The Forkes Report - Media Madness

Reality 3.2

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:01:00 -0600

This is a strange topic for the day after Mothers Day. The other day I walked out into the living room to see The Real Housewives of Orange County blaring on the TV. Don’t ask me which episode, I don’t know, I don’t care! One of the housewife babes was having some other younger woman drive her to L.A., in a Range Rover, to audition for a television show.

The one being driven was kvetching about leaving the kids, even though they were old enough to fend for themselves, and not being a stay-at-home mom. We just had this discussion on the campaign trail. My thought was, “you’re already on a hit TV show!” And lady, if you’re not acting on that TV show, then to many Americans you live one fucked up life.

Well, let’s back up. Most people, or at least many of the people, who watch that show and all of its spin-offs, see that lifestyle as enviable. All that money, the segregated and gated neighborhoods, storybook mansion homes, and the multiple 100k automobiles — it’s like being a rap star without all the fat bottom girls hanging out at the pool.

 Personally speaking: if and when I’m that ostentatious the nice bottom girls will be hanging around the pool all day. Like Miss April 2012 Raquel Pomplun, of Chula Vista, CA.

Seriously, I couldn’t watch anymore, after about 10 … 20 … 30 minutes … or whatever. So off I went to look at nearly naked women on Facebook.

But I got to thinking: there are real housewives of Orange County (California), Atlanta, New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, Washington, D.C., all on the Bravo Network. I may have missed one, there are so many. On MTV you can see a show about NBA housewives. What do they talk about? Which of their husbands is going to break Wilt Chamberlain’s record? And I ain’t talking about his single game scoring record.
 Remember when Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain published his autobiography and claimed to have banged over 20,000 different women? Every heterosexual man in America, whether he wants to admit it or not, reads that and thinks, “Wow!” and nods his head in approval.

Okay, a few years ago I admitted to being an aficionado of the Orange County housewives. Back when Playmate Jeana Tomasino, Miss November 1980, was on the show. To be honest, I can’t tell which ones are holdovers from the first couple of seasons. There are five housewives in this seventh season, all but one are blonde.

The Brunette, Heather Dubrow, is the new housewife and the one being driven to L.A. for the audition.

Here’s what I find baffling. In the original version of Real Housewives of Orange County we got the impression anyway that these women were “friends” before the show, that they had known each other for years. But come to find out, they have to audition to get into a reality show?
 On The Real Housewives of New Jersey the women appear to be long-time associates. It would be a stretch to label them all as friends. The best part of that one is, they all talk with their hands. Fingers and palms getting thrust in each other’s faces; it’s White Trash on the Jersey Riviera.

How does that work? Looking at the website and the pictures of the new cast of the O.C. brand, I had to wonder: how does someone audition to be on a reality show? Specifically, one of these housewives shows. “Hi! I’m Amber and all my friends tell me I’m one bitchy drama queen!”
“Do you have breast implants?”
“Yes!”
“You’re hired!”And of course for the Orange County edition, their homes have to be in this one particular gated community where the homes are roughly in the 15-mil range — or more.

So they plop the new housewife into the existing cast and say, “Bitches! Here’s Heather! She used to be an actress, now she’s married to a plastic surgeon, she’s a bitchy drama queen so make her feel welcome and start scheming!”

The next question is: do the women choose to leave these shows or are they fired? Maybe they weren’t overly melodramatic enough. Or maybe they got tired of camera crews following them around everywhere. The obvious solution would be to contact the producers and ask, but that would take too much time and it’s better to kvetch about it on the Internets. Adds more drama. Not to mention, could we trust the producers to answer honestly? These might be trade secrets.

Which brings up the most obvious question: do that many people watch these housewives shows? They keep churning out new versions. But, it wouldn’t be on television, even basic cable, if there wasn’t an audience for it. In fact, after checking TV By The Numbers, The Real Housewives of Orange County gets 2.5 million viewers. Granted, that’s less than 1% of the population, but think about it: if you’re selling sexy vodka or his and hers sex lube and you get 10% of the viewers to buy your product, that’s really a nice payday.
 Twenty bucks for a fifth of Grey Goose times 250k … That’s five mil, with a product that needs replenishing. For people like me that would be every day.

If the Housewives shows on Bravo aren’t bad enough, Lifetime Channel just announced they will be airing a “reality” show starring the family of Whitney Houston. How much sicker can reality show producers get?

Then there’s the family. Houston’s daughter will be in it, but it’s publicized as starring Houston’s sister and her husband. That should tell you everything you need to know about the character of the people putting this travesty together.

The one person you’d think would have Houston’s back, her mother Cissy, is all for the show. She says it will help the healing process by “… keeping the family as one.” Oh dear! I’m guessing by the end of the first season the family will be in court suing each other for breaching this, that and the other thing.
 Kudos to the Jackson Family for maintaining some dignity after Michaels untimely passing.

The big question is: will there be an audience for it? Probably. If there’s enough of an audience for a half dozen Real Housewives shows, then it’s very likely there is an audience for opportunists exploiting the life and death of a family member.

This should be a cautionary tale for young people on the verge of getting signed to a recording contract or rising fast in the film/TV business: don’t hire family members or friends as managers or agents. They can be even more predatory with your business than your average manager or agent.

And this all brings up one final question, the idea that spurred this rant: would anyone watch a program called, The Real Housewives of Who Gives a Fuck?

Friday the 13th and Other Ghostly Activities

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:01:00 -0600

It’s Friday the 13th. Do you know where your ghosts are?

The last time I tried to write about Ghost Hunters, I got off into some ethereal tangent about fun parks … what the hell are they called? Amusement parks. Anyway, Ghosts. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it — I hope.

As any fan of the super popular SyFy network show Ghost Hunters knows, this is the last season that will have T.A.P.S. co-founder Grant Wilson in the cast. It’s kind of sad, if you’ve been following the show for years and it’s really sad for the cast members who have been working with Wilson and co-founder Jason Hawes for many years.
 Hawes and Wilson started The Atlantic Paranormal Society as a side project to their day jobs as plumbers for Roto-Rooter in Warwick, Rhode Island. Once the show went on the air and became popular it became their primary occupation. Since then they have become honorary plumbers for Roto-Rooter and work occasional plumbing jobs ... as guest plumbers? Whatever works for them!

It looks like tech master Steve Gonsalves will take over as the second Lead Investigator, which makes sense because he’s been with this crew the longest. But, you never know. They could pull someone from Ghost Hunters International to take the lead. Kris Williams just moved to GHI for this past season and she said on her Facebook page she had big news coming. Of course her big news could be completely unrelated.
 Also, in her first season on Ghost Hunters International Kris Williams had a serious disagreement with fellow investigators after some of them cut themselves in a “bloodletting” incident in hopes of drawing out the spirits of an ancient South American culture. She may want to leave that show, considering it was so upsetting for her that Williams wrote about it on her Facebook page.

Anyway, I’ve been watching for six years, give or take, and have seen the cast change many times. To be honest, in all that time it never occurred to me there would be detractors and people out there debunking, or trying expose, Ghost Hunters. I liked the show, so why would it matter what others thought?

But, last week I did a little research on the show and was mildly surprised there are not only detractors, but people who have formed groups specifically to refute and expose Ghost Hunters, in particular, The Skeptical Analysis of the Paranormal Society (SAPS). Well, maybe the pusillanimous naysayers are saps!

Seriously though, TAPS needs someone looking over their shoulders, skeptics to debunk TAPS and their investigations. It may hurt some feelings in the Ghost Hunters crews, but someone needs to keep you honest, and by “you,” I mean them, not me.

Some of the criticisms: what TAPS does is pseudo-science. Well, yeah, but anything not accepted by “real” scientists is considered pseudo-science. Next? Their methodology has been called illogical as well as unscientific. I’ll go with that, a little. In GH’s defense, they actually do try to test things repeatedly during investigations. If say they hear a voice in an attic they will be sure to send other investigators into the attic to see if those other investigators encounter the same activity.

Here’s what bothers me on occasion when Jay and Grant send other investigators into the attic (or any other area) looking to see if a phenomenon occurs with others: they often tell the other investigators, “We heard voices in the attic, go check it out and see if you have the same experience.”

Okay, now Hawes and Wilson have just set up an expectation and let’s be honest, the entire team enters an investigation with expectations. They may deny it, but when you hear them speak during the show, especially when they are on their way to a location, their less than solid skepticism comes out.

It would be better for the team’s credibility if they stopped telling each other, during the investigation, what any of them have experienced. So, if say Amy Bruni and Adam Berry see a hobby horse move on its own in the basement, they should steer the others to the basement without any encouragement of what the other investigators should experience.
 The investigators usually travel in pairs and Bruni and Berry are usually paired up together.

And of course the Ghost Hunters’ use of equipment comes under scrutiny, like it’s being used incorrectly or, the team just assumes activity on a meter means paranormal activity. There is some truth to that. Sometimes I’ve seen them use an infrared thermometer and come to a paranormal conclusion, and I’m wondering, “Why?”

The one piece of equipment that troubles me, and it gets used quite a bit, is the K2 meter. It detects electro-magnetic fields, EMF’s. Okay, none of the lights on it are lit when they put it on a bed or dresser, etc. Then all of a sudden it starts to light up when the investigators start asking questions. Okay, that’s pretty mysterious and looks to be more than coincidental, but is it really evidence of paranormal activity? I’m voting “no.”

To their credit, the TAPS crew has never told a client their location was haunted because of just K2 or infrared thermometer readings, or any other pieces of equipment that don’t record noise/voice or visual phenomenon.

What a positive declaration of a haunting requires for the TAPS crew has to be recording on either audio or visual equipment. The team could be wrong in some of their conclusions with video especially, but for the most part the recordings get analyzed by several of the members and if one doesn’t consider it evidence, then it is discarded.

In fact, there have been occasions when the team recorded voices, but it wasn’t enough for Hawes and Wilson to tell the client their home or building was haunted, but I’m thinking, “No way! That place is haunted!”

That’s one of the things I like about Ghost Hunters. Not every investigation used on TV results in a haunting and often enough, the TAPS crew finds logical explanations for much of the phenomenon.

Pseudo-science or not, Ghost Hunters is a very entertaining show. The participants seem very earnest in their quest for the truth and I would be totally surprised to find out Jason, Grant and their crew were faking any findings or altering video to create images. It’s possible of course.

Back when I was a producer for local access broadcasting in Milwaukee, WI, I learned all the tricks for doing just that and not just visually, but aurally as well. So it’s not out of the question. I just don’t believe the producers or crew of Ghost Hunters engage in fraud.

And the crews have come up with some pretty startling voices with clearly discernable sentences and words, laughter, crying and threats, some so audible and creepy they’ve sent chills down my spine. The visual evidence isn’t nearly as convincing, but they have recorded picture frames, toys and other objects moving on their own and, on a couple occasions, recorded ghostly human forms on their various cameras.

On several episodes the crew’s remote cameras mysteriously moved on their own, the entire tripod being turned around or the camera tilting in one direction and then another. There could be any number of explanations, but when the investigators check out the cameras, they cameras are usually solidly locked in place and could not be pushed or twisted by sudden drafts or even gravity. And, as stated earlier, they don’t stage any of it.

You might be wondering why I would be interested in a show about ghosts and why would I choose to believe such entities exist? Personal experience. Years ago I encountered the ghost of my father, not once, but several times. And this is the really creepy part: it was in my third floor flat, a place my father had never visited. These events occurred over ten years after his death.

Now Grant Wilson is in his final episodes. He’s listed in the credits as an executive producer, along with Jason Hawes and we can expect that won’t change. In his statement, Hawes said that his friendship, as well as his business partnership, with Wilson would continue. As of a couple seasons ago, the Wilson and Hawes families have co-owned a hotel somewhere in New England. Don’t remember exactly where, but GH fans learned of it because the hotel was having all sorts of alleged paranormal activity. So, Hawes and Wilson called in the GHI crew to do an investigation.
 It’s the Spalding Inn, in Whitefield, New Hampshire.

