Where I Take Visiting Friends

I like Thalia Street Beach in Laguna Beach because there’s not much of it. Twisting stairs lead down from the street. The walk to the high water line can’t be more than thirty feet. I wade in to my calfs. Well, that’s my intent.

IMG_2904_5437

Jon and Mary Lyn Wolfert slipped in for a few days. They’re passing through from Alaska.

Tonight they’re Dallas bound. They were on-the-ground making a fuel stop at Cavern City Air Terminal in Carlsbad, NM a few minutes ago.

Their Mooney has been dodging storms, but should be good the rest of the way. The sky will be getting brighter when they land after 5:00 AM local time.

SoCal is a pretty area. Out-of-town guests get taken to see the sights.

I like Thalia Street Beach in Laguna Beach because there’s not much of it. Twisting stairs lead down from the street. The walk to the high water line can’t be more than thirty feet. I wade in to my calfs. Well, that’s my intent.

Perfect weather. Beach jammed. Lifeguard stands, not evident a few months ago, out of storage and in the sand.

Everything about this beach says Southern California!

We left and drove past homes somehow fastened to hillsides. We were heading up. Prices were going up. Views too. Up high you see a lot.

Civilization ended at the top of the hill. We walked into the Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park. One side faces the Pacific, the other the basin that holds much of Orange County and the mountains that define its border.

More people stop by now that we’re in California. People like coming here. I understand why.

I’m A Tracking Fool

My Tuesday ordered computer mostly arrived Wednesday. UPS now says the rest, shipped from California and originally coming Friday, will actually be here Thursday!

Can we talk about package tracking? This is just another version of crack cocaine, right?

When was the last time you ordered something and didn’t check at least once… or seven times? Personally I feel anything worth tracking is worth tracking constantly. UPS and FedEx need to install GPS readouts! I want street-by-street tracking.

My Tuesday ordered computer mostly arrived Wednesday. UPS now says the rest, shipped from California and originally coming Friday, will actually be here Thursday!

It first went from Baldwin Park, CA to Ontario, CA. My guess is that’s a truck route. Then air freight to Dallas, Orlando and Boston.

Hmmmm… sounds like Southwest routing. I’ll check for peanuts upon arrival.

Two hours after it arrived in Boston it moved out again to Windsor Locks. Next stop is probably North Haven then out for delivery.

There are no stores locally that sell the stuff I just bought. Mail order drove them out. Even with instant purchase gratification it’s tough to compete with the selection and convenience of online.

Car Chases

Is it news? That’s a tougher question.

“I don’t do crack, but I think this is probably what it’s like.”

The quote is from Helaine. She said it as I was scrambling to leave the house and drive to work. She was referring to today’s Dallas, TX police chase.

“There should be a channel with only this,” she added.

They are addictive even though they’re entirely predictable. Attention miscreants: If you hear a copter overhead, pull over. You’re done.

I knew what Helaine was talking about because the chase was on the TV in the bedroom as I got dressed. MSNBC’s anchors were quizzing a Texas police dispatcher. They seemed more interested than he was.

dallas-chase-crash.jpgIt was a “routine traffic stop,” the dispatcher said. In some quarters those words are considered cover for police as they hassle minorities. In any event the driver took off and led police across the Dallas area for a few hours before running through an intersection and getting slammed by a pickup truck.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a follow-up. When the perp was caught the story ended.

Why is this stuff covered? People watch–that’s the easy answer.

Is it news? That’s a tougher question. MSNBC and others were following it without knowing any off the underlying factors. They were not following a crime or criminal as much as they were following a chase.

In the past I’ve referred to this as soft core porn for newsrooms. My opinion hasn’t changed.

The Numbers Are In

Nielen ratings are in for last night’s debate

The Nielsen ratings are in for last night’s debate. I’m confused by the list of stations aggregated which doesn’t include Fox News and MSNBC, both of which would add significantly to the final total.

