Moeller TV Festival VIII: The festival lineup
Here it comes, gang: Saturday, November 14th at noon at my house in Des Moines-- Moeller TV Festival 8: Apocalypse. After years of holding ourselves back out of respect for attendees that are pregnant or have heart conditions, this year's festival promises to pull out all the stops. Chris and Aaron Plus 8.
It's still not too late to submit your favorite episodes for the popular "Open Remote" segment. Forward them to christophermmoeller@msn.com, where you can also RSVP, contact me for directions, or just weigh in on the Chelsea Handler Playboy cover photo. This year's screening schedule will be as follows...
NOON
"Second Episode" Andy Richter Controls the Universe #4 4/9/02
"The Bat Jar Conjecture" The Big Bang Theory #13 4/21/08
"The Great Debate" Welcome Back, Kotter #1 9/9/75
Open Remote
"Venus and the Man" WKRP in Cincinnati #60 1/31/81
"Nothing in the Dark" The Twilight Zone #81 1/5/62
"Jim the Psychic" Taxi #67 10/8/81
"Who Pooped the Bed?" It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia #39 10/9/08
"The Szechuan Dynasty Dana Carvey Show" The Dana Carvey Show #6 4/23/96
"Show 1819" Late Night with David Letterman #1,819 6/25/93
Des Moines residents, especially, it's time to act fast to arrange your attendance! Aaron has recently purchased a condo in Cedar Rapids and threatens to pull the festival back to the City of the Five Seasons for 2010.
As always, food and drinks will be provided at the TV Festival. The new flat-screen will be there. The great television episodes of all-time will be there. The always-popular "comment box" will be there. Will
you be there?
Terry Miller 1919-2009
Tim McCarver just announced during Game 1 of the World Series the sad news that Terry Miller, wife of baseball labor pioneer and future Hall-of-Famer Marvin Miller, died Tuesday at the age of 90. Marvin and Terry Miller were set to celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary in December.
Terry Miller was more than just the wife of a heroic progressive figure-- she was one in her own right. She was an accomplished academic with a PhD in psychology, a clinical psychologist, as well as an accomplished poet. Marvin's 1991 book, "A Whole Different Ballgame," contains a verse she had written in 1989 about baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti upon his death, which had come shortly after he had suspended Pete Rose from the sport for life for gambling....
so, 2 weeks in a row bart captures the headlines. the week before it was his decision to ban pete rose from b.b. for life. whose life? m is unforgiving, death not withstanding. he abhors all the hypocrisy that has surrounded the commissioner, the unified voice of the media to label him a god and rose a villain. well, god heard, and he, you may remember, is a jealous god. thou shalt have no other gods before me. giamatti was like a biblical character as he announced his punishment of rose. he was angry, cold, severe, flag-waving, pennant-waving. he was the savior of the national pastime, of the nation itself. he had saved the nation from pete rose, the gambler, while handing it over to ron peters, the drug dealer, whose sentence he sought to have reduced. he died a hero.driving the money changers from the temple. employed by bigger money changers, he was looked upon as the great hope for the future of the game. not, mind you, to restore its integrity, but rather to rebuild its appearance
of integrity. appearance is all. who better than a renaissance scholar to shield the lords of baseball from exposure to the light of honesty and fair play. with bart to charm the public, the owners would be able to get away with anything. his death is a big blow to twenty-six owners and ten times that many reporters and commentators who will no longer have their biased propaganda sugar coated for them.here lies a smooth talking casuist, a union-busting conservative, a simple man who was in over his head.he did look a bit satanic, didn't he? had he perhaps signed a pact with the devil to gain the post of commissioner of all the baseballs? and failed to pay up? gambled and lost, you might say, or is it truman capote's "more tears are shed over prayers that are answered?"i'm sorry i never met the man.I'm sorry I never met Terry Miller. In the book, Marvin called her "bright and beautiful," "ever alert to an intellectual challenge," and said that she "personified femininity and strength."