GHI? Ghost Hunters International. They are an offshoot of Ghost Hunters and that crew goes all over the world investigating allegedly haunted locations. That show isn’t as interesting as the original series, mainly because when it first came on my impression was that the skepticism of the GHI crew wasn’t as vigorous as that of GH.

That’s changed somewhat, most especially this last season when Kris Williams, once a member of the Ghost Hunters crew, joined the international team. Her presence seems to have added some credibility to the show, although it’s a good guess they would all disagree.

Of course Kris Williams is quite attractive so she brings that element to Ghost Hunters International as well. Ah yes, Kris Williams and Susan Slaughter on GHI and Amy Bruni on Ghost Hunters, the eye candy of the shows.

The crews and producers might deny it, but that’s a big deal for the show and why not? Sex appeal adds viewers. Sadly, for the women there are few men on either show to match the sex appeal of Slaughter, Williams and Bruni, although I’m sure Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango have their share of amorous admirers.

Regardless of their sex appeal, the women investigators of the Ghost Hunters franchise are dedicated paranormal investigators and anyone who took them to be fools or bimbos would be seriously rebuked. They are relative experts in their fiends, which for Kris Williams includes genealogy and history.

Ghost Hunters … Grant Wilson is leaving. What a shame. But I’ll continue to watch, it’s one of my favorite TV shows. I’m waiting to see a ghost appear and smile for one of their remote cameras. And if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, I’ll try to do it in my afterlife. It looks almost cool to be a ghost. Think of all the mischief one could cause as a ghost! Just saying.
•••• •••• ••••• •••• ••••
On a side note: This is my brother Rick’s birthday. We grew up rather close as kids, despite the fighting and constant terror he inflicted upon me in my wee years. No doubt I’m seriously scarred for life. Regardless, he’s my brother and I love him very much.

It just so happens that in our last phone call a couple days ago we found out — in the first two minutes no less — that our depravity and penchant for the tasteless had lowered the bottom once again! You know, some people grow up as they get older, but some of us just get better!

Happy Birthday Rick!

Too Much TV

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:01:00 -0700

What a TV watching day. Seriously. Starting Sunday Morning we had the rain-delayed Daytona 500. Then there was the NBA All Star Game and capping it off: the Academy of Motion Picture and Television Arts — the Oscars.

To start off with, the second biggest auto race in America was postponed until today, due to rain. First time in 42 years. What we got instead were clips from other Speed Week events. Racing, car crashes, hot chicks in skimpy Florida beach wear … actually, no hot chicks in skimpy Florida beach wear. I was … err … cruising the Internets while waiting for the Great American Race to start. I just … got confused. Anyway, no race for you on Sunday.

Also from the Sunshine State, up there in the Magic Kingdom, Orlando, was the NBA All Star game. Check this out: 40 dunks in this one game. Kobe Bryant had 27 points, making him the all time leading scorer in NBA All Star history with 264 points in 14 consecutive All Star appearances.

LeBron James and Dwayne Wade played on their home court and, you would think, had some home floor advantage or at least the impression of an aura. But, when it came time for James to dish one to his scoring partner Wade … they muffed it — bad! It’s going on the highlight reels for sure. The pass from James was behind Wade, and Wade bobbled it off his bicep and head and … can we get a do-over?

James and Wade have combined for two points more times than the Big O (Oscar Robertson) and Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) in their Milwaukee days so, on their home court, during the All Star game … they inspire one too many ellipses in this blog.

The West won and Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder walked away with 36 points and the Game MVP Award. The Slam Dunk contest on Saturday Night stunk. Who won? Jeremy Evans. Who’s that? He’s a forward for the Utah Jazz. No, he isn’t one of their stars. Milwaukeean and Wisconsin alum Devin Harris is one of their stars.

That’s the problem with the fading Slam Dunk contest. None of the league’s big stars bother to compete. Blake Griffin of the L.A. Clippers leads the league in dunks and he’s had some cinematic dunks on Sunday, as did LeBron James, but neither competed.

What about Jeremy Lin? He wasn’t even on the roster. Maybe next year.

Ending the night of TV viewing were the Oscars. Gee, a silent movie hit it big. The Artist won five Oscars, including Best Picture. Not Moneyball or The Descendants or any of the other six movies nominated for Best Picture — the silent movie won. This is the real reason the public considers Hollywood to be elitist. A movie that has limited appeal with the movie-going public gets top honors? Over Hugo, War Horse and Midnight in Paris?

I’d be willing to bet even those who were gushing over The Artist are wondering, “What the fuck?”

“Don’t be a hater Tim!” Oh all right.

Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award, her second as Best Actress. She’s been nominated 17 times in her 35-plus years of films, so Meryl has been long overdue. Her last Oscar was for Sophie’s Choice in 1983, so it was time.

Just for the record, I wasn’t one of the half of America who groaned, “Oh no! Not her — again!”

Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot to get excited about in this year’s Oscars. The fashions don’t interest me, unless the dresses are skimpy and/or see-thru, like Halle Berry’s in 2002. Angelina Jolie made sure we all knew her gown had a slit up to the waist.

Billy Crystal returned as the host and he was funny. The Oscars has such a stodgy crowd, it’s hard for a comedian who is making the television audience laugh its collective ass off, but is getting glares from the assembled actors. They take themselves way too seriously. But then, I probably have a thinner skin than any of the attendees.

The presentation of the Oscar for Best Original Song by Zach Galifianakis and Will Ferrell lightened up the night: the white tuxedos and clanging cymbals. It was a lot funnier than Ferrell’s movies. Some song from the Muppets movie won. I didn’t even know there was a Muppets movie released last year.

The cast from The Bridesmaids presented three Oscars and they were pretty funny. They gave out the awards for the various short film categories. So they made “Size matters” jokes and played a Scorsese drinking game.

What a travesty. In his 45 years as a filmmaker Scorsese has only one Oscar for directing: The Departed in 2006. There’s something wrong with that statistic. He should have won for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.

The Oscars … the cap to a day of epic television. Well, one event never got started, but still, it kept me in front of the TV—that and Wisconsin beating Ohio State in Columbus. That was probably the most exciting thing on TV. The game was close to the end and Wisconsin’s Jared Breggren won the game with a 3-pointer. Final score: 63-60. Yeah, the score was that close the entire game. That was the highlight of my TV-watching day.

It’s supposed to rain all day today and as the morning rolls over to our time zone, the clouds have already covered the sky. That’s okay. Southern California can always use the rain.

Oh wait! I still can watch the Daytona 500!

Be More Snarky

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:01:00 -0600

It’s not often I actually read a San Diego Reader and I often wonder if anyone else actually reads it, other than the author, a couple editors and possibly a few disinterested staffers with nothing better to do than read the weekly publication that pays them a meager wage.

The ads are always interesting of course, if you have penchant for looking at HOT women in skimpy bikinis hawking everything from weight loss programs to breast augmentation: “The perfect body you’ve always wanted.”

I’m all for women getting their breasts augmented, if that’s what they want to do. It’s hard going through life feeling “less than” about anything, especially women who are judged so thoroughly and harshly about their physical appearance.

Men too, but not nearly as much or as harshly. A man with material means or even just a good sense of humor can make up for a lot, or little, as the case may be. Not so women. Their looks, first and foremost, are how they are judged. That’s a reality, right or wrong. It’s how the cosmetic and fashion industries are able to get away with so much year after year, nay, season after season.

So, if a woman wants to get bigger boobs from the doctor in the ad on page 34 of The Reader, by all means, do so. And if a woman has accepted her natural breasts, well that’s great too. A woman’s breasts are lovely things to hold, big or small.

Here’s something funny about men and tits. Besides man-tits. I belong to an online forum for fans of Playboy, in print and online. People of all sorts, many of them dirty old men, frequent the forums, looking for love in this exactingly wrong place. Many of them like to make snarky comments about the men who get friendly with the models, which is one of the main, if not the main, attraction of being a member of this online community: “meeting” the women we lust after, if only in an electronic, I’m only touching myself sort of way.

Here’s the funny thing that’s related to breasts and breast augmentation: there are cadres of men who vociferously rail against women getting implants. The lamentation can be so melodramatic it’s absolutely entertaining! Better than daytime soaps. “She’s ruined!” That one always makes me chuckle at least. It’s also used when someone laments tattoos and different body piercings — even in the bellybutton, which I’ve always considered attractive.

Sometimes we’ll read some poor lost soul mournfully relay his sad disappointment about a nude woman with breast implants featured on the site: “At least she didn’t totally ruin herself by getting tattoos.” I feel your pain brother. Doctors have pills to arrest that feeling of impending doom.

But it’s funny because some of these very same men beating the drum against women with breast implants appearing nude on a website like Playboy.com will jump in the air and do virtual cartwheels when a woman with large “natural” breasts becomes a Playboy model, especially a Playmate. One guy even considers it an “achievement.” Really?

It’s like saying Paris Hilton has achieved greatness simply by being born a Hilton. Everyone knows her great achievement was becoming a public figure by doing absolutely nothing but look pretty in front of all the right cameras — and appearing in a self-made sex tape. That girl knows Dick and I’m not talking about Clark.
 Oh, I almost forgot that Carl’s, JR drippy cheeseburger ad! HOT DAMN! I almost started going to Carl’s, Jr. after that!

On one hand these guys decry women with breast augmentation, but on the other declare women with big breasts to be the best. So, what’s a woman to do, if she’s looking to be a part of the modeling world? Hell, if she just wants to be noticed in her little part of the world?

Everybody knows men across the spectrum prefer big breasts on women, especially men who pay for magazines and websites like Playboy and Penthouse, not to mention Twistys, Hustler and a multitude of other sites that feature adult entertainment.
 Did you ever wonder why simple nudity is considered “adult” entertainment? Apart from the religious issues, there really doesn’t appear to be any logical reason.

So, as long as the world prefers women to have big breasts there will always be a need for plastic surgeons who can deliver salvation in a silicone or saline implant.

After all that I just remembered this wasn’t intended to be about women and breasts. The initial subject was actually reading the San Diego Reader.

But a few more things about the ads. Because of the cover story, I’ll presume, there were a lot of ads for various treatments for mental diseases, like schizophrenia. Then of course there are the ads for medical marijuana and a first, for me anyway, an ad that asked, “Are you smoking too much pot?”

For the past 30 years I’ve known a person can smoke too much pot. I did for years! But the old myth about marijuana is it isn’t addictive or harmful to one’s health. Two complete falsehoods that the legalize marijuana crowd hangs its argument on in its campaigns. Pot should be legal for the same reason alcohol is legal: an adult should have the right to choose what he or she consumes, be it 4,000 calorie meals at fast food establishments, tobacco products, a quart of whisky or an ounce of pot a day. Clearly, the War on Drugs isn’t working, so it’s time to legalize all of them.

After nearly 20 years of living in San Diego I can’t remember reading a cover story, from beginning to end more than twice Maybe three times, but that’s just a wildly liberal guess. My memory ain’t what it used to be and after nearly 20 years, there might be some that caught my attention at the time, but like most other things, faded from memory.

Shortly after first arriving in San Diego in June, 1992, someone suggested I try writing for that publication. So I looked into it first thing. I even ran into a writer who was often published in The Reader. Can’t remember his name now, but he lived somewhere close to Balboa Park and as it turns out, he was taking more prescriptions for mood disorders than I knew existed.

So, I wrote some reviews of CD’s that had been recently released — this was before downloading and streaming young’uns — and sent them off via snail mail (this was before readily available e-mail) confident in my mission to become a writer extraordinaire living in the comfortable confines of Southern California. Sort of like a screenwriter, but without all the angst.

Well, them fuckers rejected it saying it wasn’t quite their “style,” which had to be more about the writer and less about the band and music. “Be more snarky,” I was told. Apparently being “snarky” is a compliment for some people.
 “Snarky,” as defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: 1: crotchety, snappish
 2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner

But you know, I can relate. Shortly after moving here, my oldest brother Carl, may he rest in peace, once said to me, “You are the most arrogant prick I’ve ever met!” Wow! I was so complimented! That was an accomplishment to be proud of, hands down! I couldn’t understand why, when I told people about that, laughing and proud of myself, they just looked at me like I’m weird.