If these overnight numbers stand, the ratings are well below other recent debates.

OK–I’m a little surprised. I thought for sure there would be a lot more interest considering all the buzz.



DMA Rank Market RTG Rank RTG SHR (000) 21 St. Louis 1 52.1 82.0 649 48 Memphis 2 49.5 67.0 330 26 Baltimore 3 47.1 66.0 515 9 Washington, DC (Hagrstwn) 4 44.6 68.0 1030 29 Nashville 5 44.0 66.0 424 46 Greensboro-H.Point-W.Salem 6 42.2 61.0 285 32 Columbus, OH 7 41.5 63.0 377 43 Norfolk-Portsmth-Newpt Nws 8 41.4 59.0 298 58 Richmond-Petersburg 9 40.3 55.0 211 18 Denver 10 39.7 65.0 586 24 Charlotte 11 39.3 54.0 426 7 Boston (Manchester) 12 39.3 58.0 944 22 Portland, OR 13 39.0 74.0 450 31 Kansas City 14 37.7 61.0 350 16 Miami-Ft. Lauderdale 15 37.2 52.0 573 38 West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce 16 36.4 55.0 282 27 Raleigh-Durham (Fayetvlle) 17 36.2 54.0 377 51 Buffalo 18 36.1 54.0 230 25 Indianapolis 19 35.3 59.0 379 53 New Orleans 20 34.8 48 209 11 Detroit 21 34.3 55.0 661 59 Knoxville 22 34.3 51.0 185 61 Tulsa 23 34.1 55.0 178 45 Oklahoma City 24 34.0 55.0 231 40 Birmingham (Ann and Tusc) 25 33.5 48.0 245 52 Providence-New Bedford 26 33.5 50.0 211 15 Minneapolis-St. Paul 27 33.4 59.0 569 19 Orlando-Daytona Bch-Melbrn 28 33.4 52.0 479 62 Ft. Myers-Naples 29 33.3 51.0 164 28 San Diego 30 33.0 59.0 349 50 Louisville 31 33.0 48.0 218 17 Cleveland-Akron (Canton) 32 32.9 55.0 505 37 San Antonio 33 32.9 48.0 261 20 Sacramnto-Stkton-Modesto 34 32.7 55.0 454 4 Philadelphia 35 32.1 51.0 941 44 Albuquerque-Santa Fe 36 32.1 50.0 218 23 Pittsburgh 37 32.1 51.0 371 6 San Francisco-Oak-San Jose 38 32.0 62.0 779 13 Tampa-St. Pete (Sarasota) 39 31.7 49.0 569 49 Austin 40 31.6 52.0 201 36 Greenvll-Spart-Ashevll-And 41 31.5 46.0 265 64 Dayton 42 31.4 50.0 161 1 New York 43 31.3 48.0 2317 8 Atlanta 44 30.9 52.0 714 3 Chicago 45 30.7 51.0 1067 14 Seattle-Tacoma 46 30.3 58.0 541 30 Hartford & New Haven 47 30.2 45.0 306 47 Jacksonville 48 30.0 47.0 196 33 Salt Lake City 49 29.9 63.0 261 35 Milwaukee 50 29.2 49.0 262 34 Cincinnati 51 28.3 49.0 256 42 Las Vegas 52 27.9 46.0 196 5 Dallas-Ft. Worth 53 27.7 46.0 671 2 Los Angeles 54 26.4 50.0 1484 12 Phoenix (Prescott) 55 24.8 47.0 448 10 Houston* 56 0.0 0.0 0 Weighted Avg. of 55 markets* 33.2

Something Special In The Air

The part of this that upsets me the most, is the way the airlines look at customers. Airline ticketing policies and contracts are one-sided, and often arbitrary and unreasonable (like one way fares often costing more than roundtrip). Their advertising does its best to hide full disclosure.

“We’re American Airlines, something special in the air.”

For years, that jingle played incessantly on radio and TV. No more.

