Auditions of game show hosts . . . you'd be surprised!

When CBS debuted three game shows in 1972 (The New Price Is Right*, The Joker's Wild, and Gambit),  the oddity of CBS Daytime executive B. Donald Grant's moves were in play.  CBS wanted Bob Barker to host The New Price Is Right, but Barker wanted The Joker's Wild instead.  CBS considered Wink Martindale, but he chose Gambit.  The network effectively was forced to have Jack Barry (though he had baggage from the quiz show scandals) host it when Barker accepted Grant's deal for New Price instead of his want of Joker.  We know the result for 35 years.  Then, when CBS attempted to audition a replacement for Barker in 2007, the network auditioned Todd Newton, Mark Steines, George Hamilton, Mario Lopez, Dave Price, John O'Hurley (who was hosting a syndicated game show at the time), and Marco Regil (Spanish language personality who hosted Mexican versions but was wanting for an English language break).  The surprise was when a summer primetime series game show host, who had semi-retired from television after the end of his sitcom and his US version of a British comedy show, was given the chance without an audition.  The rest, as we know, is history, though Drew Carey has proven he isn't afraid to be a team over me person, especially after Rich Fields' firing (which according to Fields, led to a Season 39 taping day lunch after Carey learned of his brother's death where Carey and Fields spent a considerable amount of time together that proved skeptics wrong).

That reminded me of a commentary on the Classic TV History blog, and you wonder what would have happened 41 years ago had he been given that chance.  The drunkenness of Edd Byrnes when he hosted pilots of an NBC Daytime show that would replace the long-running Jeopardy! was highly inappropriate.  Thankfully, he wasn't given the chance to do the show, but the host of the first pilot, which was considerably different than the show we now know, Chuck Woolery was, and lasted nearly seven years.  The rest, as we know . . .



When the show was still a daytime show, NBC was trying to audition replacements for Pat Sajak in 1988.  We know NBC went with a former Chargers player.  But who was on the auditions list? You'd be surprised who was auditioned by Coca-Cola (then owned Merv Griffin Enterprises) and NBC:



*The "New" tag was used until the summer of 1973, the show's first season.  The reference was made during the show's Season 44 Premiere Week, which featured throwback door designs shown on the giant monitor behind the audience except for the current decade, which used the new Season 44 pattern.

Wish I'd written that

There's writing and there's not writing. The latter time is spent preparing for the former."

- James Lileks, right as usual.

Flashback Friday: It's not what he said, but what it says about us

Let's start with this, from Bernard Goldberg yesterday.

But now that [L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling's] gone, I’m wondering who else among us has said things in the privacy of our homes that would get us in trouble if somebody recorded them and made our remarks public.

Rest assured, I’ve never ever said anything that might even vaguely be construed as politically incorrect.  But I’ll bet you have.

And I’ll bet a lot of players in the NBA have.

I’ll bet a lot of politicians have, too.

I’ll bet white people have and black people have and Latino people have and straight people have and gay people have.

So what lesson should we take of the public flogging of Donald Sterling, as deserved as it was?

How about this:  If anyone – an accountant, a garbage man, an MSNBC host, a college professor, an attorney general, a president, a truck driver … anyone! … says something racist in the privacy of his or her home, and if it somehow becomes public information, that person should lose his or her job and his or her livelihood – because racist words cannot be tolerated in America, not in 2014.

Exactly.  I'm no friend of Sterling; he's been one of the worst owners in sports for a good long time, and the recent success of the Clippers seems more in spite of rather than because of him.

But just where do we draw the line?  Is everything that everyone says, public or private, now subject to review?  And by whom?  And why stop at the spoken word - after all, the First Amendment absolutists assure us that burning the flag is an act of free speech, so shouldn't other acts be liable for our distain as well? Goldberg goes on:

I am confused, however, about why there is no universal condemnation of athletes who father children in every city in the league.  Or of athletes who beat up their girlfriends.  Or of athletes who drive drunk and kill people.  I guess none of those things warrant the moral outrage that bigoted words uttered by a foolish old man in private warrant.

But let me be clear:  I’m outraged over what Donald Sterling said.  Really, really outraged.  I say this because if anyone thinks I’m less than really, really outraged because of anything I’ve written here, I might get in really, really big trouble.

Let's suppose, for example, that I'm outraged by an owner who "had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks, and families without children in housing."  He said, among other things, that "black tenants smell and attract vermin.”  Mind you, he didn't stop with saying things; he acted on them as well.  Well, that owner would be none other than Donald Sterling - back in 2009.  Why suspend him now?  As Ben Shapiro notes in that article, "words speak louder than actions."

What about an owner who was recently spotted at a game wearing a "necklace medallion for the Five Percent Nation, which sees black men as gods and white people as devils."  And who freely uses the "N-word" for fun and profit?   Try Jay-Z, sports agent and former part-owner of the Brooklyn Nets.

And then there was at least one owner who publicly supported the right to abortion, including the grizzly partial-birth procedure, and even voted against requiring that a woman view an ultrasound before having an abortion?  That's former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, who supported those issues while he was also owner of the Milwaukee Bucks.  I know abortion is a polarizing issue, but that stand sure as hell offended me.  It's one thing to talk down to your fellow man, to dehumanize him with insult and discrimination - but is it worse than killing him?