It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand being an arrogant prick wasn’t an achievement one should be proud of. Pride, the ancient saying goes (somewhat), leads the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason. I think there are only five, maybe six, deadly sins, but that’s for another day.

Fast forward about 18 years and here we are in 2011 and The Reader, not quite as thick as in years past, is still finding its way into my now old and cold sweaty hands. I don’t really read it, as much as scan a few of the articles, maybe read a page of the cover article and mostly check out the ads for the live music clubs, what’s left of them, to see if any interesting bands are playing. And there are a few.

The writing can be really boring to be honest. There’s only so much “snarky” one can take and if every writer is writing as if they’re the best thing to ever hit the literary establishment writing about whatever extremely small niche they are into — eh, who gives a fuck. If you, as a reader, continually don’t get the steady stream of inside jokes — and most potential readers don’t — it’s just another boring exposé of the writer’s otherwise dreary life. Sort of like reading this blog from time-to-time.

So, today, while at the local Vons I picked up a copy of the most recent Reader and looked at the interesting cover. “I’m Here to Save You From Protestant Hell” it said in a picture of a Willy Wonka-looking fellow with a big smile on his face in front of a river of chocolate.

Hmmm, an article about saving someone from a Christian religion, that sounds promising! Well, as any good headline will do, this one barely touched the deeper subject of the story: a young woman’s journey through life in a broken family with a drug-addicted schizophrenic father who eventually abandoned her to that Protestant Hell.

There won’t be any details of the story, written by Brianna Van Ness, divulged here. You ought to read it yourself, but it was the first cover story in The Reader to capture my attention for the entire story since … shit, can’t even remember that last time. That’s all a cover story need do anyway is capture the attention of the reader for that moment. If it gets remembered beyond that, well so much the better.

The question I ask myself now is this: is my writing snarky and self-indulgent enough to make it into The Reader? I’d have to write about 10,000 words, which is easy enough. I can string along enough bullshit to fill the cover story space of The Reader. Anyone can do that and often enough that newsweekly proves it. But can I find a subject substantive enough to be interesting to more than just my small circle of friends? Of course!

But, what the editors might not like are freewheeling tangents and anyone who has made any effort at reading this blog over the years knows tangents are my thing. Hell, this particular blog is one big tangent. Originally it was to be about a bureaucratic hell I’ve been dealing with all summer. Now that’s put off for another day!

Hell, I’m not even getting the ads by Google anymore so this is truly a labor of love. Google Adsense dropped me for an as yet unnamed offense. Probably the hotlinks to the hot chicks sans clothing. Who knows. But now it’s time to think about writing something for The Reader. I’m finally over the resentment of being snubbed all those years ago. And I’ve become pretty darn snarky too!

Out of News

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 05:01:00 -0600

Wow! Rupert Murdoch is going down! As I start this Monday Morning, Murdoch’s top lieutenants in his UK media operations have resigned and one has been arrested. This, just a week after News International closed the 168 year old News of the World. When you finish reading. Or, if you’re already bored, Click Here to see their web site.
“THANK YOU AND GOODBYE”
We all know the story. The paper wasn’t losing any money. In fact, it was one of the few in the industrialized world doing good financially. No, what brought this paper down: illegal eavesdropping. On some 4,000 or so British citizens, including a young girl who is a murder victim. They tapped her voice mail!

Then there were the payoffs to police officers — and no one knows just how deep that is or how high up the chain it goes, but two top Scotland Yard officials have resigned since Sunday: Paul Stephenson, the director of Scotland Yard and John Yates, the assistant director. Not just any two officials, the top two officials. O dear.

Apparently these officials were close friends with Brooks.

A total of ten people have been arrested, so far, in this scandal, from reporters to Brooks, who, until she resigned, was the chief executive of Murdoch’s News International. Her arrest, from the information that has so far been revealed, seems a bit shady, but it’s sending a message.

This is the message: “Past friendships are now forgotten. Our alliance has now become a political liability.”

Brooks was considered a close friend of three Prime Ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current PM, David Cameron. Now we have to wonder just where those friendships stand now. He relationship with Cameron was described as being “cozy.” Okay, what does that mean? Well, they socialized a lot, frequently having dinner at each others’ homes. Both are married by the way so when they socialize we can assume their spouses are included.

The thought is this could very well bring down Cameron’s Conservative government because the story is still unfolding. As investigations continue, both official and from news organizations, the scope of this scandal will continue to expand; and, with the resignation of Andy Coulson, it has already reached the prime minister’s office. More on Coulson in a bit.

Today (Tuesday) Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Brooks will be answering questions in front of Britain’s House of Commons. There are a lot of questions, similar to what the Watergate conspirators were subjected to nearly 40 years ago: What did you know and when did you know it? And the evidence of the cover up will be brought into the record, and there is evidence, it will be more than Rebekah Brooks and Neil Wallis who will be arrested.
 Oh, Neil Wallis was once a deputy editor at News of the World until he got a job with Scotland Yard.

And now a whistleblower in this scandal, Sean Hoare, is dead. But, it’s not that suspicious. Hoare was a prodigious drug user and drunk, bragged about his “rock star” breakfast of cocaine and Jack Daniels. Hoare was the guy who told the world he and his former employer, News of the World, were intercepting phone calls and messages to get stories.

Hoare had been an entertainment reporter for the paper and said, “everyone was doing it” when describing the phone hacking. And, he said, his boss at the time, Andy Coulson, not only knew of it but also encouraged the crimes.

Andy Coulson had been the editor of News of the World, among other high level positions with News International, until he resigned to work with Britain’s current Prime Minister. It was a deal that was supposed to make Cameron more palpable for Rupert Murdoch, who preferred Gordon Brown as PM. With this deal, Murdoch had a loyal employee inside 10 Downing Street, a coup for any businessman.

Here in the United States, Les Hinton, publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, Inc (also owned by Murdoch), resigned in the wake of the scandal. He had been with Murdoch for decades and was part of the creation of Murdoch’s two main news organizations, News Corp and News International.

Okay, a small tidbit of the back-story is out of the way. And really, this story is such a labyrinth of shady connections, relationships between Murdoch and his subordinates and government officials, books will need to be written to explain it all — and we will no doubt still be confused.

Here’s the thing though. Murdoch, his son and Brooks all claimed, several years ago, the phone tapping was just the work of a rogue reporter. They also said it never crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. But as the story continues to expand, we are now hearing News Corp reporters may have hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims. Among others.

British actor Jude Law said his phone was hacked as well, when he was in New York. That alone opens Murdoch and News Corps to investigations here in the United States. And, because Murdoch is a naturalized U.S. citizen, he can — and most likely will — be subpoenaed to testify before Congress.

If it is found that members of News Corps have engaged in illegal wiretapping and hacking into the communications of citizens and visitors, then what’s happening in Britain will happen here. Hell, it’s already started! Les Hinton has resigned.

Murdoch and his son are natives of Australia so if the investigations show that the Murdoch’s are culpable for any crimes, be it the wiretapping or a cover up, not only can their citizenship be revoked, but the government can force Murdoch to give up all his U.S. business interests — including his television empire. The potential ramifications are extraordinary.

Now, it’s not likely Dow Jones, Inc, the Wall Street Journal, the television and radio FOX networks will go out of business, or even change their political bent, but the changes would be monumental.

A very real possibility is someone like Ted Turner, who has always wanted a broadcast network to call his own, could scoop up all of Murdoch’s TV and radio holdings.

See, I’m betting the Murdochs and Brooks get implicated in the scandal over in Europe — oh yeah, it isn’t confined to Britain — and the scope will engulf the vast media holdings of Murdoch, including his U.S.-based News Corp. And then Murdoch will pay a heavy price for his crimes, including disenfranchisement as a citizen and the dissolution of his business empire here.

For more than 20 years Murdoch has been successfully bullying his way around the media world, causing resentment with every acquisition. To be fair, a lot of that resentment was just sour grapes. Here was this foreigner buying up American media and becoming a bona fide mogul, pushing aside the other players already in the game. He even became a U.S. citizen just so he could legally own the ones that required U.S. ownership. How cynical and opportunist!

And then he started a network that soon produced some of the best programming on TV: The Simpsons and Married, With Children to name the network’s first two hits. And then Fox bought the rights to broadcast the NFL! And if that wasn’t enough, in 1996 Murdoch started FOX News and it became the dominant cable news network in America.

Now, Murdoch’s media empire is in jeopardy. Neither MSNBC or CNN are talking about the possibilities in any great detail, but they are no doubt talking about what could happen in private, snickering little conversations off the air, during commercial breaks even. People have been waiting to see Murdoch get his comeuppance and this just might be it.

Americans don’t like seeing rich bullies getting away with “it,” whatever “it” is. What gets our goat is the notion that people with lots of money don’t have to play by the rules, that they can buy their way out of anything and everything, as Murdoch and News Corp have done over the past 20-plus years, to the tune of a half billion dollars, including a case in which they were caught hacking into a business rival’s computer system to steal proprietary information.

Now, you gotta wonder, with all the government figures going down in Britain, how many politicians in America have such strong ties to Murdoch and News Corps? The thought sort of makes the Anthony Weiner scandal seem ... silly.

This is going to blow up big here in the United States. Huge. Make a note: if Roger Ailes, resigns as CEO of FOX News, you can bet News Corps is going down the tubes. And I’m betting Ailes resigns.

Not Guilty By Reason of the Law

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:01:00 -0600

It’s always amazing to see the reaction of my fellow citizens when a jury returns a “Not Guilty” verdict. Tuesday Morning (July 5, 2011) the jury trying the case against Casey Anthony returned not guilty verdicts on all but the misdemeanor charges: giving false evidence to law enforcement.

This is a sad story; a two-year old girl, Caylee Anthony, died three years ago under mysterious circumstances. Casey Anthony is the mother. She didn’t report her daughter missing for over 30 days and there was an odd odor in the trunk of her car. Oh, and she went out dancing and partying after her daughter disappeared.

Here’s one thing that always bothers me about the prosecution’s case when they are trying someone for murder: they almost always bring up behavior not the least bit connected to the case, like Casey Anthony going out dancing while her daughter was still missing. Yeah, it doesn’t show the defendant in a good light, but really, how does that prove anything?

What it asks the jury to do, and by extension, the public, is convict someone on the idea — the feeling — that only a guilty person would act this way. Especially if the prosecution has only circumstantial evidence. And in the Anthony case that was really weak circumstantial evidence.

The prosecution couldn’t prove how the child died, didn’t have any evidence linking Casey Anthony to her daughter’s death, couldn’t even prove if the duct tape found with the body had even been used to kill the child. The prosecution really couldn’t prove anything, other than Casey Anthony lied to the police.

The reactions of people on the Internet, especially Facebook, are predictable. The jury was comprised of 12 stupid people. The dirty defense lawyers used dirty tricks to get Casey Anthony off the hook. Everyone was so sure the defendant was guilty the nation was waiting for the inevitable guilty verdict and then the sentence of death. Well, not everyone. The twelve jurors (and their alternates it turns out) felt differently.

If there is a flaw in our legal system, it’s that the media can and does start reporting on a case right from the beginning and the police and district attorneys will start leaking information to the media in an effort to sway public opinion against their chosen defendant.

The news organizations do what they do. They get a news sensation that captures the imagination of the public and boom — it explodes across every TV screen and captures the cover of every magazine looking to sell more issues. It’s news! Seriously, they have to cover it. Can you imagine the editorial staff that says, “We’re not going to cover this extremely popular story because everyone else is.”?

That’s professional suicide.

So, in the course of their coverage, the news organizations get “experts” who will confirm what the public wants to hear, in most cases, and certainly in the Anthony case. Like for instance: the “evidence” about Casey Anthony going out with her friends in that period between when her daughter went missing and the time little Caylee was reported missing. Read any blog, any message board any social media outlet like Facebook, and every reference and every snide comment is about or based on Casey Anthony going out while her child was missing.