If American has a slogan now, I don’t know it. There’s none on their website’s homepage. They surely don’t have the balls to dust off ‘something special’ right now.

Aircraft Inspections Affect Some AA Travel

We are very sorry for inconveniencing you with the cancellation of a portion of American Airlines’ flights which started on April 8. Additional inspections of our MD-80 fleet are being conducted to ensure precise and complete compliance with the FAA’s directive related to wiring in the aircraft’s wheel wells. For more information about the progress of the inspections, please check our Press Releases. Please be assured that safety of our customers is, and always will be, American’s first priority.

You know how companies that put you on hold often say, “Your call is important to us,” even when you know it’s not? I feel the same way&#185 about, “Please be assured that safety of our customers is, and always will be, American’s first priority.”

Do they really think I’m buying into that gratuitous throwaway?

My friend Farrell’s relatives, visiting from Israel, were scheduled to fly AA from New York to Palm Springs. They got as far as Dallas… took a long pregnant pause at DFW… then continued to LAX (a few hours drive from Palm Springs).

Their bags? Right. This isn’t a fair tale. They followed two days later.

When I last left them, my sister-in-law and her friend were arguing with the AA clerk because AA promised $100 p/day p/person for clothing or necessities. AA since retracted that. In the meantime, Vered (Farrell’s wife) had taken the four of them to shop yesterday since they only had carry-on (my advice was to pack as much as possible in their carry-on’s).

I think we’re in the process of watching a meltdown of the so-called “legacy” airlines. With Frontier going bust, since its creditor would not support the majority of their cash, and the merger chatter going on, it’s a matter of time before prices continue to rise and consolidation becomes an actuality.

Please don’t think it’s only American I’m upset with. I’m still smarting from Southwest’s cavalier attitude toward safety inspections, and they’ve been my airline of choice for years.

The part of this that upsets me the most, is the way the airlines look at customers. Airline ticketing policies and contracts are one-sided, and often arbitrary and unreasonable (like one way fares often costing more than roundtrip). Their advertising does its best to hide full disclosure.

Why would they expect us to respect them or have brand loyalty when they so obviously dislike us?

&#185 – “I take full responsibility” goes on that list as well, especially when said by a CEO taking non responsibility.

Why Is That 737 Heading To Jamaica Tonight?

Sometime today, probably mid afternoon, Jamaica will get creamed by Hurricane Dean. It’s not a pretty scenario. Imagine watching a train barrel toward you while you’re tied to the tracks!

In the midst of this tumult, a chartered jet is heading into Norman Manley Int’l Airport in Kingston.

How do I know? I went on FlightAware and looked to see air traffic in and out of Kingston. I can only see flights which will touch Jamaica and the U.S., but that’s enough for a feel.

The plane is question is a Boeing 737 owned by Ameristar Jet Charter, operating from Addison Airport near Dallas. It’s a plane normally used for charters and configured 100% first class. There are only 56 seats.

Why is it flying there? Is it a rescue flight of some type? If so, why a plane with so few seats?

More importantly, will it get out before Hurricane Dean shuts things down? Any kind of mechanical trouble would be very costly. In this case time is money.

At the last observation, winds at Kingston were light. It is just another sultry tropical evening in the heart of the Caribbean. You can see how people were totally surprised by these storms in the pre-electronic era.

There will be enough damage in Jamaica without a perfectly good 737 being ripped to shreds. I hope they refuel and return to Texas quickly.

The French… Really?

When you spend too much time on the Internet, you end up discovering all sorts of worthless interesting things. Take what I found today about the cast of Dallas appearing at a country music festival in France!

Dallas hasn’t been on-the-air first run since 1991. Is there that much pent up demand to see Charlene Tilton and Steve Kanaly? Do Linda Gray, Patrick Duffy and Larry Hagman really need this money?

Moreover – French people… haven’t you shown your disdain for our previous cultural incursions into France? You’ve spoken your mind about McDonalds and Disney. How can you justify this star worship over the Dallas cast?