But why limit the discussion to sports?  If you're looking for people who know how to denigrate through their speech, we could cite virtually the entire on-air staff of MSNBC, some of whom have in fact lost their jobs over their comments, while others - cough-cough-Al Sharpton-cough - continue to thrive.  And I won't even get into that whole kerfuffle about Brendan Eich - I can only expect my blood pressure medication to do so much, after all.

The line between public and private, already blurred beyond recognition, is pretty much gone at this point.  In order to be really safe, to make sure that nothing you say can ever come back to haunt you, the best thing is probably to say nothing.  At all.  Ever.  Even in the bathroom.  Just keep your mouth shut.  As Rod Dreher points out when talking about the latest - whether or not the DeVos family, owners of the Orlando Magic, should be in trouble for funding ads in marriage referendum states - "Error has no rights."

I'll close this mild screed with a quote from Ben Stein, who after saying that "I hate, hate, hate racism," adds this:

But I also love individual liberty. I would much rather have a system where people are free to hate me because of my race as long as they don’t lynch me than one in which the government or the media tell me who I can and cannot hate. I loathe Donald Sterling for his comments and I do not want him near me. But I am terrified that a man can have such a level of media rage directed at him even though he violated no law. He expressed a hateful opinion and that’s a bad thing. But in a world where there are as many horrible things going on as in our world, the private conversations of one drunken old man would not seem to me to be worth this level of fury. Isn’t this “Thoughtcrime”? Does it scare you? It scares me. And I am really terrified that “anti-racism,” like “saving the earth” and “income inequality struggles,” will legitimate any level of anger. Isn’t there such thing as “the law”? Aren’t we supposed to be more worried about violence than private nutty conversations?

I can sum this up easily: Isn’t Mr. Sterling being punished for his privately expressed thoughts and not for any action? Isn’t this deeply unsettling? When did privately expressed thoughts become fair game for punishment? Where does it end? In “1984.” 

That's it.  What the Donald Sterling fiasco provides us is not a glimpse into him, but into ourselves, and an America that with every passing day seems to stand for nothing at all.  Donald Sterling has served his purpose - he's given us the opportunity for our Two Minutes Hate, and now we're ready to move on, feeling just great about ourselves.

Until we find the next person to hate, and a spare couple of minutes.


Originally published April 30, 2014

The finest moment from the Pope's trip to America

I don't deny that I've had my share of bones to pick with Pope Francis over the years, but I found this clip from his recent trip to America absolutely charming.  I'd meant to get to it earlier than now, but as someone once said, better now than later.  If you look closely, you can see the Pope bent backwards with genuine laughter - but then, who among us wouldn't be taken with a cute baby dressed up to look like you?


As I've said, I've been critical in the past, but this is not the time for that. I'll just note something that I've said before, which is that if I were lying critically ill in a hospital, I could do far worse that to have him sitting at my bedside comforting me. It has nothing to do with ideology or theology or the governance of the Church, but everything to do with how one interacts with people, and this is a pretty good indication of that.

KKKKKKKK proves McFly was wrong!

On the day that people celebrated McFly's predictions . . .

KKKKKKKK Proves McFly Was Wrong!

Joe, we hardly knew ye

Well, I have to admit I'm surprised that Joe Biden's not running for president. I suppose it might have something to do with Hillary's debate performance last week; I didn't see it, but the pundits said she'd done well, so there's that.  It's also possible that Joe discovered there wasn't as much support for him out there as he'd thought.  In any event, I would suspect this removes the last real obstacle to Clinton winning the nomination.  I don't presume to know where things go from there.

It's too bad, really, about Biden. Not that I was planning on supporting him; far from it. But I had this nice theory all worked out, you know - similar to the one I did on the Republican contest four years ago. Looking back on it, I still think that was a good analysis; I wouldn't change a word of it. And I was prepared for another good one for this campaign, one that coincidentally also hearkened back to the 1960s. (But then, doesn't everything?)

The way this one worked, Hillary Clinton was Lyndon B. Johnson - the presumptive nominee. Heavily favored, an experienced Democratic insider, but also highly controversial. Bernie Sanders was Gene McCarthy - the rebel outsider, the one daring to take on the party establishment. Thought too far out there to be a real contender, but picking up surprising support, especially with the young. And I had Joe Biden as Hubert Humphrey - presuming that Sanders took out Clinton in the same way that McCarthy did Johnson, and with an assumption by the party establishment that Sanders was too liberal to win in November, the party would have turned to Biden - a sitting vice president - in the same way that they did Humphrey. For if the conditions had existed in which Biden would jump into the race, I thought he would probably win the nomination.

There's really only one character remaining in this morality play, and that's Robert F. Kennedy. And here is where the analogy ends, unless things get more complicated for Clinton than they appear to be at this point. In looking at a candidate to model after RFK, one searches for someone who can tap into the emotion of a large wing of the party, one who has been urged to run but has refused, one who has the liberal credentials to command support without the same minuses of the others. (Notwithstanding some minuses of their own.) Hopefully, this wouldn't extend to being assassinated following the California primary, and I don't say that as a joke, because it appears that just about anything can happen in this country nowadays.

Bill Kristol was thinking along the same lines as I was, apparently, because a while back he'd come up with much the same scenario. (Another reason I should have done this earlier, but whatever.) His answer to this question makes sense, and so I'll plug it in and go with it: today's Robert F. Kennedy would have been Elizabeth Warren. And when you think about it, it does make sense, doesn't it?