For just about everyone who followed this case, that was reason enough to give Casey Anthony the death penalty. It was all the “proof” anyone needed to convict Anthony. And the prosecution knew that which is why they made a big deal out of it.

In a case like the Anthony trial, swaying public opinion is very important. The prosecution knows it cannot depend on facts to win their case, but if they can whip up condemnation in the public, thereby tainting the prospective jury pool, that makes a trial almost a moot point.

Then, after the jury selection and the trial is under way, the “experts” come out on TV. Trial lawyers, prosecuting attorneys, retired and otherwise, some who are prosecutors-turned-defense attorneys, famous defense attorneys from other high profile cases, former F.B.I. profilers, DNA experts, forensics experts, coroners, you name it, if someone has some kind of background even remotely related to whatever case has captured the public, they will get ink and air time. And let’s not forget, they get paid to give us their opinions.

We’ll get forensic psychologists who will tell us the mindset of someone who goes out dancing while their child is missing. We’ll listen to forensic experts tell us what a certain bug means in relation to dead flesh, we’ll get another expert to tell us how a piece of duct tape could be used to suffocate a two-year old child; and then we get the attorneys, prosecutors and defense alike, who rate the day’s evidence and testimony — and in this case the defense attorney’s skill and judgment.

Which side won the day in court? Defense or prosecution? The experts would analyze all the days’ proceedings, take note of the judge’s demeanor, note once again Casey Anthony’s stoic posture … and then we would be confused as to what it all meant. I mean, she’s guilty, right?

There was the constant mention of Casey Anthony’s demeanor in the courtroom, dubbed by many as emotionless. But twice I saw video of her turning away from evidence and crying during testimony.

As part of their instructions to their clients, defense attorneys tell them better to look stoic than have an emotional outburst that makes you look bad to the jury.

All this went into the day-by-day coverage of the Anthony trial, “experts” telling us who won the day’s proceedings. And always, always, what did it mean for Anthony’s guilt or innocence. The conclusions from these “experts” ranged from “most likely” to a “slam-dunk” guilty verdict.

But the jury didn’t hear and see all this from the “experts,” or hear the opinions of radio talk show hosts, all of whom were so certain Casey Anthony is guilty. Hell, the rest of the American public was convinced!

The jury didn’t hear any of that, didn’t see any of that. The seven women and five men just went by the evidence and testimony and in less than 12 hours their verdict was clear: not guilty.

This is the funny part. After the verdict was read all those experts, who admitted to being surprised by the jury’s decision, started poking holes in the prosecution’s case, including the very important fact that the prosecution had no evidence whatsoever connecting Casey Anthony to Caylee’s death. The prosecution couldn’t even prove how the little girl died. In other words, the state couldn’t prove a crime was committed.

So the jury decided they couldn’t send a woman to prison, let alone death row, without evidence of a crime, let alone evidence connecting the defendant to the unproven crime.

Maybe we’ll never know what happened to Caylee Anthony, although now the public is making predictions about TV movies and books concerning the case, with Casey Anthony reaping huge pay checks. I expect everyone connected to the case, even slightly, will cash in on this case and the verdict somehow.

That kook from CNN’s Headline News, Nancy Grace, has been cashing in on this case for three years. Her verdict of the verdict? “… As the defense sits by and has their champagne toast after the not-guilty verdict, somewhere out there the devil is dancing tonight.” Oh please! She just flat out said, on the air, that at the moment she, Nancy Grace, was speaking, the defense team was celebrating their victory with champagne. Talk about hubris!

But watching video of the crowd gathered outside of the courtroom, after the verdict was read, was really disturbing. No one could really say why Casey Anthony is guilty, all they knew was a little girl is dead. “What about the little girl,” one woman asked as she wept.

And that’s the center of everyone’s interest and maybe even concern. This little girl, who would be five today, is gone. Is Casey Anthony responsible? Hard to say, she is the mother and let’s face it, she let the disappearance of her daughter go unreported for 31 days. But that isn’t evidence a crime was committed.

That’s what’s so disturbing. People are so willing — eager even — to have someone put to death for something so tragic as this little girl’s death, but the mob doesn’t care whether the defendant is actually guilty, or if the prosecution proves their case. The mob wants blood.

In 2000 former Illinois Governor George Ryan put a moratorium on death penalties and eventually commuted the sentences of all those on death row. His reason being that the death penalty couldn’t be applied with equal justice and too many innocent people were being put to death for crimes they didn’t commit.

Since then state and federal studies have shown that as many as 13% of the people on death row are innocent of the charges that put them there. Hundreds of people convicted of capital crimes have had their convictions and sentences overturned on appeal due to new evidence, most especially DNA evidence.

That’s what makes the mob mentality so scary. It sends innocent people to death along with the guilty. So, it’s sad a little girl is dead, especially after watching the home videos. But I’m glad the jury returned the verdicts of not guilty. As Thomas Jefferson said of our legal system: “I rather let 10 guilty men go free than put one innocent man in jail.” Or one innocent woman.

Girl Out the Door

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:01:00 -0600

The really sad news of late: Crystal Harris dumped Hugh Hefner just days before their scheduled wedding. Oh, on the same day her first single became available on iTunes. As Hefner tweeted, “Coincidence? I think not.”

Ouch! Crystal! She was on some show with Ryan Seacrest explaining why she dumped Hefner just five days before their wedding and the same day her single was released. “For a while I’ve been having second thoughts about everything. I haven’t really been at peace with myself lately. I didn’t think it was really fair to him. It was all happening too fast for me. .... Was this what I wanted?”

A little background might be in order here.

As anyone who follows this sort of stuff will tell you, Hefner had a long-term relationship with Holly Madison. That ended when Hef made it clear he didn’t want to get married and/or have children. In fact, he can’t have any more kids because his sperm count is too low.

This was all public because Hef and Holly — and Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson — were in the celebrated cable show, The Girls Next Door at the time. Everyone tuned in. Well no, not everyone, but enough people to make the four celebrity sensations.

Once Hefner and Madison split, the other two girlfriends took their leave as well.

And then, before the next season of GND started, Hefner once again filled up the spare rooms with three new girlfriends, twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon and his “Main Squeeze,” Crystal Harris. The show must go on!

So, late last year, after Hef and Harris made their engagement public, everyone who gives a damn about this posed the question, “I wonder what Holly thinks?” Or “I wonder how Holly feels about this?”

It didn’t take long to find out because, as is often the case in the world of “reality” TV, Holly has her own show on the same network and she went, with cameras in tow, to the Palms Hotel Resort in Las Vegas, to meet with Hef and Harris. Holly had doubts, but wished them well anyway.

This all sounds so incestuous. Holly Madison is famous because she had this affair with Hugh Hefner that was broadcast on TV every week for five years. Because of that, she gets her own show, which is treated like a spin off from GND. And then she goes to … I gotta stop! My head is spinning!
 The other two went on their own ways as well. Kendra Wilkinson married footballer Hank Baskett, currently with the Minnesota Vikings and Bridget Marquardt got her own show, a travel show about sexy beaches. While on GND Bridget got her Masters degree, I forget the major. Good for her!

Back to Holly … err … yeah. This web can be confusing. So, having actually been in love with Hefner, Madison was concerned that any girls that followed her and her former girlfriend … err … mates? … would only be in it for the money and publicity. Which wasn’t exactly why Madison, Marquardt and Wilkinson became Hefner’s posse of girlfriends. Well, that was probably part of it, but the TV show hadn’t really gotten off the ground at that point.

Anyway, Madison had doubts about Crystal Harris. There was just something that didn’t seem right about Harris. Of course, the common wisdom circulating about the denizens of the Playboy forums was that Madison was just spewing sour grapes. Hef had spurned her for someone younger.
 Oh yes, Playboy.com has a users forum, a message boards if you will where hundreds of Playboy.com subscribers chat each day, some more than others.
 Some of these folks spend hours upon hours in these forums and quite frankly it can be quite entertaining. Oh the rivalries, fiefdoms and harems!
 Not that I would know much about it …

Back to Holly Madison: she was more than a little hurt Hefner was willing to marry Harris but not her. Who wouldn’t be? Madison had been given a job as a photo editor, one of the people who picked women to be submitted to Hefner for the possibility of being a Playmate. Some people thought her input on the subject was beneficial. The rest of us, not so much.

Once she and Hefner split, she quit that job and moved to Las Vegas to be with her new boyfriend, the magician-mindfreak guy, can’t remember his name — Chris Angel.

So, fast forward: Madison is in Las Vegas, the magician is history and she has her own show; Marquardt is … I don’t know, laying naked on a warm beach somewhere, Wilkinson is off having babies with the football player, first in Philadelphia and then on her own in Los Angeles and Hef and Harris have dumped the Shannon Twins to live in pre-matrimonial bliss.

And then Tuesday, June 14, 2011 arrived …

Unconfirmed reports were that Harris and Hefner had a terrible feud over the weekend and Harris stormed out. And then unconfirmed reports from anonymous friends of Harris said she had this planned all along, to wait until the July issue of the magazine was being shipped for release so she could simultaneously release her song on iTunes and dump Hefner to gain all that extra publicity.

You see, Harris is on the cover of the July issue as “Mrs. Crystal Hefner” and she has a feature inside. And if Harris’s exit from Playboyland was indeed so calculated, then that would make her a supreme bitch.

Hugh Hefner got dumped at the altar — well, nearly — in a very public and embarrassing manner. Even if it wasn’t a cold and calculated plot by Harris, it was a very hurtful thing to do. If she had been having doubts she shouldn’t have waited so long to leave and to do it on the same day her single drops on iTunes, that suggests a little more than just a change of heart.

How did Hugh M. Hefner spend Thursday Night? He watched 50 First Dates with about a half dozen Playmates. Dude, even on your worst days you have it pretty good … but I’m sure it still hurts like a motherfucker.

Strictly Commercial

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:51:00 -0600

There’s a new, annoying, commercial on TV. Maybe you’ve seen it already: the guy starts screaming, “I have a winner!” It’s a new taco from Taco Bell. It’s a double taco. My bad; the Cheesy Double Decker Taco. No doubt it’s delicious, as much of Taco Bell’s menu, but the commercial! It’s got a couple of hot chicks, as all winning commercials do, but the screaming guy — yeesh!

Couldn’t help myself, had to go find it on YouTube. YouTube: it’s either the savior of the oppressed or a wasteland of mindless dribble and adolescent high jinxery. That’s a real word, isn’t it? “Jinxery”? No matter.

Remember when adolescent high jinxery consisted of making a dummy for Halloween and scaring the bejesus out of the neighborhood kids and then taking the dummy up to Kinnickinnic Parkway and throwing it in front of unsuspecting motorists? Well, some of us remember doing that.

One year a perpetrator of such crimes was gonna get his ears clipped and hung on deer hooks, or something like that. Ah, the good old days. Now, you make an ass of someone and post the video on YouTube. Or, we have these yahoos who beat, or even kill someone and record the event on video.

What’s wrong with just throwing dummies out on lightly used thoroughfares in the middle of the night? Well, actually there’s a lot wrong with that — I guess — but it doesn’t involve torturing and/or killing someone just for yucks.

Times have changed. Is it the technology? Is it the decline of religious influence? I doubt it. The United States is one of the more religious nations on Earth. If anything, religion drives people crazy. People in this country commit murder in the name of Christ everyday. In other parts of the world the deity goes by a different name. But I’m getting off on a tangent here.

Television advertising has been around since 1941 when the Bulova watch company ran a spot during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies ball game in New York. “America runs on Bulova time.”

As a kid I remember the Bulova commercials. They were a part of the space program and presidents gave them to famous people and dignitaries as official state gifts! I’m thinking I might go out and buy a nice new Bulova watch! Don’t need a new watch, but just writing about Bulova …

The most popular commercials have an unforgettable catch phrase, like “Where’s the beef!”

