Rocci Fisch

May 22, 2012

THE WORLD DIDN’T END

. . . After Saturday at 6 p.m. in each time zone the “fantastically great earthquake” that Harold Camping, the California Christian broadcaster (Family Radio Network) predicted would be the End of Times (“At the end of a rainbow, you’ll find a pot of gold …” (The End by Earl Grant, on Decca Records, 1958) didn’t occur. Anybody surprised at that?
. . . Judgment Day didn’t come and people didn’t rise up in the air to meet Jesus Christ (“Hello, I love you. Won’t you tell me your name …” (The Doors, on Elektra Records, 1968) so it wasn’t time for the Rapture (“Caught up in the rapture of love …” – Anita Baker, on Elektra Records, 1986) to begin.
. . . The Second Coming (Second Time Around - Shalamar, on SOLAR (Sound of L.A.) Records, 1979) was “mis-predicted” by Camping for the second time (previously in 1994)
. . . He needs to get a new crystal ball.
. . . They’ll have get the cranes out to take down those (approximately) 2,000 billboards across America’s highways that announced that doomsday was coming and to get ready (“Get Ready ‘cause here I come …” – The Temptations, on Gordy Records, 1966).
. . . Some people reportedly gave away all their earthly possessions because they thought they’d be heaven-bound and wouldn’t need material goods up there.
. . . The tweet generation called Camping’s prediction “a dud.”
. . . That’s definitely less than 140 characters.
. . . I bet the people of Joplin, Mo., thought the Rapture that Camping predicted was hitting them over the weekend when that tornado cut a six-mile swath through the town
MARY HART’S LEAVING. The Entertainment Tonight host said goodbye last Thursday after 29 years of hosting the show. (ASKING: What is it with these people that do a Monday through Friday show saying their final goodbyes on a Thursday? Katie Couric also did it this past week on Thursday. Do they just want a long weekend?)
. . . They’ve got plenty of them coming up.
. . . ET gave Mary a whole hour special edition show but CBS didn’t do the same for Katie. She just got the normal length of her telecast.
. . . Mary will be succeeded by Nancy O’Dell (formerly of Access Hollywood), who has already been broken in and has substituted for Hart as well as doing other segments of the show.
. . . Nancy O’Dell is no Mary Hart.
. . . Jennifer Lopez told Hart, “You’ve brought so much into all our lives. There is only one Mary Hart.”
VIP TREATMENT. Pope Benedict XVI called the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on Saturday and asked them prepared questions and imparted an “apostolic blessing” on the mission. He watched them on a TV from the Vatican as they were orbiting the earth.
. . . It was very un-techy.
. . . One of the twelve astronauts all grouped together floated a coin in the air and tossed it to Paolo (fellow crew member) to demonstrate microgravity and said that he was going to bring it back to Earth and send it to the pontiff. Nice gesture.
. . . Another of the astros – and the only woman up there XXX - seemed to be having a bad hair day. Her locks were sticking straight up in the air at what looked like three feet in the zero gravity atmosphere.
EARLY HYPE. “What if you could have the original reporting of 60 Minutes every night?” says the latest promo, plugging the new CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.
. . . That sounds like an exaggerated claim to me. The evening news is very different from a news magazine show; they don’t have time for in-depth pieces. Nightly network news shows deal with news of the day – not investigations and pre-packaged pieces.
. . . If they’re planning on doing that, they’ve got another thing coming.
. . . Don’t make early promises. They did that with Katie Couric and look what happened to her. (They went back to a standard format.)
. . . They took down the Katie Couric picture banner that was hanging outside of CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in New York City last week and put up a new one featuring all of the news anchors of the network in a group shot, with Pelley out front.
. . . Couric’s body is not even cold yet. Seems like they couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.
. . . ON MY WISH LIST: A new anchor desk. CBS needs to move into the higher class-looking world of plexiglass and see-thru accoutrements. That old wooden anchor desk doesn’t impress anymore.
. . . The round lip of it makes the anchor look like he/she’s inside a kissing booth or something.
. . . ANOTHER NETWORK HOUSEKEEPING REQUEST. Do you think that CBS could’ve come up with a better background, i.e., monotonous, repeated Face the Nations written horizontally in white letters over a plain blue background one after the other and single spaced, for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich’s interview with show host Bob Schieffer on Sunday?
. . . My eyeballs ached from watching that.
. . . Spend a few bucks and get a set designer in there.
NOTICED. There’s a Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) look-alike out there: Rachel Boesing, a host on QVC, the shopping network, very much resembles her.
. . . But Boesing’s hair was all spiked up, had a lot of product on it, which Maddow doesn’t do.
. . . The big glasses are there (Maddow wears them in those MNBC promos she’s in) and both have the gift of gab.
. . . Boesing is best known for being a former weather forecaster in LA for KNBC.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN BLONDE AND PLATINUM. That’s the transition Liz Cheney’s hair seems to be making. (Cheney is one of Dick Cheney’s daughters and a “former State Department official,” as she’s billed on Fox News Sunday, on which she often appears.
. . . She seems to be on her way to becoming a “Fox babe,” the name some use to refer to the women of Fox News. The hair stylists over there seem to be giving her that bright, on-air look to fit the prevailing image.
. . . Think daddy likes it?
BIG SPECS. Those fashionable plastic, retro-looking, bold glasses that many people wear nowadays seem to also be popular with network news anchors. Lester Holt of NBC likes them and seems to be wearing them more lately. (He anchors the weekend editions of the Today show and Nightly News.)
. . . OBSERVED: It used to be he wore them more when he was in the field reporting from a news scene but lately he’s wearing them when he’s in the New York studio.
. . . They’re not quite fitting him correctly. The top part of the frame blocks out his eyes; they need to be higher up.
. . . I don’t know about you but I like to see the eyes of my news anchors.
. . . And over the weekend CNN anchor Don Lemon donned his big wide specs, had them on while talking about the Missouri tornado. They were too thick; they looked like those dumb toy glasses with the big nose and a mustache attached, like Groucho Marx.
Tim Pawlenty, former Republican Minnesota governor, made a good TV ad for announcing that he’s running for president. It has a “now,” modern look with pacing, production and editing. I was impressed.
. . . Does he have a chance?
Raoul Felder, a well-known divorce attorney, was on the Today show over the weekend and discussed the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Maria Shriver scandal. He mentioned this: “… A gap-tooth kid running around the house and nobody thought anything about that?” referring to the son Schwarzenegger fathered with a housekeeper and who was often at the Scharzenegger/Shriver home and played with their kids.
. . .

rocci.fisch@gmail.com

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