Alas, with Biden's announcement today, unless he's really playing hard-to-get, I think we've seen the last of the analogies to the 1968 campaign. It's one of the most interesting campaigns of the 20th Century, by the way, and if you want to know more about it, I'd suggest one place to start is Theodore White's The Making of the President 1968. There are better historians than White, but few of them are as readable, and as an introduction, it gives you a vivid sense of where this country was almost 50 years ago.

Who knew?

When Andre Roussimoff, better known as Andre the Giant, was twelve years old, he was banned from riding the school bus because he was already the size of a large adult.  So in order to get to school, he had to depend on rides from their neighbor, Samuel Beckett.  Yes, the "Waiting for Godot" Samuel Beckett. (Is there another one?) As Brian Phillips notes, even if you're the author of a world-famous play, "It’s still useful to have a truck."

Throwback Thursday: change of Seasons (?)

Area Man Disappointed By "Jersey Boys" Four Seasons"Those little punks sounded nothing like Vivaldi"

(MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- April 16) Local theater enthusiast Sherman Fedwick came away from the latest Broadway-touring production in Minneapolis a bit confused and more than a little disappointed.

"I hear Four Seasons and I think classical, cellos, violins, Vivaldi, you know, the whole nine yards," Fedwick was overheard remarking to a companion after emerging from the Orpheum Theater, where the popular musical was playing. "I pay big money and what do I hear? Four teenagers in t-shirts and jeans singing on a street corner about crying girls and walking like a man. And using four letter words, no less. What's up with that?"

Walters expressed hope that his next theater ticket for the upcoming production of “Mama Mia" will meet his expectations. "You can always bet on Italian opera to deliver the goods,” he said.

Opera Wednesday: The sacredness of life

There are a few operas that, in an oblique way, make reference to contemporary issues even though they were written decades, or centuries, ago.  One such example is Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the magnificent 1919 opera written by Richard Strauss, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.  The crux of the story centers around an Emperor and Empress who are unable to conceive; this is symbolized by the fact that she is without a shadow. The King of the Spirit World decrees that unless she gains a shadow before the end of the twelfth moon, "she will be reclaimed by her father and the Emperor will turn to stone."

As the story progresses, a scheme unfolds to obtain the shadow by stealing it from a peasant woman, thus depriving this woman of motherhood.  The peasant woman is urged to "sell her expectations of motherhood, dissolve her marriage [to a husband who desires children] and pursue a life of individual self-fulfillment."  As this article indicates, the notes accompanying productions of this opera generally relate the moral of the story as being "one person's happiness cannot be bought at the price of another's," yet it is clear that a major component of the story - and its moral - concerns the ability of a woman to conceive, the glories of motherhood, and the existence of the souls of unborn children

[Spoiler alert!] The opera concludes happily, odd enough for an opera; the Empress decides to reject the stolen shadow ("I will not rob humanity from someone else"), the peasant woman's shadow is returned to her, and for her act of generosity, the Empress too receives a shadow.  Both couples  - the Emperor and Empress and the peasant couple - sing of their joy and humanity, and praise their unborn children.  On occasion, the chorus assumes the guise of unborn children, making the analogy even stronger.

Ten or so years ago, the Los Angeles Times, one of the worst newspapers in the United States, committed a hilarious error by changing a review of the opera, which the critic had described as "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean," replacing the term "pro-life" with "anti-abortion." One hardly knows where to begin with this comedy of errors; the mindless policy in the paper's style sheet, which apparently dictates that all references to pro-life should be changed to emphasize the negative; the blatant inaccuracy of the edit, since the abortion message in Frau is inferred when transposed to today's times and there is in fact no discussion whatsoever of abortion in the libretto; or the idea that being pro-life should be assumed to refer to abortion only and exclusively. You can read more about it here.  Idiots.

The point is, Die Frau ohne Schatten does not deal with abortion directly; it deals with the sacredness of human life and the importance of being open to its creation.  And while it is not an anti-abortion screed, as some might think, is explains one of the fundamental reasons why the sacredness of human life is important and why, among other reasons, abortion is wrong.

Anyway, enough with the politics.  Regardless of what you think, there is glorious music in this opera, which in the video below is provided by the famed Sir. Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic.  You can get other videos that include subtitles, through which the power of the story becomes even more apparent, but you won't find many guided by better than Solti.

Not quite when hell freezes over, but...

From Charles Pierce at Grantland, an instructional aid as to when one should start worrying about the end of the world:

According to some very reliable crazy people on the Internets, the world was supposed to end Wednesday night. It was something to do with the blood moon and the prophecies of an old Christian radio host. Proving that something beyond human understanding was afoot, the Chicago Cubs won a wild-card, win-or-go-home playoff game in Pittsburgh. But the odds are that fate or the universe is just playing us all for suckers. The world will not end until the Cubs are one strike away from winning the World Series. The last pitch will be halfway to the plate and the asteroid will come to call. Blood moons and superannuated radio preachers are one thing. The Chicago Cubs and postseason baseball are a whole different and deeper level of cosmic burlesque.

Is this the year that this story becomes obsolete?

Flood thoughts

While in the Flood of the Century here it seems, I've thought for a while about voices in singing, and even songs that discuss vocal parts.

Straight No Chaser, which does "Back Home Again in Indiana" at the 500, has their own take on "All About That Bass," making it a song about a vocal part in their own a capella style.  I am no fan of bad pop music, but it made me laugh about this version because as a tenor myself, note the putdowns on the tenors by the basses!



