August 23, 2005

      PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME GO IN THE SITUATION ROOM

1. . . . I might get hurt with all that new technology flying at me. CNN's new Wolf Blitzer show airs daily from 3-6 p.m. It's total visual overload. Boxes on the screen filled up with reporters and correspondents from a million locations with time slugs on the screen indicating what time it is where they are, text copy of newspaper and Web site headlines on endless video walls, the camera panning across everything behind anchor Wolf showing people walking or the camera veering off somewhere, feeds coming in from all over the world, computer blogs on huge monitors, guests standing up around a huge desk that has The Situation Room written all over it. Sound like enough?
2. . . . I'm blitzed out.
3. . . . It is, however, getting refined as they go along. It must be a megillah to direct, that's for sure. I hope they're paying whoever does direct it some good moolah.
4. HEIGHTS. Small movie, young people, familiar faces. New York is a small place sometimes and lots of lives are interconnected. This is what the movie's all about. Glenn Close is a famous actor and instructor who needs a man because hubby is fooling around. She's on the hunt. And she's got dark brown hair in this movie and looks sort of evil sister-ish. A girl's getting married but finds something out about fiance. George Segal, Isabella Rossellini (she's in everything lately), Rufus Wainwright and Eric Bogosian are the familiars. Overall, minor movie with a plot that's not that unique. They're all like that now.
5. Condoleezzza Rice is on the cover of the September/October AARP magazine with an accompanying article titled, Condi: How She Learned to Be Fearless. Looks like a high school picture, for crissakes. She sports her former hairstyle with that flip in the back, unlike the more up-to-date look she has now.
6. . . . She looked pretty hot out there in Crawford, Tex., walking with the president and Donald Rumsfeld down a dirt road with white capri pants on, open-toed high heel shoes and a pink top and jacket, hair blowing in the wind. And the sky was blue and the grass was green.
7. MAN WITH SNAKE HEAD IN MOUTH. Yes, the picture was in The Washington Post's free news daily, Express. The man was part of an Indian snake charmers meet that "showed off various venomous snakes to villagers while worshipping the Hindu snake god Manasha." And it looked like the same snake's body was wrapped around the dude's neck.
8. A relative of one of serial killer BTK's (Dennis Rader) victims called him " a walking cesspool." He got all dressed up for his court appearances, shirt and tie, sport jacket and everything. He was imparting knowledge. All the guilty people get dressed up for court.
9. SELF-FLUSHERS. I don't like being detected while I'm relieving myself at the urinal. At work there's a little red light that flashes at the urinal in the men's room when you walk up to it, I guess, because someone's standing there. I'm being sensed. I feel like my picture's being taken. And then when you walk away the darn thing flushes itself. The flush seems weak to me and it doesn't seem to do that good a job of it. Having to flush my own urinal is not that much of an inconvenience but I guess somebody thinks so. When I'm done my hand automatically goes right up to where the handle should be but it's not there. That's a waste of my energy.
10. When I asked a friend of mine, "You know what really irritates me?," he said, "Everything." Well, what could I say?
11. So it's Diddy now for Sean John Combs, ne P. Diddy, ne Puffy, ne Puff Daddy, ne Sean Combs, whatever was the order of things.
12. . . . Ne means before.
13. Matt Lauer was in Baghdad with the troops a couple days last week. Of course, he had a bright blue shirt on with the sleeves rolled up while everybody else around him had on khaki brown. He's always got to be different. Oh, and he had on the sunglasses (He and Katie Couric are the sunglass bunch.) when he was outside talking to some of the troops. None of them had on designer shades. But he did take them off when he was inside later, interviewing Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
14. TO MADONNA. A horse is a horse, of course, of course. She's lucky she didn't get thrown like Christopher Reeve. Did she groan from the fall with a British accent?
15. DIDN'T KNOW THIS. It was reported that the Washington subway system's recessed lighting "is supposed to cast stations in a perpetual twilight" in a story about something being wrong with the lighting down in the hole. They've had to bring in big stand-up lights to make it illuminated. All I know is that generally it's so dark down there in Metro Center that you can barely read a newspaper. Somebody harness the sun or something and FIX IT NOW!
16. "Everything floods into The Situation Room," said Wolf Blitzer.
17. Gaza is not Gazaa, the music filesharing software system.
18. HANDING OVER THE REIGNS. Looks like Ryan Seacrest (American Idol, American Top 40) will be the next Dick Clark. Clark will reportedly be back for this year's New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast and Seacrest will join him and then eventually take over the show. He will also become executive producer, as Clark was. That guy does everything.
19. Do Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen have to appear together in everything they do? This time it was Living With the Dead, a CBS two-part telemovie in which Danson played a clairvoyant crime solver ("I have the ability to see things." ) Isn't that hard on the marriage?
20. HUSTLE & FLOW. Good movie about a pimp (the now hot Terrence Howard who was in Crash) who wants to channel his talent for rhyming into being a rap star. Sounds maybe unoriginal but this movie hits it right on, has some good acting, seems real. Definitely worth seeing, especially the scenes while they're recording which shows how something like a rap record comes into being. Brilliant.
