service job because he was deemed either "underexperienced" or "overqualified" for the job he really wanted. Outsourced also resorts to using American pop culture as a ~~crutch~~ source for jokes, and to a greater degree than most "shitcoms" (the series is set at a company that sells novelties such as Green Bay Packer cheesehead hats, fake vomit, and so on). Hopefully this show will be cancelled quickly and NBC won't even consider outsourcing all its other sitcom jobs to India.
No Ordinary Family: Thumbs up. It is shaping up to be Life Goes On meets Fantastic Four*--Michael Chiklis (who played The Thing in both Fantastic Four films and starred in The Shield and The Commish before that) is the dad who can catch bullets, is darn near indestructible and can make huge leaps; his wife has super speed (although I didn't think she would be so crazy as to go running on the freeway); their daughter can read minds; and their son (who supposedly has some learning disability) has turned into a genius. I particularly loved the scenes where Chiklis' character tests his powers. I'm not so sure I would have introduced super-powered bad guys so soon in the series--I would have spent more time establishing the conflicts among the family members and their internal conflicts, and hey, I hope at least one episode deals with the property damage Chiklis' character has been causing--but yes, I'm interested in seeing where this series takes me. May ABC's execs not mess with it the way NBC's execs did with Heroes.

Update on the "Healthy Foods Fund": Since I resolved back on August 3 to cut out spending on junk food, I have saved $17.86 (roughly speaking, that's about 30 cents a day, but stretch that out to a year and I will have saved over $100 at that rate). My weight this morning was 179 pounds. (I feel like it's been hovering around 180 for some time, and I still have room for improvement, but I still believe that I can continue to lose weight; anyway, 179 is such a huge improvement over 191, after years of letting my weight creep up.)

Volume 5, Number 26: The Restaurant Diet Soda Dilemma... and Possible Solutions

2010-09-23T22:04:00.004-04:00

Last night, I was thinking about how restaurants tend to be very limited in terms of diet sodas you can choose from (they usually have either Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke, but not much else). I dealt with this issue while eating at a few different restaurants during my vacation earlier this month. On most occasions, I had to have a regular soda because the only diet soda being offered was Diet Coke (which I dislike, to say the least).

You may know that sodas are dispensed in restaurants by mixing carbonated water with a concentrated syrup. And I got to thinking last night, what if you took the sweetener out of the syrup and put it in the carbonated water instead? And then, what if the fountain was hooked up to two different carbonated waters (one with high fructose corn syrup in it and the other containing my preferred aspartame/acesulfame potassium blend)? And finally, at the fountain, the customer could indicate whether they wanted the regular or diet version of a soda just by pressing a button or flipping a switch. In particular, it would allow diners to have the diet version of any regular soda being served at the restaurant, including examples that otherwise aren't available, such as:

Diet Mug Root Beer. Today, restaurants that serve Pepsi products will offer Mug Root Beer but not Diet Mug Root Beer.
Fanta Zero (orange soda). Most restaurants that serve Coke products offer Fanta orange soda--but I've never seen the "zero calorie" version of that particular soda (not at the supermarkets I shop at, anyway--Coke's web site says it does exist, though). My soda fountain idea would allow a diner to make one.
Diet Dr. Pepper--I know that Arby's serves it but I don't know of any other restaurant that does.
Here's a bonus for all those who actually liked the "new" Coke back in 1985: As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, if you took the aspartame out of Diet Coke and added high fructose corn syrup to it, you'll get that short-lived formula (also known as "Coke II"). So any restaurant serving Coke products could conceivably sell that particular formula using the unsweetened Diet Coke syrup/high fructose corn syrup-sweetened carbonated water mix.

After some searching the web, I've found that Coca-Cola has been piloting a new fountain dispenser called the "Freestyle" that dispenses over 100 brands of soda. Now that could be a solution... although after reading on the Coca-Cola Freestyle Facebook page about how expensive it is to build and maintain these Freestyle machines, I'd just as soon wish that they'd make a relatively cheap fountain that dispensed 12 or 20 different varieties. Choosing from 106 different sodas--potentially including ones that aren't available in local supermarkets--appeals to me, but right now I'll be happy with being able to choose from 5 or 6 different diet sodas.

Volume 5, Number 25: TV Party Next Week!

2010-09-17T19:49:00.003-04:00

Fall is my favorite season of the year, and it has been for many years. There are many reasons, in no particular order--the smell of dead leaves, the colors of the dying leaves, the cooler temperatures, no snow or unbearable heat, not as much rain or thunderstorms as you have in spring, a new model year for the automotive industry, new seasons in the NFL and in college football, the division races in baseball, and later in the fall, new seasons in the NHL and NBA.

But today's blog entry is not about any of those reasons. It has to do with another reason, another new season, this one for television. Back in my childhood, when cable didn't offer much in the way of original programming (and my parents didn't subscribe it anyway), the "Big Three" networks trotted out a variety of shows, from sitcoms to dramas, some new (and nothing like the mix of so-called "reality TV" cluttering the airwaves today). In particular, it was great to see new shows after three months or so of nothing but reruns (as the networks reran all their sitcoms and dramas during the summer months back then). There would be a number of shows that would interest me every year, some of whose names I shout out today whenever I listen to "TV Party" by Black Flag ("Life Goes On! Life On Mars! Werewolf! Benson!") Some, I wish I could go back in time to see because I missed them due to my father's overriding TV preferences (I never got to see Voyagers, a 1981 NBC show about two time travelers, because it was on against 60 Minutes, which my father always watched; The People Next Door, about a man whose imaginary visions become reality and the family that has to put up with them, was a 1989 CBS sitcom I would have loved to have seen, short-lived though both shows were).

OK. Back to the present day. Next week is chock full of new shows and premieres, and there's one more the following week that will interest me, in the closest thing I'll have to my own personal TV Party. They are:

Being Erica, Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern Time on CBC (third season begins September 21): One thing I would miss if I moved away from Detroit is Canadian TV. Being Erica stars Erin Karpluk (who also appears in the CW series, Life Unscripted) as a single woman in her 30s who has met a therapist who can take her back in time to fix her laundry list of life regrets. Karpluk has said that the third season will be darker and feature more future time travel (this happened once in season 2 last year).
Detroit 1-8-7, Tuesdays at 10pm on ABC (starting September 21): I'm not a big fan of cop shows--I mainly watched the long-missed Life On Mars for the temporal displacement angle--but I want to see how this series portrays the city of Detroit. (No, this is not the show that led to Warren Evans' resignation as Detroit's Chief of Police.)
Hell's Kitchen, Wednesdays on FOX (eighth season begins September 22): Of course! Hopefully the new season will be better than the previous one (in which we pretty much had only one highlight: sous-chef Scott going off on Benjamin when the latter tried to run the pass). The new season may have promise if this video is any indication (it's the first time I know of that a chef has imitated Chef Ramsay during service).
S*#! My Dad Says, Thursdays at 8:30pm on CBS (starting September 23): I've been following Justin (the son who posts his 73-year-old dad's remarks on Twitter) on both Twitter and Facebook. That Twitter feed has given rise to both a book and this sitcom, in which William Shatner will play the obnoxious but ultimately wise and lovable dad. I would have preferred either Christopher Lloyd or Harvey Keitel in that role, but Shatner's gotten much better with age so I'll give him a shot.
Outsourced, Thursdays at 9:30pm on NBC (starting September 23): If only because I want to see what humor the writers of this show can get out of an American training customer service agents in India when those jobs used to be in the United States (and heaven knows that customers would rather be talking to American customer service reps and customer service quality tends to suffer when it's based outside North America). Chances are, I won't laugh and will tune out within the first 15-20 minutes.
No Ordinary Family, Tuesdays at 8pm on ABC (starting September 28): A family survives a plane crash in the Amazon River and each member of the family emerges with a different super power. "Life Goes On" meets "The Fantastic Four"? I hope so. I've always been taken by superhero stories--including an idea for one I came up with back in '98 in which the Earth passes through an unusual spatial anomaly (an "indigo hole") and everyone on the planet becomes super-powered as a result. Heroes had such potential before NBC execs messed up Tim Kring's plans for that series. Hopefully ABC won't mess with No Ordinary Family.

Hoarders' third season (A&E) premiered last month. I've been watching that show since it started on August 17 of last year. But I wish the producers of that show would distinguish true hoarding--where people keep junk either because of sentimental value or because they think it can be fixed--from sheer slovenliness (lazy, shiftless slobs who can't even dispose of their own excrement--a recent episode featured a woman with a house was caked with cat feces and piled with bags of her own crap).

Volume 5, Number 24: To St. Louis and Back

2010-09-12T21:57:00.004-04:00

I spent a few days in St. Louis last week and finally got one item on my "bucket list" checked off--going up to the top of the Gateway Arch, the tallest monument in the United States. I will be posting pictures to my Facebook page soon.

My reviews on diet sodas I've been drinking lately:

Pepsi One: Thumbs down. I didn't like the aftertaste (which is disappointing because I thought sucralose would have a better aftertaste than aspartame). I like two other Pepsi diet products better (Diet Pepsi Lime and Diet Pepsi Max; I haven't tried Diet Pepsi Cherry yet).
Coca-Cola Vanilla Zero: Thumbs up, and a contender (along with Coke Cherry Zero) for the Diet Soda Federation's Inter-cola-nental Championship.
Coca-Cola Zero: Thumbs down. I didn't like it as much as the Cherry or Vanilla Zero (I guess I need the extra flavoring that the Cherry or Vanilla Zero's have to mask the aftertaste).
Fresca: Thumbs up. As expected, the aftertaste from the aspartame/ace-K blend is better than when it only used aspartame. But I still have wax nostalgic for the "Disco Fresca" with the saccharin in it.
Diet Rite Black Cherry: Thumbs down. It goes down easily enough and it doesn't have much of an aftertaste, but it doesn't offer much in the way of flavor.
Diet A&W Cream Soda: Thumbs up, despite the fact that it uses aspartame--rather than the aspartame/ace-K blend used in Diet A&W Root Beer--as its artificial sweetener. Why? The flavor of this cream soda seems to overpower the aftertaste of the aspartame. (In fact, back in the days when I drank regular soda on a regular basis, I preferred Faygo Cream Soda over A&W Cream Soda because I thought the flavor of the latter was too strong, but where the diet versions are concerned, having a strong flavor works in A&W's favor.)

Moral of the story: Maybe I need to rethink my strategy for trying out diet sodas. The sweetener matters, to be sure, but so is the flavor of the soda (I prefer that it be strong enough to drown out any aftertaste the artificial sweetener may have).

Diet sodas I'll give a try soon include Diet Dr. Pepper, Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper, Diet Squirt and Sam's Cola Zero Calorie.

Here's an update on my weight and diet: I've gone down to as low as 183 lb. (8 pounds down from my "record" 191 at the end of July). I'm at 185 right now but I attribute that to eating a lot of restaurant food between September 3 and September 9. There are still no crackers, chips, cookies, ice cream in my house, and since August 31, there are no Pop-Tarts in the house, either. I did buy a box of 6 SuperPretzels, but only because I wanted to have those one more time before I said goodbye to them (they're gone now--I had one a day over 6 days). The only "regular" soft drink in my house right now is a carton of Minute Maid Fruit Punch (which I bought thinking it was fruit juice--only to find, to my shock, that it actually has high fructose corn syrup in it, and so much of it, in fact, that it has more carbs than regular Coca-Cola).

And finally, an update on that Tigers road jersey entry in the Uni Watch Design-A-Jersey Contest (as featured in my last two blog entries): I came in 13th with 150 votes. I appreciate each and every vote I got from you--thank you.

Volume 5, Number 23: On to the Finals!

2010-08-31T18:21:00.004-04:00

Remember that Tigers road jersey concept I made up for the Uni Watch Design-A-Jersey contest? Well, it was evidently impressed the contest's lone judge (Alain Nina-Sinkham, the owner of Classic Old School, a company that makes custom jerseys) enough to make it to the final round of the contest, in which anyone can pick their favorite out of eighteen designs. (Alain had planned to winnow the entries down to 9 out of the 94 entries received, but decided to go with 9 for each league.)

The 18 finalists are shown in this Uni Watch blog entry. Feel free to check them all out. There are a lot of great ideas in those other 17 entries. There's a poll on that web page--please vote (the same poll can also be found at http://polldaddy.com/poll/3688854/).

The feedback I have received so far is, above all, greatly appreciated.

Some people like how the uniform number on the right sleeve is a "tip of the cap" to the '61-'71 Tigers; others think sleeve numbers don't belong in baseball. I will stand by the sleeve numbers unless, say, 90% of the feedback I got was against it (in which case I would move it back to the left side of the front, as in the current Tigers' road jersey).
Some like the logo I derived from the 2005 All-Star Game logo; others say "it's nothing special" and would just as soon do without it. I'm sticking with that (I like it so much better than the one they introduced in '94, which has a Tiger going through the "bars" of the Old English D--since the only way a tiger can do so is if it's paper-thin, I derisively call the '94 logo the "paper tiger logo").
As for the "Detroit" in Old English, some people wish it was arched instead of tilted (I didn't arch it because arching only works when all of the letters in the word being arched are capitalized, and Old English doesn't look good when capitalized; hence, no arching).
There is one thing everyone agrees on: The white outlining on the Tigers' current road jerseys, which has been in use since 1994, has got to go.

This contest has been exciting for me, from the design process to waiting for my design to be "unveiled" (last Thursday) to waiting to find out if I had made the finals (today, obviously). I have plenty of other ideas for uniform changes/tweaks/etc. in the four major pro sports, and someday I will reveal those, one at a time.

To those who have voted and those who have given me feedback, thank you.

Volume 5, Number 22: My Concept for a Detroit Tigers Road Jersey

2010-08-23T11:37:00.005-04:00

Back in the early '90s, when the Tigers were still wearing the same road uniforms they had been using since 1972, I began developing my own ideas for what their road uniforms should look like. Not long afterwards, the Tigers did replace those outdated uniforms--but they were not like I envisioned.

So last month, When UniWatch, an online community of sports fans dedicated to all things related to sports logos and uniforms, announced a baseball jersey design contest, I went ahead and submitted what I had in mind as an entry for the contest. This entry (shown below) will appear on the UniWatch blog on Thursday:

There are four major differences between my concept and the current Tigers' road jerseys:

The number one thing I wanted is to have was "Detroit" in Old English. Last time I checked, one of the most distinctive things about the Tigers throughout their history is the Old English D. Not the cursive D. The Old English D is basically the Tigers' primary logo now. So why not have "Detroit" in Old English as well?
I also wanted "Detroit" and the numbers to be outlined in orange, and only orange (as they were on the 1972-1993 road jerseys). I've always considered the white outlining you see on today's Tigers road jerseys to be unnecessary and excessive.
The feature I put on the jerseys that I imagine would bring about the most debate from fans is the uniform number on the right sleeve. Let me explain why I put it there instead of on the front. Looking at Tiger uniforms of the past, I noticed that the road jerseys of the 1961-1971 Tigers teams had numbers on the right sleeve. During those years, the Tigers produced two 100-win seasons, four second-place finishes, one World Series title and seven seasons in which they won 88 games or more. I brought that feature back back as a tribute to those teams, which featured such notably players as Hall of Famer Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Bill Freehan and Mickey Lolich. Also, sleeve numbers are such an unusual quirk for a baseball jersey (indeed, only one Major League team, the Philadelphia Phillies, uses sleeve numbers today).
I added a logo on the left sleeve. It's not my creation--it's derived from this logo the Tigers used in 2005 to promote that year's MLB All-Star Game. When I first saw it five years ago, I thought, why not use that super-fierce-looking tiger in a new logo (instead of let it fade into obscurity)? It doesn't have to be the primary logo per se (the Old English D works just fine in that regard), but you have to admit, it is an eye-popping modernization of this logo the Tigers used from 1961 to 1993. Heck, they're both bold blue circles with tigers in them--below is a side-by-side comparison.

Bottom line, I really like how my design turned out, and I hope you do as well. I invite you to take this survey I put together so you can tell me what you think about it. I thank you in advance for your time.

As it happens, two other guys submitted their own Tiger road jersey concepts (thankfully, no one dared mess with the home uniforms).

Harry Mathews submitted this, which looks like the home uniform dunked in gray dye; it's simple but dull (the road jersey really needs the orange outlining and this version doesn't have any of it).
"RC" created one that takes design elements from the uniforms of Detroit's Negro League team, the Stars. The "Detroit" with the star over the "i" comes from the Stars' road jersey; the pinstripes and the blue part in the middle from the Stars' home jersey. The Tiger head comes from the Tigers' 1927 road jerseys. The idea of using a Negro League team jersey as the basis for an MLB jersey is intriguing (no MLB team has ever done so to my knowledge). But there's just too much stuff on the front, especially with the tiger's head (I would have moved that to one of the sleeves). Also, no Tiger jersey has had pinstripes on it since 1927, and since I hate the Yankees, pinstripes go about as well on a Tiger uniform as bacon does on ice cream.

P.S. For the record, I would never mess with the Tigers' home jersey.

Volume 5, Number 21: Insidious (or, Diet Soda Reviews, Part II)

2010-08-21T20:30:00.002-04:00

I've figured out which diet sodas to buy without resorting to taste-testing every one in a lengthy, relatively expensive trial-and-error process, as I thought I would have to. Further review of the ingredients on the ones I already reviewed in Volume 5, Number 19 revealed a key finding that previously had not occurred to me.

Evidently, over the last decade or so, most diet sodas have been using a blend of two sweeteners--aspartame is still the primary sweetener, but acesulfame potassium (also known as Ace-K) is added as a secondary sweetener. The Wikipedia article on Ace-K says that this blend supposedly allows each sweetener to mask the other's aftertaste.

"Supposedly"? Based on my recent experiences with diet sodas, I believe it, regardless of whether's it's really true or not. All the diet sodas I rated at three or more stars used the aspartame/Ace-K blend (although I don't know if Fresca had switched to that blend before or after the last time I drank it--if I liked it without the Ace-K, I'll like it even more now). All the ones I rated at less than three stars used only aspartame. (All of Faygo's diet sodas use only aspartame--a total shame because one thing I love about Faygo is its variety of flavors.)

Moral of the story: I need to read the ingredients first before I buy any diet soda.

Diet Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Diet Sunkist Orange, Cherry Coke Zero, Pepsi Max and Diet Pepsi with Lime have all gained the "thumbs up" from me as the result of using the aspartame/Ace-K blend instead of just the aspartame. I would buy any of those again, but out of this group, I liked Diet Sunkist Orange the best, perhaps because the orange flavor in it was the strongest (and thus mitigated the aftertaste better than the others). (But just in case you wanted to know, Diet A&W Root Beer is still the Diet Soda Federation World Champion.)

It was after drinking the Diet Sunkist that I got to thinking, Could I be getting used to the aftertaste? My mother told me that she could never switch back to the regular stuff because she found that it tasted too "syrupy." So I asked my Facebook friends about it, and two of them said that yes, they got used to it and couldn't drink regular soda again afterwards. Maybe that's happening to me as well.

It all reminded me of a scene from a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which one alien (Quark, the Ferengi bartender) introduces another alien (Garak, the Cardassian tailor/spy) to a human drink (root beer). Garak reluctantly takes a sip and says, "It's vile!" Quark says, "I know... But do you know what's really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it." Garak responds, "It's insidious."

You can find an MP3 file of the root beer scene here.

Video can be found on YouTube as well here. (The root beer scene starts at the 1:50 mark of the video.)

Volume 5, Number 20: What You Leave Behind

2010-08-19T18:08:00.004-04:00

In light of the terrible events that unfolded on the night of August 17, 2010 in West Bloomfield, I thought I should revisit two themes: The want to appear richer and more successful than one really is, and the reality of how people will be remembered.

There are people in this small world who want to establish and maintain the appearance of being richer and more successful than their peers. Ellery Bennett was one of them. A pharmaceutical sales representative for 15 years--and that's got to be a very good job considering how well pills sell themselves these days--Bennett gave up that job to pursue a handful of "get-rich-quick" ventures. His Facebook wall includes photos from a trip he took to this year's Kentucky Derby; his YouTube account has videos of him vacationing in Hawaii and the Bahamas.

Or, rather, he appeared to be able to afford those trips and that McMansion in West Bloomfield.

What he really did, starting in 2007, was take out a huge (reportedly $400,000) loan to finance those trips and those failed pipe dreams. His wife filed for divorce on August 11; less than a week later, he stabbed her four times, stabbed himself in an apparent suicide attempt, then left behind her body and a suicide note as he drove off to the hospital in her car.

In an April 2008 blog entry, I mentioned two other people who felt that they were under pressure to at least appear to be doing well: Steven Sueppel, the Iowa City bank executive who resorted to embezzling money from his own employer; and Michael Waleskowski, the Waterford, Michigan cop who had repeatedly paid off his credit card debt by rolling it into his mortgage, then found himself short of money to pay a tax bill so he tried to steal some money from a drunken driving suspect. Both cases resulted in multiple murder-suicides as both men killed their families, then themselves. I said at that time, "Greed, ego-centrism and 'status anxiety' led to the destruction of the Seuppel and Waleskowski families," and it has led to the death of woman and the scarring of yet another family.

We as a people are so compelled to measure ourselves against each other, and compete against each other, and decide, this guy's got a McMansion, he must be more successful; that guy's got a Lexus or a BMW, he must be better off. But there comes a time when we need to leave well enough alone. Impressing our friends shouldn't come from material gain or wealth, and it especially shouldn't come at the expense of one's future.

Besides, nobody at a funeral ever says of a rich, successful person, "He got to take all those trips and drive all those expensive cars and had this huge house."

Instead, we need to remember that we never get a second chance to leave a good final impression. Ellery Bennett, a Northwestern-educated man who had a very good job and could have left well enough alone, will not be remembered that way. He will be remembered as a usurer, a liar and a murderer, and (in all likelihood) he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Now, if you have that BMW or that nice, big house, that's great. Congratulations. But no matter what, you will be remembered, not by what you have, but what you leave behind.

