December 8, 2003


      CH CH CH CHIA

  1. . . . It’s Christmas and those Chia Pets are back. And now they’ve got Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in those terra cotta thingamajigs.
  2. Former ABC News correspondent Chris Wallace debuted on Fox News Sunday yesterday. He called it the "Volume Two" edition since he’s following Tony Snow’s anchorship. And he said he hoped people would make it a Sunday morning routine like "the morning papers and your first cup of coffee." Shades of David Brinkley? He used to say, "First the news since the Sunday morning papers."
  3. The Washington area didn’t get enough snow if you ask me. But you’d never know it by watching local TV. They were all over it like it was the Storm of the Century.
  4. Beyonce shook her booty right up in Nelson Mandela’s face at the AIDS benefit concert held last weekend in Cape Town. That’s what it looked like in the photo that ran in the papers. There she was on stage shake, shake shaking it right up against a backdrop picture of the South African leader’s face.
  5. ARE SADDAM AND OSAMA GAY? The Weekly World News shows a picture of bin Laden in a flowing white gown and Hussein in a pink tu-tu in last week’s cover story about a home videotape that was found in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. They even quote CIA director George Tenet as saying he didn’t know "whether to laugh or cry" when he saw it. Where do they get that stuff?
  6. . . . The doctored picture is funny. They’re both standing on their tippy toes in ballerina shoes.
  7. Hillary Clinton was on three Sunday talk shows yesterday: Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week. You’d think the networks were covering a presidential press conference or something. At one point she was on two of ‘em at once. And Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, was on three of ‘em too. These people make the rounds.
  8. Now there’s an Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. It was on last week and got good ratings.
  9. I think Jermaine Jackson wears almost as much makeup as his brother Michael.
  10. ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT . . . WILDFIRES? That’s apparently the new slogan used in the current Smokey the Bear public service announcements. (I may be late on this. I just noticed it.) Forest Fires went by the wayside after all those years, I guess.
  11. Rev. Al Sharpton can dance like James Brown. He slid his feet to I Feel Good on Saturday Night Live pretty darn good and the skits were pretty funny too. He was once road manager for Mr. Brown.
  12. A LITTLE UPSET. Mary Tyler Moore was "devastated and completely debilitated personally and professionally" after receiving a critical letter about her performance from playwright Neil Simon in his new comedy, "Rose’s Dilemma."
  13. . . . And Nicole Kidman seems to be miscast in The Human Stain. She’s too pretty to be the part she’s playing. And as for Anthony Hopkins ... Talk about majorly miscast. And there’s totally no resemblance between the actor (Wentworth Miller) who plays his character when he was young and how he looks now. The acting’s good but the movie sorta misses. And the flashbacks are sometimes better than what’s going on in the present.
  14. American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken’s album, Measure of a Man, is a hit and former runner- upper Justin Guarini’s isn’t. Clay’s is basically power pop that’s done like it’s done. But his voice is lost in all the power cord production. You don’t hear the strength of it on the album.
  15. JUST ASKING . . . And in his single, Invisible, he sings, "If I was invisible ..." Shouldn’t he be saying, "If I were invisible?" (Just to be correct.)
  16. . . . And Justin’s been reportedly dropped by his record label, RCA. Poor sales or something.
  17. Mr. Big Stuff asked if there really was a Paris Hilton and yes, there are: The Hilton Paris, the Hilton Paris Arc de Triomphe and the Hilton La Defense. Plus, there are two airport Hiltons - at Orly and De Gaulle. And SNL’s Jimmy Fallon asked the real Paris Hilton on Weekend Update, "Is it hard to get into the Paris Hilton?"