Who can forget that commercial? If you were cognizant in the early 80’s you remember the commercial. The old woman, taking the top off the hamburger bun, looking at the peanut-sized piece of meat and hollering that catch phrase: “WHERE’S THE BEEF!”

Then it started getting used for just about everything, including politics!
 Just an aside: Did you know political advertising on television is banned in Norway?

Speaking of political commercials, there have been some very memorable, like “It’s Morning Again in America,” Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan, or maybe it was his “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Most people weren’t, but heck, Reagan just made you feel so good, it had to be better than 1980!

One of the most memorable political commercials for TV was used by the Johnson campaign in 1964 against his Republican opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater: “The Daisy.” It showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy. As the screen fades to black, zooming in on her eye, a white flash replaces the black and a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion appears. “The stakes are too high,” the commercial intones and Johnson wins in a landslide.

That is without a doubt the most memorable and controversial political TV commercial of all time, with maybe George H.W. Bush’s 1988 “Willie Horton” commercial in a close second place. In that one the Bush campaign reached out and touched the racial fears and bigotry of the White community by showing the mug shot of an African-American man (Willie Horton) in prison for murder who had been released from prison on a furlough program. While on this furlough he committed burglary, assault and rape.

Horton had been in a Massachusetts prison on a life without parole term after murdering a gas station attendant when he was released on that furlough. Michael Dukakis was governor at the time of his furlough and in 1988 was the Democratic opponent of Republican George H.W. Bush.

Like Johnson’s “Daisy” commercial, Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad was controversial and roundly criticized — and successful. By implication, Dukakis wasn’t just a party to rape, the Black Man had raped a White Woman.

Bush’s political point man Lee Atwater received the scorn and credit for the ad and for many years after he bragged about its success. Although he didn’t create the ad (the official campaign didn’t use it, an independent group, Americans for Bush produced the ad) Atwater vowed to make Horton Dukakis’s running mate.

“Reach out and touch someone.” That was the tag line for AT&T and the Baby Bells starting in 1984. We got so much sexual mileage out of that one! Reminding me of a man “getting in touch with his feminine side.” I won’t even go there … err … very much.
 I have no idea how or where that phrase came about, but it’s rich with comedic possibilities!

Commercials … sex sells of course. Back in the previous decade Playboy had an online feature called “Sex Cells” in which two Playboy models would be given cell phones with cameras and then given a few days to take photos of each other. Some of the results were wonderfully picturesque!

Getting back to commercials, the most overtly sexual ones come from GoDaddy.com, the web domain giant. Their top spokesperson is Indy Car racing’s Danica Patrick. They save their best and most sexual commercials for the Super Bowl.

Then of course there are beer commercials. Drink Miller Lite and every hot chick in the bar will be looking for you … to fetch her another round. Or, it could be Heineken, Bud Lite or Michelob Lite. Or any beer for that matter, even Guinness.

My favorite beer commercials were those Miller Lite ads that featured the “Miller Lite All Stars” arguing, “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” Or, the two I remember most vividly featured Mickey Spillane (“Ohh! Mickey!”) and Bob Ueker (“Must be in the front row!”).
 Now, when you go to a Milwaukee Brewers game in Milwaukee’s Miller Park, you can buy one-dollar tickets for the “Ueker Seats,” located in the highest, farthest reaches of the grandstands, right behind Home Plate.
 Just viewed a few on YouTube! I still crack up watching them!

The men in the popular commercials lately are all the new version of “Metrosexual.” You know the type: a couple days worth of stubble, or maybe a sparse beard; an ill-kept — but clean — look to his apparel; wears a sport coat over a t-shirt or maybe a button down shirt that isn’t tucked in. Michael Sorrentino isn’t a “good” example of the new Metrosexual. “Who,” you ask? The Situation from the MTV show Jersey Shore.
 Men, is this what we’ve come to? We’re represented by Metrosexuals or The Situation? Say it ain’t so!

Anyway, getting back to Taco Bell’s newest commercial: PepsiCo, the parent company of Taco Bell, probably has a winner, pardon the pun. The two women talking about the idiot shouting about his double decker taco. I don’t see it having the same staying power as “Where’s the beef!” But it will get replicated in any number of unrelated situations.

All right, this is getting mightily verbose and categorically without socially redeeming value so it’s got to come to an end, but I just saw Macy’s new commercial. Making a cameo is the newest big name in the birther movement, Donald Trump. O Dear …

Wonder if I can get a job acting in commercials?
•••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• ••••
My thanks to Frank Zappa for the title. Comes from his song “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.” As you may recall, the fur trapper was strictly from commercial (“strictly commercial”).

The Guiltiest of Pleasures

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:01:00 -0600

Okay, exactly a week ago this space published a blog about dirty little secrets. Actually, guilty pleasures, none of which are secret or ridden with guilt. I do, however, keep some of them low profile, the topic becoming too tedious over the years. It’s like the rule against talking politics and religion — and the New York Yankees in certain quarters.

This is a guilty pleasure, a dirty little secret, one I’ve mostly kept to myself over the last 12 years. Yes, it began in the Clinton years, when America was in its biggest and longest materialistic boom. I was deep into it too. Had a little sports car, a 1988 Mazda RX-7. But I was living somewhat beyond my means, wearing a façade, being something I’ve never been nor ever could be, a lie only I was trying to buy.

Carl was still alive obviously, and we shared that condominium over by Poway. We paid rent on time, paid the bills mostly on time, and that was where the lie began and ended. The loan payments on that RX-7 were sporadic at best, then it needed serious repairs; the jobs came and went, from one telemarketing job to another, consistently unhappy with all of that, unhappy and putting on the façade that I was just the opposite: happy as a clam.

Ever wonder from where that little idiom originated? It’s fully American in origin, first being used in the early 19th Century up around the Northeastern part of the country, New England I guess. A clam, you see, when not ripped apart and served in a white sauce over your pasta, looks happy when it is opened and clams are often open at high tide, when they are less vulnerable to predators. Hence the phrase, “As happy as a clam at high tide.” Most Americans, like me, abbreviate the phrase and leave off the high tide reference. Who has the time to get it right these days?

So, in 1998 I was living “over the hill,” working jobs I was too ashamed to admit working, looking for and hoping for, meaningful employment. Since I subscribed to cable, and paid it myself, I couldn’t live without HBO. At the time, we could still get the premium channel on the analog signal most common with cable TV up until that time. HBO was my refuge from reality.

Sunday Nights were reserved for HBO. All of the network’s TV series aired on Sunday Nights, my favorites being Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show and Dennis Miller Live. Yeah, believe it or not, Dennis Miller used to be funny!

All three of those shows were comedies, and none of them scrimped on language and sexual content and Dream On had lots of gratuitous nudity! Ah! The best reason to watch HBO! Everything you ever wanted to see on network TV, but couldn’t because the prudes who whine about good programming prevented it. Not that gratuitous nudity equals good programming, but it helps.

See, on network TV, people never use language many of us use on a regular basis; words like “fuck” and “shit.” Back in the 1990’s NYPD: Blue experimented with nudity, but we had to endure Dennis Franz’s bare ass. We did hear the characters talking like real Americans, but after that groundbreaking show left the air, network TV went back to bleh-as-usual.

So, what we were left with were the premium channels.

By 1998 Dream On had been off the air for two years and Sunday Nights were not quite as entertaining as they had been. The Larry Sanders Show was still the funniest program on TV, but HBO really had nothing to replace Dream On, in my book.

In stepped Candace Bushnell, sort of. More directly, in stepped producer Darren Starr with a series based on Bushnell’s book, Sex and the City, a tome taken from Bushnell’s newspaper column of the same name published in the New York Observer from 1994 to 1996.
 It should be noted: the TV show and subsequent movie bare little resemblance to the actual book and column.

Now, what caught my attention about the show, from all the previews and hype, was the name obviously, but two of the actresses as well, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall. Parker had been in a movie with Nicholas Cage, Honeymoon in Vegas, one of the funniest movies of that decade. Who can forget the Flying Elvises!

Besides the great storyline, Parker was often dressed in sexy, barely there clothing. After that film she was in the funniest movie of the 1990’s, Mars Attacks! She and Pierce Brosnan ended the film with their talking heads in jars.

Kim Cattrall, well, there’s really only one film that stands out over all others: Big Trouble in Little China. That’s not all she did of course. She had been in films and on TV since 1973 when she was — believe it or not — a contract player with Universal Studios. She was a regular on the old TV show, The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno as Dr. David Banner and the Hulk, respectively. And Cattrall was in the original Police Academy, the only one from that franchise that actually made me laugh.

But, it’s Big Trouble in Little China that remains firmly implanted in my memory! He co-star was Kurt Russell and the two had to battle supernatural, Kung Fu masters to … save the planet I think? No, just looked it up on Wikipedia: they had to save the girlfriend of Wang Chi, one of Jack Burton’s friends. That was a pretty funny movie and cult classic!
 I belong to a cult!

So, Cattrall and Parker would be the stars of Sex and the City on HBO and if it was anything like Dream On, with sex and nudity, it would be a great show. It did not disappoint. Although Parker didn’t showed the goods, Cattrall frequently did and my one friend, who also had HBO, and I would cheer the episodes when Cattrall flashed us her lovely body.

At the time, we had no idea this was considered programming for women — and gays. I mean, my friend and I are heterosexual so what do we know about women’s issues and Manolo Blahniks? We were watching for the great stories and the beautiful women.

Sex and the City had 94 episodes over eight years and I rarely missed the Sunday Night airing. One year when I went to visit family in Denver I implored my brother to subscribe to HBO for a month so I wouldn’t miss Sex and the City or The Sopranos. Sadly, I had to wait until I got home to watch the replays.

Most people would look at me like I am crazy when I said Sex and the City is one of my favorites TV shows. But, most of those people never subscribed to HBO and therefore had no idea what the show was all about, who was in it and of course, just how sexy a program it still is. Unless of course you’re watching the abbreviated version on one of the cable networks that edit out the naughty words and nudity. It’s as bad as trying to watch the Sopranos on one of the basic cable networks—worse! Sex and the City is all about sex! And relationships, most importantly the relationships between the four characters.

Ah yes, we cannot forget Miranda Hobbes and Charlotte York, played by Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, respectively. Four highly ambitious, very beautiful single women taking Manhattan by storm.

By the end of the show’s run on HBO I had stopped telling people I was a fan of the show. For most, it was a program for women and gays and who really wants to have that conversation in this day and age? But I watched every episode, right ‘til the end when Mr. Big flew to Paris to take Carrie Bradshaw back to New York and make her his! She had moved to Paris to live with her lover, the Russian Aleksandr Petrovsky, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Charlotte converted to Judaism and married her divorce lawyer, Samantha fell in love with her actor/client/lover Smith Jerrod and moved to Los Angeles, and probably the worst end to the show, Miranda married Steve. I never liked Steve. He was such a whiney … man! He didn’t want to live in Manhattan on Miranda’s considerable income, so they lived in Brooklyn. He didn’t want to enter Miranda’s world, she had to leave it to live in his. Why did she do it?

So anyway, the movie came out a couple years ago, but I never saw it. Life was different for me at the time and going to see a movie wasn’t high on my list of priorities and going to see a movie made for women? Not a chance.

Recently we started getting HBO in this house and on HBO On Demand you can still watch Sex and the City as it was meant to be seen and, wouldn’t you know it, the movie is featured on HBO On Demand as well. So, I watched it, from start to finish.

Steve cheated on Miranda and she left him, Samantha realized she loved New York and herself more than she loved Los Angeles and Smith, so she left him and moved back to New York. Charlotte actually got pregnant and Carrie, well, she and Big were planning the biggest wedding of the century, taking place in the New York Public Library, to be covered by Carrie for Vogue, complete with a one of a kind wedding dress by a designer with a name I can’t remember. What do I know about fashion? Have you seen my wardrobe?

Then, about halfway through the movie, with Carrie in that one of a kind dress waiting on the steps in the library, Big didn’t get out of his car. He jilted her on their wedding day!