My April 2008 blog entry also references a column by Mitch Albom. That column was published in the Detroit Free Press on January 14, 1990, and it appears below in its entirety.

LAWRENCE DELISLE'S QUIET DESPERATION

I never got much out of reading Thoreau. Maybe because I read him in high school. An urban teenager doesn't exactly fall for a guy who moves to the woods and talks to squirrels.

I do, however, remember one line he wrote. It struck me when I read it and it has stayed with me all these years: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

What did he mean by that, I wondered? Did grown-ups really have it so tough? Quiet desperation? Such contrasting words. Like "dying hope." Or "deafening silence."

Or "I didn't mean to hurt my babies."

That last sentence has been in my brain since I read it in the police statement of a 29-year-old tire store manager named Lawrence DeLisle. Five months ago, on a warm summer night, DeLisle allegedly slammed his foot on the gas pedal and drove his station wagon - with his wife and four children inside - smack into the Detroit River. The adults escaped; they swam to the surface, gasping for air. The children drowned.

It was originally deemed a tragic accident. But a week later, in a rambling and confused conversation with a police investigator, DeLisle suggested he might have been trying to kill everyone in that car - including himself. The reasons he gave were 1) the suicide of his father, something few of us have had to endure, and 2) the pressure from work, bills, children and a wife - things many of us endure every day.

It is the latter that haunts me. Could life become so intolerable that you might think of ending it like that, in a river, the water rising, no way out?

"I didn't mean to hurt my babies."

Quiet desperation.

Chances are you read the transcriptions of the Delisle tapes. Were you shocked? How could you not be? The horror. The senseless death. Here were four beautiful kids - they had just stopped at McDonald's - and now they were at the bottom of a river.

We may never know the true story. Even DeLisle's statements - in which he said, "I don't even want to go to trial. Just lock me away" - were ruled inadmissible in his trial because of the interrogation methods used by police. (That ruling has been appealed.) Just the same, what disturbed me most was not DeLisle's gruesome account of the incident, or his alleged attempt to kill his family by leaving a candle near a leaking gas pipe.

What got me were exchanges such as these:

Police: What were you thinking about?
DeLisle: Peace ...
Police: What were you thinking about?
DeLisle: Not having to pay bills every week ...
Police: At the time you wanted to be rid of everybody, didn't you?
DeLisle: I just want it to be over ... the constant repetition. Same thing day after day.

Is it possible that everyday pressures - a thankless job, credit card debts, sexual friction with a spouse - could push a man to such an unforgivable act? Can "normal" life be so awful? We distance ourselves from killers by believing they are sick creatures, out of the ordinary. What frightens me is how ordinary some of DeLisle's pressures were.

And not just him. We read today of how a man in Boston may have murdered his pregnant wife, in part because the baby would have interfered with his career. We hear of children murdering parents for inheritance money, because their jobs don't pay their bills. Horrifying. DeLisle said he loved his wife, he loved his children. He also said he sometimes wanted to escape them all.

Quiet desperation.

How many more Lawrence DeLisles are out there? Who knows? He could be a lone troubled man or one of an army of walking time bombs. In eight years of reporting, I have learned this much: We never know what is going on inside the heads of the people next to us. Not even if we live with them, eat with them, work with them.

We never know. People bury their darkest thoughts; they appear perfectly normal. But inside, private demons - such as DeLisle's memory of his suicidal father - can chew at the heart, making the most simple parts of life seem too burdensome, and the most unthinkable solutions somehow appealing.

So we have men driving into rivers and parents selling babies and husbands injecting wives with poison to rid themselves of things such as debt or marital problems.

And we can only draw this conclusion: Perhaps surviving everyday life is more noble than we think. Perhaps we should ignore sports stars and actors and celebrate instead the husband or wife with two jobs and no bank account who still has time to hug the kids.

God knows not everyone is making out that well. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." OK, Thoreau. I get it now.

It scares the hell out of me.

Volume 5, Number 19: Diet Soda Reviews, Part 1

2010-08-13T03:43:00.005-04:00

I started drinking diet sodas earlier this week after 28 years of drinking regular soda, the main reason being that I had been consuming way too many carbohydrates (which apparently can only be burned with exercise, which I don't do enough of; and/or a faster metabolism, which I no longer have).

I had dreaded the switch to diet because the artificial sweetener used in many diet sodas for the last 30 years, aspartame (aka NutraSweet), leaves an aftertaste that I don't like.

Another reason I would have called such a change unthinkable in 1982: At that time, diet sodas were generally marketed to women (examples: Tab, the Coca-Cola Company's first diet cola, came in a PINK can; also check out this Diet Pepsi commercial). My father was still drinking regular sodas even though he was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 1980 and may have had the disease even before then (he did switch to diet a few years later). My mother did drink diet colas and she was the only woman in the family (I have no sisters). Between all that, I managed to hardwire it into my mind that since women tend to be more diet-conscious and appearance-conscious than men, that diet sodas were NOT for men (it might also help explain why my father continued to drink regular sodas even after learning he had diabetes).

Some 28 years later, however, I saw a picture a friend took of me as I was on July 31, and I finally saw what I refused to see in my own mirror: An overweight, out-of-shape man at risk of getting Type II diabetes himself. As the result of that experience, I've hardwired totally different thoughts into my mind:

I can't expect to lose weight while still drinking regular soda
I shouldn't be taking on empty calories every time I'm thirsty
I'd rather drink diet soda than ever have to inject insulin.

In case there's anyone else like me who is about to switch to diet sodas, I'm going to publish a series of super-short reviews of such sodas. The first two in this blog entry, I bought this past week:

Diet A&W Root Beer: ⋆⋆⋆⋆ The aftertaste of the aspartame seems to blend well with the aftertaste of the root beer. I'll buy this one again.

Faygo Diet Redpop: ⋆⋆½ Faygo is a Michigan-based company that produces sodas in a number of flavors I like, one of which is Redpop (a strawberry-flavored soda). Diet Redpop, however, I'm not so crazy about--the more I drank it, the less I liked its aftertaste.

These next three, I've had in the past whenever there was no regular soda, and I haven't had them since so I don't know if they've improved, but since they still use aspartame, I doubt that they have:

Fresca: ⋆⋆⋆ I love grapefruit-flavored sodas and Fresca is a big reason why. I remember having a can of it back in the late '70s. But I stop short of giving Fresca four stars because today's formula has gosh-forsaken aspartame (it tasted better back in the '70s because it had saccharin at that time). Darnit, someone at the Coca-Cola Company has got to bring back the old one and call it "Fresca Throwback" or "Fresca '77" or "Disco Fresca" or something like that!

Diet Pepsi (I can't get that jingle from that late '70s/early '80s commercial out of my head): ⋆⋆ The taste is all right but the aftertaste means I'm unlikely to buy it in the near future. I'll try Pepsi One and Pepsi Max before I try Diet Pepsi again.

Diet Coke: ⋆ Diet Coke is vile. Given that I prefer regular Coke over regular Pepsi, it may initially surprise you that I said that. But Diet Coke's formula has never been based on regular Coke. In fact, it's more closely related to the "new Coke" that came out in the spring of 1985 (and bombed so badly that the Coca-Cola Company brought back the "classic Coke" less than three months later); that "new Coke" was essentially a high fructose corn syrup-sweetened version of Diet Coke.

Coming soon in a future blog entry: Diet Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Diet Sunkist, Pepsi One and Pepsi Max

Update on that healthy foods fund: It's now up to $7.30 (that's the money I've avoided spending on roody poo junk food so far). I haven't spent any of it yet.

Volume 5, Number 18: Introducing Mark's Healthy Foods Fund

2010-08-03T00:23:00.006-04:00

I have come up with a new idea that I hope will help improve my health.

You see, for ten years now, I freely bought all sorts of junk food (chips, cookies, ice cream, candy bars, pre-sweetened cereals, Pop-Tarts and so on), and that's on top of the soda I drink. During those ten years, I have put a higher priority on keeping my food bill low (read: buy foods that are on sale and for which I have a coupon, regardless of how good for me those foods really are). Ten years ago, I was relatively skinny and thought I could get away with it.

But I didn't.

The end result is that my weight has ballooned to 191 pounds.

That wouldn't be such a problem if I was 6 feet tall, but I'm just 5'7".

And it dawned on me, every time I bought junk food, yeah, I satisfied my inner child; unfortunately, my metabolism doesn't work like it does when I was a child. Not even close.

To that end, here's my idea, in three steps:

First, I will stop buying regular soda, junk food, and pre-sweetened cereals. I'll still use what I bought last month--looks like the last regular soda I ever bought is a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi Throwback--but after I'm done with it, THAT'S IT. All I've been doing by buying that stuff is basically turn money into flab (like this poor guy in this New York City Department of Health TV ad) and I've become sick of it.
Second, begin keeping a log of junk food purchases I will not make so I know just how much money I am saving by not buying them. (For example, under my old ways, I was going to spend $1.19 on a bag of those new Pretzel M&M's this week--but now I'm NOT going to do that so now that's $1.19 I've saved. Next time I see a kick-butt special on ice cream, instead of buying it, I will make a note of how much I would have spent on it and put that in the log. The money saved will hereby be called Mark's Healthy Foods Fund.
Third, spend the money saved in the second step on healthy foods I've previously been not buying enough of--fruits and vegetables I like (apples, oranges, grapefruit), meats (beef, pork, chicken), fish, maybe a bottle of multi-vitamins... That $1.19 alone can go a long way towards that end.

Well, that's the strategy. My plan is to lose some weight in time for my high school class' 20-year reunion (it's less than four months away), and hopefully after that, I will have developed enough good habits to make me feel better and extend my life.

Volume 5, Number 17: Kielbasa Frittata

2010-07-01T12:43:00.007-04:00

In an effort to expand my limited recipe repertoire past "chef salads," "grilled cheese," "BLT sandwiches," "that slow-cooked kielbasa/potatoes/sauerkraut dish," "potato latkes," "throwing pieces of meat on a George Foreman grill" and "chimichitos," tonight I am going to cook a kielbasa frittata, as per this recipe. (FYI I'm leaving out the caraway seeds--I hate those--but otherwise will not be altering the recipe.) The whole started when I thought "kielbasa frittata" sounded funny and it got me wondering if it actually existed.

Now, on to miscellaneous bits and pieces I'd like to share:

So long as I began with food, I need to add two more items to "Foods I Miss": Chef Boyardee Canneloni and Chef Boyardee Meat Tortellini. I realize that, under ConAgra's ~~iron fist~~ ownership, the Chef Boyardee brand has been repositioned more towards appealing to kids, but simply put, the products they've added towards that end (forkables, twistaroni) are not nearly as good as those discontinued products. Besides, making silly-shaped pasta isn't the only way to make canned pasta appealing to kids. Kids like to try new things! Chef Boyardee is how I discovered canneloni and tortellini in the first place!
I'd like to see bad movies take a stab at quoting negative reviews for promotional purposes. That way, when people who like good and great movies (and check out rottentomatoes.com, a web site that has saved me from wasting money on seeing bad films a few times) find out that The Last Airbender is a piece of crap, and don't come to see it, the studio that produced the film (in this case, Paramount) can then cut its losses by deliberately re-marketing it to people who actually get gratification from watching crappy movies. A TV ad for The Last Airbender could thus go like this:

Four nations discover a common destiny in...

"A soul-crushing disaster." - Todd Gilchrist, Cinematical
"A new low point in M. Night Shyamalan's crumbling career." - Mark Dujsik, Sci-Fi Movie Page
See why The Last Airbender "makes The Golden Compass look like a four-star classic." - Ty Burr of the Boston Globe
Don't miss "The most well-rounded failure of the year so far" - Neil Miller, Film School Rejects

David Tennant wore this really awesome "muscle torso" T-shirt (shown above) in the 2009 Royal Shakespeare production of Hamlet. Anyone know where in the US I can get a shirt just like it? (And I mean EXACTLY like it--same color, same "muscle pattern," and yes, I've already looked on eBay!)
Here's a great promotional giveaway idea for baseball games: Foreign Legion-style hats (an example of which is shown here). The big flap on the back offers great sun protection for your neck--and also gives a big space for the people giving them away to put a big advertisement on the back!
Why can't anyone design office chairs that are more like the bucket seats in cars? I keep imagining such chairs would be more comfortable.
Can't we have a rear car horn to honk back at any schmuck honking at us (or, for that matter, any idiot who swoops into my blind spot right when I'm about to change lanes)?
If you like new wave/punk rock/alternative rock from the '80s, check out KROQ-HD2. It's a re-creation of the mix of music KROQ played in the '80s (which, in turn, is a lot like the music WABX played in '82 and '83, which is where my fondness for new wave music stems from).

Volume 5, Number 16: Baseball All-Star Tweaks

2010-06-28T23:27:00.003-04:00

Recently, Bud Selig made a couple changes to the All-Star Game that I feel are a joke. First and foremost is expanding the All-Star Game rosters (like the game hasn’t been slowed down enough with all the substitutions already being made now in an effort to get every player to make his appearance). That also cheapens the value of making the All-Star team. The second is having the DH rule every year, regardless of whether the host city/ballpark are in the American League or not. Uh, given that the All-Star Game determines home field advantage in the World Series*, and you’re a National League manager, you should be fuming that every single such game will now be played under the AL’s rules.

* (That’s another Selig tweak I was never fond of—home field should always go to the team with the better record, like in the NBA and NHL.)

I do believe changes need to be made. But the ones I have in mind are different. I mentioned them back in 2006, and I’ll reiterate them below:

First, and a number of baseball writers have said this, it's not necessary to have every single team represented at the All-Star Game because it leads to crummy players making the All-Star rosters while more deserving players are forced to miss out. Take Mark Redman of the Kansas City Royals in the 2006 All-Star Game. Any pitcher with an ERA over 5 (as Redman did that year) should not be allowed within 1,000 feet of the ballpark, much less be on an All-Star roster.

Second, and this one may be met with some disagreement (but just hear me out), is this: Being a top vote-getter in the All-Star balloting should guarantee that they will play at least 3 innings in the All-Star game, nothing more. The managers should be allowed more power in determining the starting lineup.

How do I back up my argument? Two simple words: Reggie Jackson. Some of you remember the early '80s, when Jackson was a perennial top vote-getter (indeed, one of the most popular players the game has ever seen). Trouble is, his defensive skills had eroded so severely that AL All-Star managers at that time cringed at the prospect of having to start him in right field.

One factor that favors my second little tweak is television. I'll bet that the majority of viewers will tune away from the All-Star Game by the time the 6th or 7th inning rolls around. Would they tune away so quickly if certain favorite players had just gotten into the game (or were still on the bench, waiting to enter)? I don't think they would. Going back to Reggie Jackson, it would have been more intriguing to see him come into the game in the 6th inning as a pinch-hitter for the pitcher (supposing for the moment that said game was being played in an NL park) than to see him butchering the NL team’s base hits in the bottom of the 1st.

In summation, the question driving the ballot shouldn't be "Who do you want to start in the All-Star Game," but just "Who do you want to SEE in the All-Star Game?"

Volume 5, Number 15: The Post-World War III NFL-USFL Merger

2010-06-23T20:53:00.005-04:00

Today, I was going through some old creative writing of mine and came across an idea that basically came from mixing two interests: Alternate history stories and fantasy sports.

Some time ago, I imagined a TV series in which a newspaper columnist finds himself stranded in a parallel universe, a world in which (among other things) the United States lost 12 western states to the Soviet Union in March 1986, during the Third World War.

One of the more trivial ramifications of such a loss would take place in the world of sports. Both the National Football League and the nascent United States Football League would have lost franchises as the result of the Soviets taking over the 12 western states and thus would have had to merge into a new NFL. To wit, here is how such a merger would have looked. The franchises added from the USFL are indicated in red.

NFC East:
Dallas Cowboys
New York Giants
Philadelphia Eagles
Washington Redskins
St. Louis Generals

Notes: The St. Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix in 1985, so the Cards were stranded in the new Soviet States of America (Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico). The New Jersey Generals were a talent-rich team, having merged with the Houston Gamblers following the 1985 season, and Donald Trump wanted them to compete in the NFC East, but NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle would not allow a third team in the New York-New Jersey market. Rozelle wanted the Generals to relocate to St. Louis, the city the Cards left behind (and the largest TV market in the postwar United States that could support a pro football team, yet did not have one). He also wanted them to move to the NFC Central (to save on gas, an extremely precious commodity in wartime). Trump and Rozelle reached a compromise: Trump left the New York/New Jersey market in exchange for staying in the NFC East.

NFC Central:
Chicago Bears
Detroit Lions
Green Bay Packers
Minnesota Vikings

Notes: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers left for the newly-formed NFC South division (below). This division is thus the same as the NFC North division we have today.

NFC South:
Atlanta Falcons
Birmingham Stallions
New Orleans Saints
San Antonio Bandits
Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Notes: Birmingham finally becomes a big-league city as the NFL adds the Stallions. The San Antonio Bandits are the result of merging one of the USFL's better franchises, the Tampa Bay Bandits (who could not compete directly with the Buccaneers and had been opposed to the USFL's decision to switch to fall football for that reason) with the San Antonio Gunslingers (one of the USFL's less successful franchises). San Antonio was one of the few markets left that might support an NFL team. The Stallions are in the NFC South--as opposed to the AFC South--so they can enjoy rivalries with the Saints (another Gulf Coast state) and the Falcons (in the neighboring state of Georgia).

AFC East:
Baltimore Stars
Buffalo Bills
New England Patriots
New York Jets

Notes: The Stars, the only team to appear in all three USFL championship games (winning two), had relocated to Baltimore from Philadelphia after the USFL's pre-war decision to compete directly with the NFL. What great timing. Baltimore gets an NFL team just two years after losing the Colts to Indianapolis, and get to play against three of the Colts' old rivals (but not the Colts themselves; they relocated to the AFC Central).

AFC Central:
Cleveland Browns
Cincinnati Bengals
Indianapolis Colts
Kansas City Chiefs
Pittsburgh Steelers

Notes: The Chiefs are the only surviving team from the old AFC West. The Houston Oilers got moved to the new AFC South division (below). The Colts join the AFC Central because, after moving to Indy, they're closer to Cincinnati and Cleveland than they are New York and New England (and the postwar American government prefers that the NFL's teams minimize all logistics costs; let's not forget, they lost Alaska and its oil supply to the USSR).

AFC South:
Houston Oilers
Jacksonville Bulls
Miami Dolphins
Orlando Renegades
Memphis Showboats

Notes: The Bulls looked to be a stronger franchise after merging with the Denver Gold following the 1985 USFL season, and had great enough support already (in fact, in our universe, Jacksonville's support of the USFL Bulls was why the NFL gave that city an expansion franchise in 1995). The Renegades and Showboats were two of the teams that were preparing to play a 1986 fall season in the USFL and were more than happy to play that season as NFL teams. The Dolphins leave the AFC East for two intra-state rivalries (Bulls, Renegades), a cheaper, less tiring travel schedule, and in the short run, a much easier schedule (in addition to three ex-USFL teams--more than any other division--the 'Fins would have two games against an Oiler team that went 5-11 in 1985). Incidentally, the Dolphins and Oilers would revive a short-lived divisional rivalry; they were rivals in the old AFL Eastern Division from 1966 (when the Dolphins joined the AFL as an expansion team) to 1969 (the last season before the AFL-NFL merger, in which the Oilers moved to the newly-minted AFC Central).

Volume 5, Number 14: To Be, Or Not To Be... Smart

2010-06-06T20:46:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, I wrote this blog entry about how I did better in courses where the right answers were clearly defined (like math and spelling) than subjects in which students could answer various ways, depending on how they interpreted the subject material (like social studies and English literature). I mentioned that I developed the need to have as many "right answers" as possible, which is why I did well in spelling bees and trivia games.

Recently, however, it dawned on me: Being smart isn't about knowing all the right answers beforehand. Being smart means asking questions when you need answers. It means knowing which question to ask to get that answer, and in some cases, finding out who to ask. Long ago, I used to think that if someone asked a question in class that they must not be smart because it meant they were having trouble grasping whatever subject the teacher was teaching.

Back in high school, I was too proud to ask my English teacher to give me a literal interpretation of certain phrases in Shakespeare--I could have sworn that some of them read like Yoda the Jedi Master had written them--because I thought the teacher was already expecting me to interpret Shakespearean correctly. Meanwhile, my mind was getting lost in words that felt like they weren't being used properly because I kept thinking of how they are used to today (e.g. it didn't occur to me that "soft" actually meant "stop" or "be quiet"; I sure could have used a reference like this back then). I never understood what the characters were really saying until recently, some 20 years later, when I saw the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, starring David Tennant as Hamlet and the recently-knighted Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius (he also played the ghost of Claudius' brother, Old Hamlet). I strongly recommend you see it--you may have to buy the DVD as it aired on PBS a little over a month ago--but I digress here.

Point it, I could have asked other students in the class after school as to what certain words meant or how certain parts should be read. An example is Act I, Scene II: I failed to figure out that Claudius' lines at the start of the scene were intended as a speech to the other characters on the stage, not just to one or two (and certainly not a soliloquy); and furthermore, that speech is divided into separate parts (first about his marrying Gertrude, then about Norway's continuing war with Denmark under the leadership of young Fortinbras). When I first read Hamlet, that speech seemed like nothing more than one long, rambling stream of words.

Obviously, it's better to ask a stupid question now than make a stupid mistake later.

And sometimes failing to ask questions can be the stupidest mistake of all.

Volume 5, Number 13: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster

2010-05-23T16:24:00.002-04:00

I've heard it said many times that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

That statement has certainly been true with the recent BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, because there are a number of parallels between it and a similar disaster that took place in 1988: Piper Alpha, located in the North Sea (approximately 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland), was another offshore drilling rig. It had been operating for 12 years when a series of explosions and fires destroyed it.