One last question. What exactly will these five do?

Audio Tape – How Quaint

When we cleaned out the house last month, a lot had to be thrown away. There were certain items, however, where I drew the line. Specifically, I kept audio tapes. These little five and seven inch reels chronicle my time in radio.

I know I work in television, but in many ways I still maintain my undying love for radio. It’s where my broadcasting career started. In high school, it was the career I lusted after.

Radio has changed. What I found romantic has been beaten out of the medium by national chains and their bean counters. I still love radio.

Unfortunately, my audio tapes represent a dead storage format. I’m not sure audio tape recorders are made anymore. I don’t have one.

We used to have a very nice audio deck at the TV station. Where it is now is a mystery to me. Audio, like everything else, is recorded digitally, not on tape.

Luckily, my friend Rick still has two audio decks in his basement. One is in the studio, the other sadly sits in storage. Even the deck in the studio needed to be re-cabled before we could roll on the tapes.

They’re too nice to chuck, too dated to use.

First, we listened to an aircheck from the early 1970s. I was working at WBT in Charlotte, NC. 1110-WBT was a blowtorch – a 50,000 watt AM station that could be heard from Canada to Florida (and we had a jingle which claimed just that).

I thought I was a pretty good disk jockey then. Wrong. This aircheck will never see the light of day again.

There were a few things of note on the tape. Our hourly IDs were voiced by Johnny Olsen, who was the announcer on virtually every Goodson-Toddman game show of the era. Rick, who can recognize most contemporary VO guys, drew a blank.

Trust me, back then he was immediately recognizable.

This tape was meant to get me a job. In order to attract some attention, I opened with a medley of jingle singers trying to sing my name – and failing. That was actually pretty cool.

The other tapes included more recent airchecks, a few custom jingles and the “TM Song.” TM, a jingle company in Dallas, produced a sales presentation jingle, singing all their clients call letters.

There’s just no way I could have let these tapes become unplayable. And now, they’re stored digitally and protected from another era of electronic obsolescence.

Blogger’s note: I have worked on this audio for over an hour. How frustrating!

For some reason you sometimes have to click on the play button twice. I wish I knew why. Adding this reminder is much simpler than fixing it.

T.O To Go

A few minutes ago, Helaine yelled to me upstairs. “Are you going to write about the Eagles in the blog?”

That was her way of saying, “Write about the Eagles in your blog.” OK – who am I to resist, especially after such an emotional victory.

If you’re not a football fan, let me get you caught up in about ten seconds.

The Eagles are Philadelphia’s football team. They used to have a player… a star player, named Terrell Owens. Though he was a pain in the ass, he was our pain in the ass. At least he was until he became such a pain he threatened to create dissension within the team.

T.O. was let go.

A guy’s got to earn a living, so Terrell to his number 81 and went to the Dallas Cowboys. In Philadelphia, the Cowboys are tied with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Kim Il Jung at the bottom of the popularity polls.

To make things a little juicier, T.O. was involved in some sort of incident with the Dallas police. Whether he attempted to commit suicide or just had an accident – who knows? The next day he was practicing on the field and smiling. It was weird.

Today the Cowboys came to play the Eagles for the first time since Terrell left. Fox saw fit to make it their marquee game, shown nationwide at 4:15 PM EDT. Anyone even peripherally connected with sports was talking about it. There was no end to the hype.

Quickly, the Eagles went to a 10-0 lead. Helaine and I pinched ourselves. Then we remembered, this is football the king of non-linear games. Ten points in the first quarter means nothing.

We were so right.

The game seesawed back and forth. Donovan McNabb, Eagles quarterback had a pretty good game. T.O. was ineffective. Still, the game was close.

Late in the fourth quarter, the Eagles were up by seven, when a missed tackle, long pass and offensive pass interference penalty (all on the same play) moved the Cowboys eighteen feet from tying the game.