  18. There’s a new 90-minute DVD re-release (OTP Productions) of James Brown: The Man, the Music & the Message, which had a showing Friday night at Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre. The Godfather himself was there. He was in town for the Kennedy Center Honors.
  19. Ellen DeGeneres said this, "Take a nap in your fireplace. You’ll sleep like a log."
  20. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile doesn’t know what to do with her hair. For a long time it’s been up, then it was down for awhile and now it’s back up. (Looks better up.) And her fellow debate partner Bay Buchanan finally got her hair thinned out plus the color’s lighter. They’re usually on CNN together.
  21. Some chef on TV was explaining how you can cook a turkey and other food in the dishwasher. (Plastic bags are the key.)
  22. Barry Manilow’s hair is sorta sticking up all over the place like Clay Aiken’s.
  23. Valerie Bertinelli still pretty much looks the same. She was just on the TV movie, Finding John Christmas. She looks young and short.
  24. Scott Peterson’s hair’s longer now. Maybe he doesn’t like the way the barber does it in prison.
  25. QUESTION. Does Scott Peterson’s mother have emphysema? She always has that tube thing in her nose.
  26. . . . And who’s gonna get ahold of those Laci autopsy photos? You know somebody will.
  27. Does Ron Howard ever not wear a ball cap?
  28. GET REAL. How many people are giving Lexuses this year as Christmas presents? A friend of mine saw the commercial and said this, "Yeah, right."
  29. CLAP ON, CLAP OFF. Old granny is still in bed clapping her hands to turn off the TV set in the ad for the Clapper.
  30. A friend of mine who wasn’t counting calories had a turkey sandwich with stuffing, cranberries and mayonaise on it. Is this common?
  31. Good Morning America called Paris Hilton and other rich kids Heir Heads.
  32. Alleged young sniper Lee Boyd Malvo draws pretty good pictures. His pencil drawing of Neo of the Matrix looks just like the Keanu Reeves character and he does a good rendering of a sniper with a shotgun crouched in the bushes really well. He’s got experience.
  33. STUCK ON YOU. The upcoming movie with Matt Damon and Greg Kinner as conjoined twins doesn’t seem like maybe it’s the right thing to do. Politically incorrect? There’ve been a lot of conjoined twins in the news lately and one set even died as the result of surgery to try to separate them. Don’t mean to get all serious here, but somehow I don’t think it’s right to make a comedy film about it.
  34. FYI: Nicole Richie, friend of Paris Hilton and co-star with her in the RTV show, The Simple Life, is Lionel Richie’s daughter and Michael Jackson is her godfather.
  35. Roy Horn (Siegfried and Roy) must’ve really been attacked by that tiger back in October. They still say he can’t walk, talk or eat.
  36. The actress Leslie Hope (24) on the new ABC crime drama, Line of Fire, looks a bit at times like Judy Woodruff and at other times like Sharon Stone.
  37. Mr. Highfalutin thought Ron Howard’s direction of The Missing was "pedestrian, at best." (Snotty, he.)
  38. Where’s ABC7’s Don Hudson? Used to see him all the time.
  39. NBC News is doing a series on Civil Rights which will be seen on the network and CNBC and MSNBC and on the Internet. Think that’s enough coverage?
  40. Was Rush Limbaugh doctor shopping?
  41. Tic Tacs are now 30% larger. Why’d they do that? And they seem slightly softer once you bite into them.
  42. WARNING. If you’re at the duty free shop on the border of Jordan and Iraq, don’t buy a radio or alarm clock, says a Traveling TV Producer friend of mine. They tried to sell him a radio/alarm clock combo that had the aerial broken off and wouldn’t discount it. He thinks their merchandise is probably used by the store staff and then put back in the boxes.
  43. Hanalie, dog in the neighborhood, traveled back to D.C. from Atlanta by car with owner Sally on Saturday. The dog didn’t eat before departing and during the ride north, started shaking. Sally thought she was having a hypoglycemic attack so she stopped along the way and fed her a Slim Jim and some cheese crackers so she could get her protein. She ate it all up and was fine after that.
  44. UH . . . Jim Dandy - LaVern Baker on Atlantic. 1956. Good jitterbug.


rocci@roccifisch.com

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