Errors and questionable decisions led to both disasters, which could have easily been avoided. (Here's a report about what went wrong on Deepwater Horizon. And this Wikipedia article summarizes the Piper Alpha disaster.)

And of course, both rigs were destroyed the same way--by explosions and fires.

In Piper Alpha's case, a design change was made that enabled the platform to process natural gas as well as crude oil, but the additional equipment was placed much closer to the workers' quarters than it should have been. Also, on July 6, 1988, workers had begun working on routine maintenance for a safety valve but did not finish it before their shift ended and the night shift began. The engineer in charge of the maintenance in question did not properly inform anyone that this work was not complete and that the condensate pump connected to that valve should not be operated under any circumstances.

In the Deepwater Horizon case, improper well design, the flawed design and maintenance of the blowout preventer and the ill-advised removal of "drilling mud" on the day of the disaster all played a part in the loss of that rig, the loss of 11 workers' lives, and the jeopardizing of ecosystems and people's livelihoods along the Gulf Coast.

But what really alarms--no, wait, disgusts me is how BP has allowed the disaster to become even worse (in ecological terms) than Piper Alpha. Famous firefighter, the late Paul "Red" Adair, was able to put out the Piper Alpha fire and cap the leaking oil wells in three weeks. Deepwater Horizon has been lost for a month now and all BP has done (other than point blame at Halliburton and Transocean) is stick a little bendy straw into the leak to siphon off a small fraction of the oil. Here's a live video feed of the leak, 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

The executives at BP keep saying they'll have this leak plugged "next week," refuse to use a less-toxic oil dispersant than the one they've been using, and presumably continue to pay themselves the same as they've been over recent years. Are they aware that they're constructing a better advertisement for the abolition of offshore drilling than the Greenpeace folks could ever dream of?

Volume 5, Number 12: The NBA Draft Lottery and Why I Don't Like It

2010-05-13T21:06:00.008-04:00

Next Tuesday night, sports bars across Detroit could well be packed with die-hard Detroit Pistons fans hoping their team gets the first pick in next month's NBA Draft, by virtue of winning the NBA Draft Lottery. I won't be among them.

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned that I am opposed to that Lottery. The best draft among the major pro sports is the NFL Draft (in which the team with the worst record is first in the draft order, barring any expansion teams entering the league--no lottery). I stated my opposition to the Lottery in a letter I published in the Detroit News on March 17, 1985 (see below--not very well written, but in all fairness, the News cut out at least one "reason" to make the letter fit, and I was in 7th grade to begin with).

David Stern introduced the Draft Lottery after Dallas Mavericks head coach Dick Motta made allegations about the Houston Rockets throwing games in order to get the first pick in the 1984 Draft (they lost 14 of their last 17 games, got the first pick and would select center Hakeem Olajuwon). In addition, the Chicago Bulls went 1-14 in its final 15; they secured the third pick and would take now-legendary guard Michael Jordan with that pick.

Those losses may support Motta's argument, but that doesn't make it iron-clad. Let me poke a couple holes in it.

Generally speaking, when a sports team racks up so many losses, the cause is, simply put, a lack of talent, which in turn comes from these factors:

Bad drafting. Detroit Lions followers like me need no more than two words: Matt Millen. None of the players he drafted between 2002 and 2006 are members of the Lions today. Also, the Detroit Tigers had a string of bad drafts when Randy Smith was their GM, which meant that by the time owner Mike Ilitch fired him in 2002, the farm system was virtually devoid of talent.
Bad trading. Like when the Pistons traded M.L. Carr and two #1 picks to the Boston Celtics for Bob McAdoo (allegedly at the urging of then-Pistons head coach Dick Vitale). (The Celtics would use one pick to select PF Kevin McHale and trade the other to Golden State for C Robert Parish; McHale and Parish would help Boston win three NBA titles.) Or when the late Ted Stepien, who owned the Cleveland Cavaliers 30 years ago, traded away five future #1 picks for mediocre players he thought would be stars (in particular, he traded the 1982 #1 pick, which turned out to be forward James Worthy, to the Lakers in a February 1980 deal for forward Don Ford; he also dealt the #1 picks from 1983 to 1986 to the Dallas Mavericks in other trades; as a matter of fact, the NBA made a rule prohibiting the trades of first-round picks in consecutive years because of his bungling, informally known as the Ted Stepien Rule).
Injuries. The 1996-97 San Antonio Spurs were decimated by injuries (most notably star center David Robinson; forward Sean Elliott also missed half the season). As the result, a team that had averaged 59 wins over the previous three seasons finished 20-62.
Economics. Over the years, teams in various sports have had to gut their payroll, either due to debt or (as in the case of the 1998 Florida Marlins in baseball) the new owner didn't want to take on the old owner's payroll. Oftentimes, teams have too much money tied up in bad contracts, which precludes them from spending money on players they need. (The Detroit Tigers of the Randy Smith era are a big example; Smith signed Jeff Weaver, Damion Easley, Dean Palmer and Bobby Higginson to long-term deals. He also offered Juan Gonzalez a monstrous 8-year, $120 million pact that, had JuanGon signed it, would have paved the way for the Tigers to declare bankruptcy.)

Looking back at the Rockets, they had lost their best player, Moses Malone, to the Philadelphia 76ers in 1982. Even with Malone, over the previous four seasons (1978-79 through 1981-82), the Rockets had never more than 47 games in a season. They went 14-68 in the 1982-83 season, not because they threw away games, but because after Malone's departure, they had no other talent.

What's more, sports teams are, frankly, too smart to throw games to get the #1 pick. Here are a few reasons why it would be against a team's best interest to do so:

#1 picks get bigger contracts with more guaranteed money and they (and the teams that pick them) face more media pressure.
Besides, having a high pick is not always an iron-clad guarantee you'll get a player who can improve your team. (I also touched upon this in my 1985 letter to the Detroit News, noting that Ralph Sampson did nothing to turn around the Houston Rockets' fortunes.) In the NFL, over the last nine drafts, the Lions and the Oakland Raiders have had top-10 picks year after year, with no winning seasons to show for it. The NBA is no stranger to #1 busts (Joe Barry Carroll, Danny Manning, most recently Kwame Brown).
Teams that throw games lose the respect of their fans as well as that of other teams.
Sports team owners generally understand that the main business they are in is winning games, not selling jerseys, building a better stadium or wowing fans with a mascot who can dunk while backflipping off a ladder.

Now I'll move on to the problems I have with the NBA Draft Lottery as it stands today.

One thing the Draft Lottery has done very well is take players away from the teams that sorely need them. Take 1985, the very first year of the Lottery. The Indiana Pacers and Golden State Warriors tied for the league's worst record that year and one reason was that they didn't have a center. Patrick Ewing would have filled that need for either team. Yet, due to the Lottery, he went to the New York Knicks (a team that already did have a center in Bill Cartwright). Other examples over the years:

1992: The Minnesota Timberwolves, a team that had been struggling for respectability since joining the league in 1989, had the league's worst record at 15-67, but they ended up with the third pick and missed out on the best centers the '92 Draft had to offer, Shaquille O'Neal and Alonzo Mourning. Instead, the Wolves take forward Christian Laettner.
1993: The Dallas Mavericks threaten the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers' all-time mark for futility before finishing 11-71. Under the NFL Draft rules, they would have had the first pick. But the Orlando Magic--who narrowly missed the playoffs--end up with the first pick. They select Chris Webber, then deal him to the Golden State Warriors for the third overall pick and three future first-rounders. The Mavericks pick fourth.
1997: As mentioned earlier, the San Antonio Spurs were decimated by injuries, but under the NFL Draft rules, they actually would have picked third. Tim Duncan would have gone to the Vancouver Grizzlies (14-68), but because Vancouver fell to fourth in the lottery, they settle for point guard Antonio Daniels, who quickly proves to be a bust and only plays in Vancouver for one season.
2005: The Atlanta Hawks, whose best center is 42-year-old Kevin Willis, finish with a sorry 13-69 record. But the top pick in the draft--center Andrew Bogut--goes to the Milwaukee Bucks, who won more than twice as many games as the Hawks.

In the NFL, if a team has a .500 or better record, there's no chance of it having the top pick in the draft (unless they acquired that pick from the team with the worst record). But last year, the Phoenix Suns were in the Draft Lottery because they didn't make the playoffs; never mind that they had a better record (46-36) than four of the Eastern Conference's playoff teams. I touched upon a similar issue in my letter to the News: In 1984, two Western Conference non-playoff teams had better records than the Eastern Conference's #8 seed.

To be fair, the Draft Lottery has been improved somewhat over the years. When the Lottery began 25 years ago, every team that didn't make the playoffs had the same chance of getting the first pick, and the team with the worst record could fall as low as seventh. Today, the team with the worst record is guaranteed no lower than the fourth pick, while teams that barely missed the playoffs get about a 0.5% chance of getting the top pick.

But in summation, the NBA Draft Lottery is still a flawed system founded on a flawed argument. Let the worst team get the first pick. Period.

One postscript I'd like to add: Motta didn't exactly do himself any favors by complaining about the Rockets' throwing away games. His Mavericks owned the Cleveland Cavaliers' first-round pick in 1986. If the 1986 NBA Draft was "NFL-style," that pick would have been the third overall pick. But instead, thanks to the Lottery, it was 7th. I pity the fool who complains like that, and I'm sure Mr. T would agree.

NBA Team Nickname Mix-up
So long as I'm talking about the NBA:

Don't you think it would make sense for three certain NBA teams to be called the Utah Bobcats, the Charlotte Hornets and the New Orleans Jazz instead of the mess we have now (Utah Jazz, New Orleans Hornets, Charlotte Bobcats)? Jazz and New Orleans have always been strongly associated with each other, Charlotte's history with teams called the Hornets goes all the way back to 1901 (it had a minor league baseball team by that name until 1973, and the very next year, when the World Football League's New York Stars relocated to Charlotte, they were renamed the Hornets as well). To complete the nickname switcheroo, bobcats are plentiful in Utah!

"Utah Bobcats" also sounds a heck of a lot better than "Utah Thrust," the name I wanted to give the Jazz when they relocated from New Orleans in 1980 because, prior to that relocation, the #1 sporting event in the whole state of Utah was high-speed racing at Bonneville Speedway, where all sorts of land speed records are made and broken.

Volume 5, Number 11: A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

2010-05-12T18:09:00.003-04:00

News: The last few weeks have been bad. Storms hit the Southeast, causing flooding in Nashville the likes of which people there have never seen; an oil rig was lost in the Gulf of Mexico, causing ecological disaster along the Gulf Coast; severe storms and tornadoes struck Oklahoma earlier this week; there's been a rash of school attacks in China; there's the threat of a diphtheria epidemic in earthquake-stricken Haiti, and last but not least, a family of four died in Quebec when the ground beneath their house collapsed due to clay liquefaction.

Sports: A mix of good and bad here. The Tigers are off to a good start. I wanted the Cleveland Cavaliers vs. the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals but the Cavs are now down 3 games to 2 against the Boston Celtics, while the Mavs were already eliminated in round 1 against the San Antonio Spurs. The Pistons are in next Tuesday's NBA Draft Lottery; thing is, as much as I'd love for the Pistons to get Kentucky point guard John Wall, I have opposed the Draft Lottery ever since Commissioner David Stern introduced it in 1985 and I prefer the NFL style of drafting (worst team gets the first pick, regardless of conference). The Red Wings are out of the playoffs but maybe it's just as well; they were too inconsistent this year and both the Sharks and Blackhawks are better teams. Personally, I'm rooting for the Blackhawks because their head coach (Joel Quenneville) is one of the NHL's best, and they also have the longest current Stanley Cup drought (no Cup since 1961, and remember, the Wings used to have a drought like that).

Fantasy sports: Smackdown Unlimited (baseball) is off to a surprisingly good start--4th place right now, and 1st as recently as April 29. In football, one league I'm in (Todd's Ultimate Fantasy Football, or TUFF for short) had its rookie draft last week. I thought I did OK--I got QB Jimmy Clausen to give me sorely needed depth at that position but couldn't get a running back to replace Kevin Smith (maybe next year, I can address depth at that position).

Weather: In addition to what I mentioned under News: Temperatures here in the Detroit area dropped this past weekend; it also snowed in parts of Wisconsin and northern Michigan. Did the recent volcanic activity in Iceland have anything to do with it?

TV: I'm getting tired of Operation Repo--you can only watch so many schmucks who fail to understand any part of the statement, "We wouldn't be here if you weren't making the payments." As for Kitchen Nightmares, I like it best when Gordon goes after dirty restaurants (Dillons and the Seascape in 2007 and Fiesta Sunrise in 2008 are prime examples) and there hasn't been such a severe case in this, the third season. Another thing about the new format of KN is that Gordon only stays for three days instead of seven, a result of which is that Gordon can't shut down a restaurant for a day or two (like he did a few times under the old seven-day timetable). I'm looking forward to Season 7 of Hell's Kitchen, which starts on Tuesday, June 1.

Movies: There are a whole bunch I'd like to see but nothing that makes me want to go to the theater and shell out $7+ to see it. At least not until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Volume I. So instead of waiting for movies to come out in theaters, I've resigned myself to waiting until I can see them on a cable TV network like TNT, TBS, FX, USA, Spike, whatever. So I keep checking the TV listings looking for movies from two or three years ago.

Internet: Family Feud on Facebook is fun (at least when the app works, anyway). I'd rather have a faulty Feud than an error-free FarmVille or Mob Wars.

Volume 5, Number 10: Hal McRae vs. the Press

2010-04-26T09:03:00.006-04:00

Exactly 17 years ago today, Kansas City Royals manager Hal McRae launched into one of the greatest tirades in the history of sports. His team had just lost to my Detroit Tigers, 5-3, and one reason is that they could not score in the bottom of the 7th inning when they had the bases loaded.

The Royals did score 2 runs in the 9th; that rally, while too little, too late, was sparked by a double by George Brett off Tiger reliever Mike Henneman.

During the post-game press conference, held in McRae's office, John Doolittle (a sports talk show host for radio station KMBZ) asked McRae if he had considered using Brett as a pinch-hitter for Keith Miller in the 7th. Miller had fouled out to end that inning, straning all three baserunners. Below is the video of that question and McRae's reaction:

At first, Doolittle's question seemed like the classic second-guessing, nitpicking, "Monday morning quarterback" kind of question. And in fairness to McRae, putting up with questions like that can be irritating. Imagine if members of the press asked you about every single thing you did--"Why'd you have this for lunch instead of that?" or "Why'd you buy this car instead of that car?"

However, a look at the boxscore from that game helps reveal that Doolittle's question about pinch-hitting Brett for Miller was actually well-founded.

In the middle of his outburst--after tossing microphones and tape recorders, but before hurling a phone and clearing reporters out of his office--McRae says (at about the 0:32 mark of the video), "Miller started the (expletive) game, he's batting against left-handed (expletive) pitchers, Brett is not playing against left-handed pitchers."

As it happened, the Tigers' starting pitcher that night, Tom Bolton, was left-handed; also, in 1993, Brett would hit just .209 against left-handed pitchers. However, Bolton had left the game after 5 innings, and the pitcher who relieved him for the 6th and 7th innings was Dave Haas--a right-hander. Therefore, McRae, perhaps, should have started giving thought to using Brett as a pinch-hitter as early as the 6th.

But with the bases loaded and two outs, Miller went to the plate, even though he had grounded out in each of his previous three at-bats. Miller fouled out to Alan Trammell to end the inning.

Two innings later, in the bottom of the 9th, George Brett pinch-hit for 2B Jose "Chico" Lind and hit a double that started a 2-run rally. If Brett--who hit .295 against right-handers in 1993--had gone in for Miller in the 7th and hit that very same double, at least 2 of the men on base would have scored--perhaps all three.

In the final analysis, Doolittle didn't ask such a "stupid-ass question." Looking back, he was wondering if McRae had perhaps overlooked the fact that right-handed Haas had relieved left-handed Bolton and that was why he didn't put Brett in for Miller in the 7th.

Two footnotes about that outburst:

One of the objects McRae threw hit Alan Eskew, a reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal, opening a gash about an inch below his right eye. (Eskew appears briefly in the video, at about the 0:56 mark.) McRae later apologized to him. According to this reproduction of a column Eskew published two days later, Eskew accepted the apology, never sued McRae or the Royals, and said, "We get along fine."
Curiously, in the 36 games that followed that 5-3 loss (starting on April 27 and ending on June 7), the Royals went 24-12, suggesting that McRae's outburst could have (to coin a phrase) lit a fire under his players' asses. (See the Royals' 1993 schedule and results in case you don't believe it.) The Royals would fire McRae the next year despite his managing the team to back-to-back winning seasons--a feat KC has not duplicated since. I recall wanting the Tigers to hire him after Sparky Anderson retired as their manager (they hired Buddy Bell instead).

Volume 5, Number 9: Unabomber Haikus

2010-04-03T00:54:00.005-04:00

Exactly 14 years ago today, the FBI arrested Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at a remote cabin in Montana.

How he got that name bears some explaining: In the late 1970s (when Kaczynski's bomb attacks started), as the FBI assigned six-letter designations to each case, and because they were going after a BOMber who had attacked UNiversities and Airlines, this particular case came to be known as UNABOM. At the time that these university and airline bomb attacks began, nobody knew who was carrying them out, so for nearly 18 years, the suspect was only known as the "Unabomber."

Nobody even knew what he looked like. Here's a drawing that the FBI circulated that bore no resemblance to Kaczynski. That drawing looks more like what you'd get if the late-'70s "High Rollers" Alex Trebek put on a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of BluBlockers.

But the real reason for this blog entry is that after Kaczynski's arrest, all manner of Unabomber-related haikus were circulating about the Internet. I guess it was an Internet meme, like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" had been two years earlier. Many of the haikus were funny, such as this one, my personal favorite:

I have a vision
But I am misunderstood
Do you like my beard?

You can read these haikus at a few different websites:

http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/unabomber-haikus

http://www.pmw.org/~welling/unabomber_haiku.html

http://danny.sadinoff.com/fun/quotes/unabomber_haiku.txt

There may be other web pages out there as well, but most of the ones I found on Google are just repeating the ones found at the three I listed above.

Volume 5, Number 8: Headaches in Electronics

2010-03-18T14:12:00.003-04:00

I have a beef with electronics manufacturers about making products that don't last, then failing to support the customers who bought them and who had reasonably expected them to last.

About 9 years ago, a circuit board on a Magnavox VCR failed, a VCR I shelled out $80 for less than a year before. Unfortunately, the warranty was only six months. I asked Philips Magnavox if they could just ship me a new circuit board (as the VCR in question was actually easy to disassemble and reassemble, and so I could replace the board myself). No can do, they said. I bought a Panasonic VCR, and it has generally been trouble-free.

A year later, I bought my first DVD player, an Apex. Well, 14 months after that, the motor in the DVD drive stopped working. Now, it's out of warranty, so I'm screwed, but I could at least buy a replacement DVD drive, right? Wrong. I replaced it with a Panasonic DVD player, which served me flawlessly for four years before I had to sell it to make room for another Panasonic, a DVD recorder.

(As an aside: Yes, I did swear by Panasonic back then. Still do, but due to what I'm about to describe, not to nearly the same extent.)

Last week, that Panasonic DVD recorder decided to quit on me. Why? All I know is that in the middle of a recording, it gave me some message about needing to shut down and run some sort of self-diagnostic due to some error it found, but it could not fix that error (code U61 for those of you keeping score).

The problem isn't the whole DVD recorder. It's a small circuit board, about the size of an index card, that screwed up everything. And it's a common problem with this particular model.

What does Panasonic do? Recall the item to fix what is obviously a defect that existed ever since the DVD recorder was made in some factory in China in 2006? Ship a replacement part to anyone who wanted to fix it?

Nope.

As far as fixing it was concerned, my options were to either pay more money to have some "Authorized Service Center" fix it than a new one would cost, or look for the same model on eBay and risk having the same defect crop up again later. No way, Jose. All in all, this DVD recorder has become a black mark on the otherwise excellent track record Panasonic has had with me.

I decided to pay $73 for a newer DVD recorder on eBay.

Anyway, I don't understand why I can't get better support for these products.

If a bridge had a defect, it would be closed for repairs. If a car had a bad circuit board, it hopefully would be recalled.

But electronics that consumers spend billions of dollars a year on, all the while putting tremendous faith in Chinese factories whose quality control is, at best, questionable? No such help there, apparently. These manufacturers can't even send replacement parts. Bottom line, electronics manufacturers' quality control has slipped as the result of re-sourcing their production to other countries, they need to improve their quality control to where it was when they were making everything in Japan, and they need to stop claiming that fixing their products will cost more than a new one would cost.

Volume 5, Number 7: Hilarious Glenn Beck Attack Video

2010-03-10T15:52:00.005-05:00

Disclaimer: If you lean towards the conservative end of the political spectrum, or vote Republican more often than not, you may not want to click on the link as liberals are far more likely to enjoy the video than anti-liberals.

OK. This is the best example of computer technology being used to insert names and pictures into a video that I've ever seen. And I can't stand Glenn Beck anyway (I knew the first time I saw him on HLN, the network formerly known as CNN Headline News, that he and Fox News Channel were made for each other). A screen shot of the video is below, but the web page (created by Brave New Films) is set up so that your name is used.

Click here to see Beck wage a ludicrous attack on YOU--note: this works even better if you are a Facebook user

Volume 5, Number 6: Career Quandaries

2010-02-27T12:21:00.003-05:00

Last night, Lucy Knisley (a creative genius both as a cartoonist and a musician) posted her latest comic strip on her blog. It's about all the negative reactions one may receive after answering the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

In Lucy's case, an old man told her that cartooning was "a really difficult field" and "a man's game" and it got me thinking about similar events in my childhood and how that question has frustrated me almost my whole life.