Mac's back and Tony's got him
Tony LaRussa agreed to return for another year as Cardinals manager today, and I register myself as "generally pleased." I think Tony's main contribution to the team over the years has been molding and strengthening the psychological makeup of the club. The players mirror his intensity. He has now led the team for 14 years, longer than any other man in Cards history, longer than the 9 1/2 years he spent in Oakland, longer than the part of eight he spent with the White Sox, and long enough between all three teams to tally more wins than anybody in big league history who isn't name Connie Mack or John McGraw.
But I've never been convinced that the manager makes that much difference in the outcome of a particular game or season. With the exception of the rare individual who revolutionizes how the game is played, like a McGraw or a Whitey Herzog, I often wonder if we all aren't wasting our energy in dissecting the various lineup preparations, bench shiftings, and bullpen maneuverings. During one celebrated and corroborating moment in history, Yankees great Casey Stengel called to the bullpen and asked his coach to get "Williams" loosened up. The coach reminded Casey that there were two Williamses stationed in the pen, a lefthander and a righthander, and asked which one the manager wanted? "Surprise me," Casey said.
Tony always
seems like he's working for his money, anyway, and I guess that's good enough for me. He utilized 136 different batting lineups during the course of the 162 game season in 2009. More rookies were introduced to Cardinals fans than in any year in recent memory. He ably navigated disputes between his pitching coach and the team front office, his pitching coach and the media; and all the while, worked to maintain multiple feuds of his own with various opposing managers and players, even resolving a pair of them with former players, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds, on separate occasions late in the season. And he never smiled once the whole time, so clearly he's not dicking around.
What I am most excited about, though, is the manager's announcement of the new Cardinals hitting coach-- you know him as the savior of baseball eleven years ago, Mark McGwire. Tony LaRussa has never impressed me as much as a man as he did today when he stood up at a press conference in St. Louis in support of the heavily-hounded McGwire, who's been burned at the proverbial stake by the nation's snide sports media more times than any man in recent memory save for Michael Vick. It wasn't just what LaRussa
did, either, giving Mac a job, it was how he explained his action. He didn't repeat the smears or innuendo about the legitimacy of McGwire's career hitting numbers. The veteran manager acknowledged that his decision was personal-- that he was bringing in McGwire because the skipper's retirement draws ever nearer, and he wants to spend at least one year on the bench with one of his all-time favorite players while he still has the chance. He said he hopes McGwire can restore his public image, "I think that's a byproduct-- he's back in uniform, and people can see his greatness."
I'm also impressed with LaRussa's thought process. Obviously it's important that McGwire do
well in the position of hitting coach. But the man who has bopped the 8th-most home runs in Major League history has been running an informal offseason hitting clinic for several years already, and additionally, one of his frequent work-out partners/students is Matt Holliday, the impact slugger of 2009 the Birds are trying to coax into signing a long-term term. What can it hurt to have another voice in there pitching St. Louis and the Cardinals to Holliday and his agent?
McGwire's return to the game is going to be extraordinary, I believe. Frustratingly, no other sport has made such a concerted effort to throw so many of its great players under the bus. Since even the waning days of the Civil War, the lords of the game have been shamelessly appealing to our sense of nostalgia (when the Northern cities were filling in, it was the great "pastural game") and patriotism, holding their product up as the great institution of purity and simplicity that it's never been. During their cyclical purgings of the undesirables and the anointed villains of fair play, we forget that we are losing the great players like "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, Pete Rose, and McGwire not only as stars, heroes, and Hall-of-Famers, but as teachers. Many of these men still are with us and have much to offer the game and its fans, and I'm tickled red that LaRussa's heart and mind were in harmony when he hatched this initiative to lure Big Mac back to baseball and the Cardinals. Sometimes the right thing to do also leads to great success.
Sharing the road
The rights and responsibilities of bicyclists is an increasingly popular topic. In Des Moines, the city council recently approved a plan to add bicycle lanes along Ingersoll Avenue (near my home) over the objections of some of the commercial-area business owners who believe the change will hit them in their pocketbooks.