In the end, Carrie and Big get married at City Hall, Miranda forgives Steve and goes back to him and Samantha, well she ceremoniously turned 50 and celebrated her singleness of purpose — being herself!

That’s why she has been, and will forever be, the best character in the franchise. Not to mention, she is still smokin’ hot nude! Ah, the scene from the movie when she lays nude on a table for Smith, bits of her homemade sushi covering the tasty bits of her lovely body!
 which brings to mind this little tidbit of trivia: two Playboy Playmates from the 1980’s recently posed for Playboy’s online site, The Cyber Club: Miss December 1989 Petra Verkaik and Miss August 1986, Ava Fabian. Verkaik is 42 and Fabian 48. Both are still smokin’ hot!
 Makes you wonder, did the smokin’ hotness of Kim Cattrall at the age of 50 convince the powers-that-be at Playboy women can still be sexy after 36? Gotta wonder.

Well, that’s my one guilty pleasure, my one dirty little secret: I’m a fan of Sex and the City. Glad it eventually came to HBO so I could watch it in the comfort, convenience and secret anonymity of my home. Now I’m waiting for the prequel, based on Bushnell’s prequel, The Carrie Diaries. What can I say, I’m a hopeless romantic.

Wildly Entertaining!

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:01:00 -0600

Everyone knows I have guilty pleasures and quite frankly, I’m not feeling guilty about any of them, except for maybe Ghost Hunters. Naah, not even that TV show. In fact, Wednesday Nights are sacrosanct in my household so I can watch three hours of the TAPS crew, headed by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, hunting ghosts and debunking sightings and experiences.

We’re still waiting for a ghost to smile for the cameras, but nearly every week we get ghostly shadows, disembodied voices on the Electronic Voice Phenomenon recorders and sometimes members of the team get touched!
 Some people say I’m touched.

The real guilty pleasure with Ghost Hunters though is that I like to see the two women ghost hunters on the show, Kris Williams and Amy Bruni. Being a guy, and a skeptic in matters of entertainment and media, my first thought was that these two lovely women were brought into the TAPS team for their looks and maybe they had a prior interest in the paranormal. What the Hell, every TV show needs to have some eye candy and the same could be said for the two young male investigators, Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango … err … I assume. Who knows what young women find attractive.

My skepticism was unfounded — somewhat.

Bruni has a long history of paranormal investigation. Her father is an amateur paranormal investigator so Amy has been researching the paranormal her entire life. Williams has had experiences with the paranormal, but her main passions are genealogy and history, two fields that lend themselves to the overall investigative nature of Ghost Hunters.

Most interesting about Williams: she has also been a carpenter and flooring installer. That cute little waif of a woman? Well then she knows creaking floors and settling timber.

Still, being a skeptic, I would bet being physically attractive makes the addition of Williams and Bruni to the TAPS team a plus for both the team and the TV network, SyFi. It’s all about the ratings.

Just have to say, I didn’t start watching Ghost Hunters for the women on the team. Didn’t even know they were there and when the show first came to my attention there were different women who really didn’t catch my prurient interest the way Williams and Bruni do.

There is a TV show, on E! that I watch entirely to please my prurient interests, Pretty Wild. I really don’t watch The Girls Next Door anymore. Maybe I should, but a guy has only so much time and this year, my pleasure is Pretty Wild.
 I may of course purchase all the DVD’s from The Girls Next Door just because the parts that are blurred or bleeped on TV are not blurred or bleeped on the DVD’s. I’m hoping the same is true for Pretty Wild.

What first got me interested in the program was that one of the “stars” happens to be Playboy Cyber Girl Tess Taylor Arlington, who is now the 2010 Cyber Girl of the Year. Okay! But, being on E!, you know there will be moments when the network has to blur and bleep. Tess and her sister, Alexis, have been trying to become fashion models, especially in the glamour and lingerie fields: specifically in those fields actually, so we know there will be numerous “wardrobe malfunctions.”

It’s apparent now that when Arlington first appeared as a Cyber Girl in July, 2009, the network was at least planning the TV show, which didn’t debut until Sunday, March 14, 2010. Filming began sometime in late 2009, before Alexis was arrested on suspicion of being a part of the “Bling Ring.”

You may have heard of it; young Hollywood wannabes burgled the homes of famous young stars, stealing their bling and clothes and then wearing it around Hollywood, going to parties to show off their ill-gotten booty. And maybe their bootays as well. They are young and live in Hollywood after all.

That’s pretty much how the show debuted. Alexis and Tess were just getting hired to model for a lingerie company, Biatta Intimates, were planning on modeling for LA Fashion Week and then … Alexis gets arrested, the police tell the TV crew to turn off the cameras, the home of the Neiers family is searched and off to jail goes Alexis.

This show actually has more crying than any other show I’ve seen. Alexis does most of the crying, as she is biologically the oldest child of her mother, Andrea Arlington so is most likely to be the most spoiled. Tess is an adopted daughter of Andrea and her husband, Jerry Dunn, but for purposes of modeling, Tess has taken her adoptive mom’s maiden name of Arlington. And that’s really about as convoluted as it gets.

Oh ... and Mom Andrea raises her kids according to the teachings of the movie, The Secret. I’ve never seen it or read the book, but apparently it’s a self-help tome that says that what you believe and envision will become reality. “And so it is.” They also appear to be, some what at least, into Buddhism. There are a lot of Buddhas around the house and Tess has a lovely Buddha in a lotus tattooed on her side.

We have to wonder though, as many other blogs and sites have wondered, what is it we find so fascinating about “realty TV,” especially shows like Pretty Wild. Other than the attractive mom and her three equally attractive daughters, there’s really nothing of great import. The premise is that the girls have been brought up with very little structure, the two older girls, Tess and Alexis get into all sorts of situations.

With Ghost Hunters, I’m waiting for a ghost to smile for the cameras. With Pretty Wild, well, so far I want to see if Alexis gets out of the mess she’s in with the law and of course I’m waiting for the wardrobe malfunctions.

There are people I know who can’t miss an episode of Dancing with the Stars or American Idol. The problem I have with those programs is that the American public gets to vote on who stays and goes and some of the contestants stay far longer than their talent allows. I did watch an episode of DWTS (if you’re cool, you know the text shorthand) just to see Pamela Anderson!

Actually, the only program I watch with any regularity is Ghost Hunters. And it really isn’t for Amy Bruni or Kris Williams. I like the investigations and once in a while — ONCE IN A WHILE! — they have such a provocative show I’m checking all the dark corners and moving shadows in this little condo.

Despite the hot participants of DWTS and PW, what the two shows are doing really doesn’t capture my interest. Yeah, it’s nice to see a side of Tess Taylor Arlington we don’t experience from her Playboy appearances, but after a few episodes, eh. I’ll keep watching just to see if and how Alexis gets out of the charges that she was part of the burglary ring. In truth, being a bit of a spiritual person myself, I was kind of hoping to see more about the family’s spiritual beliefs. But I’ve only watched three episodes so far so maybe we’ll see more of that in future episodes, if I can remember when it’s on. Sunday Nights, I think.

There’s really nothing exciting or controversial about Pretty Wild, not yet anyway. At the moment Tess is dating a singer from an unknown rock band. Musicians! We’ll see how long that lasts. And I’m not jealous in the least!

For real controversy, you should check out the Playboy forums. Because of her tattoos, piercings and TV show, a lot of subscribers are unhappy with the selection of Tess to be the Cyber Girl of the Year. The conspiracy theories rival those of the Kennedy Assassination and who actually planned and carried out the attacks of 9/11. If you haven’t heard that one, it has to do with Bush (43) and his Administration orchestrating those attacks. The planes slamming into the Twin Towers all a hoax. Seriously, there are people who believe it.

But that’s a topic for another day. Right now, I wanna watch the clips from Pretty Wild on their Web Site and leave messages on their message boards to piss off all the people who watch the show and hate it. That’s the funniest part of this: there are people who hate Pretty Wild but watch it every week nonetheless. The question is: is this appropriate programming for our children? Well — duh — it’s on cable, late at night. Maybe the kids would be better off watching One Tree Hill or the Gilmore Girls.

So there’s this clip of Tess and Alexis in Cabo San Lucas running around in bikinis …

The 24 Hour Conspiracy

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:01:00 -0600

There’s no crying on 24, not Jack Bauer anyway! Jeez, here we are, in the final season of 24 and we see Jack Bauer cry. No way! Whose idea was that? This is the show that got Vice President Dick Cheney and his neocon lackeys to sit around a faux situation room and say, “Torture works! This TV program proves it!” Wonder what Cheney thinks now.

Jack Bauer is unlucky in love. You become one of those super secret spies, flitting about the country thwarting conspiracies of foreign terrorists and domestic alike! Remember, for several seasons now Bauer and C.T.U. — the Counter Terrorism Unit — have been fighting a shadow government of Big Wig control freaks, by inference, the people who are really in charge of the country. You know, the Bilderberg Group, but in fictional form!

See the Bilderbergs, as portrayed on 24, manipulate the foreign terrorists to do their bidding, all in an effort to force Americans to see the world and the United States their way — it’s in dire need of a totalitarian government to keep everyone safe and by golly, they’re just the ones to do it!

Eh … I’m getting away from Jack Bauer’s unlucky love life. Back in the beginning of this program, I’ve seen every episode of every season so far, Jack had a thing going on with a HOT, HOT babe who worked for C.T.U., Audrey Raines, played by Kim Raver. She was in two early seasons, then was brought back for season six left in a coma — after the sixth day.
 Real 24-philes don’t refer to them as “seasons,” they’re “days,” get it? Each season chronicles a 24 hour period, a full day, although the start time can start at any point in a day and conveniently, they always start on the hour!
 And if you’re a real 24-phile you’ll be following it on the show’s website where you get a lot of back-story on the show’s characters.

Back to Kim Raver: we can now see her on Grey’s Anatomy every week. I don’t watch that show, even though it features Raver and Sandra Oh.

So, in the course of these eight seasons our favorite domestic spy, Jack Bauer, has loved and lost twice … no, three times! In one season, he was on the lam, with an alias no less, and living with a woman with a young son. He had to leave them behind when terrorists decided to blow up Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb. As I recall, the terrorists succeeded with that one and it was up to Jack Bauer and C.T.U. to stop the other bombs from going off.

Well, maybe that was season two … or maybe season four … who can keep it all straight? I’m thinking of the season terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in Valencia, CA — blowing up Six Flags Magic Mountain! I like Magic Mountain! Maybe it was the same season Jack came to grips with his father and brother — and his father was in on the Bilderberg conspiracy! James Cromwell played Jack’s corrupt father.

See, that storyline in the show can’t really be a tangent for long because it always comes up every day — every 24 day. Let me reiterate, this isn’t the Bilderberg Group the producers of 24 are talking about, but some vague, shadowy, fictional conspiracy that wants to rule the United States and eventually, we should presume, the world!

Great idea. Take the roots of a “popular” conspiracy, like the Bilderberg Group, incorporate it into a storyline, but leave it vague, like the actual myth of the “real conspiracy,” — wait, this is getting too funny. Do we really believe the Bilderberg Group is a real organization bent on world domination? There really is a group of conspiracy theorists; conspiracy nuts (?) that believe the Bilderbergs are trying to rule the world. Many of them are the same nuts that believe the Bush Administration (43) planned and carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Several years ago I “friended” a guy on MySpace who was really, deeply, convinced that theory was true. I tried to debate him on it, but his rhetoric steadily got more animated and violent-sounding, so I “unfriended” him.

You see, on MySpace, not all “friends” are friends. Same with FaceBook, although with that social site I’m a lot more discriminating about who I choose for a friend.

So, this, the eighth day, is the final season of 24. There will be a feature film, but all good TV shows eventually come to an end. Since there will be a movie, we can assume Jack survives Day Eight. Too bad his girlfriend, F.B.I. agent Renee Walker, didn’t. That’s what caused Jack to cry.