And of course, while the boys talk about low men, there is a song for girls about the low women.  And this lament is one that could make some of them unsuitable for Fox News, if you understand the network's dress code, and they want to be on Fox News!  Ben Moore wrote this song, "(I Can Be a) Sexy Lady" for Susan Graham, a mezzo lamenting her roles in opera.  It is part of the mezzo's repetoire, and often sung at recitals, as I've learned.  The first time I heard it was Kelsey Harrison in her recital (since Serena LaRoche had a part in that recital), and I wanted to know what the song was -- and it was a lament.  Now think about "(I Can Be a) Sexy Lady" and "All About That Bass (No Tenors)" and think of their low voice songs.



Hoosier Hysteria Retirements

So one "gospel" singer who has performed the National Anthem at the 500 in 1992, ironically the year that a famous motor racer who never won at the Brickyard despite seven career starts presented her that trophy for Female Vocalist of the Year for an 11th consecutive year.  Neither won in that premier class in their careers after that year.  The presenter retired after 2000.  That singer just announced she is on her farewell concert tour.

Add to that another Hoosier, a motor racer, with 20 years in major motorsport, who is hanging it up after 2016 too, and unfortunately, he fits in the same role as Doug Sanders, Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia, and Colin Montgomerie do in golf.  He is the best driver in motorsport to never win a major, though he has won championships and other races, he never won an official INDYCAR or NASCAR Sprint Cup major.

Opera Thursday: The musical that belongs in the opera house

NINO CASTELNUOVO AND CATHERINE DENEUVE IN THE MOVIE THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

A trend over the past few years has brought increasing numbers of musicals to the opera house.  I'm not talking about a road show performance or anything like that; after all, plenty of non-operatic entertainers perform in opera houses.  What I'm talking about is the inclusion in the regular opera season of musicals that in no way fall under the general category of "opera": Show Boat, Passions, The King and I, and other Broadway standards are among the works that have seen significant stage time at various world opera houses.  “The vast majority of musicals are not appropriate to opera companies, but there are a small number of titles that are enhanced by the skill and scale of an opera house,” said Anthony Freud, general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago. “I see it as an inherent part of our output. I don’t see doing ‘The Sound of Music’ with any less professionalism than in doing ‘La Traviata.”’  The Lyric is one of the major promoters of this trend, staging Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, Carousel, The King and I and South Pacific over a five-season period, but lest you think this a strictly American move, European companies are doing it as well: the Volksoper in Vienna has added Guys & Dolls and Kiss Me, Kate, while musicals such as Miss Saigon and Sunday in the Park with George have featured at other European houses.

In the interview with the late Jon Vickers to which I linked a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned how one of the main differences between opera and musical comedy is that "entertainment, for the most part, deals with the superficialities of life, and works usually become extremely dated because they relate to a certain society and a certain framework that has developed in a certain society."  Musical comedy, in Vickers' opinion, qualifies as "entertainment," and "If opera degenerates into entertainment, I would far sooner go and watch a good production of My Fair Lady or Brigadoon because I think it's much better entertainment than opera is."  In other words, you have to be very careful mixing the two genres, and Vickers felt that a true American opera would never develop out of the Broadway musical.

This is all appropriate, because in today's AV Club there's an example of the one musical that I think might be the exception to the rule, the piece that I'd have no trouble staging in the opera house: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, written by Michel Legrand and brought to the cinema by Jacques Denny.  I'll let you read A.A. Dowd's article to get the full flavor of Umbrellas, but two things have always stood out in my mind as justifications for staging this as an opera: its true-to-life subject matter recalls the verismo school of opera, and there is no spoken dialog - everything is sung as "a series of recitative song conversations."  To my mind, that alone puts it far ahead of the My Fair Ladys and Guys & Dolls's of the world.*

*You're probably wondering where that leaves something like singspiel; well, to tell you the truth, I think both The Merry Widow and Die Zauberflöte would profit from having their significant amounts of dialog converted to recitative.  As for Carmen, I've always preferred the version in which recitative replaced spoken dialog.  But then, that's just me.

I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg included in the occasional opera season, but not often enough.  You've heard me complain frequently about the habit of commissioning new operas (many of which are never heard from again after their initial productions) when there are plenty of underperformed ones lying around; the same goes here.  If you've got The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, why bother with The Sound of Music?  This is not to criticize the great musicals which the American theater has given us, merely to point out there's a place for everything, and the opera stage is not the place for most of them.  No, the bigger question is this: am I making an exception for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or is that where it belonged all along?

You may not think you recognize any of it's music, but I'll bet you do: here's the justifiably famous theme, "I Will Wait for You."

The line has been crossed: Big Four's X-rated programming draws ire of Actors Union

Television's Big Four have crossed the line.

Until the late 1980's, television was set with the Big Three networks.  Now it's the Big Four services of HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and Amazon Prime in control of television, content, and standards, with the Emmys favouring the TV-MA (X rated) shows on the Big Four they watch, winning the major awards annually. With no accountability required to viewers or advertisers, the shock value of television, which is part of art's turn to shock value, has become the standard.

If crossing the line wasn't bad enough with language, now the standards have crept into advancing all forms of sexual immorality, with Amazon Prime's winning shows promoting such actions, and HBO denouncing President Reagan for not helping with a cause celebre of the Left.  We have now seen that line truly crossed with a report on the filming of HBO's Westworld has drawn the ire of the SAG-AFTRA.  According to the report, background actors ("extras") for the HBO show are required to sign what the Hollywood Reporter calls "a nudity and sex consent form that reads like the Kama Sutra and that has SAG-AFTRA officials worried".