I believe I was 9 years old when I developed an interest in archaeology. The movie Raiders of the Lost Ark had just come out, and I had read a fascinating article in Cricket magazine about how the dead were mummified in Egypt. The idea of unearthing and restoring old relics so today's people could see them... that was just so interesting to me (and still is today; for example, I saved and restored a 30-year-old snow thrower last August; it was just hours away from being hauled out as garbage). My Dad responded that it was a low-paying line of work.

At 13, I wanted to go into advertising, at the advice of one of my teachers. My Dad told me that it was a field where the supply far exceeded the demand; he envisioned a scenario where I would end up having to work in a factory, then be out of a job altogether after that factory replaced me with a robot.

(OK, now I'm about to go off on a tangent here, but it's related to the whole "what do you want to be when you grow up" subject:)

The most frustrating part came at 18, because when you go into college, you're practically forced to pick a line of work. Long story short, I decided on accounting (on account of my strength in math and my ability to pay attention to detail), but I didn't get into the University of Michigan's School of Business Administration. I had an interest in teaching but it would have required taking a whole new set of courses. So I settled on another major (Actuarial Mathematics) which is a field that is in demand, and did take advantage of my math skills and the accounting coursework I already had, but that subject was extremely difficult. So when I left college, I left with a slate that was almost as blank as the one I had when I entered college (save for a Bachelor of Sciences degree).

The first time I found a job that I both liked what I did and the pay I got, that happened in 1999, when I was almost 27 (I was a data analyst at a market research firm, sort of like the job I have today, except the job I have today is better).

That's too darn long.

The point I'd like to make is, our society should allow people as much time as they need to find the kind of vocation that suits them, regardless of what other people think, without being told they don't have the experience. I've met at least few people who wound up in a different line of work than the one they studied at college. My older brother left college as a software engineer, but is now a lawyer. My best friend graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in communications, but he became a very successful mortgage broker at Quicken Loans (he has since been promoted to a Regional Vice-President position). I have a friend who graduated with a master's degree in marketing, but has since moved on to nursing, a totally different field.

What we have today, instead, is a system where people have to go to college (and spend tons of money for the "privilege") just to get a job, then be told upon leaving college that they don't have the experience, then spend more time to find out that what they thought they wanted, wasn't for them after all. It's a waste of time and money orchestrated by Corporate America and today's colleges and universities (both of which care more about profits than people). The former doesn't want employees who want to "just try out" a certain line of work, and the latter doesn't train people for the real world. The end result is a load of unhappy, underdeveloped employees. It's a flat-out broken system and we're better off with one where people could explore vocational options--especially ones that may not have occurred to them--and go to college at the same time (and whichever employer wishes to develop that employee, would be paying for that employee's advanced education).

Volume 5, Number 5: A Novel Approach to Getting Rich

2010-02-15T23:46:00.006-05:00

It's been a slow month, blogging-wise. I am watching certain shows on TV (Past Life, Life After People, Hoarders, Operation Repo, and Kitchen Nightmares). My car needed a new alternator and I just bought one today (haven't installed it yet). It's been snowing (but it's never gotten bad enough for me to break out that snowblower I fixed last August 1). The Pistons are struggling, and the Red Wings, with 19 games left in the season, are presently fighting it out with a few other teams for the last two spots in the Western Conference playoffs (and it's looking like the Western finals will be San Jose vs. Chicago--between those two, I'd root for the Blackhawks because I think Joel Quenneville is one of the NHL's best coaches).

So I thought I'd repost a column from one of my favorite writers, Dave Barry. Dave writes for the Miami Herald, and the first time I heard of him came through this column. (Knight-Ridder Newspapers, owners of the Herald, also owned the Detroit Free Press at that time, and this column appeared in a December 1986 edition of the Free Press' weekend magazine.) Barry, along with Freep columnist Mitch Albom and Los Angeles Times columnist Mike Downey, inspired me to take Journalism in high school.

MIAMI - I figured out why I'm not getting seriously rich. I write newspaper columns. nobody ever makes newspaper columns into Major Motion Pictures starring Tom Cruise. The best you can hope for, with a newspaper column, is that people will like it enough to attach it to their refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit.

So I have written a suspense novel. It has everything. Sex. Violence. Sex. Death. Russians. Dead Russians. Here's what the newspaper critics are saying:

"A very short novel." - The Waco, Texas, Chronic Vegetable
"This is it? This is the entire novel?" - The Arkansas Dependent-Statesperson
"Not enough sex." - The Evening Gonad

No doubt you motion picture producers out there would love to see the novel these critics are raving about, so you can send me lucrative film offers. Here it is:

CHAPTER ONE
Carter Crater strode into the Oval Office. He looked like Tom Cruise, or, if he is available, Al Pacino.
Behind the desk sat the President of the United States. To his left, in the corner, stood the Secretary of State. Crater sensed that something was wrong.
"Unless we act quickly," the President said, "within the next few hours the entire world will be blown to pieces the size of Smith Brothers cough lozenges."
Crater frowned. "We had better act quickly," he said.
The President looked thoughtful. "That just might work," he said. "Use whatever means you consider necessary, including frequent casual sex."

CHAPTER TWO
In the Kremlin, General Rasputin Smirnov frowned at Colonel Joyce Brothers Karamazov Popov.
"It is absolutely essential that the Americans do not suspect anything," Smirnov said.
"Yes," agreed Popov.
"Shouldn't we be speaking Russian?" he asked.
Popov looked thoughtful.
"We should at least have accents," he said.

CHAPTER THREE
Suddenly, it struck Crater: The Oval Office doesn't HAVE corners.

CHAPTER FOUR
Some 2,347 miles away in East Berlin, a man and a woman walked briskly eastward on Volkswagenkindergartenpumpernikelstrasse. Talking intently, they did not notice the sleek black Mercedes sedan, its windows tinted almost black, as it turned off Hamburgerfrankfurterwienerschnitzelstrasse and came toward them from behind, picking up speed until, travelling at 130 kilometers per microgram, it roared into a parked garbage truck.
"Too much window tint," the woman said.

CHAPTER FIVE
Some 452.6 miles away, Crater had sex.

CHAPTER SIX
"Ach," said General Smirnov. "Zees American agent, we must keel heem."
"Dat's de troof," agreed Popov. "'Less we do, he gon' mess up de plan to blow up de worl'."

CHAPTER SEVEN
Crater handed the microfilm to crack intelligence expert Lieutenant Ensign Sergeant Commander Monica Melon.
She studied it carefully for about 15 minutes. Finally she spoke.
"There's something written on here," she said, frowning, "but it's really teensy."

CHAPTER EIGHT
Smirnov frowned at Popov. "Blimey, he said."

CHAPTER NINE
In the darkened room, Crater could see the shadowy figure who threatened to destroy the world, who had led Crater on this desperate chase across nine continents, a race filled with terror and death and women whose thighs could have been the basis for a major world religion, and all of it leading to this moment, Crater and the shadowy figure, alone in the gloom. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Crater reached for the light switch. He flicked it on. The shadowy figure turned, slowly, slowly. At last, Crater could see the figure's face.
It was a big surprise.

CHAPTER TEN
"Good job of saving the entire world," the President said. "But I have one question: How did you know Miss Prendergast never heard the cathedral bell?"
"Easy, sir," answered Crater. "You see, Lord Copperbottom is LEFT-HANDED, so the gardener couldn't possibly have taken the key from the nightstand."
"I never thought of that," said the President. He frowned at the names coming up out of the floor and drifting toward the ceiling so the audience would know who had played what parts.
"Hey," the President said. "These names are BACKWARDS."

Bye for now. Safe to say, next time I blog, I'll have a new alternator in my car, the Winter Olympics will be over and I'll be catching the last few episodes of Ben 10: Alien Force.

Volume 5, Number 4: Attitude and Incentive

2010-02-06T21:24:00.001-05:00

In my life, I've found that attitude and incentive go hand-in-hand.

What do I mean by that?

Consider the workplace--any workplace. From an employer's perspective, an employee with a good attitude is more likely to do good work, stay with the company for a long time and be considered for promotions down the road. On the employee's side of the coin, if they work towards an incentive and that incentive gets yanked away from them, or they work for a company for a long time but are not considered for promotions or even pay raises, their attitude towards their job and that company will ultimately go south.

People have lost jobs, loved ones and even freedom due to a loss of temper. What does that have to do with attitude and incentive? Well, they lost sight of what they stood to lose--the incentives--and why? Because they put their emotions ahead of everything else--a poor attitude adjustment.

When attitude and incentive are out of balance, there's something wrong. Certainly, the 2008 case of a Michigan postal worker failing to deliver mail was beyond wrong; what happened in that instance was simply criminal. Jill Hull, a mail carrier for 3 1/2 years prior to resigning on August 16, had stashed more than 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage unit. According to postal agent Douglas Mills, "When asked why she did it, Hull stated that she could not do the job but needed the job."

When people seek even greater incentive than the more-than-adequate compensation they were already getting for a job, that can be construed as another example where their attitude toward a job had changed. Consider two recent cases from the world of sports where individuals compromised their morals in order to obtain something more for themselves. NBA referee Tim Donaghy used his whistle depending on whether some oddsmaker wanted the "over" or the "under." Evidently, his six-figure salary wasn't good enough for him. And as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, baseball slugger Barry Bonds just wasn't satisfied with having the richest contract in baseball; he resorted to steroids and other performance-enhancing substances to steal the records for the most home runs in a season and the most career home runs in Major League Baseball history.

You could also apply the principle of attitude being tied to incentive to the realm of learning. I wasn't interested in learning how to repair or maintain a car until I had my own car. I had no interest in the inner workings of my washing machine until that day four years ago when it broke down. Being interested in a given subject can be construed as characteristic of a good attitude; if, on the other hand, someone says they're not interested in whatever you're talking about, that doesn't resemble a good attitude.

So next time you find yourself occupied with some great reward someone gave you, or have a bad taste in your mouth over a transaction that went sour, consider the balance between attitude and incentive. You just might see the matter in a whole new light.

Volume 5, Number 3: Web Sites I'd Like To Introduce You To

2010-01-23T23:14:00.000-05:00

I have bookmarked a whole lot of web sites over the years, and I thought I'd share some of them with you:

News/Information
News Inferno - Here's a blog for those of you who want to keep on top of the latest in product recalls, food poisoning, and other consumer safety-related issues.
The Red Tape Chronicles is a blog by MSNBC's Bob Sullivan, specializing in consumer fraud and security.

Bargains & Discounts
Sweet Free Stuff - A blog with lots of freebies you can get (mostly free samples of stuff)
Sunday Coupon Preview - I clip coupons for anything I either use or would consider buying. Coupons are the #1 reason why I buy a newspaper on Sunday. But this site helps me in two ways: First, it gives a sneak preview of next weekend's coupon inserts; second, and more importantly, there's a schedule on the site that shows which weeks have NO coupons so I know when not to waste $1.50 on a paper with no coupons in it. (There are eight weeks in 2010 where there will be no coupons, so when this year is done, this web site will have saved me $12.)
The Cheapskate - Rick Broida's blog on CNET highlights some serious bargains in electronics and software. In the past, he's found deals on HDTVs, GPS systems and Blu-Ray players.
Hot Deals Digest is another site that lists more bargains, mostly in the way of electronics.

Entertainment
Awful Library Books - This blog is good for a laugh because it discusses books that are, inexplicably, still being found in libraries. These books are either severely outdated, or were useless to begin with, and should have been "weeded out" ages ago. Like the one about horses doing drugs. What, someone actually thought that anthromorphed animals would be more effective at telling people not to do drugs than, say, human characters?!?
Bone The Fish - Remember jumptheshark.com, the site where people could discuss the point in the course of a TV series where that series went downhill? Well, the owners of jumptheshark.com decided to sell that site to TV Guide, and TV Guide basically trashed it and replaced it with some useless blog. A group of justifiably angry jumptheshark.com users started up their own site to fill the void, so now bonethefish.com is where you can tell people that American Idol will "bone the fish" when Simon Cowell leaves, or The Tonight Show has "boned the fish" now that Conan O'Brien has left. I've left comments on a whole bunch of TV series; you can read them here if you so desire.
Elbo.ws - This "music blog aggregator" is a good first place to stop if you're looking for the MP3 of a song (look for the search box near the top right corner of that web page). It indexes hundreds of thousands of music-related blog posts and MP3s. Mind you, you'll have better luck finding newer songs than older ones; for example, I couldn't find a blog that had an MP3 of "That Girl" by Steve Wonder, but I did find at least one that had an MP3 of "God's Gonna Cut You Down" by Johnny Cash.
Shit My Dad Says - Wait, some of you may already have this one among your bookmarks. This site has freaking hilarious quotes from a 73-year-old man who won't hesitate to share his wisdom with his son, no matter how painful it is. His quote from January 19, rocks: "No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain't shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist." I'd love to hear Harvey Keitel and/or Christopher Lloyd read these quotes (both are actors who recently turned 70 themselves). Thanks to Kirk Herlitz for introducing me to this site.
Fail Blog - A great blog with pictures of all kinds of things that FAIL--badly labeled products, things being used for purposes other than what they were intended for, poorly written signs, and more. Kirk introduced me to this one as well.
Lucy Knisley's Blog - One fine day a couple of years ago, YouTube had, in its "Featured Videos" section, this really cute video of this equally cute original song played on a ukelele. From that point, I made it my business to find some more stuff by the creator of that video, Lucy Knisley. This blog features lots of Lucy's wonderful drawings, comics and writings. She's published a couple of books and a CD, too (just search for Lucy Knisley on amazon.com). I like a couple of the 29 videos she uploaded to YouTube (Supervillainy and Preventive Plans for the Paranormal, both of which deserve more views than they've had; it's been a while since she's done any new videos, though).
There, I Fixed It - Kludge at its best. (For those who are asking what "kludge" is, it is generally a clumsy, hastily-improvised repair or solution.) To give you one example of kludge, check out this photo of a chair being used as a basketball backboard--just take off the legs and the cushion and attach it to a pole.

Volume 5, Number 2: Foods I Miss

2010-01-15T01:32:00.001-05:00

I was just going through a list of foods I had years ago that I wish I could find today:

Kellogg's Nut 'N Honey Crunch - Corn Flakes with a nice, relatively thick honey coating and little bits of peanut on them. Simple yet awesome. Kellogg's stopped making it in the late '80s, but later did a "Honey Nut Corn Flakes" (which just wasn't the same--not as much honey or nut). They recently started making a "Touch of Honey" version of Corn Flakes, of which I can say, at least it doesn't get soggy like regular Corn Flakes do, but anyway, darnit, I want my Nut 'N Honey Crunch back!

Campbell's Chunky Soup: Fisherman's Chowder - Apparently, I'm the only person left in the world who remembers this variety of Chunky Soup. Chunks of fish and potatoes in a creamy broth. Again, simple yet awesome. My dad introduced me to it when I was around 11 years old, and at the time, I didn't like New England Clam Chowder (I do today), so I didn't think I'd like this Fisherman's Chowder. But I more than liked it--I loved it. I tried to find it when I first went food shopping on my own (around 1995) and found out that they stopped making it around '85 or '86. I imagine it was probably more expensive to make than beef or chicken soups, but for Pete's sake, do I have to go to some expensive seafood restaurant for fish chowder?

Pierre's French Ice Cream: Mississippi Mud - Back in the '80s, there was a supermarket chain in Michigan called Great Scott! and it sold a line of ice cream called Pierre's French. Mississippi Mud was this chocolate ice cream with coffee and chocolate sauce, and I think it had bits of chocolate cake in it, too. I find it odd that Pierre's is based on Ohio, and Kroger (the chain that bought Great Scott! and took away everything good about it) is also based in Ohio, but Kroger stores in Michigan do not carry Pierre's ice cream products.

McDonald's McD.L.T. sandwich - The greatest sandwich McDonald's ever made. The concept was simple, yet brilliant--keep the cool ingredients (tomato, lettuce) separate from the hot (hamburger) ones until the customer is ready to eat the sandwich (as opposed to, say, Burger King's Whopper, in which the lettuce, tomato and pickles may be lukewarm by the time the burger is served to the customer). Then a number of events conspired to kill it. First, the container the sandwich was served in was styrofoam (this was true of all McD sandwiches at the time, but the McD.L.T. container used twice as much styrofoam because it had two compartments). Second, there was a big anti-fat movement that was apparently spearheaded by a bunch of paranoid hypochondriacs, because when McD pulled the McD.L.T., they replaced it with... the McLean Deluxe (which was basically crap). The only complaint I ever had with McD.L.T. was that they kept putting the cheese on the "cool" side when it should have been on the "hot" side, but that's just me nitpicking (I prefer the cheese on my cheeseburger to be at least somewhat melted).

Taco Bell Fajita Wraps - What the McD.L.T. was to McDonalds, that's what Fajita Wraps were to Taco Bell: the best thing they had going. Cuts of real meat and fresh veggies (as opposed to the liquefied beef and bagged shredded lettuce they generally use in their tacos). (Now, I suppose I could try making something like that at home, but that's beside the point.)

Campbell's Chunky Soup: BBQ Seasoned Burger - They introduced this one in 2006. It instantly became one of my favorite varieties. Apparently it wasn't popular because they didn't make it for long. It had beef (similar to the beef they use in the Sirloin Burger version), potatoes, corn, beans, and celery in a mild barbecue sauce.

Campbell's Chunky Soup: Pepper Steak - This one, they recently stopped making; until then, they had been making this variety since the '80s. You'd think someone else would fill whatever "niches" Campbell's has abandoned by making this and the other two ex-Chunky Soups I mentioned in this blog entry, but that hasn't happened yet.

Fresca (the one with saccharin in it that they made in the '70s) - I had the saccharin version of Fresca and I enjoyed the taste of it. Thing is, after all the findings about saccharin being bad for one's health, the makers of Fresca decided to replace it with aspartame (aka NutraSweet). Bad move. Aspartame has a terrible aftertaste and I don't know anyone could drink any soda with an aftertaste like that. Heck, I'd wish they'd make one with sugar (or high fructose corn syrup, at least) and rename the aspartame-sweetened one "Fresca Light."

Mr. Phipps Pretzel Chips - Nabisco made these in the early '90s with the idea that the best part of a hard pretzel is the crispy outside. Very addicting. (Snack Factory Pretzel Crisps are a good subsitute, but I just liked the taste of the Mr. Phipps Pretzel Chips better.)

Apple Newtons - Back in the '80s (there's that phrase again), Nabisco decided to wrap that soft cake they were using for their Fig Newtons around other fruit fillings, like strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and apple. Apple Newtons were addicting as well, but sadly, Nabisco stopped making them.

Nabisco Ideal Bars - Peanut butter on cookies, covered in chocolate. Tasted WAY better than my lame description. Angie from Georgia wrote on this board: "When I was growing up my mother would buy Ideal bars and hide them... when [I and my siblings] found them they didn't last too long. My mom would be so mad she would spank our butts... They were worth every whack! Please bring them back, my mom is too old to catch us now!"

Carnation Breakfast Bars - You've heard of Instant Breakfast for years, but back in the '70s and '80s, they had Breakfast Bars. They came in flavors like Chocolate and Peanut Butter and were chocolate-coated, and I really liked how they tasted, but to boot, they also generally had more nutritional value than your typical bowl of cereal. Other companies have made nutritional bars (Slim Fast, Kellogg's Krave), but they'd be better off to try to replicate the original Breakfast Bars.

Crystal Pepsi (the second of the two formulas they had) - The formula Pepsi had when they first came out with it in 1993 was too bitter, but they went to a "citrus cola" formula in '94 and that was a hit in my book. Most sodas, I generally sip, but Crystal Pepsi, I could chug. Then suddenly, Pepsi stopped making it.

Hostess Choco-Bliss - Chocolate overkill in the form of two layers of chocolate cake with chocolate creme filling in between, with a chocolate frosting on top of that. You can find commercials for it on YouTube, like this one.

Hershey's Cookies & Mint chocolate bar - To be fair to Hershey, this was a limited edition. But they should make it a permanent addition to their product line.

Hostess Banana Twinkies - Also a limited edition, and the next time they have them, I'll buy a package; the last time Hostess made these (2005, I think, around the time Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong came out), I didn't exactly have the income to justify spending a few bucks on junk food.

Volume 5, Number 1: Credit and Kids

2010-01-08T15:14:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago, I came across this eye-opener of a story: Hasbro, the maker of game of LIFE, which had used fake money since 1960, introduced a "Twists and Turns" version featuring a Visa-branded card!

Is a toy credit card any different from those candy cigarettes that I thought were a thing of the past (yet, shockingly, they're still around)?

Let me explain. Credit cards and cigarettes both have a terrible downside to them (deep debt for the former; health problems for the latter). It's one thing for companies to market fake toy imitations of the real things adults have. But I draw the line when the real thing has such a downside to it.

The fake money is just fine--it's simple for kids to understand; you use it to buy things, and once you use it, it's gone, so you have to use it wisely. The downside for credit cards, on the other hand, is much worse: They give you the ability to spend money that you don't really have. There is an element of responsibility involved that most children don't even grasp as teenagers.

What's even scarier, children are learning about credit cards on their own.

One of my friends on Facebook has a daughter, who asked for a credit card for Christmas. She said, "Thankfully my husband's been telling her every time she asks for a credit card that she can't have one until she's 18. I think we need to start teaching her now to be responsible with her money. I'm hoping she'll also learn a bit from us since we're saving up for things around the house and not just buying like mad on credit."

Even toddlers are grasping the concept of credit cards.

I added that not only do children need to learn how to be responsible with money, but unlike past generations, today's children will, later in life, will have the added challenge of learning how to use credit responsibly. The temptation to use credit irresponsibly is tremendous, especially in a world where governments and corporations do "deficit spending" on a regular basis.

My Facebook friend said, "Exactly! That's one of the things that really bothers me. How can anyone expect our children to learn fiscal responsibility when our government and various large corporations can't set a good example? That makes the children think Mom and Dad are just being boring old fuddy duddy penny pinchers, (as opposed to) financially responsibile people."

