It’s Official: TV Writers Walk

Yep, the WGA went on strike last night at midnight, which means that most TV series’ should be in re-runs a few weeks from now, and most (if not all) late-night talk shows should be in re-runs tonight.

How lame and pathetic are the late-night talk show hosts that a writer's strike is enough to send them into immediate re-runs? I wish I had a job where all I had to do was read unfunny crap that other people wrote for me. I can't believe that for what these guys get paid, they can't function without their precious cue cards.

I bet Carson would have stayed on just to spite ‘em. Wimps.

A Reminder

Happy Novembuh! Remember to set that clock back this weekend!

Halloween Sure Can Be Scary

Happy Halloween, one and all – hope everyone doesn’t suffer from sugar shock after eating all those chocolate bars and candy corns!

Wanna hear a scary Halloween story?

A few years ago, it’s coming up on October 31st and I’m hanging out with a couple of people and their family. I innocently asked if they had anything planned for Halloween – any parties, hay rides, what have you.

“We don’t do Halloween here”, the father says. I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean, you don’t “do” Halloween here”? “It’s a nasty, evil holiday”, he tells me. “We stay home and watch movies”. Intrigued, I queried on. “Do you give candy to trick or treaters?” “No, because that just further legitimizes this evil day”. Evil day? What planet had I just fallen on to?

I attempted to point out that the paganism of the day had long ago been co-opted by seven-year-olds dressed up like Superman looking for Bite-Size Snickers, and teenagers looking for a more creative use for toilet paper, eggs and shaving cream. None of this seemed to matter to the patriarch of this clan.

This would have been scary enough, except that further prodding revealed that the family also never did any of the innocent, childhood things most of us grew up with: no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny…I was dumbstruck. I looked at the people I was visiting and asked, “Did you guys have ANY childhood”? Apparently not…and they all thought this was completely normal.

Thank goodness my parents were not so narcissistic as to think my childhood should be all about them. There is only one time in your life when your suspension of disbelief is such that you can find yourself believing in something as wonderful and innocent as jolly old St. Nick and other bearers of joy. There’s plenty of time when you are an adult, with mortgages, utility bills, illness and threats of terrorism to be a cynical mess. To not know that innocence is a shame

Who said Halloween wasn’t scary anymore?

Breaking News (of the Insane Variety)

This just in via e-mail from Jim Nazium:

From: Jim Nazium
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2007 6:26 PM
To: Pete Sayek
Subject: It's over!

I can say without feeling guilty to anyone including my friends that if you voted for Eliot Spitzer you're an asshole!

NY Senators mum on Spitzer's ID plan for immigrants

Eliot Spitzer's Halloween Trick: Driver's Licenses for Illegal Aliens

Thankfully, Jim knows I do not qualify under the ‘asshole proviso’ as I left New York for greener pastures many a moon ago, and even IF I still lived there, there’s no way in Hell I would have been THAT stupid.

I guess the events of 9/11 weren’t tragic enough for shit-for-brains megalomaniacs like Elliot “the bulldozer” Spitzer to have learned anything of value. I guess the guy is always too busy to trying to ruin people that oppose him to pay attention to what goes on in the real world.

Equal shame on “Homeland Security Secretary” and withering corpse Michael Chertoff (a.k.a. Skeletor) for capitulating to this effing insanity. What a disappointment this administration has truly become.

I am guessing this will NOT be the final word on this matter. Stay tuned.

Goodbye, Alex…Hello, Joe

Early this afternoon, the Yankees announced that Joe Girardi had been chosen to succeed Joe Torre as manager. This is good news. Girardi is that anti-Torre. He’s a smart baseball man who won’t play favorites and allow funk to spread uncontrolled. The rumor is a formal announcement could come as early as Wednesday.

The real BIG news took place overnight and into the early morning hours. The fires hadn’t even been set and the windows barely broken in Boston last night when Alex Rodriguez announced via his mouthpiece and pimp, Scott Boras that he had chosen to opt out of his final contact year, effectively severing his ties with the New York Yankees, ending a tumultuous – occasionally caustic – three-year affair between Arod and the Yanks.

There’s no denying that Arod is a phenomenal player. That is one thing that can’t be argued. However, when he played with Texas – and before that, Seattle – you would always hear rumors about what a head case the guy was, how for all the good he brought to the table, there was always the bad; there was “the baggage”.

Who knew that no only were those rumors true – they were 100x worse than you could ever have imagined.

When Arod came to the Yankees, it was right after a deal to send him to Boston fell through. Remember that? Oh yeah, New York really pulled a fast one on Boston, didn’t they? They pulled Arod right out from under them! Nothing left to do now but sit back and count the rings. Well, since “stealing” Arod away from Boston, the Red Sox have two World Series titles while the Yankees have made three hasty first-round exits from the playoffs.