Now that the Hollywood elites have changed from network television to the Big Four Services, there are no standards.  And the result is such garbage being called "art".  Would this have been permitted 30 years ago?

Don't move!

L



ongtime readers know my fondness for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, whom I've quoted many times at this blog, as well as having praised one of the very best television adaptations over at the TV blog.  It should be no surprise, therefore, that I was attracted to this story at the Weekly Standard on the history of what Benjamin Welton calls "the stationary detective."  Wolfe is, of course, the first name that comes to mind (my mind, anyway) when one thinks of sleuths able to solve crimes without leaving the house, and Welton spends a good deal of this brief article talking about Wolfe, but mentions several other detectives as well.  Mystery fiction is all the rage out there, but if you don't mind going back a few years, I think you'll find that many of the authors Welton discusses are worth your while as well.  Check them out, but read Wolfe first! 

The legendary Yogi Berra, R.I.P.

Lawrence  Peter (Yogi) Berra passed away earlier this week, at the age of 90. This remarkable Yankee catcher had an even more remarkable career, participating in World Series as a player, coach and manager. He was an All-Star selection 15 times. He won his league’s Most Valuable Player Award three times. As a manager, led both the Yankees and the Mets into the World Series.

Yogi didn’t look like an athlete; his somewhat squatty and dense, 5’8” frame made him look more like a construction worker than a professional ballplayer. He had that broad face and those protruding ears. (“You’re ugly, Berra,” a rival catcher told him one day. “I don’t hit with my face,” was Yogi’s reply. Along with a double into the gap.) You could see why one day years later Yogi would inspire a cartoon character. Yes, that famous bear.

Yogi Berra was no Joe Dimaggio, some might say.

But while Dimaggio, the graceful Yankee Clipper, is praised for striking out only 369 times in his entire career,  Yogi, also a power-hitter, struck out only 414 times in nearly 1,500 more plate appearances. Percentage-wise, Yogi tops his legendary teammate on that one. “You could,” as their shared skipper used to say, “look it up.”

Yes, Yogi was an athlete. A great athlete. And one of sports (all sports) greatest winners. From 1957 through 1981, the New York Yankees were in the World Series 13 times. Yogi—as a player, a coach, a manager—was on every one of those teams.

He got more famous later for his “Yogi-isms,” those witty, seemingly spontaneous comments he made (or supposedly made) about life. (“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” is one often quoted.)  Those funny sayings sold books and t-shirts. They shouldn’t make us forget what an amazing athlete Yogi Berra was.

Let’s imagine a Yankee Mt. Rushmore. Who should be up there? Babe Ruth, arguable the greatest baseball player of all-time (and a giant of a character himself), is so far above everyone else that we’ll let him be the foundation that this Rushmore sits on. On the mountain itself has to be Lou Gehrig, Dimaggio, and Mickey Mantle. We will officially add the fourth right now: Yogi Berra.

Yogi’s talents, his child-like enthusiasm while playing a man’s game, his almost Forrest Gump-like prowess for being right in the middle of so many memorable baseball moments (including calling Don Larsen’s perfect game in the Series of ’56), his ability to embody a baseball  era like few others—it all adds up to quite a career, and a life. Oh yeah, he was a 19-year old American soldier who hit Omaha Beach on D-Day. Yes, there is a lot to say, and to remember, and to honor, about Yogi Berra.

My wife and I operate a Bed & Breakfast in a small town in southeastern Minnesota. This morning, eight new guests gathered around the breakfast table. These first moments can be a little tense, awkward even, for people who’ve never met who are about to share a meal together.

These folks, from Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa, smiled politely and seated themselves quietly. One young man was wearing a Kansas City Royals shirt. Mention was made. The conversation would start with baseball.

“Did you hear?” one woman asked the group. “Yogi died this week.” No prompting was needed. They all knew who she meant. Immediately the early table tension melted. There were knowing smiles all around. “He was so funny, the things he said,” said another lady. Soon they brought up shared memories of that stubby little Yankee catcher with a gift for making people smile. These were not sports fans, baseball fans. But somehow they all knew Yogi. They were Yogi Berra fans.

I was trying to think of another American professional athlete in the last 50 years who could do that for people. (Last century even.) An athlete that ordinary people could relate to, and not just admire, but genuinely like. An athlete who seemed authentic and approachable.  It did help that Yogi was a hugely gifted athlete, one of the best of all time at his position.  But that wasn’t the most important thing about him. It  isn’t what people immediately and fondly recall.

How many of those athletes are there? A handful at best. One was certainly Yogi Berra. And now he is gone.

“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” Manager Yogi Berra famously told his Mets players in the summer of 1973, stirring them to an improbable World Series run. With his passing, it is over. And it’s all a little bit sadder.

The Emmys and the President's Official Delegation for the Holy See: Sin (and perversion) being promoted

Antonin Scalia, in his dissent of the sexual perversion movement's landmark case, made importance in his opening paragraph regarding the configuration of the courts being dominated by elite educational institutions in two hard-left corners of the nation, and how these institutions have an absolute monopoly over an entire branch of the government.  As previously noted by Sean Hannity in a February 2014 broadcast, the entertainment, and we now know, advertising, agencies are completely out of touch with the rest of the nation.  What sells in Hollywood, Stonewall or the Castro District (which seems to be the basis for every acclaimed show or ad) does not play in Peoria, let alone your heartland of America.