The one way that I fear people use credit irresponsibly is this: they could theoretically treat credit cards as "hypothetical future money"; they could also--again, theoretically--keep their creditors at bay by juggling credit card balances (e.g. using a balance transfer from Card A to pay Card B, using a credit card check from Card C to pay Card A, and taking a cash advance out on Card B to pay Card C; this just boils down to "robbing Peter to pay Paul" and temporarily hiding their debt problems).

And in the end, is it all that different from what Enron did a decade ago--spending money they never had to look like a much bigger, much more profitable company than they really were, then hiding those debts through various means such as legal loopholes and "special purpose entities"?

If there's any consolation, it's that credit cards banks don't hand out credit lines the way they did in the '90s and the early to mid-2000s. But the elements of responsibility and temptation will always be there no matter what.

Volume 4, Number 13: Mark's Shopping List For the Near Future

2010-01-07T20:07:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this on Facebook as a note on December 31, 2009.)

Among the hundreds of people who lost money investing with Bernard Madoff, there is a woman by the name of Alexandra Penney. An accomplished author and the former editor of Self magazine, Alexandra took it upon herself to write a series of columns--a blog of sorts, if you will--called The Bag Lady Papers.

These columns, I thought, were going to be about coping in the aftermath of the Madoff scam--the "culture shock" of going from being rich to having to re-evaluate her priorities every time she wanted to buy something, her takes on the Madoff investigation and trial--and for the most part, her earlier columns did just that.

But I was hoping her newer columns would present perspectives on just what the most important things in life really are, and that hasn't been the case. Instead, they have smacked of the same longing for the past--croissants at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, the ability to limit one's purchases "strictly to top-quality name-brand stuff," not having to ride the subway, and so on.

In particular, I was hoping her newest column would be a "One Year Later: A Look Back, and Lessons Learned" sort of deal. Nope. Instead, she published a "fantasy shopping list" of things she could have bought if she hadn't invested with "the M.F." It includes pashmina shawls in every color imagineable (I'm thinking to myself: wait 'till she gets one in "snot" or "puke" and I'll bet she changes her tune), a purse that may well cost more than what I spent to buy my car a year and a half ago, and an Aston Martin that runs well over double what my house cost.

With that in mind, here is a shopping list of my own. These are all things I'd love to buy this year, but unless I win a lottery or get an unexpected inheritance, I'll have to settle on a few this year and take care of the rest over the next 5-10 years.

1. A new gas range. I am getting one next spring, no bones about it. My old one is 43 years old, the "towel bar" handle fell off the oven door ages ago, and every so often, a pilot light will go out and I have to re-light it (this sack of crap has three such lights--one for the left stove burners, one for the right stove burners, and one for the oven). I don't ask for much in a new range, as long as the oven has a window I can see through and a light (so I don't burn anything in there) and the oven and burners ignite right away.

2. A new garage door. Mine is the old kind that swings out and uses those huge, dangerous springs. It works just fine except for one problem: In recent winters, my garage floor has risen so the door will no longer shut all the way. It is also hard to open at times.

3. A new driveway. The previous owners of my house had a GMC Suburban, and the driveway shows it. There are pits and valleys from years of being driven on and sat on by said Suburban, so it's not a nice and flat driveway. There are times when I think I'm going off the driveway when all I've done is hit one of those pits or valleys. No fun. This one will run into the thousands of dollars because this driveway is 80 feet long.

4. A remodeled kitchen. Basically, the cabinets are crap, the floor is puke, the countertop is crap, the light fixture is as outdated as the range, and the previous owner of my house did this idiotic thing: he installed a flourescent light above the sink. The only good things in it right now are the dishwasher (even if it is 12 years old now) and the fridge (which I bought two years ago to replace another 40+-year-old sack of crap).

5. A remodeled bathroom. My current one is a mishmash of crap. Gray tiles, an off-white bath surround, wood towel bars from 1985, crappy wicker cabinets above the toilet and by the sink, a bathtub in sore need of reglazing, and the vanity is both outdated and a poor use of space. I wouldn't mind if the contractor told me he'd have to rip out everything but the walls and start over from there. It really sucks.

6. A high def--no, wait, I just bought an HDTV a few weeks ago for my living room, so strike that from the list. But I'll be on the lookout for a smaller (19") one for my bedroom.

7. A digital camera that can run on ordinary AA alkaline batteries. This may not seem like a big deal, but the one I have right now cannot take more than a few pictures without telling me the batteries are low and promptly shutting off. Then I test the batteries and they still have juice in them. How horribly inconvenient. I've been able to make do with that because I don't use cameras a whole lot to begin with.

8. New concrete steps for my front porch. The ones I have are a) crappy-looking and beat-up and b) too darn steep. My mother could dislocate a hip going down those steps! I have two 10"-deep steps when I really need three 7" steps. This item is another one that I'd like to cross off the list in 2010.

9. Seeing as Alexandra wants an Aston Martin DBS Volante, I want you to know that I like that new 2010 Buick LaCrosse. I like the styling of it. I really like how it looks in silver. I'll certainly be on the lookout for one in 2013 (when my current car hits the dreaded age of 11). Whaddaya mean only old folks drive Buicks?

10. Speaking of my current car, three of the tires on my car will be six years old in about 40 weeks. How do I know this? Well, last year, I came across an ABC News report about the dangers of driving on old tires, regardless of the wear on the treads. To my horror, three of the tires on my car--which the previous owner had bought as "new" in January 2007--were actually made in October of 2004. The British Rubber Manufacturers Association warned in 2001 that "unused tyres [sic] should not be put into service if they are over 6 years old." Bottom line, I will have to replace all of the tires.

I look back on her first column and she says she lost forty years of her life savings to Madoff. I'm sorry she lost that much, but at the same time, I wish I could say I ever was able to save that much. Due to problems I had earlier this decade, my savings pretty much only go back to 2006. Even today when I am doing the best I ever did, I save what I can, and that includes things like clipping coupons and trying to combine errands in as few trips as possible (to save gas), because you never know when that next "rainy day" will come... or how long it will rain.

Volume 4, Number 12: Kitchen Nightmares Season 3

2010-01-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this as a note on Facebook on December 24, 2009.)

I've recently read that the third season of Kitchen Nightmares will begin a little over a month from now, on January 29.

Here are five restaurants that will be featured over the course of season 3:

Lido di Manhattan in Manhattan Beach, CA
http://foodandwineblog.thefoodietraveler.com/2009/08/25/my-first-kitchen-nightmares-experience-before-and-after.aspx
http://www.southbayfoodies.com/2009/07/17/gordon-ramsay-brings-kitchen-nightmares-to-manhattan-beach/

Le Bistro in Lighthouse Point, FL
Anna Vincenzo's Ristorante Italiano in Boca Raton, FL
http://www.examiner.com/x-11474-Miami-Reality-TV-Examiner~y2009m6d30-Hells-Kitchen-star-bringing-new-show-to-South-Florida

Fleming: A Taste of Denmark in Miami, FL
http://www.buddytv.com/articles/hells-kitchen/hells-kitchen-star-in-town-for-29723.aspx
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/shortorder/2009/07/on_set_at_pinecrest_gardens_wi.php

Hot Potato Cafe in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, PA
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/the-insider/Hot_Potato_Cafes_new_look_and_menu.html

Unlike season 2, Gordon will not be visiting the Midwestern U.S. You may recall that in 2008, he tackled two Michigan restaurants, along with one in South Bend, Indiana and another near Chicago.

I hope the restaurants he tries to save are, collectively, more successful than the group he visited in season 2. Of the 12 he dealt with over the course of that season, at least half of them are closed (J. Willy's, Fiesta Sunrise, The Black Pearl, Hannah and Mason's, Sabatiello's, Cafe 36) and another was sold (Jack's Waterfront Restaurant). But that's due mainly to the crappy state of the economy, where mom-and-pop businesses of all kinds are folding. Also, at least two of the closed restaurants failed to stick to Gordon's advice (Hannah and Mason's and Fiesta Sunrise).

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Volume 4, Number 11: Even More Ideas For TV Shows

2010-01-07T19:57:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this as a note on Facebook on September 16, 2009.)

One of my Facebook friends has been sharing his ideas for stories, so I thought I'd share two of my more recent TV show ideas:

Turning the Tables: Bill Hurdle is a father who's struggling to raise a family with the economy the way it is now, and he gets so sick and tired of the struggle that he decides to run for public office in an effort to fight an increasingly callous and uncaring Corporate America, a government that's increasingly bought and paid for by Corporate America, and the complacency running rampant in today's society. Think "Life Goes On" (a socially aware family drama) meets political sitcoms (like "Benson," in which Governor Gatling had left a paper mill management job to run for office despite being a widower and having to raise a daughter). (The working title comes from the lyrics for the Tracy Chapman song, "Talkin' About a Revolution"--And finally, the tables are starting to turn...)

Frankly Stark: Frank Stark, "the Almost-Ad Man," comes up with ads that "don't quite cut it" with his clients, but then the commercials that do make it to TV are SO close to his that you might as well say his ideas were stolen. Example: He does a Lectric Shave commercial where the whiskers scream as the electric razor "lops off" their "heads" in a bloody massacre like looks like something out of a Rob Zombie movie. Or that Gillette Fusion commercial where the Fusion head begs the razor's user to end its life due to anxieties about not being able to give said user the quality shave he deserves. Each episode would center around a near-success like that.

Volume 4, Number 10: Reflections on 9/11

2010-01-07T19:50:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally published this as a note on Facebook on September 11, 2009.)

At 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, a plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

As TV news crews scrambled to cover what appeared to be a horrific accident, I was still asleep.

Seventeen minutes later, with TV news cameras trained on the towers, another plane slammed into the south tower.

As millions of viewers recoiled in shock, I was in the shower.

At 9:37 A.M., a third plane plowed into the Pentagon.

By then, I was getting ready for what seemed to be another ordinary day at the office. At that point, the big news story was that I had more work to do on a presentation for a client.

I did not hear about the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on American soil until I was driving to work, westbound on I-696. The DJ on the radio station I was listening to broke into the music to inform listeners about hijacked planes flying into the Pentagon and both towers of the World Trade Center, describing what had happened as "surreal," like it was in a movie, before switching to an ABC Radio news feed.

Several thoughts flashed through my mind:

I remembered hearing that the Columbine High School gunmen--Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold--wrote in a journal they kept about wanting to hijack a plane and crash it in New York City. (Harris and Klebold shot and killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives on April 20, 1999.) Now this sick fantasy had been crystallized.

Could other planes may be in the air, on their way to more targets?

Might the perpetrators might turn out to be extremely disgruntled Americans, not Middle Eastern terrorists? I recalled that on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, people were quick to blame the latter until we met the enemy... and it was one of our own, Timothy McVeigh. I recalled that we were 10 months removed from the most controversial presidential election in U.S. history, in which George W. Bush beat out Al Gore by the narrowest of margins--did some extreme left-wing zealots come up with this evil plan to attack symbols of corporate greed (the WTC) and excessive military spending (the Pentagon)?

As I parked at the building where I worked at the time, I wondered, will things be any worse? I thought to myself, For all I know, the country could be under martial law when I get into the office.

When I walked into work, I headed straight for a spare office where we had a TV set up. Co-workers were already there, watching the twin towers burn like sick, grotesque parodies of cigarettes.

By that time, United Airlines Flight 93 nosedived into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the result of passengers fighting back to keep their hijackers from mounting another attack on the nation's capital.

Also, a new disaster reared its ugly head. I overheard a report that one of the towers had just collapsed. "What?!" I exclaimed in shock. It seemed absolutely inconceivable--hearing about planes flying into skyscrapers is horrible enough. But then a tower collapses? I had never even conceived of a controlled demolition of a skyscraper, much less a progressive collapse of one. Skyscrapers, by their very nature, are not designed to be demolished. As we watched a replay of the collapse (a wide shot angle that appeared to be taken from a helicopter several miles away), it looked more like the tower had just turned to dust.

Information on the attacks trickled in very slowly, and what we information we did get was mixed in with a good deal of misinformation. Early on, United Airlines Flight 175--the plane that hit the south tower--was unaccounted for and was thought to be still in the air. At least one report indicated that American Airlines Flight 77 hit the south tower, but it was later discovered to be the plane that hit the Pentagon. I seem to remember hearing that morning that one plane had crashed in Cleveland and another was hijacked over Pittsburgh (when, in fact, United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked over Cleveland and crashed outside of Pittsburgh). I hoped that wherever that crash was, that there would be survivors who could shed some light on what the hell was happening. Numerous sources reported an explosion at the Capitol building. The Howard Stern radio show (admittedly not a news source; I am adding this to further illustrate how much misinformation there was) reported that a third plane struck the south tower, and that was what caused it to collapse. I also recall that when I mentioned to Krissy that it was a plane that crashed into the Pentagon, she said that she heard it was a helicopter (at which point I mentioned that I heard that pieces of the plane's tail were found in the wreckage).

Even as the workday neared its end, I had so little information that I still refused to rule out the possibility of a domestic attack. After all, the previous two terrorist acts to take place on American soil (the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine High School shootings) were carried out by Americans. The flights were domestic, the carriers were domestic. Only when I heard that two flight attendants on American Flight 11 had the presence of mind to relay the seat numbers of the hijackers, all of whom turned out to be Al-Qaeda operatives who were living in the United States on student or tourist visas, did I rule out that possibility.

At home that night, I made a point of turning on CNN and recording as much as I could that night. (Documenting these events was important to me because I wanted to show it to my children, and tell them about these tall buildings that once stood mightily over a big city, and the attacks that destroyed them.) I saw some more video of the attacks on the World Trade Center. One video in particular, shot from Battery Park, gave a better impression of the size of the second plane as it struck the south tower, and it looked as though it passed through the south wall like a ghost just before it exploded. Other shots showed office paper floating down like a sick, horrible mockery of a ticker tape parade.

People were quick to compare it to Pearl Harbor (mainly because each attack was unexpected and forever changed the American sense of isolation and security). But this was much worse. In 1941, Pearl Harbor was a military outpost, and Hawaii wasn't even a state at the time. This attack took place on the American mainland, and the weapons were not old Soviet guns or bombs, but America's own airlines (two United Airlines flights and two American Airlines flights were hijacked).

I should be happy just to be alive every day from now on. It's hard to fathom boarding a plane one morning, whether it's to attend some business conference or see loved ones, and less than an hour afterwards, the plane is under the control of a few religious fanatics and it will soon slam into a building. It's hard to imagine being at work and seeing a plane hurtling towards your office at 500 miles per hour.

Our country has never been more violated, or looked more fallible, than it was that day. And the enemy is not another country, or communism, or some homespun militia group, or even drug lords from South America; simply put, the enemy is terrorism.

I also find a few parallels between the World Trade Center disaster and the sinking of Titanic in 1912. Both were the first disasters of their respective centuries, and both concerned engineering achievements that met their demise due to unforeseen circumstances. Both were designed to survive certain disasters (Titanic could float after being struck broadside by another ship, the worst possible scenario at that time; the World Trade Center was designed to survive the hit of a Boeing 707, the largest commercial jet when it was designed in the 1960s, as well as withstand heavy winds). Terrorist threats simply not exist in the 1960s, and designing a skyscraper to survive a 10,000-gallon Molotov cocktail was absurd. In Titanic's case, the thought of the ship grinding against an iceberg was just as unthinkable. Evacuations in both disasters were difficult (for Titanic, it was due to an insufficiency of lifeboats; in the World Trade Center, all but a few people above the explosions got out, and the plane crashes destroyed all of the elevator shafts, meaning that the stairwells were the only way out).

In the meantime, I continue to collect documentaries and footage pertaining to these attacks. As with the Holocaust, we cannot let these events go gently into the past; we must drag them out to show our children and our grandchildren. We must tell them about people who abused the freedom we gave them, the people whose lives they took, and two towering buildings that once stood proudly for three decades before evil struck.

Volume 4, Number 9: Still More Miscellaneous Mumbo-Jumbo

2010-01-07T19:41:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! blog on September 8, 2009.)

My latest achievement: Giving new life to a 30-year-old snowblower. I rescued it from the garbage on July 29 and, in the process of searching for a manual for it online, came across this web site, where another guy had troubles with the same snowblower and gave step-by-step instructions showing how he was able to fix it. After about 50 unsuccessful attempts to start mine, I decided I had nothing to lose and so I might as well check out that web site. A few hours later, I have a working snowblower for the first time since I moved to my house nine years ago. (The ad below is further proof of how old it is--it's from a September 1980 newspaper--and it also gives you some idea of what it looks like.)

I'm overweight and it reminds me of something I heard somewhere: "You could lose weight if you leave a little food on your plate." Actually, you could do the same if you cooked less food beforehand, or better yet, bought less food at the supermarket to begin with! It's just frigging wasteful to leave food on your plate; it meant you cooked too much food, and besides, there are people starving everywhere, including here in America.

When it comes to buying electronics, there are certain brands I swear by (Panasonic, Sony, JVC) and brands I've had bad experiences with (Apex, Funai). Unfortunately, Philips Magnavox recently decided to have Funai make all their HDTVs and DVD players so I will have to add Philips to the verboten list.

Shows I've been watching as of late: Hoarders (A&E, Monday nights at 10); Operation Repo (TruTV, usually on Mondays); Drop Dead Diva (Lifetime, Sunday nights at 9--yes, isn't that something, I'm actually watching a Lifetime show) and of course, Hell's Kitchen (Tuesdays at 8 on Fox). That first show is about people who compulsively hoard stuff to the point that their houses turn into big garbage dumps. Operation Repo chronicles the goings-on at an LA repo company--fighting, swearing and all-out idiocy abound. Drop Dead Diva--a vapid model is killed in a car accident and her soul gets transferred into the body of a smart but, er, heavy-set lawyer and I like fantasy shows like that.

Kitchen Nightmares' third season will start airing this fall (probably after the World Series is finished) and I've heard that Gordon Ramsay will try to turn around restaurants in Miami and Philadelphia as well as New York and LA. Being Erica returns in two weeks on CBC, too. I miss Life On Mars and wish ABC hadn't cancelled the show; prior to that cancellation, I had been looking forward to seeing Sam Tyler continue to cope with being stuck 35 years in the past as 1973 became... 1974.

Volume 4, Number 8: Dodgy Dealings in the World of VOIP

2010-01-07T19:34:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! blog in July 2009.)

I thought I'd go on http://www.voipreview.org/ (a web site dedicated to informing consumers about the various voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, providers out there) to find out what Zingo Telecom was up to. ZingoTel was the VOIP provider that I had from October 2006 through October 2007; they were great in the beginning, but then they moved their technical support and customer service to India in January 2007 and the quality of their service went down the toilet after that.

When I left them in 2007, I told them they should move those departments back to North America if they wanted any chance of sustaining their business. Below is an excerpt from one of my last e-mails to ZingoTel:

"Maybe you weren't getting as many subscribers as you had expected, and needed to cut costs, but all I have to say is, you get what you pay for."

Obviously, that plea went in one ear and bounced back out the same ear.

Instead, they not only kept the technical support and customer service in India, but they proceeded to go out of business with no notice whatsoever, then give their customers' e-mail addresses to a newly-formed company.

According to what I've read on this forum, Miracle Telecom was formed on April 27, 2009. Miracle Telecom, like ZingoTel, has corporate offices in the US but has its technical support and customer service in India. It also uses the same verbiage in its user agreements as ZingoTel did. Around May 20, ZingoTel went out of business and its customers received e-mails from MiracleTel inviting them to "switch to MiracleTel" when, for all intents and purposes, they're really the same company.

Really shady stuff going on here. If you're looking for a VOIP provider, avoid Miracle Telecom.

Volume 4, Number 7: New Beginnings

2010-01-07T19:23:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! blog on June 1, 2009.)

June 1 is not just the beginning of a new month. It also marks a new beginning for GM (which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning) and a new place for this blog (which is still on Yahoo!, but it's now on profiles.yahoo.com--which lets me edit blog entries without said entries disappearing when I click "Post Entry" the way Yahoo! 360 had been doing).

Let's see, maybe I should review what's been going on:

News: Detroit's got a new mayor in Dave Bing (never mind that he's only serving out the remainder of Kwame Kilpatrick's term, because Detroit's City Charter forced the city to spend $3 million to hold a desperately unneeded election; it would have been better to just let Ken Cockrell Jr. serve out the remainder of the term).

Sports: The Detroit Lions shelled out $41.7 million in guaranteed money to Matt Stafford to kick off the NFL Draft, but then when they have the chance to protect that investment with offensive tackle Michael Oher (who was available when the 20th pick came up), they pass him up?! Don't get me wrong, Brandon Pettigrew is a very good value, but this year's draft was far deeper at tight end than at tackle (for example, the Lions could have taken Shawn Nelson from Southern Miss in Round 3). They also passed up LBs Rey Maualuga and James Laurinatis in Round 2. On a happier note, the Red Wings are back in the Stanley Cup Finals (and in fact, are up 2 games to none in their rematch against the Pittsburgh Penguins).

Fantasy sports: In baseball, my Smackdown Unlimited is having a terrible season due to bad pitching. In football, my Detroit Vipers--defending TUFF Bowl Champions--had their draft last month. Keep in mind, this league only uses offensive players--quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends and kickers. I took TE Brandon Pettigrew, RB Mike Goodson, WR Ramses Barden, RB Frank "The Tank" Summers and QB Rhett Bomar. You can read about them and the other 59 players taken in the draft here.

Entertainment: I'm looking forward to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which opens July 15, the day after my birthday; never mind that I still would have preferred it to have come out last November). Also next month, the sixth season of Hell's Kitchen begins.

Volume 4, Number 6: Detroit's Blight Problems... and a Pay-Per-View Solution

2010-01-07T19:06:00.000-05:00

(Note: I posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on May 20, 2009.)