It leaves me stumped personally as to how the mostly-sandwich and coffee shops and retail clothing stores could lose business by making the thoroughfare more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly, while re-routing to the parallel-running Grand Avenue the race cars bound for the suburbs who currently use Ingersoll as a major east and westbound artery but would sooner have their tires punctured by city toughs than stop and browse retail along the urban corridor. Besides, green and sustainable urban development has been routinely found to benefit everyone in the community, unless, that is, you'd prefer to buy property in Jacksonville, Birmingham, or Houston than Portland, Seattle, or Burlington, Vermont.
I look forward to the boom in bicycle traffic and "bicycle people" in this nearby neighborhood, but it will be important for the bicyclists to remember that with their rights come responsibilites in sharing the road with motorists. While it's true, as many bicycle-rights advocates claim, that traffic laws came into existence solely
because of motor vehicles (if we were all still on bicycles, they argue correctly, we would have no need for traffic laws), and while I feel that we're generally overregulated on the roads and that most law enforcement efforts seem to be directed directly and disproportionately at fining me and sending me back to "anger management" traffic safety class in December for excessive vehicle speed along wide-open, rural highways, it is imperative that bicyclists follow the very same rules of the road as cars and trucks, particularly in the city, where we're piled on top of each other like rats. Stop signs mean stop signs for all, and respect for the traffic laws by bicyclists will drastically increase the respect that motorists have for bicyclists as well.
Perhaps the greatest change that will evolve from increased bicyclists on the road is that we'll pare down the total number of laws in the current glut. Many are vehicle-centric, such as the law that says you have to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Much of the opposition to bike paths and bike lanes now seems to be centered on the proposition that bicycling is a frivolous activity engaged in mostly by tree-huggers, rather than the much-needed commitment to global sustainability that's going to be required to keep humanity afloat for generations to come. The goal should be the enaction of common-sense traffic laws that protect all road consumers regardless of the mode of transportation, as well as the abandonment of laws, like speed limits, that are almost universally flaunted, disrespected, and disregarded, and that serve instead to turn a nation of well-meaning, tax-paying citizens into incidental criminals forced to spend eight hours over two evenings in early December imprisoned in a community college classroom with a scruffy, middle-aged psych professor and a group of teenage derelicts.
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Pretty soon everyone will have a cell phone (and we won't need people to sell them). Pew Research has found that 85 percent of Americans now own at least one of the mobile communications devices. The widespread use of the technology has reached this extraordinary height after only 20 years on the market, catching on faster than cable TV or personal computers. But there are still a few
hold-outs.
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New Jersey rock band Bon Jovi has been given the honor of performing the first concert in the history of the new Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band were passed over, having been the
last act (and the final 5 shows) in the outgoing Giants Stadium in the same Meadowlands Sports Complex earlier this month. (Springsteen even wrote
a song about the old girl.) The
Deadspin sports website drops a little science on all of us in breaking down the conflict between Bon Jovi and Springsteen:
Who does deserve this highest of honors?
The TV Festival so nice they scheduled it twice
Plans are moving forward on two Moeller TV Festivals for this season. TV Fest VIII is set for Saturday, November 14th, at my house in Des Moines (site of MTFs VI and VII).
Then, during a still-undetermined weekend in January or February, the TV Festival will travel south of the border to Lenexa, Kansas, home of friend David Levenhagen, for Moeller TV Festival VIII.5: "The Baseball Festival," with all baseball-themed episodes of your favorite television classics.
The viewing schedule for the faster-approaching Des Moines event will be unveiled in short order. Your old favorites will be there, along with episodes of at least five shows that have never been viewed at a TV Festival before. As usual, Aaron and I welcome your episode requests for the popular "Open Remote" segment. Please email them to us at
christophermmoeller@msn.com and/or
atmoeller@hotmail.com. RSVPs are requested at the same. Information on the Kansas event will be forthcoming as well.
Can't wait to see you on the 14th.