The Emmy Awards proved Mr. Scalia's point of elites, as the awards have now become a celebration of the elites and their ideals that cannot win in the heartland, but rely on these few areas to force their way through.  The major awards at the ceremony were given exclusively to premium pay television programming, with broadcast network television being shut out of the show.  The winning premium pay programming (HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Amazon Prime) is complete with themes that pander only to Hollywood values in an attempt to mandate social change that mocks, rejects, and now criminalises, the Bible, while appeasing all forms of sexual perversion as part of the Erotic Liberty push, in effect declaring, as has been wanted by Obama Administration official Chai Feldblum, sexual freedom is the only freedom, triumphing over all other beliefs, even if over 75% oppose.  Acceptance speeches of these winners, whose shows cater to these elites but not watched by the people because of the elite status of premium pay television, were transformed into political rallies of this tiny corner to advance the next cause of these leftists, whether it was to advance socialism, increased government intrusion, sexual perversion propaganda, or attacking those with a Biblical worldview.  Consider the pushing of one such sexual perversion by an award winning series available on premium pay, and how the speech by the show's developers was based around pushing special rights for boorish behaviour.

In the movie industry, film studios cut scenes from movies to avoid an adults-only movie rating, which depending on industry or national authority, will be declared X, NC-17, 18+, or similar rating, since an adults-only rating will be rejected by the theatres, as such movies would force an entire theatre multiplex to be adults only for the day, similar to the Kyle Busch Rule with regards to tobacco.  But on television, the same adults-only rating, known as TV-MA, is now regarded as superior writing and acting, and wins the major awards, despite only appearing on premium pay television.  Why is there such a double standard?

(NOTE:  Kyle Busch was 16 when CART ejected him during the 2001 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Auto Club Speedway since the American Racing Wheels 200 Truck race was part of the CART FedEx Championship Series Marlboro 500 presented by Toyota weekend, and the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement specifically prohibits participation of persons under age 18 years if any event on the schedule carries tobacco sponsorship.  Four CART Champ Car teams were sponsored by tobacco firms that signed the agreement – Phillip Morris (now Altria) and British American Tobacco, meaning Busch could not participate in the event, even though NASCAR sanctioned that race only, CART enforced the federal tobacco regulations.)

The President's official delegation for the Holy See's visit to the nation once again shows how the elites see faith.  It is another list full of sexual perversion, a quasi-victory lap of the Hollywood and academia elites over the entire nation that has voted over 4:1 in many states against the perversion agenda.  Once again, as he has mentioned about the decline of nations thanks to sexual perversion, Владимир Путин is correct.  This Administration is pushing the wants of a few elites in Hollywood as seen in the Emmys, much to the opposition of the entire country, with this list for the Holy See's visit.

Is there any more wicked standard for this President other than the sexual perversion crowd?

Retro TV Friday: The Muppets

S'm not sure if Mitchell will be covering this at the TV blog, but in case he doesn't, take a look at the following:

What were previously sly winks to a grownup audience are now grotesque full-body grimaces, delivered with depressing sledgehammer brutality. In one scene, Animal laments his consequence-free promiscuity. In another, Zoot from The Electric Mayhem is outed as an alcoholic. And then, most heartbreakingly of all, there’s Kermit.

This version of Kermit is absolutely unrecognisable from anything that’s ever come before. This Kermit badmouths fellow celebrities, openly discusses his sex life and, at one point, describes his life as “a living hell”. That’s not who Kermit is. Kermit is the perennial wide-eyed optimist, the figure who grounds the chaos around him in sincerity. Kermit is the dreamer who believes in the power of people. He’s the one who sings The Rainbow Connection. He is most definitely not the stress-eating, coffee-drinking executive that The Muppets paints him as. It physically hurts to see what ABC have done to him.

Rod Dreher points out that all this comes back to Disney, which doesn't surprise me in the least, considering the liberal political attitude of the company and how some of their ABC Family programs include homosexual relationships.  California is due for a major earthquake soon; my question is whether it will be caused by Jim Henson spinning in his grave, or Walt Disney spinning in his.

Throwback Thursday: Talk about bad fortune. . .

KING OF PRUSSIA, PA -- Local resident Harold Ludman says he can’t understand why he was recently fired from his job writing fortunes for the homemade fortune cookies served at Leonard Wang’s Chow Palace.

“My fortunes speak to the human condition,” Jones said, holding a sheet of paper with his most recent saying, "When misery knocks at the door, you don’t ask if it’s made a reservation." I know it’s not cheery, but it’s real life. People need to face up to that once in awhile.”

Other fortunes which Jones said he was proud of included “If at first you don’t succeed, try again, but know that the possibility is great that you might fail again,” and “Every glorious sunset means you’re one day closer to the cold eternal darkness of the grave.”

Jones said he had always hoped to find a profitable use for his Master’s degree in the works of French existentialists such as Camus and Sarte, and considered writing fortune-cookie fortunes to be the ideal job.

Wang, however, begged to differ.

“People look for escapism when they crack open a fortune cookie,” he said. “They want to read things like, ‘You will meet a tall, dark stranger,’ not the depressing crap he was coming up with. I was afraid I was going to have to start offering Prozac instead of after-dinner mints.”

Ludman, who himself had recently undergone electro-convulsive therapy at nearby Pleasant Valley Mental Health Clinic and Sanitarium, was disappointed with Wang’s decision, but sought to put a positive spin on the dismissal. “I was thinking about getting out of the fortune-cookie business anyway,” he said. “To be honest, there isn’t a lot of growth potential in it. I didn’t want to be caught in the bathroom when the last lifeboat leaves the Titanic, if you know what I mean. Hell, I’m not sure I know what that means.”

