Rocci Fisch

May 25, 2011

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. (He said the same thing back 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 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 things 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 last 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 them and the mission. He watched the astros on a TV from a sparse-looking room in the Vatican as they were orbiting Earth.
…One of the twelve astronauts who were all grouped together for the transmission 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 one of them – and the only woman up there, Catherine Coleman -- 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.
…She has a bushy mane.
EARLY HYPE. "What if you could have the original reporting of 60 Minutes every night?" says the latest network promo, plugging the CBS Evening News with newly appointed news anchor Scott Pelley.
…That (already) 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.
…ADVICE. Don't make early promises. They did that with Katie Couric and look what happened to her. (The show went back to a standard news story format after they tried numerous things suited to her personality. )
…They took down the big Katie Couric picture banner that was hanging outside of CBS News headquarters on West 57^th 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.
…The body's not even cold yet. Seems like they couldn't get rid of Couric fast enough.
…ON MY WISH LIST: A new anchor desk. CBS needs to move into the modern 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 Bob Schieffer on Sunday?
…My eyeballs ached from watching that.
…Spend a few bucks and get a set designer in there. Quit being so cheap.
NOTICED. There's a Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) look-alike out there: Another Rachel, this time with the last name of Boesing, a host on QVC, the shopping network. She very much resembles her. (Boesing was hawking Skechers casual shoes for women, like Maddow hawks her agenda.)
…But Boesing's hair was all spiked up and looked sticky and punky and had a lot of product on it, which Maddow doesn't do -- at least on her TV show.
…The big glasses were 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.
…So people in TV come in all shapes and sizes.
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 female image on the cable network.
…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 his more lately. (He anchors the weekend editions of the Today show and Nightly News.)
…OBSERVED: It used to be he just 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 studio in New York.
…But they don't look like they fit him properly. The top part of the frame blocks his eyes a bit; they need to be higher up and above the eyes. Maybe he just needs to push 'em up the bridge of his nosy, nose, nose.
…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 with eyewitnesses. They were too thick; they looked like those dumb toy glasses you buy at Halloween time 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 good pacing, production and editing. I was impressed.
…He must've signed with a good ad agency.
Raoul Felder, a well-known divorce attorney, was on the Today show over the weekend and discussed the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Maria Shriver scandal. He speculated 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 often played at the Scharzenegger/Shriver home with their kids.
…Good point. Didn't anybody notice and wonder anything about that?
…It seems sorta like a case of hiding in plain sight, like Osama bin Laden.
…The Schwarz-Shriver kids tweet a lot. (Who doesn't?) "They're controlling their media," said a psychologist on CNN's Showbiz Tonight program, in discussing the family and what they're saying about the "crisis" they're going through.
…"Crisis, healing, rebuilding …" Those seem to be the key words all those relationship experts are using in analyzing their marriage on talk shows and interviews.
…Good, have some tech make up a tag cloud (visual representation of text data) over it.
…Sounds like an Oprah Winfrey show topic to me. Whoops, too late, her show is ending this Wednesday.
…It's been reported that 17-year-old son Patrick has changed his last name on his Twitter account to Shriver to show that he's siding with his mother and not his father.
…That's cruel news for daddy.
NOTICED. Men in black and white striped uniforms stacking sandbags in Stephensville, La., last week, seen in Janet Shamlian's NBC news piece about the Mississippi floods.
…Were they prisoners on work duty, like a chain gang? They were dressed like jailbirds.
…And once again Shamlian was dressed like she was in a high-fashion ad sporting a red zip-top zippered down a bit and with the collar up. She didn't look like she had been trekking through muddy flood waters to me.
A LITTLE PREMATURE? Josh Elliott, former ESPN SportsCenter anchor and reporter and now ABC GMA news reader, anchored World News Saturday for David Muir, who was off giving a graduation speech somewhere. Elliott's been with ABC for about a month.
…Isn't it a bit early to be giving him a plum assignment like that? Aren't there other more experienced and deserving reporters/substitutes in the ABC stable than relative newcomer Elliott?
…Correspondents wait years in the wings for opportunities like that. Just sayin'.
PERSONAL PREFERENCE. For some reason I don't like Aol's new (I know it's not that new) logo with upper and lower-case letters. I liked them all upper (AOL) -- seemed more together, uniform, authoritative. Now they've lost me.
IF IT HEAR THE WORD 'JOURNEY' ONE MORE TIME … It's been used a lot by and in referring to Oprah Winfrey and her "travels through life" with her TV show and what the "next chapter" will be in her career now that she's ending the show. Come on! I've heard enough
…And Katie Couric used it on her last broadcast for the CBS Evening News last week: "Thank you for coming along on this incredible journey," she said at the end of her show
…I'll give ya an incredible journey: "To the moon Alice," as Jackie Gleason would say on The Honeymooners.
UNFORTUNATE. That we're seeing the legitimization of TMZ, the tabloid/celebrity"news" and rumor mill which is owned by Time Warner. For God's sake, The New York Times (I was shocked) and other reputable news organizations are reporting what they're "reporting" in articles about the Arnold-Maria breakup and interviewing lawyer-turned-journalist Harvey Levin like he's some preeminent scholar or something.
…I'm naïve. I guess it was inevitable. Everybody's being dragged down in the muck when it comes to celebrity news and gossip. Sad.
…SEXIST REMARK. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm (D) tweeted last week how she felt about the Schwarzenegger scandal: "Another guy guy admits to cheating on his wife. Maybe we need more women governors. Guys: keep ur pants zipped, for Pete's sake. #Arnold."
…ASKING. Was there any dust kicked up over that flip remark? There should have been. "Keep ur pants zipped" is a very crude, stereotypical and sexist remark to be lobbed his way. She should have been called on the carpet for issuing that warning and feeding into the frenzy over it.
…A former attorney general and state governor should be above such foolishness. Why did she have to weigh in on it?
…What if a man tweeted something similar and insulting about women and their sex drive or how they procreate? We'd never hear the end of that.
…Unequal playing field.
…IF YOU ASK ME … That MySpace picture Mildred Baena (the woman who is the mother of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "love child") posted of herself makes her look sorta come hither-ish.
… UH … Love Child – Diana Ross & The Supremes, on Motown Records, 1968.
…"Love child, never meant to be … Love child, (scorned by) so-ci-e-ty … Love child, always second best … Love child, different (not quite) from the rest."

rocci.fisch@gmail.com

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