Things I liked that no one else did
Chris Rock hosting the Oscars
Oliver Stone's "W."
Pontiacs
Brad Thompson as the Cardinals' fifth starter
Boston Market restaurants
Norm MacDonald on "Weekend Update"
Balloon hoaxes
The color episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show"
Ewoks
The last "Seinfeld"
Gary Carter (This guy's so white though that, in the '80s, teammates Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden reportedly tried to snort him.)
The second Darrin on "Bewitched"
Unprotected sex
Bread (the band)
Widespread Panic (not the band)
Dennis Miller on "Monday Night Football"
Jell-O Pudding Pops (It seems like people liked these, but where are they?)
The filmography of Tom Arnold
The discography of Tim McCarver
John McEnroe's talk show
Confederate junkie broadcaster faces opposition
It's often said today that there is so much media in existence that a person can isolate him or herself by getting the news only from the outlets with which they already agree. If you're a liberal, you keep yourself up-to-date with Rachel Maddow, and if you're a conservative, you can follow along with the headlines by watching Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and a bevy of leggy, blonde GOP spokesmodels on Fox News.
Rush Limbaugh knows this, and he's been playing that card this week on his radio show. A large number of progressives, African-American commentators, public advocates, the head of the players union, and now even a pair of team owners have spoken out against the prospect of Limbaugh buying into the NFL cartel of owners by purchasing the St. Louis Rams (disclosure: my favorite NFL team). Meanwhile, a number of African-American players have said or implied that they would refuse to play for a Limbaugh-led club. Limbaugh's response, as it is every time he's confronted by opposition in "the mainstream" of American life, is that his critics don't listen to his show, and that they're taking all of his past "controversial" comments out of context.
Well, that argument falls flat here. I have listened to Rush's program. I listened to all three hours of that fucker's show every day for almost four years, from 1997 to 2000. I had to. I operated the audio board during the afternoons when his show would air, and still does, on WHO Radio in Des Moines. Do I think that Rush is a racist? Maybe. He raises the specter of persecution against white racists on a semi-hourly basis. He is a capitalist, and that's often the same thing. What I do know for certain is this-- the man is a constant complainer. His whole act is predicated on the financially-lucrative truism that many white men liked things a lot better when they didn't have to compete with women, or men and women of color, for career and economic advancement. And while he pretends to care most of all about "freedom" in America and not giving any minorities "preferential treatment," he never cops to the fact that the entire system is actually rigged-- unless it's being rigged against him.
That's why-- for me-- Limbaugh's plight to own an NFL team and the ongoing desperation in his life to be loved back by an institution that he loves so much (and make no mistake, Rush is clearly a man who is underloved-- the guy could be a psychotherapist's life's work) is not so much about his right to buy a football team or about other team owners' hesitation to subject themselves to the daily controversial public commentary of a business partner. It's about how hysterically funny I find this all to be. The Germans call it
Schadenfreude. Limbaugh has made himself a fabulously wealthy man over the last two decades by dividing Americans on gender, ethnicity, and belief system, labeling and denigrating everybody he disagrees with consistent with only his terms. He claims the audience and loyalty of millions, but the trade-off is that he's alienating everybody else to get them. Rush has human needs and desires though too, and unfortunately, one of them (his having been a fat child who now wants to pal around with the jocks during middle-age) requires that he land himself firmly in the mainstream of American cultural life. And, as he well knows, the barn door closed on that prospect years ago-- right when his television venture went down in flames.
An ESPN anchor this morning said that Limbaugh was facing opposition to his bid because of his comments six years ago on that network that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the news media was "desirous that a black quarterback do well." The radio host contends he was treated unfairly in that instance because he was being critical of the "liberal news media," not McNabb, but it's still a terribly divisive statement, and those are bad for business in the world of Corporate America unless you're in the business he's used to of only "narrowcasting" on radio to the angry white males.