As for his future plans, Ludman said, “I’ve already sent my resume to Hallmark. There’s always a market for a good greeting card.”

What is it with the Pope, anyhow?

The Pope is in town, in case you haven't heard. Not in Dallas, where I am, but out father East.  There will be a fair amount of fuss being made, much of it over how Good Pope Francis is ushering in the new progressive nirvana, and probably even more about how the evil conservative Catholics, not to mention the evil Republicans, are busy slamming him.

Of course, that's the typical MSM slant.  It is true that many Republicans disagree with the Pope on matters environmental and economic, and it's also true that a lot of conservative - more likely traditionalist - Catholics have been having kittens over his papacy.  If you're a regular reader, you know I haven't been too happy about this papacy either, having gone so far as to suggest that if I were considering converting today (instead of twenty years ago when I did convert) I probably wouldn't do it because I would be looking at a Church that might have truth on its side, but didn't appear to stand for anything.

Now, it's very easy to find political commentary picking a bone with the Pope.  For instance, George Will had this to say:

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

Meanwhile, at the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last asks if we should see the Pope as "Menace or Farce" (h/t Fr. Z)

For instance, the Holy Father seems to have a habit of appearing to endorse all sorts of left-wing political causes. There was the time he posed with environmental activists holding an anti-fracking T-shirt. And the time he posed for pictures holding a crucifix made from a hammer and a sickle. And the time he held up a poster calling for the British to hand the Falkland Islands back to Argentina. In each instance, the official Vatican response has been to suggest that Francis didn’t mean to endorse anything because he’ll pretty much smile and pick up anything you hand him, like some sort of consecrated Ron Burgundy.

Now, it is true that there's a ideological dimension to this; there's no question that the Pope is interjecting himself into a political discussion, not merely pointing out the existence of a problem, but offering explicitly political solutions, rather than charging the various legislatures with finding a solution.

There is, however, a spiritual aspect to this as well, and one can make a compelling case that in this religious, as opposed to political, dimension, the Pope continues to fall short.  The website The Federalist had a very good piece on this Monday, with Joy Pullmann writing, among other things, this:

I’m not sure who Pope Francis’s religious advisors are, but it seems they’ve forgotten the Gospel isn’t directly aimed at helping the poor or averting supposed environmental disasters. The Gospel is centrally about saving our eternal souls, about addressing spiritual—not material—poverty. Yes, the material world is broken because of sin, and it will be restored after the Last Day, but that’s an effect, and not the focus of scripture. What’s primary is our souls, not our pocketbooks.

She goes on to write:

In the course of loving our neighbors, as the Bible commands, of course we should seek to meet their physical needs, both through and beyond seeking to meet their spiritual needs. Acknowledging the truth that the world will always contain hungry people is not an excuse for not feeding the people in your life whom you have a duty to feed.

Maybe Pope Francis should welcome the environmental apocalypse he thinks is coming.
But the human condition of sin has ensured that everyone cannot be rich, healthy, and a lover of God. It’s sad, but true. We will never achieve utopia in this world. That’s kind of the central story arc of the Bible: How humans screwed themselves and the whole world up, and how Jesus has and will ultimately put things to right. Getting all the way to a perfect eternity, however, requires first an apocalypse.

So maybe Pope Francis should welcome the environmental apocalypse he thinks is coming. That’s partly a joke and partly serious, because every time I see another Planned Parenthood butchering video I am ready for Jesus to take me and my kiddos right up to Paradise and end this sick, mad world. But at the very least, Francis could do a better job communicating what my Catholic friends keep insisting to me he really does mean.

I get weary reading all this; it grieves me to see the Church that means so much to me disintegrating like this.  I'll say it again: Pope Francis could not be doing a better job driving the Church apart if he'd been sent by the Soviet Union (or Satan, take your pick) to ruin everything accomplished by the last two popes.  And I get just as weary being reminded by henny-penny hand-wringers that you're not allowed to criticize the Pope.  As a matter of fact, that really ticks me off.

Look; one should always be careful talking about the Pope.  The papacy is a divinely-ordained institution, and that's all there is to it.  Not only do I accept that, I wholeheartedly embraced it at the time of my conversion.  I believe it today.  But it also has to be said that the College of Cardinals don't always choose the right man for the office; anyone who thinks that the Holy Spirit divinely chooses the pope not only denies the existence of man's free will, he overlooks such occupants of Peter's Chair as the Borgia Popes.  In other words, one must respect the office, but there is no reason not to look at the specific occupant with a cocked eye.

Let's take this a step further, though.  Not only the papacy, but the basic clerical structure of the Church - bishops, priests and deacons - exists in the Bible.  What goes for the pope goes for them as well; respect the office, if not the occupant.

However, when it gets to the Curia, the governing organization of the Church - well, that's a man-made institution.  No only is there nothing divine about it, even the popes themselves have had to keep a very close eye on it from time to time for their own benefit, not to mention well-being.  The Curia, and the upcoming Synod of Bishops, is fair game as far as I'm concerned - again, as long as you remain somewhat respectful in your words.  Just as I get turned off by old ladies taking me to task for criticizing the pope, I also get torqued by people who behave like rabid Pavlovian dogs whenever Francis' name is mentioned.