We had seen this before. So close – yet so far. When the Giants tied the Eagles in week two, they went on to win. Would the same fate befall the Eagles again?

Simply – no.

With the Cowboys charging, Drew Bledsoe threw to the end zone. The pass was caught, but by the Eagles Lito Sheppard who scampered 102 yards for an Eagles touchdown. Case closed.

Here’s the one awful part of this game. We were on an emotional roller coaster, as if it were meaningful in our lives. It’s only a game, but we allow the football season in general and the Eagles in particular to stake a claim on our lives.

Already, in the Eagles loss to the Giants, we took an emotional hit that lasted a few days. We were depressed as if something really awful had gone on.

Even though I can intellectualize the real meaning of football, that’s not strong enough to overcome my emotional attachment. It’s just as bad for Helaine, maybe worse.

The Eagles were picked to finish last in the NFC East. Now they’re leading the way. The emotion has just begun.

Rita As An Underachiever

From Forbes.com “”It looks like the Houston and Galveston area has really lucked out,” said Max Mayfield, director of the hurricane center. “

That one characterization pretty much sums up Hurricane Rita’s arrival on the Gulf Coast. In reality, everyone lucked out.

There is a very fine line in being a weatherman (I can actually refer to myself as meteorologist, but I’m worried it sounds pretentious when it comes from me and not someone else). With big storms, you want to be accurate and convey the gravity of the situation without going overboard.

I spent a good part of the last few days hoping my worst fears would be wrong – and hoping if they were, people would not punish me for a forecast that was too pessimistic. In essence, I wanted to be right and wrong at the very same time.

When Hurricane Rite first clocked in at 175 mph, I swallowed hard. That’s quite a spectacular example of physics at work. There’s not much that can take 175 mph sustained winds – or the 200+ mph gusts that accompany them.

I knew the storm would diminish, you don’t need to be a meteorological genius to know that, but I didn’t know how much.

And, of course, I worried about the imponderables in Houston and even Dallas. Maybe I’ve read too many scientific papers where theory rules and the real world is just an imaginary setting. We really haven’t seen a significant hurricane blow through a city of tall buildings, like Houston.

Rita came on shore overnight. She’s a tropical storm now and will probably become a regular old low pressure system soon. The damage is significant. If we hadn’t had Hurricane Katrina, it would seem a lot worse. The damage will be calculated with 10 digit numbers as opposed to 11 or 12.

Amazing. We look at damage in the billions of dollars and marvel how we got off easy.

There is a rising tide of popular opinion that wants to tie this year’s hurricane season into Global Warming. And, of course, Global Warming proponents (they are for the theory, not for the outcome) are quick to fan these flames.

You can’t base scientific theory on popular opinion – and certainly not on one or two years of storms in only one of the world’s hurricane basins. This is much too complex to draw a conclusion from that small amount of data.

When I was a kid, I never could understand how the United States had any people before 1900, because everyone I knew was an immigrant, child of immigrants or grandchild of immigrants. I only knew what I personally saw. I didn’t have a broad enough set of facts and circumstances to make an educated stab at a theory.

I was a kid. Lack of scientific basis or proper research techniques didn’t stop me. I am scared that same kind of logic is in play today.

Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, auditions for “Stan” have just begun:

SATELLITE IMAGES SHOW THAT THE AREA OF DISTURBED WEATHER A FEW HUNDRED MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS IS DEVELOPING A SURFACE CIRCULATION BUT THE SHOWER ACTIVITY REMAINS POORLY ORGANIZED. UPPER-LEVEL WINDS COULD BECOME MORE CONDUCIVE FOR SLOW DEVELOPMENT DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO.

Culture Shock Texas Style

My friend Bob recently moved from Minneapolis to Austin, TX. Is there anything these two cities have in common? I assume there’s culture shock… in fact I know there is.