In a previous blog entry (Kwame Is Out!), I touched upon the urban blight that is abundant in Detroit--the abandoned warehouses, factories, houses and other buildings that need to be torn down. You already know about this, it's old news. You've heard about the train depot in recent news, and may have read about such relics as the old Studebaker-Packard plant. I drove down 7 Mile Road in '94 (my father's drugstore used to be by 7 and Livernois) and saw nothing but long stretches of abandoned buildings that once housed specialty stores and other small businesses.

The city has enough buildings for the population it once had (around 2 million in 1950), but now only has around 930,000 people; there's no excuse not to destroy buildings no longer usable or fit for human habitation. If the city's so-called leadership would tear them down, that would be fantastic.

Instead, we have buildings decaying for years before ultimately being torn down (like the Hudson's Department Store building, which did nothing but gather moss for 15 years before finally being imploded in 1998)--if they get torn down at all. The train depot has gotten to the point that restoring it would cost much more than the building is worth--and why restore it if there's no purpose for the building to serve afterwards? Same way with Tiger Stadium. Every other stadium--Ebbetts Field, Forbes Field, all those multipurpose round stadiums that got built in the '70s, they all got demolished regardless of the sentimental value attached to them. With Tiger Stadium, part of it is still standing while people waste time and money trying to preserve it. I am reminded of old Olympia Stadium (where the Red Wings used to play before they moved to Joe Louis Arena in the late '70s); that arena, too, sat for about eight years before finally being demolished.

Solution? Create a pay-per-view event where a whole bunch of Detroit buildings are demolished in quick succession over the course of three hours--the train depot, Tiger Stadium, the Studebaker-Packard plant, and as for that Harper/Piquette/Mansur/Hastings grayfield I talked about in the aforementioned "Kwame Is Out!" blog entry, you could have an aerial bombing... if you think I'm joking, just remember that in 1985, Vince McMahon used pay-per-view to turn what once was a low-rent form of television (pro wrestling) into a multi-million dollar industry. I'm sure a lot of suburbanites have been willing to pay good money to see Detroit make some progress, and a pay-per-view like this is a more realistic way for the city to raise sorely-needed funds than, say, trying to get people to come back to Detroit as it stands right now.

Volume 4, Number 5: Life On Mars Cut Short

2010-01-07T18:55:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on March 17, 2009.)

I got word the other day that ABC has cancelled Life On Mars. The only good news arising out of all this is that ABC told its producers now so that they can plan a series finale (as opposed to cancelling the series with so many loose ends untied, which is what happens with most TV shows). ABC also canned Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone, but did not give their producers the opportunity to tie up their "loose ends."

Another fan of LOM reminded me how it stunk that ABC pulled the series off its schedule for two months, which undoubtedly hurt LOM's ratings upon its return in late January; when it did return, they aired episodes out of sequence (which was particularly galling because the previous episode was the first part of a 2-part episode).

Then again, I should know better than to trust ABC. Back in 1991, Robert Iger had just become head of ABC Entertainment when he decided to trash a bunch of shows his predecessor (Brandon Stoddard) put on the schedule (Gabriel's Fire, China Beach); he also never gave Life Goes On a chance, first by keeping it on Sunday nights at 7pm (opposite CBS' 60 Minutes) instead of moving it to a better timeslot, then by shortening its final season to 17 episodes (during which LGO was pre-empted at least twice in favor of political infomercials). Curiously, although ABC slipped to third place among the broadcast networks on Iger's watch (it had risen to second under Stoddard), Iger has since become the head honcho at ABC's parent company, The Walt Disney Company. Over the years, it's become obvious that Iger prefers low-cost, high-profit programming (like America's Funniest Videos, and then look at the Disney Channel, which features kiddie sitcoms as Hannah Montana, That's So Raven and Wizards of Waverly Place; and then there are those High School Musical movies) over very good but relatively expensive storytelling.

That's not to say the other networks haven't been perfect themselves. CBS screwed Christy out of what could have been a long run, first by pulling it off the schedule, then putting it on different nights of this week, then cancelling it in favor of such garbage as Central Park West (an utterly forgettable rip-off of Fox soap Melrose Place); NBC canned a great political sitcom called The Powers That Be in the early '90s; Fox drew the ire of millions by cancelling Firefly and Arrested Development before their time; and (this is a personal wish of mine) UPN should have given the Leonard Nimoy-produced action/fantasy series Deadly Games more than just 12 episodes. But the execs behind those decisions are gone. (I think so, anyway.) Iger isn't.

Volume 4, Number 4: More Assorted Odd Thoughts & Ideas

2010-01-07T18:26:00.001-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog in on February 24, 2009.)

First, a quick update on my previous blog entry: 11 days ago, Peanut Corporation of America filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and shut down its last remaining plant (in Suffolk, Virginia). Jean Halloran, the director of Consumers Union, stated in response, "It is unacceptable for corporations to put consumers' health at risk and then simply declare bankruptcy and go out of business when they get caught. PCA's declaration of bankruptcy will, among other things, shield it from liability suits filed by consumers who became sick or whose loved ones died as a result of eating PCA's peanut products."

Now, for more odd thoughts and ideas:

I'm pissed off that Ryan Seacrest has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but Gene Wilder doesn't. What the f&#* has Seacrest done?
I don't believe that nice guys finish last... but it sure seems like they hardly ever finish first and pricks never finish last.
I've seen potato and onion pierogies, and potato and cheese pierogies. What I'd like to see is one with onion, cheese, bacon and chives (so it would be more like a baked potato--just have some sour cream to dip 'em in, that would be an excellent side dish).

I've been watching Life On Mars for a few months now, and I can imagine Harvey Keitel uttering the lines made famous three decades ago by Karl Malden: "It could happen to you. So don't carry cash, carry American Express Travelers Cheques. Don't leave home without them." I mean, Malden did a '70s TV cop show (The Streets of San Francisco); Life On Mars (another cop show) is set in 1973. Malden was famous for his nose; Keitel's character in Life On Mars has said "The nose knows" in at least a couple of episodes. Malden was around 60 when "The Streets of San Francisco" began airing in 1972; Keitel will turn 70 later this year. Finally, both men are alumni of the famous Actors Studio Drama School.
Anyone ever try mixing orange soda and Vernors together? I've done that, although it's been years. (I think it's 1 part orange to 1 part Vernors, but maybe it was 3 parts orange to 2 parts Vernors.) Think of the result as a "spiced orange" soda.
You know how the two oldest NFL teams to never appear in a Super Bowl are the Lions and the Browns? They have more in common than that. In the post-merger era, both accomplished next to nothing (the Lions have one playoff victory; the Browns have four). Both took on new owners in the early 1960s who have drawn the ire of their fans (William Clay Ford with the Lions, Art Modell because he moved his team in 1995). Both cities have suffered economic and population declines in recent years. Also, in 1980, wide receiver Ahmad Rashad of the Minnesota Vikings caught a game-winning TD pass in Week 15. If it wasn't for that catch, the Lions would have won the NFC Central and the Vikings would have been out of the NFC playoffs. Who'd Rashad make that catch against? Yep, the Cleveland Browns, who incidentally blew a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter of that game. For all those reasons, when anyone asks me what team I'd root for if the Lions left Detroit, I'd answer "the Cleveland Browns" without hesitation. They're basically Detroit's AFC team.
Ever heard of jumping the shark? Well, Subway has created a commercial that has jumped the shark. I like the return of the $5 footlong special, but a musical dance number of the "Five... five dollar... five dollar footlong" jingle at the front counter? That's just nuts.
About a year ago I e-mailed Hostess with the suggestion that they come out with Ding Dongs that have mint creme (as opposed to the usual vanilla creme) in them. They were kind enough to send me a coupon for any Hostess product free. Recently, another idea came up: What about Ding Dongs with a dark chocolate coating on the outside and coconut creme on the inside? The idea was inspired by those dark chocolate-coated coconut patties my dad used to get as part of this shipment of Indian River grapefruits and oranges. Gosh, those were good times.
Some time ago, I admitted that the first time I heard of Hell's Kitchen, I thought it was an American adaptation of the British sitcom "Chef!" (which starred Jamaican-British comedian Lenny Henry as Gareth Blackstock, who predates Gordon Ramsay by at least seven years; like Ramsay, Chef Blackstock is at the top of his profession and hurls all kinds of insults and invective at everybody under him in an effort to get them to do their best). And it just hit me--a "Chef!" movie where Chef Blackstock has sold Le Chateau Anglais due to economic problems and is looking to become head chef at another restaurant, and the only restaurant offering him a job is one straight out of Kitchen Nightmares.
Finally, I'm glad someone did an ad advising people how stupid it is to use the word "gay" where they should be using words like "wrong," "crazy" or, yes, "stupid" instead. I'd like to see a similar set of ads telling people to please stop using the word "retarded" in a similar fashion as that just serves to offend mentally-challenged people.
TV show drinking games. They're generally set up to favor the big, fat guys who have so much body mass that they need more alcohol to be drunk than a relatively small, skinny woman. But I have an idea: I would set it up so that for a certain event, only one person takes a drink. You write down each event on an index card (e.g. in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Captain Picard says 'Thank you, Mr. Data,' +1 drink" on one card, "Anyone says 'Shut up, Wesley,' +1 drink" on another, "Commander Riker repeats part what someone else says immediately after hearing it, +2 drinks" on another, and so on). Then you shuffle the cards and distribute them so that each person gets a different set of events.

Volume 4, Number 3: Parnell's (Evident Lack of) Pride

2010-01-07T17:36:00.001-05:00

(Note: I originally published this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on February 11, 2009.)

Anyone who reads my blog--OK, maybe there are three of you--knows that I hate food poisoning, having had two bouts with bad restaurant food that made me severely nauseous. Past blog entries have touched upon the Chinese tainting milk and gluten with melamine in order to pass tests for protein content, a massive 143 million-pound recall of ground beef, and the bagged spinach crisis of 2006.

I had not blogged about the no-longer-so-recent matter involving the Peanut Corporation of America for a few reasons. One is that I've been busy at work; the other is that new developments keep coming up in that case. First it was that PCA was re-testing products that tested positive for salmonella, then shipping them once they tested negative at another lab. Then there was the report of a shipment of PCA product that was rejected in Canada and then could not be allowed back into the US because it contained a filthy, putrid or decomposed substance.” Then there was the matter of a plant in Texas operating for four years without a license or any inspections whatsoever.

But earlier today came the worst story yet. The head of the PCA, Stewart Parnell, whom I thought must be shaken to the core because his surname appears on a brand of peanut butter made by PCA (Parnell's Pride), is the one who urged the shipment of contaminated products. According to internal correspondence released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which can be found on this web page, Parnell complained about shipment delays and losing money.

(In the picture above, Rep. Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, holds up a jar of recalled peanut products while questioning Stewart Parnell.)

Parnell refused to testify today before a House subcommittee. In particular, Rep. Walden asked Parnell if he would be willing to unseal a jar of recalled peanut products and eat any of them, and Parnell did not answer, instead invoking the Fifth Amendment. If the over 600 hospitalizations and the eight deaths were nails in PCA's coffin, then consider Parnell's actions leading to and during the crisis to be a nuclear bomb in that coffin.

A federal criminal investigation is underway, needless to say. Bill Marler, an attorney who has specialized in tainted food cases for over 15 years, keeps a blog that covers this developing crisis as well as other food poisoning cases.

FYI I bought some peanut butter cracker sandwiches last fall. Fortunately for me, they were Lance, a brand that is on the safe products list. Yes, the recall is so widespread that the FDA actually had to make a list of products that are not subject to it, and that is unheard of to me.

Volume 4, Number 2: Even More Miscellaneous Mumbo-Jumbo

2010-01-07T17:02:00.000-05:00

(Note: I posted this to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on January 28, 2009.)

I have a bunch of ideas, musing and other stuff swimming around in my head. They include (but are not limited to):

The first time I heard of rock artist Eagle Eye Cherry (he did this song 10 years ago, Save Tonight), I thought, what a crazy name for an artist--pick a name of a bird, then a name of a body part, then a name of a fruit, and presto! Instant rock band name, Mad Libs-style. Like Vulture Spleen Kumquat. It wasn't until later that I found out Eagle Eye Cherry was actually the brother of Neneh Cherry (she had a song in the Top 40 back in '89, Buffalo Stance).
I hate it anytime a sports journalist refers to the NFL's Miami Dolphins as "the Fish." Dolphins aren't fish, they're mammals. Look it up!
Did you know the difference between a sunroof and a moonroof? Neither did I, before I read this. (Evidently, I've never had a car with a sunroof. Never mind that the word "sunroof" makes a lot more sense than "moonroof.")
I always spelled it M-U-A-M-M-A-R K-H-A-D-A-F-Y.
Here's a channel I'd love to see on cable--The Traffic Channel: Constant updates on local traffic conditions, coverage of major traffic jams and police chases, and shows about classic police chases and all-time great traffic jams, and to balance things out, also shows about how motorists can drive smarter and more safely.
You know how the band, Gorillaz, does animated music videos? It got me thinking--Milli Vanilli would have been a lot more successful if their music videos had been cartoons (instead of using those lip-synching model/dancers, Rob and Fab).
Rene Auberjonois would make a great spokesman for SmithBarney. Watching him on Boston Legal one night, I couldn't help but imagine him delivering the line, "At SmithBarney, they make money the old-fashioned way... They earn it."
Benecol... It's this substitute for butter and margarine, but anyway, I would never buy a food item whose name sounds more like a medication. "Yeah, I'm just going to put some Cepacol on my toast."

Volume 4, Number 1: Microsoft Songsmith, and More Miscellaneous Mumbo-Jumbo

2010-01-07T16:44:00.000-05:00

(Note: I posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on January 17, 2009.)

Earlier today, on YouTube, I came across a possible excuse Microsoft could have for why Windows Vista was such a crappy, buggy "upgrade" over XP: Apparently, they spent too much time working on this other software project called Microsoft Songsmith, where you sing a song and Songsmith comes up with music to back up your lyrics.

Some genius on YouTube decided to put Songsmith to the test, using some vocals-only tracks from songs like "Roxanne" by the Police. On Roxanne, Songsmith apparently decided that Sting's lyrics deserved a Caribbean beat with steel drums and horns. In other words, absolutely hilarious. (Update 1-7-2010: You may also want to check out the Songsmith polka version of Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train.)

Other potential hilarious applications could include extracting the audio from certain failed American Idol Auditions (like that guy in Philadelphia last year who sang "Go Down Moses" in that crazy voice, or Fookling Lee's audition in 2005, or William Hung's "She Bangs, She Bangs"). And I wonder if I could get Songsmith to put Vegas swingin' lounge music to the lyrics from Godsmack's "Keep Away." (Update 1-7-2010: Actually, I did do two Songsmithed versions of failed AI auditions: the aforementioned Go Down Moses, and also Milo Turk's No Sex Allowed.)

In other news...

The holidays: Shopping was a pain; 1/3 of my shopping wound up being a Walmart gift card for my older brother and his family and another 1/3 was a Amazon.com gift certificate for my younger brother. I also finally accomplished a long-overdue goal: I gave more than I got.

Fantasy football: My Detroit Renaissance finally won the Hughes All-Internet League title for the first time in 13 tries. I started out 2-2 in that league (with two very close losses), then went 11-0 the rest of the way to win the title after three losses in the big game. But the real surprise was my Detroit Vipers--whom I expected would go no better than 7-7 going into the season--winning the championship in Todd's Ultimate Fantasy Football (TUFF). They got hot when it mattered, going from 4-5 to 9-5 to finish the regular season and then knocking off three division winners in the final three weeks. One noteworthy bit was that Brandon Jacobs helped the Denver Devils get to TUFF Bowl IX, but then his NFL team benched him for Week 17 to keep him healthy so he couldn't help Denver beat my Vipers.

Real sports: The Lions finished 0-16. All the more reason why I play fantasy football to begin with--when I was young, I was frustrated with waiting for the hometown teams to win titles--no Detroit team won a major sports title in the 1970s, if you remember. Anyway, the Lions just hired Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to be their new head coach, and I have hope for him. After all, Jim Mora Sr. (my personal first choice, never mind that he's almost 74 years old) was an NFL defensive coordinator before becoming an NFL head coach and he expunged the losing cultures from New Orleans and Indianapolis during his time with each of those teams.

Business--excuse me, it's not business news anymore, it's Capitalism Gone Wrong: Gosh, why the heck haven't I mentioned it before: Bernie Madoff. A month ago, we all heard the shocking news that Madoff has done what I thought no human would be so devoid of conscience as to do it: Rob from rich (billionaires) and poor (charities) alike. He claims to have stolen $50 billion by means of a Ponzi scheme, but according to Alexandra Penney (a former editor of Self magazine and one-time best-selling author), $17 billion is more accurate. No matter what the number, the damage is everywhere--suicides, the impact on Wall Street, and people who once thought they were set for life suddenly finding themselves having to go back to work (like Penney). What's alarming is that the agency that was formed under Franklin Roosevelt to stop precisely this kind of fraud from happening--the Securities and Exchange Commission--has been failing to do so for years now. First Enron, then the subprime mortgage mess, then the bank failures (Bear Stearns et al.) and now this. 28 years ago, in his Inaugural Address, President Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." What a frigging lie.

Volume 3, Number 33: Ding Dong, The Bleeping Bratz Are Dead

2010-01-07T16:28:00.000-05:00

(Notes 1-7-2010: Yes, I am well aware that the Bratz are not dead yet. A search of toysrus.com reveals that Bratz products are still around. Darn! Oh, and I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on December 4, 2008.)

Anyone who's read my blog knows by now that I hate materialism. I prefer to replace things only when they either stop working or become unreliable. I hardly ever shop at malls. I've never owned a car that was less than five years old. I firmly believe that "form follows function"; that is to say, I care about how something works far more than it looks.

Well, in 2001, a company called MGA Entertainment launched a line of dolls that promoted and even glorified materialism in the most arrogant fashion. Even the name screamed out "spoiled and materialistic": Bratz. I had hoped that parents would refuse to buy them and they would die a quick, quiet death in the "marketplace of ideas," right alongside the "New Coke," McDonald's Arch Deluxe hamburger, and stupid movies like Gigli and From Justin to Kelly.

Oh, but little girls loved them, and apparently, today's parents don't have the same sense of responsibility in dissuading them from making bad decisions that, say, my parents had. Otherwise, how would one explain the rise among children in violent behavior, drug use, obesity, and Type II diabetes? Or, for that matter, the success of Bratz?

I cringed every time I saw Bratz displayed prominently in some store ad, be it Toys R Us or Target, thinking thoughts like: How could people, in good conscience, buy this crap? Now there's Bratz babies and Bratz pets, and next thing you know, maybe Ford will come out with a Ford Explorer Bratz Edition.

But there is good news: Those pesky, materialistic, ignorant, disgusting, skanky, brutal, bottom-feeding trashbag ho's are about to become history.

See, Bratz designer Carter Bryant developed that ill-conceived concept while working at Mattel. Mattel sued MGA in 2004, and just yesterday, they won. MGA can't make any more of the infernal toys, and after the holiday season, they will be pulled from store shelves everywhere. What an unexpected relief. That's one more thing to look forward to in 2009--a New Year, Bush leaving the White House, the transition to digital TV, and no more Bratz.

So long as we're on the subject of materialism, I want to touch upon the dark side of last Friday. You've already heard or read about that 34-year-old security guard being trampled to death at that Wal-Mart on Long Island, and also that shooting at the Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California (thankfully, it was two men shooting each other, not some angry kid taking out some trivial frustration on innocent people as initially feared). It makes you want to rethink the concept of Black Friday (substantial discounts on select items for a limited time). Long lines are one thing, but if there's violence and lawlessness, stores may decide it's no longer worth the trouble. Is there really anything in the world--let alone in a store--worth smashing doors and trampling people for?

Volume 3, Number 32: Another Assortment of Small Stuff

2010-01-07T16:08:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on November 21, 2008.)

Politics: I'm happy Barack Obama won. I look forward to seeing how he takes on the biggest mess any president has inherited since Franklin Roosevelt took over in the middle of the Great Depression. Locally, in a race for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Gary Peters knocked Republican incumbent Joe Knollenberg out.

Business: Speaking of the Great Depression, there is one important parallel between the mess we have now and the mess that took root during the so-called "Roaring Twenties," and it is that for years, consumers and corporations alike tried to fool others into thinking they were doing just fine by borrowing on credit. In the '20s, ordinary consumers could get a piece of the rising stock market by buying shares "on margin," which basically meant they only had to put down a 10% down payment to claim ownership of a given stock. Over the last several years, we've had everything from people living off of credit cards to the subprime mortgage crisis. Both of these messes could have been prevented--or at least reduced--if the government had watched over Corporate America instead of being bought and paid for by it. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then a million dollars of regulation is worth a billion dollars of bailout.

Sports: The Lions are 0-10. I'm 9-2 in a two of the six fantasy football leagues I'm in, and no worse than 4-7 in the others. Therein lies the reason why I play fantasy football--I'm more likely to experience a championship by playing fantasy football than by watching the Lions. In college football, I will root for Michigan to beat Ohio State--but not for the Wolverines' sake, and certainly not for Rich Rodriguez, whose job should have been filled by ex-Minnesota assistant head coach Mitch Browning over a year ago. It's to help Michigan State, which could get a Big Ten title with a win over Penn State and a U-M victory over OSU. The Tigers raised ticket prices despite finishing last in the AL Central this past season. Joe Dumars made the "shake-up" trade everyone was waiting for--Chauncey Billups and two other players to the Denver Nuggets for Allen Iverson. I'd like to think that Iverson's grown up since his legendary "We're talking about practice" shtick several years back, and I know he led the Pistons to victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers just the other night, but as with the new head coach (Michael Curry), I will take a "wait and see" approach.