Therefore:  I have great concerns that Pope Francis is doing dramatic damage to the Church.  He disrespects those who have fought long and hard to defend tradition; his recent decision on annulments is nothing short of indefensible; his off-the-cuff statements are tiring at best and alarming at worst.  We like to talk about the "brand" today, and Francis has weakened the Catholic "brand" to an almost crippling degree.  Those who are the most impressed are those least likely to come back to the Church, or to defend the Church's traditional teachings.  Those most disregarded, most dismissed by him, are the ones who have fought the hardest and believe most fervently in Christ's teachings.  I don't know about you, but buddying up to your enemies and dissing your friends is not my idea of a successful business plan.

Francis' papacy has been a disaster, and if the upcoming Synod weakens the family further, as many expect it to, going back on two millennia of Church teaching (as well as Christ's words), then we see a real possibility of schism, and if that happens then we're really going to have some questions to ask.  All we know is that at the Last Judgment, we'll all be called to account for my actions.  I will not fare well when that happens, but at least I'd like to think I've tried to defend the Church, in my words if not always my actions.  However, the man who calls himself a "loyal son of the Chuirch" will have to do the same, and all in all I think I'd rather be in my shoes than his.

There's bound to be more to come on this, both from the Pope's trip and from me.

Just how old is your granddaddy, anyway?

All together now, for the thousandth time: Words Mean Things.  Case in  point is this article, posted on si.com yesterday.  In fairness to its author, Ryan McGee, writers don't generally do their own headlines, so he can't be to blame for the following:

We've all heard that old saying - "this ain't your father's..." or "this ain't your grandfather's..." and we know what it's supposed to mean - this isn't the way it was back in the old days. The point of this article is to suggest that the times are a changin', that things aren't the way they used to be.  Well, seeing this headline, I knew right away there was something wrong; I just had to do the math to make sure.

Now, let's say you're 25 years old, a good age to be a football fan.  Le'ts further say your father was 25 when you were born, and his father was 25 when he was born.  That would make your grandfather 75.  Assuming he was a football fan when he was 25, that would make it 1965, 50 years ago.  So, just for the hell of it, let's take a look at college football's top ten for the end of the 1965 football season:

Well, Michigan State certainly was in the top 5.  And in case you're thinking I'm nitpicking about this, let's go a little deeper: Michigan State was #2 the following year, 1966 (the year they lost the title by tying Notre Dame in the Game of the Century).  Just a fluke, you're thinking?  Very well; let's suppose your grandfather's top 5 started in 1960, when he was 20.  Sorry - Michigan State was ranked that year as well.  In fact, they were ranked #11, in 1960, #9 in 1961, #10 in 1963, and #20 in 1964.  In other words, although they were in the top 5 only twice (1965, 1966), they were ranked in the top 20 six times in the seven years that your grandfather might have been looking at.  And in case you think granddad's top 5 might have come when he was older, say in his mid-30s, that doesn't really hold up either: the Spartans were ranked #9 in 1950, #2 in 1951, #1 in 1952, #3 in 1953, #2 in 1955, #10 in 1956, #3 in 1957 and #16 in 1959.

In other words, Michigan State was pretty much a college football power throughout the '50s and into the mid-'60s; it wasn't until Southern schools started integrating, destroying the pipline that Northern schools such as State had built up in the South, that Michigan State dropped from the power rankings. Let's call that the '70s and '80s, which wouldn't be your grandfather's time as much as it was your father's.

Do you think I'm nitpicking too much?  All right, let's look at Mississippi then.  You'll note that in that 1965 poll, Mississippi ranked #17, the eighth year in the decade of the '60s in which Mississippi was ranked in the top 20.  Matter of fact, Ole Miss was pretty good in the early part of the decade, when your hypothetical granddaddy was in his early 20s, finishing #3 in 1960, #5 in 1961, #4 in 1962 and #7 in 1963.  Playing the devil's advocate and going back to the 1950s (as we did with Michigan State), we see that Mississippi was #7 in 1952, #6 in 1954, #9 in 1955, #8 in 1957, #12 in 1958 and #2 in 1959.  As was the case with Michigan State (though for different reasons), Mississippi's decline came much later on, in the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Which brings me back to the beginning question: just how the hell old is grandfather supposed to be?  I know there's always a tendency to look back in the past and think it's father back than it actually is; 50 years sounds like a long time ago, but it was actually 1965.  Taken in the most generous sense, a grandfather usually isn't going to be much younger than 40 when the first grandchild is born, and unless you're about seven years old (and if you are, you shouldn't be reading SI.com, especially when the swimsuit issue is out), you're going to have a hard time proving your grandfather didn't know a time when Michigan State and Ole Miss were in the top 5.

You could have avoided so much of this confusion simply by saying that this year's rankings "aren't your father's top 5."  Is this a case when the headline writer gets so caught up in the story (one-legendary programs making a big comeback, which itself is problematic considering Michigan State finished last year ranked #5 and the year before #3, meaning they aren't all that unfamiliar with the top 5 lately) that they write the headline to fit a preconceived notion?  Is it that the headline writer doesn't know much about football history or is so young that they can't remember the last time these teams were ranked so high?  Or is it that the writer was too lazy to spend five minutes Googling College Football Polls (as I did) to write an accurate headline?

Take your pick, but I wish these headline writers would do their homework.  I'm old enough to remember when Michigan State and Mississippi were highly-ranked programs, and I don't have any grandchildren (yet).  Please, I don't need to feel any older than I already do.