Now wait a minute, just remembered that in Day One, Jack’s wife was killed, so he’s been unlucky in love four times. Jack’s daughter Kim, played by Elisha Cuthbert, survives! Thankfully, at least one hot babe in the series survives. Usually, the sexy ones are either one of the bad guys or they get killed. Why do TV shows do that? It’s like people hate beautiful women. I like beautiful women.

Speaking of beautiful women, my friend Claudia is competing in some Hooters Restaurant bikini contests here in San Diego County: Monday, April 19 at the Mission Valley Hooters, Thursday April 22 at the Rancho Bernardo store, Monday April 26 at the Gaslamp store and finally May 6 at the Oceanside Hooters, where Claudia works!

If you have a free night or two — or three or four — stop by one of those Hooters and cheer on Claudia! As a matter of fact, this Monday I’ll have to miss an episode of 24 to cheer on my dear friend!

You might be thinking, “Tim is such a sucker when the woman is so beautiful.” Actually, that’s true, but Claudia really is a friend and a sweetheart. There are few reasons I’d miss an episode of 24, and cheering on Claudia is a really great one! Not to mention, she’ll be in a hot bikini with about a dozen other Hooters Girls! I’m so predictable.

So, this is the last season of 24. What will I do on Monday Nights? Guess I could take up reading books again. Time to buy an iPad. Then I can be a real 24-phile and “watch” it online.

Back to 24. I’m thinking the real story behind the program isn’t the various threats from terrorists, both foreign and domestic, but that shadowy group that’s behind every plot, that fictional Bilderberg Group. And I would bet the feature film will finally expose it, at least to we viewers who have been watching all these years. After all, what good would it be of the conspiracy was exposed and defeated in the fictional story? Sort of kills off the chance of doing a sequel, or two.

Not that conspiracy nuts ever shut up about their theories. Sheesh, the “Birthers” are still trying to convince us the president was born in Kenya and those nuts who believe George W. Bush and his cronies planned and carried out 9/11, they’re still out there too.

So, whatever the outcome of this season and the movie, we can always believe the shadow government will always exist. That’s the beauty of conspiracy theories: you can’t prove a negative, but we can always claim the theories are true, with just a few facts to make it real.

Which is probably the how and why of Dick Cheney and his cabal thinking torture works. It looks like it’s working for Jack Bauer, so why wouldn’t it work in real life? And what the heck, it’s on that fair and balanced network, FOX! 24 is sort of like reality TV that way — without the reality. I mean, really, a real Jack Bauer crying? No way!

Like a Rolling Stone

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:25:00 -0600

The other day I got an issue of Rolling Stone in the mail. Huh … About ten years ago, maybe less, my subscription lapsed and I never renewed. The magazine was no longer relevant in my life, the music and pop culture it covered so out of touch with a working stiff about to turn 50, it was a waste of the yearly subscription.

So out of the blue comes this issue, dated April 15, 2010: Issue 1102. It’s the one with the cast of Glee on the cover. I’ve never seen that show, even though it gets high accolades. Many TV shows with critical and commercial success don’t interest me. I’ve never seen an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, even though it featured two of my favorite actors, Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts. I hear it was a fine show, but who really wants to watch another sitcom with a standup comic as the star? Even if it has a great ensemble cast? Well, maybe I’ll start watching it in syndication. Peter Boyle’s da bomb!

Thirty years ago … naaa … it was longer than that — I was a devoted fan of the Bob Newhart Show. Now there was a show for stoners! Well, stoners thought so, although it was a hit with just about everyone else who watched television in the 70’s. I watched The Bob Newhart Show for nearly a decade after that, stoned and laughing every time a character said, “Bob?” Couldn’t be Dr. Hartley, it had to be “Bob”? Or “Hi Bob,” in the case of their next-door neighbor, Howard Borden, played by Bill Daily. And a few other characters as well.

Before this gets off on a rant about sitcoms, which is always a good topic, I’ll say this: I watched four episodes of Friends just because everyone I know insists it’s a funny show. It isn’t. Well, maybe it is, Friends remains one of the most popular TV shows of all time. I actually watched the pilot when it first aired to see Courtney Cox. She was a babe then and still is now. Maybe I’ll watch Cougar Town if it’s still on the air.

Friends just never amused me, although I like most of the actors in it.

Did you ever notice: men, heterosexual men anyway, will watch a TV show just for some hot babe who might be a cast member? My friend watched Star Trek: Voyager primarily because it featured Jeri Ryan as … wait, let me look it up on the Internets … Seven of Nine, a Borg who looks really HOT in those skintight costumes ever so popular in the Star Trek pantheon. Seven of Nine’s breasts were so prominently featured! But I never watched it.

Back to the Rolling Stone. Remember back in the day when Dr, Hook and the Medicine Show sang “Cover of the RollingStone”? They got on the cover, in caricature, shortly after that song made the Top 10. It was actually written by humorist, songwriter, poet and author Shel Silverstein, possibly the last renaissance man of our time.

Today’s story subjects rarely interest me. Hip-hop isn’t my thing; wayward young men living the rock star dream don’t interest me, RollingStone has covered that story now for … wait, let me look it up on the Internets … since November, 1967. The comings and goings — and cummings — of the younger TV and movie stars rarely interest, unless it’s Britney flashing her kootchie for the cameras. The pictures of the young women of music, film and television are sweet, but really, I can see those for free on the Internets.

And this is really “funny:” 40 years ago Led Zeppelin was persona non grata in Rolling Stone, but now, they are one of the greatest rock bands ever, as are the Beatles and Beach Boys, both 1960’s icons brushed off by the magazine back in the day.

RollingStone still has great investigative reporting, with such great journalists as Matt Taibbi, but, reading Rolling Stone for the political coverage is like reading Playboy for the articles. It ain’t its bread and butter.

Okay, I like the political and hard news of RollingStone and read Playboy for the articles. Both offer some of the best journalism in print, but it’s primary content, well, you can get WAY HOTTER pics of women nude for free on the Internets and Playboy.com has way hotter photos of it’s Playmates than you’ll find in the print magazine; and if I want great photos of scantily-clad women artists, the Internets fill that need as well.
 One of the benefits of getting the centerfolds online is that with programs like PhotoShop, you can easily do things to the photos to enhance the images to your liking! Not that I ever would …

The mystery is, how and why did I get a subscription to Rolling Stone? Like Playboy, I let that subscription die a long time ago. The woman at the UPS Store (where I keep a box) and I discussed this at length and figured it was one of two scenarios: someone got me the subscription as a gift and I forgot, due to old age, or, I ordered it myself and forgot — due to old age. I’m not that old, am I?

They say, after major surgery with your body being under a heavy anesthesia such as is used for open heart surgery, some of the brain cells in the frontal lobe especially are killed while under, affecting your short-term memory in particular. It can also change your personality; sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Better to let my friends and family judge that, I mean, just ask me, I may not be much, but I’m all I think about!

So, in this issue of Rolling Stone that has a photo of the cast of a TV show I’ve never seen, were a few tidbits of interesting information. Famed rock’n’roll photographer Jim Marshall passed away at the age of 70 and Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh turned 70. Dang! Really? Two icons of rock, one dies and the other celebrates a birthday (March 15).

August 9th will mark the 15th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. Hard to wrap my head around that too, but Phil Lesh is 70? Hard to believe. He doesn’t look it either. It’s all that hippie-dippy clean vegan lifestyle of his. Actually, I have no idea what his lifestyle is, but he had a liver transplant in 1998 and survived prostate cancer (and surgery) in 2006, the same disease that took the life of Frank Zappa over 15 years ago. FZ would be turning 70 this year, were he still alive.

Beware the Ides of March, for it will bring The Dead! Lesh is a founding member of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia may have been the front man, but as the old saying went, “If Phil’s on, the band is on.” And Phil was so often on! Years ago, back in the 1980’s when covering a Dead show at Alpine Valley Music Theater for the Shepherd Express — well, for me mainly — I had a photo pass that allowed me access to the very front of the stage for the first three songs so I stood in front of Phil for half a song — about 10 minutes — mesmerized by his playing. Wish I had those photos somewhere.

Also in this issue of RollingStone, the news that Alex Chilton died. “Who dat,” you ask? He was the front man for the cult band Big Star. “Who?”

Big Star. All the post punk, pre grunge indie bands loved Alex Chilton and Big Star and patterned their music after them. Still doesn’t ring a bell? Before Big Star Chilton was in the Box Tops and sang the #1 hit, “The Letter.”
 “Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane, ain’t got time to take a fast train. Lonely days are gone, I’m a-goin’ home, ’Cause my baby just a-wrote me a letter.”

Chilton was only 59 when he died, just a few days away from headlining the final night of the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, TX. That’s only a few years older than me. Heart attack got Chilton, which is probably how I will go. Well, if I could bet on it, I would choose heart attack. My friends would probably bet on a bicycle accident, which isn’t a bad bet either.
 As a testament to Rolling Stone’s lack of vision and forward thinking, this was the first year the magazine sponsored a stage at the legendary showcase festival. It’s been going on now for nearly 30 years.

Anyway, I’m keeping my subscription to Rolling Stone. It appears they’ve brought back topics relevant to me, even the newer music. And maybe I’ll start watching Glee.

Who knows, maybe I’ll subscribe to Playboy again. I miss reading the articles.

Truly a Derriere Faux Pas

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:01:00 -0700

Joy of Joys! The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is on the stands! Millions upon millions of boys, ages 8 to 80, were looking forward — nay — were waiting at their local convenience stores for the magazine to appear in the racks of their favorite convenience stores.

This is funny: there are chains that will sell the S.I. Swimsuit Issue, as well as the “Laddie” magazines like Maxim and FHM, but they won’t sell Playboy or other men’s magazines that feature entirely nude models. The hypocrisy is incredible. No matter, we’re looking forward to the Swimsuit Issue here!

Just to gain access to all of the Sports Illustrated online content, I may subscribe to the magazine. I used to do that, read maybe two or three issues a year, just so’s I could, in one day, download all the Swimsuit Issue content. Sadly, it’s a lesson in futility I’ve had to learn year after year because, let’s face it, looking at really hot women in swimsuits and coyly covering up their mammary glands is really just a tease. Heck, do a Google search for naked women and voila! You might even find a few of the Swimsuit Issue models sans clothing.

This is funny: after all these years, over 40 (I think), people still protest the magazine with the same screams of horror people were using when the magazine first published a Swimsuit Issue. Here’s a clue to all those who shake and jerk in a frenzy when the Swimsuit Issue hits the news stands: it isn’t going away. It’s the magazine’s most popular issue.

Time Warner, the parent company of the magazine, puts more money, time and effort into that issue than any other because it sells and, more importantly, it sells subscriptions to the magazine. Probably to guys like me who will subscribe just to get the online content the TW suits hold back just so we will subscribe. Business is business and they figured this out.

After a few years I stopped subscribing because the subscriber-only content was hardly more … err … revealing … than the “free” content. In fact, over the years, the Swimsuit Issue has become more conservative with the attire. The zenith of their swimsuit models has to be Cheryl Tiegs in that fishnet one-piece that caused such a stir over 30 years ago.

Sports Illustrated could cause a great (and welcome) blast of subscribers and protestors if they had more revealing photos of their body painted models. Just my humble suggestion, but I doubt that will happen because the trend has been to be a little more conservative. But, if they saved those photos for those of us who subscribe for the content —and offered them in extremely high resolution — I bet their subscriptions would go through the roof. I’m just saying.

Super model Brooklyn Decker is the cover model, a big deal for models. She was on Late Night With David Letterman and was … not quite as entertaining as Jennifer Garner, who had the two segments prior to Decker’s appearance. She is married to tennis star Andy Roddick, for any of you who might harbor any unrequited fantasies. This is just a guess, I don’t really know, Decker is not only 30+ years younger than me, but she’s likely to be at least four inches taller than me. Super models always leave me feeling short. Any fantasies I might harbor for a S.I. Swimsuit model get dashed as soon as I read their stats.

“Stats,” you ask? Age, height, weight and measurements. It is a sports magazine after all. There has to be stats in every issue.