Entertainment: I've come up with two other ideas for TV shows:

Clunker - In contrast to shows like Knight Rider and Viper (where already expensive cars are worked into crime-fighting machines), in this one, a government agency (or maybe a private investigation agency) has to rework a crappy old car like a Dodge Dart into such a crime-fighting machine, only to see it destroyed at the end of the episode. Kind of like "Knight Rider" meets "Pimp My Ride."
DIA: The Divine Intervention Agency - What happens to souls that aren't good enough to go to Heaven, but not nearly bad enough to go to Hell? St. Peter puts them to work at the Divine Intervention Agency, going after condemned souls have either escaped from or eluded going to Hell (and defending the innocent from them).

I am watching exactly two shows on a regular basis.

One is Life On Mars (about a cop who wakes up in 1973 after getting hit by a car; he resolves to continue solving crimes in his 1973 world but keeps coming across clues about what's happening to him in the present day). It's written far better than I expected (you should especially see the pilot episode) and I hope the writing doesn't go in a direction I don't like it going in (as Lost and Heroes did).
The other, of course, is Kitchen Nightmares (where Gordon Ramsay finds more failing restaurants in dire need of a turnaround--my favorite episodes so far are Fiesta Sunrise and Hannah & Mason's, both due to filthy kitchens).

There's one show in the UK that I wish would be adapted to the US: Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, a show where Brooker skewers just about everything in television, from the whole "reality TV" genre to soap operas to annoying TV commercials. He doesn't pull any punches, either--he even uses crude language, as Gordon Ramsay does when he skewers bad restaurant owners and chefs. Yes, in the US, we do have shows where C-list celebrities put in their two cents on some TV show scene (like in the 100 Greatest Celebreality Moments) or some event involving another, presumably A-list celebrity. But it's just not the same.

Volume 3, Number 31: Various Election Day Observations

2010-01-07T16:02:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on November 4, 2008.)

When this year started, I would have been content with Sen. John McCain as the Republican nominee for President. I have contended for years that the grave injustice of that election year was the GOP nomination of George W. Bush over McCain, not the dimpled or hanging chads or whatever else took place in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election. As 2008 progressed, however, I have seen a McCain who looked more and more like he would be a continuation of the last eight execrable years.

One particular ad that aired earlier this year stood out very much for me: It quoted both Bush and McCain saying "The fundamentals of America's economy are strong," then played back both simulataneously to show that even the tone of voice was the same. In the meantime, the fundamentals of the American economy are not strong; they have changed for the worse over the last few decades. The USA, once a great manufacturing country, now imports far more than it produces. The rich have gotten richer (usually by breaking rules, abusing loopholes or abusing power), the poor are no better off, and the middle class is being killed off. (Note: I'm not blaming this entirely on the Republicans; the point here is that the statement, "The fundamentals of America's economy are strong," is wrong.)

The last three Democratic presidents all came from Southern states (Lyndon Johnson, 1963-1969, Texas; Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981, Georgia; and Bill Clinton, 1993-2001, Arkansas). In the last four elections where the Democratic candidate was from the north (1972, 1984, 1988, 2004), that candidate did not win a single Southern state. An Obama victory would mark the first time that a Democratic candidate from outside the South won the Presidential election since John F. Kennedy (Massachusetts) in 1960. Such a victory would thus prove that the Democrats can win the White House without despite a lack of support in the South (or, for that matter, without resorting to a candidate from that area).

As far as the Electoral College goes, I predict it as follows: Obama 322, McCain 216. The main difference between this election and the 2004 one is that Obama will win several states that John Kerry did not (Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia). But otherwise, I figure that the Southern states will remain red, as will most of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states.

Ohio is a microcosm of the whole country: The north is more urban and Democratic and is suffering from the same manufacturing job losses as the rest of the Rust Belt; the south is more rural and Republican. Also, in each of the last 11 elections, the winner of Ohio's electoral votes has also won the Presidency (the last one to win without carrying Ohio was, once again, JFK).

Volume 3, Number 30: Pipe Wrench Fight!

2010-01-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on October 9, 2008.)

We had the Star Wars kid in 2003, the Numa Numa Dance in 2005, and Can't Tase This last year. But this year's Viral Video of the Year has got to be Dustin McLean's "Literal Video Version" of the music video for A-Ha's Take On Me, in which McLean replaces the song's lyrics with lyrics that more closely depict what happens in the video. The really hilarious part starts around 2:12 with the fight/chase scene ("I told you to stay away from my magic frame!"). Check it out.

Volume 3, Number 29: TV Show Ideas

2010-01-07T15:42:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on September 27, 2008.)

About a year ago, in response to CBS' short-lived reality show, Kid Nation, I suggested that the premise would work a lot better if the ghost town were run by ex-cons. Ex-Con Nation is still a thought in my mind, but in the meantime, I've had a few other ideas for TV shows:

Hell's Kitchen: New England - For the past four years, Scott Liebfried has worked under Gordon Ramsay as the sous-chef overseeing the blue team in Hell's Kitchen. Now, Chef Liebfried returns to his old stomping grounds for his own Hell's Kitchen (he previously worked in Long Island, Boston, and Martha's Vineyard). He carries himself like a cop, treating his chefs like they came straight out of America's Dumbest Criminals. (note to mark: insert YouTube links in which Chef Liebfried rips into contestants) In fact, I'd even promote him as "America's Culinary Cop." Added twists: From time to time, Chef Liebfried will give a contestant the choice of either going to culinary school (but leaving the competition voluntarily), or staying in the competition (in which case Chef Liebfried will almost certainly not offer the scholarship again to that contestant). (This last bit is inspired by the part in season 3 where, after eliminating Julia, Chef Ramsay gave her a free ride to culinary school.) Finally, instead of "Fire" by the Ohio Players, the theme song will be "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix.

Tuned Out - You've seen all kinds of shows that do nothing but comment on celebrity news, pop culture, other TV shows, and the like--I Love the '70s/'80s/'90s, those top 20/50/100 countdown shows like you see on E! and VH1, and more. And you see the same people on them--comedians who don't have anything better going on (like Patrice O'Neal and the Sklar brothers) and celebrities who are between gigs (like Chris Jericho before he returned to the WWE). Why not put 13 of them in one house and see who's the best, and give them their own show? Now, British TV ubercynic Charlie Brooker (who has a show on the BBC called Screenwipe where he has all kinds of things to say about TV shows and commercials) has invited 13 such people to live a big house where they do nothing but watch TV and make all kinds of commentary on what they watch. At the end of every episode, Brooker will be in a room with 13 TV sets--one showing each of the contestants--and will tell them which ones will stay, until he gets to the one to be eliminated, at which point he says, "I'm sorry, you're Tuned Out," and picks up the remote corresponding to that set to switch it off. The winner--hopefully the one with the wit that is the quickest, most well-rounded, most acerbic, most creative and/or most original--gets to host his/her own show in which they get to comment on TV shows, pop culture, celebrity news, something along those lines.

New Wave Corporate Raiders - A group of ex-cons are sent back to the year 1982 to murder some Wall Street execs and take their places. But why, and who are they working for? Will they do what they're told? Is anyone going to find out about them, and if so, how? The series will serve as a thinly veiled attack on Corporate America and Wall Street and the practices they've employed since the days of Reagan.

The Kevin Fisher Times - This one, I've had on my mind for years. Set in the year 2002, it's about a newspaper columnist who finds himself trapped in a parallel universe. In this universe, the technology to travel between universes has existed since 1945 (courtesy of an accident that caused Flight 19 to disappear from our universe and appear in the parallel one). Global media corporations have control over the technology and will do anything and everything to prevent the government, intelligence agencies and the military from finding out about it. Why? Put bluntly, the marketplace of ideas is a gold mine. Media executives from this parallel universe also travel to ours in an effort to exchange ideas with their counterparts (for example, the film "The Terminator," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, is based on another film of the same title taking place in the parallel universe, except that it was made in 1978 and starred Jack Nicholson and Sissy Spacek).

Tooth and Nail - It's a sitcom about a dentist who sets up his office at some strip mall and falls in love with a manicurist who also has a shop in the very same strip mall. OK, it needs a boatload of work, but the idea came at a time when I wondered if TV shows weren't created with the title first and more important stuff like plotlines and characters second. Case in point #1: Neat & Tidy, a parody of action/adventure shows from around 1987 that got its title from its characters, Nick Neat and Tena Tidy. I kid you not. This short-lived syndicated series is now referred to in the Internet Movie Database as Adventures Beyond Belief. Case in point #2: In 1988, Mr. T used to have this syndicated action show. The producers of the show decided that both his character and the female lead character both have last names that start with T so the show could be called "T and T" in order to cash in on the name recognition Mr. T had.

Volume 3, Number 28: Bad News On Top Of Bad News

2010-01-07T15:37:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on September 23, 2008.)

As you know, after a tide of failures and near-failures among America's largest financial institutions, the federal government recently announced a plan to bail them out... at the cost of increasing our already outrageous national debt.

It has a lot of people outraged, asking, Why? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said just earlier today, "There is a lot of blame to go around - a lot of blame with big financial institutions that engaged in this irresponsible lending ... blame to the people who made loans they shouldn't have made, people who took out loans they shouldn't have taken out." Shouldn't the greedy people responsible for this crisis be the ones to pay? The way the bailout is set up right now, it's exactly like the other bailouts that have taken place (the savings & loan bailout, for example)... the honest, responsible middle class citizen is being made to pay for the greed of the rich and the irresponsibility of those who took out the loans they couldn't afford to pay.

In China, we have another example of greed by a few people who don't care about the well-being of the many leading to disastrous results: A number of baby milk manufacturers were found to have had melamine (the same chemical at the heart of the 2007 pet food scandal) in their products. In one example, a supplier of the Sanlu Group deliberately diluted their milk and added melamine to it in order to enable it to pass a certain test (called the Kjeldahl protein test) after Sanlu rejected earlier shipments.

I don't know which fact is worse--the two brothers at the aforementioned supplier who completely disregarded consumer safety by adding the melamine, the fact that Sanlu only notified stores and not consumers, or the fact that nobody would have known about the problem until a New Zealand-based part-owner of Sanlu informed the New Zealand government about it, which then informed the Chinese government. You read that correctly--the New Zealand government was the first government to act on a China-based problem.

Finally, this morning, yet another college shooting took place in Finland. 10 are dead; the shooter turned the gun on himself and died from his injuries (which begs the question, why in the world didn't he take his life to begin with?).

And I've been thinking... We as a society need to maintain the same values that make us human in the first place--respect, compassion, love, moderation (the opposite of greed), and reject those values that hurt the quality of life such as greed, selfishness and violence. I am astounded by the number of people who know that something is wrong, but do it anyway; as well as those who know that it's wrong and yet don't fight against it.

Volume 3, Number 27: Kwame Is Out!

2010-01-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on September 4, 2008.)

Just when I thought Kwame Kilpatrick and his attorneys would find another way to extend Detroit's nightmare of lies, corruption, misplaced priorities and irresponsibility, that nightmare is about to end.
Earlier today, Kilpatrick agreed to a deal in which he pled guilty to two felony counts of obstruction of justice, agreed to resign as mayor of Detroit, surrendered his law license, forfeited his pension, agreed to pay $1 million restitution to the city of Detroit, and also agreed not to run for public office for five years. In exchange, six other felony charges were dropped, and he will get a greatly reduced jail sentence (120 days; obstruction of justice is a 5-year felony offense).

I am both happy and angry. Happy, obviously, that Kilpatrick is resigning, but angry because lots of money, time and energy were wasted, mainly because Kilpatrick spent so much money covering up his lies, causing his opponents to spend a lot of time and energy in exposing him and fighting against the cover-up. All that waste could have been avoided if Kilpatrick had some sense of responsibility.

Per Detroit's city charter, Detroit City Council President Ken Cockrel, Jr. is expected to become the 61st mayor of the city in two weeks. He has been working on plans to restore credibility to the office of Mayor and to get rid of all the nepotism and cronyism Kilpatrick brought to the city offices. But as anyone whose parents or grandparent fled the city in the late '60s and early '70s knows, Detroit has light years to go.

There are tons of abandoned warehouses, factories, stores, houses and other buildings that need to be torn down. One example leapt out at me a couple of years ago as I took the ramp from southbound I-75 to westbound I-94. Looking to your right, I saw a large area of nothing but grayish-white buildings in poor condition, all of which looked 50 years removed from happier, more prosperous times. This area is bounded by four streets (Harper, Piquette, Mansur, and Hastings). What really galls me, too, are buildings elsewhere in Detroit that obviously haven't been used in years, yet have "FOR SALE OR LEASE" signs on them. Someone's got to tell the owners of such buildings that they are a loss. They're magnets for drug trafficking and graffiti. It's time the city's brownfields were converted back to greenfields.

Whereas people used to live and work in Detroit 50 years ago, today, most people live in one suburb and work in another, and some have to drive long distances just to get to work (e.g. from Royal Oak to Northville, or from Troy to Dearborn). And all that driving means having your own car--try getting from Royal Oak to Northville using SMART buses, which are not a viable form of mass transit. With gas prices the way they are now, living in the suburbs is becoming that much more expensive for people. Thus, the city has the opportunity to recreate the situation of living near where you work--provided they can attract new business and find ways to attract residents (preferably those who don't have children, due to the next problem on the list).

Detroit's Public Schools are a national embarrassment. Ridiculous amounts of money are squandered every year on buildings and technology that a number of suburban districts would die for, and yet the teaching is inferior, the students don't graduate at the same rate, and neither their parents nor the leadership nor the management seem to care. The failure of the city to properly secure its closed schools and reallocate those schools' resources (textbooks, computers, supplies) to other schools was particularly aggravating. DPS needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, with teachers who know the material they are teaching and are willing to bring out the best in their students, and administrators who can get the students' parents to give a damn about their education.

Volume 3, Number 26: Another Kitchen Nightmares Update

2010-01-07T13:48:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally published this entry on August 31, 2008, to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

Holy crap. It turns out that Gordon Ramsay visited not one, but two Metro Detroit restaurants. In addition to Giuseppi's Trattoria, Gordon also took on Jack's Waterfront Restaurant in Saint Clair Shores (it's near 9 Mile and Jefferson). I should go to both these places before the rest of the country finds out.

Two other restaurants that will be featured in season 2 are:

Trobiano's Italian Dining in Great Neck, Long Island, NY
Fiesta Sunrise Mexican Restaurant in West Nyack, NY. But according to this message board posting, Gordon didn't get through to the owner of this place.

How'd I find all this out? Fox posted a season preview on YouTube a couple of days ago, and it included a few quick snapshots of various restaurants he visited. (The video has since been removed.)

Volume 3, Number 25: Song Covers I'd Like to Hear

2010-01-07T13:30:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on August 30, 2008, to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I've come up with ideas where I wish that certain artists would cover certain songs by certain other artists. These ideas didn't all come up at once; they pretty much came to me over the last eight years or so.
Donald Duck - Break Stuff (originally performed by Limp Bizkit)
You've seen Donald Duck get frustrated and lose his temper. You may have even come across clips of Donald Duck swearing. Can't you just imagine him breaking the fourth wall and saying, "It's just one of those days"? I can imagine Donald Duck doing some other Limp Bizkit songs (like "Full Nelson" off the "Chocolate Starfish" CD: "You'll get knocked the f*** out/Cause your mouth's writing checks that your @$$ can't cash").

Bjork - White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
Hearing this song, Jefferson Airplane's lead singer (Grace Slick) used inflections in the opening lines that reminded me of Bjork (who uses similar inflections in songs such as "Human Behavior"). It got me thinking, the instrumentation could use updating, too--something more orchestral.

Fiona Apple - A Day In The Life (The Beatles)
Fiona's already covered one Beatles song, "Across The Universe" (for the 1998 film Pleasantville). I think her voice would go well with this song, the last track from the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album; there would be one lyric change, though. Not the English army, but "The U.S. Army had just won the war," partly because Apple's American, not English; and partly because the altered lyric could be taken as a cynical stance towards the war in Iraq.

Crash Test Dummies - Between The Wars (Billy Bragg)
I haven't heard from this Canadian band, who are best known by far for "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," in about nine years. I've heard two different versions of Between The Wars--the original by Bragg, and the other by a virtually unknown gothic band called Illegal Teenage Bikini. Now, if the song were performed on a piano instead of a guitar, I think the voice of Brad Roberts (lead singer) would lend itself well to such a piano accompaniment (seeing as "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" had a piano in it, too). (Update 1-7-2010: Now that I think about it, British gothic rock vocalist Peter Murphy is another candidate to cover this song.)

Living Colour - Destination Unknown (Missing Persons)
This one bears some explaining. Living Colour (a great rock band from the late '80s and early '90s) reunited in 2003, and one of the tracks on the CD they released that year, Collideoscope, is Great Expectations, a song about a man who has become lazy and shiftless. I thought it sounded like a song that Missing Persons, a Los Angeles-based band from the New Wave era (early '80s) might have performed had the song been written way back then. It made me wonder if Living Colour could do any Missing Persons tracks, and Destination Unknown sprung to mind. You know how Living Colour likes to insert audio samples into their songs (e.g. Cult of Personality from Vivid, A ? of When from Collideoscope)? That would serve them well in a cover of Destination Unknown, too.

Iggy Pop - What's Good (Lou Reed)
First time I heard this song, I thought it was Iggy Pop who performed it. So now I wonder what it would have sounded like if Iggy really had performed it. I think it would have a harder edge than the original.

Sean Connery - One (Creed)
I was trying to imitate Creed's lead singer while hearing this song in my car, and long story short, when I got to "I feel angry, I feel helpless," the "helpless" sounded more like "helplesh" (like Sean Connery's well-documented speech impediment). So now whenever I sing along to any Creed song, I imitate Mr. Connery. He could do justice to a few other Creed songs, too (Higher, My Sacrifice, Arms Wide Open). I wonder if Darrell Hammond agrees.

Volume 3, Number 24: Kitchen Nightmares Returns

2010-01-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on August 26, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

On September 4, one week from Thursday, the second season of Kitchen Nightmares premieres on Fox. It starts with a two-hour special in which Gordon Ramsay revisits six of the ten restaurants he went to last year. It's safe to assume he won't return to Lela's (which went out of business due to insurmountable debts), and there is no Sebastian's in Burbank, California anymore (because the owner of that restaurant decided to move back to Boston; the Burbank restaurant is now known as Robano's). That leaves eight restaurants that Gordon could possibly visit, but I'd be surprised if he managed to visit the former Seascape Inn (which got sold).

(UPDATE 1-7-2010: The former Seascape Inn is now one of a chain of J&R's Steak Houses.)

The following week will feature the Handlebar Restaurant in Mt. Sinai, NY. which Gordon visited in February. According to MSN's TV site, the owners were in denial about the restaurant's outdated decor and the head chef's lack of passion.

I've found proof that Gordon truly saw more of America this year (unlike last year, when he stuck around New York and Los Angeles).

For starters, the September 18 episode will feature a restaurant called Giuseppe's, not far at all from me in Macomb Township, Michigan.

Two of the four restaurants listed below are in the midwestern U.S.:

Sabatiello's in Stamford, CT
J. Willy's Bar & Grille in South Bend, IN
Hannah & Mason's in Cranbury, NJ
Cafe 36 in La Grange, IL

Volume 3, Number 23: Used Car Sales Tips

2010-01-07T11:36:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on July 29, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)
As you know, I recently bought a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix (and am very happy with it, thank you). I found that car on Craigslist; in fact, I had been checking the local Craigslist used car listings every day. I still do, from time to time, just out of curiosity (just to see the deals that would have been available to me if the problems I had with the Ford hadn't occurred until now). However, I find that some sellers just don't follow a few important rules (note: thankfully, the guy who sold me the Pontiac did):

Spelling and grammar matter. It turns me off when someone uses "breaks" instead of "brakes," or "transmition" for "transmission." If the seller can't use proper spelling and grammar, how would I know if they're smart enough to handle their end of the transaction? This also applies to misspellings of certain car models (for example, I've seen "Cavalier" spelled as "Cavilier", and "Brougham" spelled as "Broham"--darnit, you've been driving the car for so long, you should know how it's spelled).
Don't hold any important details back--even negative details such as high mileage or mechanical problems. When I see a newer car being sold at what a price I find reasonable, and I check the listing and it doesn't mention the mileage, I scoff, "Must have a lot of miles on it" and move on to the next listing that interests me. Or when someone says, "The body and interior are in great shape," but doesn't mention anything about the car's mechanical condition, I might imagine it that car to be a "mechanic's special" (read: needs lots of mechanical repair). Even something as seemingly minor as the trim level (the two or three letters that usually come after the name of the car) can affect the sales price (for example, a 2007 Chevy Cobalt LT has more standard equipment than a Cobalt LS, so all other things considered equal, the LT should sell for a higher price). Another thing--list the options that came with the car. Each option is a minor selling point (as long as you don't use them to overinflate the car's price; for more details, see point 3, "Price your car reasonably").
Price your car reasonably. I know it sounds obvious, but there are some people in this world who seem to think they can sell a car for more than it's worth. For example, as I write this, some yutz on Craigslist is trying to sell a '94 Ford Thunderbird with 136,000 miles on it for $2,800. Just to clarify things, a few different pricing experts, such as Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds, use three different values for pricing cars. An explanation of each value follows:

Trade-in value: What you should expect a dealer to pay you if you were to trade your car in to that dealer for another car
Private party value: What you should expect to get if you're an individual selling your car to another individual, or what you should expect to pay if you're an individual buying one from another individual
Dealer retail value: What you should expect to pay a dealer if you were to buy a car from that dealer

Now. The whole idea behind "private party" transactions--allowing individuals to sell used cars--to other individuals is eliminating "the middleman"--the dealer. In an ideal "private party" transaction, the seller would make more money in a "private party" transaction than they would by trading it in to the dealer; the buyer would save money compared to buying the same car from a dealer.

Therefore, if you're an individual looking to sell to another individual, you should always check the "private party" value and set the sales price for around that value, maybe a little higher (to compensate for the time you spend dealing with all those potential buyers). But if you're trying to sell an older car for $3000 and my research on Edmunds.com says it's not even worth $2000, you won't get my attention--at least not until you lower the darn price. Going back to that '94 T-Bird--even if the seller was a dealer and the T-Bird had every option available, it wouldn't fetch more than $1700; thing is, the seller is not a dealer and shouldn't even expect $1000 for it.