Last night, while talking the dog outside to do her bidness, I encountered my first scorpion. It was parking itself in Terri’s space in the garage, as she’s away in Dallas, learning how to drive the Wells Fargo loan stage.

This Lobster mini-me danced across the cement like an effeminate waiter with two full trays, its claws in the air with an invisible WELCOME TO TEXAS banner stretched across them. Its tail was curled in challenge.

The siege had begun.

Then Mister Shoe stopped the show. And added another just for crackling sure.

I’m gonna get a gun!

My best,

Bob

OK – we’ll scratch Austin off the list.

A Former Teacher Finds My Blog

How do you describe a blog to someone who hasn’t read one? It’s like a diary&#185.

Forget all this political mumbo jumbo and the (false) promise of blogs as the new journalism. Blogs are diaries. Some might be political, but many more concentrate on Britney Spears or the emotional traumas associated with high school.

This is my blog. It concentrates on what’s important to me, without the controversial stuff that would prompt my boss to ask me to stop.

Here’s where a blog differs from a diary. Diaries are private or only read by a select few. Blogs, on the other hand, are available to anyone, and once indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest, become a contextual part of the Internet.

That indexing is very important. Stupid, insipid things written by me and others… relatively unimportant people, can gain weight when they concern an esoteric subject which isn’t often discussed.

Take Junior High School 218 Queens, aka – Harold G. Campbell Junior High School. On the Internet, I’m considered a source for JHS 218Q. But how many people care, or more importantly search for Campbell Junior High? So it was a surprise to read the email I got this morning

I was at the club this morning (Saw Mill River Club in

Mount Kisco, NY. I prefer the Powerhouse Gym on

Francis Lewis Blvd. but it is 39 miles away), working

away on the elliptical when I thought, “Why not go to

a search engine and type in Harold G. Campbell JHS?”

So I did (when I got home).

Your name and the Kennedy assassination article

appeared. I started reading it when I was shocked to

see my name. I then read that the day after,

Saturday, we went to a show. I have no recollection

of that but if you say it, then I must have gone.

Here’s that Google link. My website is the second citation.

The shocked man is my former 8th grade teacher, Harold Friend. He was Mr. Friend then, he is Dr. Friend now. The academic elevation doesn’t surprise me. He was very smart.

Dr. Friend was mentioned when I wrote about the Kennedy assassination. It was his classroom I was in when we got the word from Dallas.

How cool to get this email. How strange for him to search the Internet and find someone talking about him. The indexing power of search engines is a luxury of our times that never existed, or was even contemplated, as recently as 15 years ago.

After reading the email, Helaine said Dr. Friend must be old now. If he was 30 in 1963, that would put him in his early 70s now. Of course he could have been 25, or 45. To me, in the early 1960s, he was old. I was a kid. But, being in his 70s now doesn’t seem to make him as old as it once would have.

The fact that his story begins in his gym means, however old he is, he’s really younger.

Once again I have to ask myself, who reads this… and why. I can tell from my logs that most of my traffic isn’t to my home page, but people going to inside pages – archived material I had written about earlier which is pointed at by the search engines. It just boggles my mind that anything I write has any impact on anyone.

I’m just a guy who likes to write. Like all bloggers, all I bring are my own experiences and insights. It can be read, but that doesn’t make it special.

&#185 – Be careful on the spelling, because it’s certainly not like a dairy.

Blogger’s addendum – It has been established, in further communication, that he doesn’t remember me.

My Friend Bob

Bob Lacey has been my friend for a long time… a really long time. I met him my first day as a paid broadcaster – a part time, minimum wage position at WSAR in Fall River, MA. “Ahoy there matey, it’s 14-80.”

WSAR was a great place to start. It was a small station in a small market. The studio and transmitter were located in a residential neighborhood at the foot of Home Street in Somerset, MA.

We were top-40 back when stations still actually played forty records. We even had PAMS jingles. If you weren’t in radio back then, this might not makes sense, but PAMS of Dallas was the gold standard of radio station jingles.