What’s truly humorous about the tumult over the publication of the Swimsuit Issue is the inclusion of swimsuit photos of über skier Lindsey Vonn. Not just Vonn, but fellow Winter Olympic athletes Hannah Teter (snowboarding), Clair Bidez (snowboarding) and Lacy Schnoor (skiing).

The controversy over Lindsey Vonn began with the February 5, 2010 issue that featured Vonn on the cover, in her skiing gear and the downhill tuck speed skiers crouch in when they’re flying down a mountain at about 70 miles per hour.
 I’m afraid to sled down a hill at 20 mph!
 Hell, I don’t even like going near snow!

The problem with the photo? It’s too sexually suggestive. If we were only kidding. I guess seeing the fine contour of Vonn’s fine, fine derriere was too much for the puritans of the land. Sports Illustrated has featured male athletes in similar poses. And who can forget Michael Phelps — and Mark Spitz all those years ago — gold medals around their necks, on the cover shirtless. No cries of horror over that type of display.

But, if it’s a woman athlete we need to adopt different standards because, golly, it would be objectifying to show them in a pose that might suggest something sexual. Or, equally pernicious, women are the Biblical founts of seduction, temptation and ultimately evil and we need to hysterically avoid any displays that might tempt men to commit evil acts, like masturbating! Ah bullshit.

Women’s figure skating, for instance, will be very sexual for a lot of men. Scantily clad women twirling around the TV screen? But, the broadcasters will succumb to the puritan pressures of a few and crop the camera shots so as not to be too revealing of the women’s bodies. They do it every time women’s figure skating — or gymnastics — is shown on television. Here in the United States anyway.

The trouble with that is, when someone is figure skating, their entire body is part of the routine and something very technical and/or beautiful that is part of that routine is being lost to the viewers because in the U.S. we have this nonsensical notion about sex and the female body.
 Which brings up another issue: there is no women’s ski jumping competition in the Olympics because somehow making ski jumps affects those “female” parts on women. Really.
 A few years ago the president of the International Ski Jumping Federation, Gian-Franco Kasper, said it could be damaging to female parts. His words: “It’s like jumping down, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”
 The IOC has a lot of better excuses now, none of which hold water when men’s events are put to those standards, but this is a whole different can of worms from the one’s surrounding Lindsey Vonn and her cover photo on Sports Illustrated. But it does show a consistent bias and attitude towards women competing in sports.

Friends in Canada tell me that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation doesn’t crop the camera shots or put up message banners across the bottom of the TV screen to block what might be shown, as their American counterparts do here.

Back to Lindsey Vonn. My hope is, after these Olympics she will pose for Playboy as Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard did after the 2004 Summer Olympics. Now that was a celebrity photo spread worth viewing! As for Vonn’s cover photo, I didn’t realize it had sexual overtones until critics pointed it out. That’s when I noticed just how fine a derriere Vonn has in that suit!
 Sadly, Vonn may miss competing in these Olympics due to a shin injury.

The real crime with that particular cover: look at the positioning of Vonn’s fine, fine derriere in relation to the words “Sports Illustrated.”

“PU?” That just kills any boner a guy might get admiring Lindsey Vonn’s fine form. Someone at Sports Illustrated needs to be smacked upside the head for that faux pas. Eh, I’ll just page through the photos of Vonn and her fellow Olympians in their bikinis — after I fill out the form to order a subscription to the magazine. Jeez, I’m a sucker through and through.

Screwed

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:01:00 -0700

Years ago, when David Letterman left NBC to get his own 11:30 p.m. show, opposite the Tonight Show, I started watching his replacement, Conan O’Brien. He wasn’t funny. His band was mostly lame. Great musicians, but no original sound. Letterman’s band, led by Paul Shaffer, like the Tonight Show band led by Doc Severinsen, had a personality. It still has that personality today since most of the members have been with Dave and Paul since the beginning.

Since Letterman’s debut at 11:30 p.m. I’ve had to flip between Leno, host of the Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired, and Letterman’s The Late Show. Then, just over five years ago Leno announced he would retire in 2009 and hand the Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. Problem solved. I would no longer watch the Tonight Show.

Years ago it was a common thought Letterman would replace Johnny Carson once the Late Night King retired. NBC freaked out everyone when they announced long-time Tonight Show guest host Jay Leno would follow in Carson’s chair.

Letterman got fucked. So, when his contract expired, Letterman took up the offer from CBS and switched networks. Letterman is still funny. He got Sarah Palin all wound up when he made a joke about Sarah’s single mom daughter and Palin tried convincing everyone the joke was about her as yet to be single mom daughter.

Letterman apologized, sincerely it should be added, but Palin kept bashing Dave and even took part in a little cabal of nutcases trying to get Dave fired from his job. So, Letterman went back on the offensive and now Palin is a joke at least once a day.
 Well actually, Palin is the joke. But more on her later.

Anyway, since August 30, 1993, I’ve had to split my TV time between Letterman and Leno and now, since 2000, I don’t watch either until the Colbert Report is over at midnight. Well, since June 1, 2009 I don’t really bother with the Tonight Show, even though I did give Conan a try couple of times. He just isn’t funny.

In September 2009 NBC began it’s prime time experiment with Leno coming on at 10 p.m., before the local news. I watched it a few times since it’s pretty much just an earlier version of Leno’s Tonight Show. Leno is still funny. Most of the bits he did on the Tonight Show are seen on his early program, my favorite being “Jaywalking.”

But that all changed recently. Leno’s rating at 10 p.m. have been abysmal, due more to the fact that viewer habits at that time slot had been entrenched and people were not giving up their favorite 10 p.m. shows to watch Leno.

Add that to the Tonight Show slipping in the ratings and you have “the suits” of NBC tripping all over themselves to find a remedy. Over time, as other 10 p.m. programs finished their runs and went off the air, Leno probably would have picked up viewership, but who in TV has patience these days?

So the remedy the suits came up with was simple — and downright cruel to Conan O’Brien: Leno would do a half hour show at 11:35 and the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien would start at 12:05.

Since it’s inception the Tonight Show’s start time has been 11:30-35 (10:30 in the Central Time Zone). For decades I watched Johnny Carson nearly every night. Before Carson there was Jack Paar and … sheesh, I’ve forgotten his name. There have been a few hosts before Carson, but it was Johnny who made the Tonight Show a brand. He was the host for 30 years? Close to it anyway. On his last Tonight Show broadcast, Bette Midler sang to him from the guest’s chair, one of the most touching moments in late night television.
 Had it been Carson’s choice, Letterman would have taken over the chair of the Tonight Show.

The promise for O’Brien, made by the suits at NBC was that he would be the host of the Tonight Show (I’m not sure how long the contract is for) at it’s regular time slot which starts at 11:35 in most time zones. O’Brien moved his family, band and entourage from New York City, where he did the Late Night Show after the Tonight Show.

Now, just over seven months into his turn as the host, the suits have decided to “change” things. Yeah, moving Jay Leno out to make way for Conan O’Brien was a big mistake, but bumping the Tonight Show and O’Brien? NBC screwed both Leno and O’Brien and now Conan is going to walk. Good for him. I may not like his humor, but he deserves better. The rumor is, he will get a late night show on FOX. They haven’t had a successful late night variety/talk show since Arsenio Hall, and that was a long, long time ago. Maybe Conan O’Brien will carry on where Hall left off.

Then there is Sarah Palin, the newest commentator on FOXNews. If anyone believes she quit her job as governor of Alaska for the good of her state has to be living in a fantasy world. Since quitting and going out as a celebrity, the faux hockey mom has made millions of dollars on her book, speaking engagements and now her deal with FOX.

The woman had one thing and one thing only in mind when she decided to quit her job—MONEY! And lots of it. Had she fulfilled her term as governor, she would have faded from the public eye and all the money she is getting now wouldn’t have been there in a year or two. Sarah Palin, like many of her fellow conservatives, is a lying fraud.

Going rogue … what bullshit! Sarah Palin has gone greedy! No harm in that, but she could at least be honest about it.

The best thing about late night television: watching Letterman use Sarah Palin as the butt of his jokes. The perfect exposition for the ass that is Palin.

Gory Details

nospam@example.com (Tim Forkes) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:01:00 -0700

My roommate John is out in the living room watching Dawn of the Dead. Me, I don’t care for gory movies. Never have. Back in the day I saw the original Dawn of the Dead, the George Romero classic, and that put me off gory movies forever. Didn’t even want to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Left either — but I did. Then I joined the Marines.

Bit of a dichotomy (at the very least) I agree, but movies with people getting hacked to pieces, stabbed with weird gardening tools, eaten by zombies and otherwise mutilated for cinematic excess just never appealed to my sense of entertainment.

Once, when there was a marathon of Nightmare on Elm Street movies on one of the cable channels, I watched one of them, part of the way through, but eventually switched to something else. Probably professional wrestling.

Same with the Halloween series. Had to see the movie that made Jamie Lee Curtis the famous “Scream Queen.” Didn’t watch that one all the way through although it was nice seeing Jamie Lee as a teenager.
 For purely prurient reasons, Trading Places is my favorite Jamie Lee Curtis movie. If you’ve seen it sans commercial interruption and network censoring, you know why.

For me, The Exorcist is as gory as it gets. That’s probably my favorite movie of all time. Loved the book as well. True story; one summer I was spending the season in Florida with my two sisters, Cheryl and Mary Lou. Both older and Cheryl’s son, Christopher, was but a wee lad so I occasionally found myself babysitting. Which is okay because I like to read and watch TV.

So, one night, as the two sisters were heading out to … I forget where, Mary Lou, evil as she can be, hands me The Exorcist and says it’s a good book. It’s about church stuff, Catholic Church stuff, I thought naively, the religion we were brought up in, so how interesting could that possibly be? About six hours later when they got home I was still parked on the couch reading, every light in the house turned on, petrified with every word but too engrossed to put it down, too terrified to put it down.

No lie, I read that book in one sitting, no small feat when you consider the number of pages.

When the movie was finally released I went to see it with Mom and my younger sister Elaine. I guess they figured the news reports of people fainting and running out of the theater was just Hollywood hype to get people into the theaters.

They were mistaken. In fact, it was probably a mistake to take young Elaine to see The Exorcist because I believe she still has nightmares associated with it. Nine years ago when the director’s cut was released into theaters her son Dan and I went to see it and the young lad, being brought up in the Catholic religion just like his mother, was visibly shaken.

The scene of Regan crab walking down the stairs, the faces that momentarily glowed during the electrical sequence, that freaked me out a bit too — so I got on Amazon and bought it. That movie, The Exorcist 2000, is just too good! Still the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.

But the Dawn of the Dead movies: not my cup of tea. But what are you going to do on a Saturday when you only alternatives are heart-warming stories like Forrest Gump and The Green Mile? I’ve seen both, a number of times, so they don’t stir my interest.

Now, whenever AMC features the Godfather series back-to-back, I gotta watch that! Never get tired of watching the Corleone family saga. Same with the first three Dirty Harry movies. Well, any Clint Eastwood movie is worth watching again and again — except for Million Dollar Baby. That is such a heart-breaking film. Women shouldn’t box, or fight at all. That just ain’t right, but they do. I guess my view of women and femininity is old fashioned, quaint.

There’s this Playboy model I know, Koa-Marie Turner, who is a professional wrestler. She’s currently on tour with Hulk Hogan in Australia. She loves it. Eh, I’m quaint and old fashioned. More power to Koa-Marie and all the other women who want to mix it up in the ring.

But this is a tangent, the subject of which is far a field from the original thought, but gotta mention this: Mixed Martial Arts, MMA, is really popular as a spectator sport among women. Damn! Were I thirty years younger and a foot taller!

Naah, I don’t care for gory slasher movies. The Dawn of the Dead films are so popular they were all remade with today's cinematic technology. Guess that makes them even more popular. That’s what John is watching in the living room — the new version.

Maybe I’ll watch eight hours of Sports Center, see college quarterbacks get crushed and defensive backs limp off the field after getting bounced off the turf like rubber manikins. That’s always entertaining!