One more thing--even before listing the car, I hope that you, as the seller, have a clear title. I realize that this is true in almost all cases. But nine years ago, I came across one seller who still owed money on the car (I talked about it in more detail in this 2007 blog entry). He had this idea where I'd give him the money, he'd clear the title, and he'd send me the title in the mail. However, in that scenario, he could have then turned around and reported the car stolen.

Volume 3, Number 22: A Hidden Danger

2010-01-07T11:28:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on July 17, 2008 on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I just came across a scary report on ABCNews.com. The president of my local Pontiac Grand Prix club brought it to my attention. It's a segment from ABC's 20/20 newsmagazine program in which Brian Ross reports on tires that various dealers sell as brand new, and consumers assume them to be new, but in reality, they may already be a few years old (except that many people don't know about a date code stamped on the tire that can tell them the age of the tire). According to Ross, research and tests have shown that tires can become dangerous after six years, regardless of how many miles they have on them.

Needless to say, I now feel the need to check all of my tires to see just how old they are.

That said, I am disgusted with Corporate America's increasing disregard for the consumer, especially where matters like consumer safety and giving them what they paid for are concerned. Previous to watching this report, I assumed (as many undoubtedly did) that anytime I bought new tires, they would indeed be brand new, not 4 or 6 years old. And it's not earth-shattering revelation that rubber loses elasticity with age--ever try re-using an old rubber band, only to have it snap on you? Point being, these tire manufacturers should be recalling tires that have not been sold a certain period of time after the date on the tire (using the 6-year recommendation used in Great Britain as an initial guideline). But they don't, because they know such a measure would cut into their profits big time.

Volume 3, Number 21: I Got Published (Well, Sort Of)

2010-01-07T11:24:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on July 9, 2008 on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I know, it's been more than a year since the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide, but here I go with another Benoit-related blog entry.

It turns out after I wrote my most recent Benoit-related blog entry, Irv Muchnick put an entry in his blog the very next day in which he commended me for "intelligent backup of my report proving the dishonesty of WWE’s Benoit tribute show." (On May 22, I had summarized what Muchnick said in his April 3 blog entry that WWE knew the Benoit deaths were the result of a murder-suicide well before the tribute show went on the air; I also argued that even before the facts came forth, there was already a very good chance that Benoit was the perpetrator, citing one study that said that most mass murders are familicides, and another stating that 95% of murder-suicides were perpetrated by men.)

I didn't know about it until today because I hadn't been reading Muchnick's blog on a regular basis. Today marked the first time in over a month that I had done so. The main reason I read it to begin with is that he's been working on a book about the Benoit murder-suicide. It was originally scheduled to come out earlier this year; however, Muchnick keeps digging up new information related to the Dr. Phil Astin probe, the Fayette County (Ga.) sheriff's investigation, and so on, leading me to wonder if the book will cover more than just the "perfect storm of physical, mental and emotional pain" that led to the horrible events of that June weekend.

It is an honor for a journalist of Muchnick's background to mention a blog entry of mine in his blog. It's kind of like getting a letter published in a magazine like Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. Muchnick is one of the foremost journalists (along with Dave Meltzer) in the sports-entertainment trade, and was praised by Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford for his knowledge of that trade. He is also the author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death and Scandal, a book he published in April 2007.

Volume 3, Number 20: The Grand Prix Era

2010-01-07T10:37:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry in on June 16, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

The era of the Taurus is over, and the era of the Grand Prix is about to begin.

What do I mean by that? Since October 2002, I had been driving a 1997 Ford Taurus, but last Friday, I bought a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix. It's got a powerful engine (200 horsepower V6, 225 ft-lb of torque), tons of options I'll have a ball with (leather upholstery, a power sunroof, heated seats, a rearview mirror with a compass and thermometer built in, and that "heads-up" display that lets you see your speed reflected on the inside of the windshield), and of course, it's five years newer.

I found it on Craigslist and bought it from its previous owner in Huntington Woods (just a few miles from me, and it's a very affluent suburb of Detroit) for $4,800. I ran an appraisal on edmunds.com that suggested that I should have paid over $5,500 for it (due mainly to all the options that were on it). If you want to check out what your car might be worth on edmunds.com, go here.

As for the Taurus, it never had any major problems, but recently, it developed a few bad ones that, if I fixed all of them, it might have cost more than the car was worth:

Six months ago, the wipers and the washer pump started to work intermittently (probably a wiring problem);
The battery was 5 years old and acid was starting to leak from the terminals;
The gas mileage had declined over the last 2 years (I was getting 17 mpg);
That same computer also gave me the infamous "SERVICE ENGINE SOON" light;
The driver door would not shut whenever the weather got really cold (like 10 degrees or lower);
The passenger door wouldn't shut if the handle on the outside stuck (probably due to a broken spring), which was a pain in the butt on the few occasions that someone rode with me as I had to explain to them about the handle;
The upholstery was made of cheap fabric that had already started to look bad when I bought the car in 2002, and it was looking worse now;
A drive boot may or may not have needed replacing (a mechanic told me one of my drive boots was cracked, but I never verified that with my regular mechanic);
One thing my regular mechanic did find was a broken bracket in the rear that caused this "clunk" noise to come from the trunk every time I hit a bump; until he told me what it was, I just thought maybe I didn't fasten the spare tire securely enough
One of the cruise control buttons broke off my steering wheel--no big deal as I don't use cruise control, but it sucks when anything breaks off.

And finally, there was the Rule of 11. I have a history of driving cars that break down by or before they are 11 years old:

1991: I had a 1980 Toyota Tercel, and in the spring of '91, it started smoking due to a bad head gasket. The car already had over 100,000 miles on it, which, for a 1980 car, was an extremely high mileage, so its value was very low and did not warrant repairing.
1999: I had been driving a 1988 Ford Festiva for seven years when it developed the following problem: In cold weather, water condensation would get into the fuel line, causing the car to be either hard to start, or impossible.
2001: I had a 1993 Oldsmobile Achieva that blew a head gasket, and the resulting coolant leak caused a bunch of electrical problems. I decided to donate the car to Purple Heart and spend $1,400 on a dinged-up '93 Honda Civic instead. As it was, the Oldsmobile's Quad 4 engine design meant that replacing the head gasket alone would mean hours of labor, costing more than the car was worth. Fixing the electrical problems (such as the courtesy lights staying on all the time) would have cost more.
The Taurus was built in August 1997 and so was two months away from turning 11. I figured that all the problems I listed above were signs that it was about to fall victim to the Rule of 11. I'd just as soon put that money towards a newer one, and so I did.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the Taurus and it got me through some tough times. It only broke down once in the five years and eight months that I owned it, and there was only one day when I missed work because it had to be in the shop. I took it to Chicago, I took it to Pentwater (for a friend's wedding in 2005), I drove it 25 miles or more to work more than 400 times (by my estimation, at least), and it almost never gave me problems.

One minor bit of trivia: I believe that buying the Pontiac makes me the first member of the family to drive a car that was built in the 21st century. My Grand Prix was built in June 2002. Sander (my older brother) still has a '98 Ford Escort sedan, my mother still drives a '98 Saturn SL2, and Josh is still driving a '95 Suzuki Sidekick.

Volume 3, Number 19: Dreams and Parallel Universes

2010-01-07T10:26:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on June 8, 2008 on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

Recently, I came across an unusual idea: That when people have dreams, they may in fact be "tuning into"--or even travelling to--a parallel universe. I found it in someone's blog, but there are numerous web sites that discuss this idea as well, like this one.

That just fascinated me, because I've had dreams where not only was my father alive, but everyone else in the dream acted like he never died (he died in 1994, may he continue to rest in peace). Dreams like those definitely fit the theory, and I certainly would like to have more dreams like that.

However, not all of my dreams fit that theory well at all. I have had some very odd dreams that don't appear to take place in any parallel universe at all.

Take, for example, dream I had a month or two ago, the one where Gordon Ramsay and I revisit the Seascape Inn in Islip, New York. In that dream, we discovered that Doug (the lazy, dirty "head chef") had returned, and we urged the new owners of the restaurant to verify everything on Doug's resume, at which point Doug fled (yea!). Later on in the dream, we met with the previous owners (Peter and Irene) in the dining room, and Irene asked me if it was a new tradition for an ocean liner to pass by the restaurant, at which point we saw one such ship breaking through the parking lot and colliding with the restaurant. Wait, it got even weirder. The restaurant started to sink like it's another ship. No, wait, the weirdness wasn't done yet. The restaurant was sinking at such a list that some people needed to climb a rope tied to a railing, only there wasn't a rope, so I had to fashion one out of one of those industrial-sized rolls of bubblewrap (we had to twist the bubblewrap as it come off the roll to make it into a "rope"--what one of those was doing in a restaurant, I'll never know).

Another odd dream I had was the one last year where I find secret passageways to otherwise unknown rooms in my house (I mentioned it in this blog entry). That was just surreal.

Then there's the one I had, around 13 years ago, took root as the result of falling asleep with the television on. I was watching some PBS documentary (either Nova or Frontline) and fell asleep in the middle of it. Next thing I know, I'm sitting in an auditorium at the Chemistry Building at the University of Michigan, attending a lecture, only the lecture's being given by none other than Barney the Dinosaur.

Wait, it got weirder. Barney's giving a lecture on fire safety, as opposed to, say, chemistry or economics. No--wait--it got even weirder. Barney approached me with a fire hose, saying that I was on fire, even though I wasn't (he was pretending I was, apparently) and had just begun to douse me with the hose when I woke up... and gosh darn it, Barney and Friends was on.

Volume 3, Number 18: Matinee

2010-01-07T10:12:00.002-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on May 25, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

With Memorial Day upon us, the summer film season has begun. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which opened last Friday, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Summer is the prime season in the film industry for one obvious reason: Kids are out of school and are thus more likely to succeed in getting their parents to take them out to see a film during that time than they would at any other time of the year.

But this blog entry isn't about this year's films. Right now, I'd like to rant about Universal Pictures' denying millions of filmgoers the chance to see a great film, just by releasing it in the dead of winter: The 1993 Joe Dante film, Matinee, a film that only seems to get better with age--that's assuming you've seen it before.

I first learned about this film because I was a huge fan of Kellie Martin, who had a supporting role in the film. Kellie, at that time, played Becca Thacher in the ABC drama Life Goes On. (Haven't heard of it? That's because it was on Sundays at 7pm, the same time slot as CBS' newsmagazine juggernaut, 60 Minutes. Consequently, it didn't do very well in the Nielsen ratings, and ABC's chief of TV programming at the time, Robert Iger, couldn't be botherered to move it to a better time slot--say, Friday nights at 9pm. If anyone needed her first notable film appearance to be released in the summer, it was Kellie, both a talented actress and a dazzingly beautiful young woman.)

Matinee was released on January 29, 1993, and did poorly at the box office (earning $9.5 million), and in my estimation, the ill-timed release was the #1 reason. I mean, here's a film set in the FLORIDA KEYS, for Heaven's sake--it just screams out "put it out during the summer, or the spring at the earliest." I wonder if maybe Universal was afraid that releasing Matinee at or around the same time as its blockbuster, Jurassic Park, would steal the latter's box office thunder.

Also, I think the marketing folks should have promoted it more as an "ensemble cast" vehicle (the way New Line Cinema did with Pleasantville in 1998), rather than have "John Goodman" in bold letters at the top of the posters/ads. Don't get me wrong, Goodman is a fine actor, and I enjoyed his performance in Matinee. But strictly from a marketing perspective, he has no "star power." The marketing guys should have placed a greater emphasis on the story, rather than emphasize whichever name was the most recognizable among the cast.

I also wonder: Had Matinee been released around Memorial Day in 1993, would Kellie have ended up getting some of the roles that Drew Barrymore ended up getting (Never Been Kissed, Ever After, and let's not forget Charlie's Angels alongside Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar). (Wait, you mean those two didn't get cast in that film, either??!) I bet she would have. Or Liv Tyler's role in Armageddon, at least. Certainly, she would not have needed to do all those made-for-TV movies for NBC, Lifetime and Hallmark Channel--going that route wrecked Valerie Bertinelli's career (so a fan of hers has told me), and it may have derailed Kellie's as well.

Fifteen years later, my displeasure with Universal extends to its release of Matinee on DVD. Universal thought so little of Matinee after its poor performance the box office that it sold the DVD rights to a little-known company called Image Entertainment, which produced such a small quantity of the DVD and let it go out of print. I think it's only ever aired on TV a couple of times, so I wouldn't hold my breath as far as that's concerned. The only way to get a copy is to search eBay (and be careful--you want to avoid the Brazilian bootleg). You're lucky if you can get a copy (the genuine article, that is) for less than $30. That said, I paid $32 for my copy, and in my humble opinion, it's worth every single penny.

UPDATE: Universal Pictures has re-released Matinee on DVD (good news: no longer have to pay an arm and a leg for a copy; bad news: like the DVD version Image Entertainment released in 1998, there are no bonus features whatsoever, not even the "film within the film" MANT! which is reportedly available on the Laser Disc version).

Well, that's all the venting I have for now. Thanks for listening.

Volume 3, Number 17: Ragging on the Metro

2010-01-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on May 24, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I came across this story the other day on CNN.com.

First, it stunned me when I read that Marci Solomon had to bid $7,300 on eBay just to buy this '96 Geo Metro.

Impressions pro:

Obviously, it gets excellent gas mileage, which is huge considering the price of gas today
It's in great shape (it had less than 40,000 miles on it because it was owned by an elderly couple that didn't drive that much)
Hatchbacks are versatile in that if you fold down the back seat, you can haul relatively large objects with no problem whatsoever

Impressions con:

The thing's got a three-cylinder engine. Even the Ford Festiva, a Kia-built car that I drove from 1992 to 1999, had a four-cylinder engine. Three cylinders stinks because if one cylinder goes, you're down to two cylinders and that won't be enough to get you anywhere. You need at least four cylinders.
Never mind the lack of creature comforts. I could live with manual locks and hand-crank windows. But like the Festiva, the Metro's a cardboard box on wheels.
Also, like the Festiva I used to drive, Solomon's Metro has no air conditioning.

According to the CNN.com story, $7,300 is more than five times the Blue Book value of the car. So let's suppose the actual Blue Book value was less than one-fifth of the selling price--$1,400. That means the buyer paid $5,900 more than it was worth. How long will she have to drive the car for it to be worth that extra $5,900?

Let's do a little math, shall we:

She was paying $100/week with a car that was getting 28 mpg (the Honda Element).
Divide that $100/week by $4/gallon and you get 25 gallons per week.
25 gallons a week times 28 mpg is 700 miles a week.
Now, 700 miles a week divided by 40 miles per gallon means that now she'll be buying 17.5 gallons each week, so she's buying 7.5 fewer gallons each week than with the Honda.
7.5 gallons times $4 is $30/week savings.
Divide that $5,900 by the $30/week, and she would have to drive the car for 197 weeks to get back the money she overpaid.
That's more than three years and 9 months, ladies and gentlemen. Three years and 9 months from now, it will be the year 2012, and that Geo Metro will be about 16 years old. And it would have close to 180,000 miles on it.

Advantage: Seller. One CNN.com reader called it case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish, and I couldn't agree more.

Volume 3, Number 16: The Benoit "Tribute" Show, Revisited

2010-01-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry on May 22, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

Almost eleven months ago, I and millions of other "professional wrestling" fans worldwide were shocked to hear of the news that not only was Chris Benoit found dead (having already missed a house show and a pay-per-view event), but so were his wife, Nancy, and their son, Daniel. The shock became much greater, of course, as we heard and read that Chris Benoit had killed his wife and son and then killed himself.

I subsequently attacked World Wrestling Entertainment for making what I thought was a rushed decision to do a tribute show to Benoit, instead of waiting at least a few days for the facts to come forth. A few days later, the generally trustworthy lead announcer (and onetime Vice President of Talent Development), Jim Ross, stated in his own blog that when the tribute show started, all they knew was that the Benoits were found dead at their home. At that point, in another blog entry, I apologized for "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" (or to put it another way, "playing the general after the war").

Well, last night, I came upon a blog entry by Irv Muchnick stating that the incident was declared a murder-suicide more than an hour before the show started. Muchnick is a wrestling journalist who has been working on his own book on the Benoit murder-suicide and the investigation that ensued. Among other things, the blog entry states that WWE informed Scott Zerr, an Edmonton journalist, that Chris Benoit had killed his wife and son and then taken his own life; Zerr then broke this news to Chris' father, Michael, around 6:45pm Eastern time. This statement is given more gravity by the fact that Zerr, a sportswriter for the Edmonton Sun, is a friend of the Benoit family, and by that virtue alone, is among the most qualified people to break the bad news to Michael Benoit.

Obviously, this contradicts Mr. Ross' statement, along with similar statements given by Vince McMahon and various other WWE officials, that the show began before all the facts came out.

Admittedly, when I attacked WWE, it was shortly after WAGA-TV (Atlanta's Fox station) reported that police investigators believed it to be a murder-suicide, at which point the show was well underway. I certainly did come off like someone "playing the general after the war" at that time.

Also, when I said, "The murder-suicide is more prevalent in crimes where whole families are wiped out," I didn't have any research study data to back up that statement. I merely cited two examples (Mark Barton, Michael Waleskowski).

Since then, however, I have come across this story--which, incidentally, was published less than a week before the Benoit murder-suicide--that states that family murder-suicides are the most common form of mass killing. This means that when the Benoits were found dead, there was already a very good chance that it was a murder-suicide, not some sicko from outside the family killing them.

I also discovered that in the vast majority (95%) of murder-suicides, the perpetrator is a man, according to this study on murder-suicides.

So you have a entire family found dead, one of whom is a man. That should have raised a huge red flag for WWE where doing any kind of tribute was concerned. I said that not only did they play Russian Roulette, they did so with bullets in all six chambers, and it turns out that I was right. Jim Ross implied that I was among "those who seem to know all the answers and seemingly like to give the appearance of having 20/20 vision after the fact"; now you, Mr. Ross, can count yourself among them.

Volume 3, Number 15: Contemplating Life in Hell's Kitchen

2010-01-06T14:47:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog on May 20, 2008.)

I've been watching the latest season of Hell's Kitchen since it began over a month ago, and I have to say, you have to hand it to the majority of the contestants on that show. There are a number of things you need to have in order to coexist with Chef Gordon Ramsay for two weeks--among them, the passion, the talent, the experience, the temperament, the team mentality, and the leadership ability.

After much contemplation, I realized that even if I had all of those things, I still wouldn't be a good contestant for Hell's Kitchen. Here are six reasons why:

I tend to be methodical and relatively slow in a lot of things I do, and cooking is no exception. I still swear by anything with pre-measured ingredients (like those Hamburger Helper boxes--the only things I need to measure there are the milk and/or the water) and easy-to-follow directions that have specific parameters (e.g. "simmer over low heat, covered, for 25 minutes"). My slowness greatly reduces the chance that I'll have my garnish ready at the same time that another chef had his main course ready. My methodical nature means not only more cooking time, but more prep time as well. For example, if I had to cook risottos in Hell's Kitchen, the first thing I would do during prep time would be to determine the amount of rice that went into the pan each time and put that exact amount of rice into a series of Ziploc bags, and do something similar with whatever other ingredients went into the risotto (with the idea that it would prevent me from using too much or too little of any ingredient).

I get dizzy and/or tired after bending over and then standing back up dozens of times. I actually discovered this around 17 years ago when I was helping my little brother, then six years old, clean up his room. After bending down to pick up something and standing back up to put it where it belonged, and repeating this a number of times, I started to feel dizzy. This is obviously not a problem when I cook at home because I don't cook more than one meal in a 4-hour span. But cooking a few dozen appetizers, main courses and desserts in a 4-hour span... That means leaning over a stove or bending down to put something out of an oven or take something out of an oven repeatedly. I might start to feel faint after two hours, at which point Chef Ramsay would yell, "Maaaaaaaaark... wakey-wakey, yes?!!"

Chef Ramsay talks too fast when reading off tickets to his chefs. Add in the fact that my short-term memory is not as good as my long-term memory, and it's no wonder that I'd have to lean on the other chefs on my team to verify what I heard from Ramsay. One example came early in the second season, two years ago, when Gabe wasn't sure of what he heard on one particular order, and (in my opinion) was justified in asking Chef Ramsay about whether there should be something else on that ticket. "Two quails?!?" asked an incredulous Ramsay. "Shut the f*** up! Would you mind not being so rude?!? There's quail nowhere on that ticket--just listen, concentrate--four minutes to the window, one spaghetti of lobster, one scallops! Now, would you like me to f***ing e-mail that to your Blackberry? MOVE YOUR ARSE!!!"

I don't want to risk food-poisoning other people - As I mentioned in at least two previous blog entries, I've been poisoned by restaurant food a couple of times. The last thing I want is to cause the same thing to happen to anyone else. All steaks would be cooked at least medium to medium-well. Chicken, I'd have to stab every so often to make sure there wasn't any pink in it. I would probably overcook seafood due to the fact that one of my two food poisoning episodes involved shrimp.

I am limited in terms of the ingredients I use. I've never eaten a scallop, much less cooked one. I still don't like a number of foods, like mushrooms, asparagus, artichokes, and avocadoes. I only like carrots and celery when they're in a soup, preferably overcooked. As a consequence, there are tons of items I never buy at the supermarket.

I am also very slow to expand my "comfort zone" in cooking. Twelve years ago, I was reluctant to cook anything that didn't come out of a can or a box. At that time, I would have been content to live on a diet of canned soups, canned pasta, TV dinners, macaroni and cheese dinners, and ramen noodles. Around five years ago, my cupboard still included stuff like Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and Spaghetti-O's with Sliced Franks. I expect Betty Crocker Helpers and Freschetta pizzas to remain constants, though.