WSAR promoted itself as serving the Tri Cities: Fall River, New Bedford and Newport. Yes, they were physically close, but Fall River and New Bedford might as well have been on another planet as far as Newport was concerned!

I met Bob (he was Skippy Ross back then) that first day and we’ve been friends ever since. After Fall River, we also worked together in Charlotte, NC, where Bob has been for over 35 years. How is that even possible?

We don’t see each other as often as we should and we had trouble hooking up on the phone because his hours and mine are as opposite as can be. Bob is the guy half of Bob and Sheri, the nationally syndicated morning radio show.

Obviously I’m biased, but this is a phenomenal morning show. In the parlance of radio, it is female friendly. It’s funny… sometimes even sexual humor… but never smutty or sophomoric.

Bob is a technophobe. There are no two ways about it. If it’s electronic or technical, count him out. I always expected his first laptop computer would be steam powered. That’s why it’s so nice to have him finally sending email. OK – he’s a decade late, but he’s here.

I can’t begin to tell you how good it was to get a message from him, and then a reply to my reply, and another email later. It’s been a while since a good friend has come into the modern era. Email can be a wonderful thing.

There are so many people who feel our constantly connected world is driving people away from human contact. I disagree. A few sentences from a friend is the real power of the Internet, not its weakness.

Watching the Eagles at the Bar

This is two out of three weeks now. Helaine and I have become ‘regulars’ at Eli’s where the bar is ringed with TV sets showing satellite delivered football feeds.

We decided, so we’d get a good seat, to go at 12:30 for the 1:00 PM start. Maybe we could have gone a little later, but not much. The place filled up pretty quickly with groups of fans clustered near individual sets and games.

To our right a group of Detroit fans watched, cheered, and complained, as the Lions played . When Detroit lost on a botched extra point with a few seconds to go, they were crestfallen. As fans they have lived a life built on heartbreak.

As ways to spend an afternoon go, this is pretty good. Within a few minutes of sitting Helaine ordered a soda and I had some coffee. Then as the game began, so did the food!

Actually, this allows me to question the whole economics of football at a bar. There’s no doubt we got our money’s worth. The food was good. We were thrilled to watch the Eagles. Would it be cheaper over the long run to drop cable and just get DirecTV and the NFL package?

The problem becomes my high speed Internet package. The cable company would ramp up its cost if that was the only service I bought from them – and I’m not about to get my Internet access from anyone else right now.

Something to ponder before next season.

The Eagles’ game was painful to watch. The Eagles went up 6-0 early. The Eagles scored a touchdown but David Akers, who is to kicking as FedEx is to packages, failed to deliver. It was 7-6 a few minutes later, and Dallas stayed ahead most of the way.

One of the Eagles star receivers, Todd Pinkston, dropped another ball in what seemed like a case of hearing footsteps. If, all of a sudden, he’s lost his nerve, that’s troublesome. Then, all star receiver Terrell Owens went down with ankle problems. It’s too early to know how serious that injury is.

Toward the end the Eagles scored to go ahead, and did win. But it was an ugly win for a team that has been a dominating force in football.

Going into this game the Eagles had so little more to gain by winning that a performance like this goes down as a moral loss as much as a “W.”

Next week they’re playing on Monday Night Football. Helaine can watch at home. I will watch at work. We’re out of the bar scene for one week.

Two Friends in the Times – And They Didn’t Shoot Anyone!

The New York Times did a wonderful profile of a friend of mine, Jon Wolfert. Jon is to radio jingles as Janet Jackson is to wardrobe malfunction. What makes it even cooler is the gratuitous mention of our mutual friend, Peter Mokover.

Jon is responsible for some of my favorite jingles – including a few he did for me. I am responsible for sneaking him into the Kennedy Space Center to watch John Glenn’s launch.

I’ve attached the article to the link below.

Continue reading “Two Friends in the Times – And They Didn’t Shoot Anyone!”