I THOUGHT SADDAM HUSSEIN GOT A HAIRCUT

1. . . . But it wasn't him. It was Chemical Ali, his cousin (Ali Hassan Majeed). They look a lot alike. The Kissin' Cousin appeared before a tribunal in Baghdad last Saturday for the start of an investigation into executions of thousands using mustard and nerve gas. Nice guy.
2. YOU WANT IT? YOU FIND IT. Nobody was at the information desk at Borders over the weekend when I went there. Two computers on the counter but not a person in sight. People were searching on them for books in the store. That's all anybody does anymore - search, Google. No live help.
3. "Celebrex! Celebrex! Dance to the music." Yeah, who didn't know that was coming after Vioxx? And now it's Aleve. How many TV commercials do they have for that?
4. John Tesh (former Entertainment Tonight co-anchor with Mary Hart, eons ago) was on TV last week for a concert he gave called Worship at Red Rocks. He's like a Yanni now, only he doesn't have as much hair to shake but he does have some. It was a religious concert he gave and he was like a singing profit up there on stage, raising his hand to the sky, looking up and jumping around to the music in between playing his keyboard.
5. IMPROVEMENT. Shooting Bloomberg News reporter Linda Bell a little wider with a slightly different background and with her hair lightened. It/she's more inviting and easier to watch than when it was such a tight shot. She does business news updates for Good Morning Washington with Alison Starling and Doug McKelway.
6. "I'm a gonna mail myself to you ..." Are you sick of that one yet, from the U.S. Postal Service?
7. Somebody said Channel 7 should bring over J.C. Hayward and then they'd basically have the whole former Channel 9 Eyewitness News team.
8. . . . Speaking of Channel 9, during prime time, Tracey Neale or Todd McDermott often comes on during a network break and says something like, "We'll get you back to Without a Trace or CSI in a minute ..." and then mentions an upcoming story for the 11:00 news that's similar in nature to what's happening on that show. They're likening what's going on in the drama to real life news. What, do they get an advance screener of everything that's on in prime time and then make sure they've got news in the show to match it? Ridiculous.
9. Will that Ukraine politician who was poisoned, Viktor Yushchenko, ever get his old face back? Some have said he will but it's got a long way to go.
10. NEW TO ME. Lord & Taylor using real-life models in their ads. For years they've been line drawings and I thought they were too cheap to pay the models. Maybe it's changed.
11. That light blue military jacket with the epaulets that President Bush had on when he addressed the Marines at Camp Pendleton two weeks ago looked like something from Flash Gordon.
12. Whenever Mr. Big Stuff sees and hears Nicollette Sheridan's name (Desperate Housewives) he thinks of that Nicorette gum that helps people quit smoking.
13. ANCHOR VOICES FROM THE PAST. John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw. Those are the names you hear quickly at the beginning of the NBC Nightly News opening. No David Brinkley? Why, because he defected to ABC?
14. Kelsey Grammer publicly supports irritable bowel syndrome awareness. (This learned from AARP magazine.) Grammer turns 50 on Feb. 21.
15. No more Deborah Norville to kick around at MSNBC. She's outta there. Ratings low (average, 267,000 viewers) and besides that, it's been too much for her to anchor Deborah Norville Tonight and her real job, Inside Edition. Heavy journalism.
16. Oprah's got Beyonce hair now. She's on the cover of O. Who else would be?
17. CNN is advertising on the networks. I've seen ads featuring Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Paula Zahn and Christiane Amanpour on ABC and NBC. Maybe CBS too. Seems odd that another net would advertise itself on another net. But money's money, I guess.
18. . . . The ads are funny and clever.
19. DIDN'T KNOW. The voice of the AFLAC duck is actor Gilbert Gottfried, known as the "scrunch-faced comic." He's been in scores of movies and has done loads of TV appearances and his duck appears in the current Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
20. Can we have a little bit less of Sarah Jessica Parker? If she's not in some shampoo ad with blonde locks she's hawking for the Gap. I noticed on a recent New York trip that someone had blackened out one of her teeth on a Gap bus poster.
21. The blond from CSI: Miami (Emily Proctor who plays Calleigh Duquesne) is in TV ads for Colgate Dental Cream (with Gardol) - that's what they used to call it. Now it's just toothpaste. And the ads have a CSI-ish look to them, with fast, extreme close-ups and jutty pullbacks and a camera that looks inside the gel.
22. I'd like to see Yanni with his head shaved.
23. I see Granny's still in bed using The Clapper to turn off the TV this Christmas season. But she needs a trip to the hairdresser. That woman's hair looks like she stuck her finger in a light socket.
24. A friend of mine says this about Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith: "He looks like the kind of guy you want to smack in the face. He's got the kind of face they always give the bullies in movies."
25. The cover of the current Newsweek has Barack Obama on the cover. He's the guy who was just elected senator from Illinois and is described as a "rising star" for the Democrats. The headline is Seeing Purple. Well, what's that mean to most people? Is it The Color Purple? Is he gonna be in that movie? Oh, it's the color you get when you combine the Blue states with the Red states. What do those designations mean? I always forget. The election's over.
26. I want Get Down Tonight - The Disco Explosion 3-CD box set for Christmas. It retails for $44.99 but on the PBS pledge drive they were asking about $100 for it. What a bargain.
27. DASHER, DANCER, PRANCER, VIXEN, COMET, CUPID, DONNER, BLITZEN, AND RUDOLPH. Someone wrote me to say that according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, "while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of the winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in the spring. So all of Santa's reindeer had to be girls.
28. . . . But talking with Martha in the office up in Juneau, Alaska, she said that some of the young male reindeer do keep their antlers for a longer period and may retain them through the winter. That would be Rudolph since he was supposedly the young one. The rest of the reindeer pulling the sleigh, then, were female. So what would the names be under those circumstances, I ask?
29. UH . . . Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Singing Cowboy Gene Autrey on Columbia Records and written by Johnny Marks in 1949. Autrey recorded it first but Burl Ives did it too and his was the version used in the Christmas TV staple, named after the song.

rocci@roccifisch.com

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