21. JUST WONDERING. When they're searching for a criminal, should they just say the police are on a hunt and not say manhunt anymore? Is manhunt a sexist term now? Is there a womanhunt? ABC reporter Sonya Crawford did a news piece for Good Morning America on the husband and wife team (Jennifer and George Hyatte) who killed a prison guard in a jailbreak and said, "... after a two-day hunt ..." in describing the search for that Bonnie and Clyde duo. She probably said hunt because they were in search of a man and a woman and manhunt seemed inappropriate. So does any of this matter?
22. Were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark? Somebody said they were.
23. Hanalie, dog in the neighborhood, just got back from Charleston, S.C., with owner Sally. They went out to see the stevedores (ship loaders) on the Cooper River who Sally used to work with in her port monitoring project to detect radiation. (The whole thing's EPA-ish). Anyway, the head steve commented on Hanalie's weight loss and said she was a "foxy little dog."
24. Did Jennifer Wilbanks (Runaway Bride) do a good job mowing the lawn? That was her punishment for faking herself missing. When you mow it's good to get up close to things and when you can't, to hand trim with clippers the grass you can't reach with the lawn mower blades. That makes it look like a nice, clean job. Did she do it that way?
25. NOW WE KNOW HOW THE FISH FEEL. That Russian sub that got entangled in antenna cable or netting of some kind about three weeks ago was just like what happens to dolphins or whales or tuna. They get trapped all the time. So now I guess we know how the other half lives ... or dies.
26. In the promos for CNN's American Morning they say the full names of each of the anchors: Miles O'Brien and Soledad O'Brien or Soledad and Miles O'Brien. Why don't they save a nanosecond or so and just say Miles and Soledad O'Brien or Soledad and Miles O'Brien? Oh, I know. They want everyone to understand that each is an individual unto him/herself. They're not married and not brother and sister and they're not tied together. They're separate but equal individuals and they each are a complete person in her/his own right. Yeah, Baby!
27. DON'T CALL WILF, WOLF. ABC has a new correspondent and his name is similar to Wolf Blitzer's. He's Wilf Dinnick and he's bureau chief in Israel for the network. Kate Snow introduced him to the audience on his first report for GMA.
28. PETER JENNINGS. It's hard to believe he's gone. It happened so fast. He was the intrepid anchorman who went everywhere and reported on everything. That's why ABC named the two-hour special, Peter Jennings Reporter. He liked to get out of that anchor chair. The people he looked up to when he was coming up were his father, Charles Jennings, himself a newsman in Canada, Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, who he later worked with for ABC News's election coverage through the years, said his former producer Michael Clemente, in an online discussion with washingtonpost.com. Regarding whether it marks the end of an era of network news, Clemente said it's "the end in terms of three men involved but in terms of getting news and information, there's never been more available than there is now. Perhaps it's the beginning of a new era."
29. Actor Alex Baldwin is to receive the Linda McCartney Memorial Award at PETA's (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) gala in Hollywood on Sept. 10. He narrated a documentary and as a result of that Baldwin said everyone should become a vegetarian. So I guess he's one now. Good, maybe he'll lose some weight.
30. Rapper Snoop Dogg is in a new commercial for Chrylser with Lee Iacocca. They're both seen on a golf course and riding in a modified golf cart. When Iacocca talks about everybody getting a great deal, Snoop agrees and says, "Fo-shizzle, I ka-zizzle." And at the end of the spot Mr. Dogg says, 'If the ride is more fly, then you must buy. " It's funny.
31. I saw some young guy eating French fries in the Metro and I thought of the young girl who was arrested some time back for doing the same thing. So I guess that incident didn't make a dent in what people do down there in the subway.
32. CRUEL. A flyer has been up on light poles near my work for about a month with a picture of a missing cute little black, gray and white shih tzu dog with an award posted at $3,000. Somebody --wrote GIVE UP! on it. Not nice.
33. I wonder if the Post Office likes being referred to as snail mail in this e-mail age we're living in.
34. Some people are calling Northwest Airlines, Northworst. They say the service and reliability is terrible.
35. I feel sorry for Courtney Love. She cried in the courtroom when the judge ordered her into another drug rehab program because she violated probation. She's only human.
36. Enrique Iglesias looks like he's got cleavage in an ad for True Star Men, the new Tommy -Hilfiger fragrance. It looks more womanly than manly.
37. The new leader of Motown group the Four Tops who appeared in a concert on a recent PBS fund drive telecast was awful. He's replacing the great Levi Stubbs who is ill but was in the audience. Stubbs is a hard act to follow but the new guy was way out of his league. Spoiled it. (There are only two surviving Tops left.) Too bad we can't bring back the good old days.
38. Exercise guru Richard Simmons was on the Today show recently and was still wearing those same red and white striped too short shorts. I mean, Gimme a Break!
39. UH . . . Short Shorts-The Royal Teens, on ABC-Paramount. From 1958.