In lieu of championships, we were treated to the Alex Rodriguez Traveling Road Show and Flying Circus. Stupefying heights. Mystifying slumps. The Contract. The sports psychologist. The bad blood with Jeter. The carefully-rehearsed interviews. Photos from Toronto with a mystery blonde. The ‘HA!’ incident. The ‘don’t boo me’ pity party. The 500 HRs. The magnificent regular seasons…and most glaring of all, the mind-numbing, Winfield-like post-season failures that piled up like leaves in Autumn.

Arod’s stay in New York will be littered with the debris of “the baggage”. People will remember three things about Alex now that he’s gone: the fact that he could never live up to the money he was paid no matter how many heroics he put up (he never allowed himself to); his astonishing October disappearing acts; and the fact that when push came to shove, he just couldn’t hack it in New York.

Alex is represented by Scott Boras, as big a dirty pimp as there is in organized sports. He schools his clients in the fine art of selfishness and disloyalty; his only concern is big contracts to maintain his big percentage cuts and large lifestyle. The onus however is all on Arod. Boras also represented Bernie Williams. Bernie had no problem telling Boras to shut the fuck up when he wanted to stay with the Yankees. Arod is different – he is Mr. Sensitive, Boras’ Golden Goose. As such, he is kept on an obedient, short leash.

Arod’s departure allows the Yankees to take the 30-million per it would have cost them to keep him in Pinstripes and disburse it in a wiser, saner way – namely on bringing in some sorely-needed bullpen help and keeping their new, youthful core intact well into the 2010’s.

So long Alex. Thanks for that meaningless home run in Game 4 against the Indians.

Take your “baggage” and your pimp with you.

The End of an Era

The Joe Torre era came to an end for the New York Yankees yesterday. Torre’s tenure ends with a whimper – a poor post-season showing and first-round elimination for the third straight year. Despite that, the Yankees made a more-than-fair offer to Joe: 5 million for next year with added incentives for each milestone that the Yankees reach: a mil for the Division, another mil for the Division Series, another for the Championship Series, and a payoff for a World Series title – with an option for a second year.

In light of how things have gone since 2001, I can’t say as I blame the Yankees for making that offer. Torre parlayed the good will of four championships in the late-90s into becoming the highest-paid manager in baseball by a WIDE margin. What did the Yankees get for their buck? Not much bang. Six straight years of post-season disappointment following the bloop-and-error-aided 2001 WS loss. Joe didn’t think so, and so he moves on.

I appreciate what Joe did while he was here. Four World Championships are nothing to sneeze at. However, many knowledgeable Yankee fans – who watch this team day in and day out – will tell you that the four championships could have (and should have) easily been seven or eight.

So what happened? There is a theory that managers are only successful for a certain amount of years because once the familiarity sets in, managers become partial to “their guys”. They play favorites over doing the right thing (something Joe Torre was guilty of the last few years), and the complacency starts to set in.

Joe’s dugout naps and lack of a pulse were OK when the Yankees were winning. When they are getting screwed repeatedly by bad calls and being blinded by bugs, suddenly it’s not so cute. It’s an old saying, but it is true – sometimes you DO need to make changes just for the sake of making changes. Casey Stengel, Joe McCarthy, Miller Huggins – all eventually parted ways with the Yankees because that’s the way it goes. Nothing lasts forever.

So long Joe…it was fun while it lasted and what you did while you were here is definitely appreciated…but it’s time for a change.

NY Libs Wild About Rudy

Courtesy Tammy Bruce comes this little gem: a piece in The Observer outlining the various ways the mere CONCEPT of Rudy Giuliani running for president is driving New York Libs crazy:

Rudy’s Doin’ It! Shocked Cacophony Among New York Democrats That The Rudy They Know May Actually Become Republican Candidate

“It’s totally unbelievable,” said Charles Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation and a longtime adversary of Mr. Giuliani. “I refuse to believe that this could possibly happen to our country. I have too much confidence in our country to believe that this could really happen.”

The article is chock full of classic New York Liberal narcissism in action from the likes of Rangel, Norman Siegel and Ed "You actually didn't do so good" Koch.

The reason why Rudy drove (and drives, apparently) charlatans like Siegel, Rangel and Koch bananas was because he came in after two administrations (Koch and the uber-charlatan Dinkins) that made it their day-to-day business to bend over backwards for every “special interest” and “activist” like pathetic puppets.

Giuliani came in and fumigated the stench from City Hall by not doing the popular things, but doing the correct things. He took people and situations on a case-by-case basis and (correctly, IMHO) wouldn’t give clowns like Sharpton and his ilk the time of day, letting them know in no uncertain terms that they would no longer be allowed to run slipshod over City Hall like they did the previous four years. Little things like actually enforcing laws started to make a difference immediately. This drove a whole sub-class of rabble-rousers insane because they were effectively de-fanged and made irrelevant. Meanwhile, the city turned around and it became a decent place to live in again. Autocrat Bloomberg is doing his best to reverse all that, unfortunately.

Yet, I have a lot of misgivings about Rudy as President. However - if he can take out the Clinton Machine, I might be able to live with them.