If NFL owners reject Limbaugh-- and they will soon enough-- it won't be because they disagree with Limbaugh's politics. Political fundraising disclosures reveal they probably overwhelmingly agree. In fact, that's likely a healthy part of why Rush wants to be a member of their exclusive club. Part of the joy of becoming a "new-money" multimillionaire, I would think, would be that you could then rub elbows with the possessors of the "old-money." No, it will be instead because his well-known public divisiveness is bad for the business of everybody else in the club. He would be a public relations disaster each new time an African-American player announced that he didn't want to sign with the Rams.
The McNabb comment was hardly the only one that is now causing Limbaugh harm. A couple others, uttered during the otherwise safe hours of his broadcast on the EIB ("Excellence in Broadcasting") Network when only the dittoheads are usually listening, are more alarming still-- boldly racist, in fact, and even defamatory towards the NFL. Among them:
"
The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There I said it.""The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."And my personal favorite:
"We didn't have slavery in this country for 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark." Yep, and I'm an idiot for equating capitalism with racism.
ESPN ran an audio clip of Limbaugh crying about the opposition to his bid on his radio show this week. As usual, he was playing the anti-elitism angle even as the news release for his ownership group announced that he couldn't disclose the terms of the specific offer for the Rams "because of a confidentiality clause in our agreement with Goldman Sachs." Yes indeed, a partnership with the bailout kings of Wall Street is certainly an anti-elite position to be in and a powerful example of pulling one up by his own boot straps. It's almost as inspiring as the time Rush got his first job in radio because his uncle owned the station.
Does Rush Limbaugh have a right to buy a professional football team? Of course he does. But then so too do tens of millions of African-Americans, and yet strangely, even though 70% of NFL players are black, none of them actually do. NFL owners, who pride themselves on the diversity of their enterprise, recognize this delicate and unfortunate fact, and understand that Limbaugh's entry into their exclusive club will only draw unneeded attention to the void when it was well-established in the U.S. decades ago now that if you want to go about the business of exclusivity and continuing to toast wealthy colleagues who look just like you, do it quietly. Rush, for everything he is-- and isn't, is not quiet.
The satisfying part of this for me is that when Limbaugh is denied entry, he won't be denied entry by Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Harry Edwards or Donovan McNabb, it will be by overwhelmingly conservative white males who look and think just like him. Americans that support an inclusive society, you see, have made their feelings known that Limbaugh's participation in the NFL would be bad for business. Many of them might be fed up with seeing "Crips and Bloods" fight it out on their televisions on Sunday afternoon, but many more look at the same screen and see their fathers, brothers, and friends.
Feingold on Afghanistan
In an upcoming interview with
Rolling Stone, Senator Russ Feingold asks why the U.S. has to invade Afghanistan in order to fight al Qaeda. After all, we're confronting al Qaeda in countries all over the world.
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President Obama's record on Afghanistan, Iraq, and detainees have made him unworthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Only his rhetoric-- and the fact that he's not George Bush-- measure up. He should decline the award. His stature, here and abroad, would rise immeasurably if he did.
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The Cardinals, swept out of the Division Series by the Dodgers on Saturday, really missed retired outfielder Jim Edmonds in their series against Los Angeles. In 22 Division Series games with the Cards between 2000 and 2006, Edmonds batted .333 (27 for 81), scored 17 runs, hit 7 doubles, 7 home runs, and drove in 17. The Cardinals won 17 of those 22 games.
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Superblogger Ken Levine and LA Times sportswriter T.J. Simers both wrote this week about their experience in St. Louis while covering the Dodgers over the weekend. Levine published
a St. Louis travelogue, but missed a few subtleties of the region-- for example, Anheuser Busch was sold to Belgiums, not Germans; and Steak & Shake restaurants serve Steakburgers, not T-bones. Simers is
panicked that the NFL Rams might try to return to Los Angeles.
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I got a few other predictions wrong-- really, the Cubs, White Sox, Diamondbacks, and Mets, what was I thinking?-- but I want to remind everyone that I forecasted a Yankees/Dodgers World Series
all the way back on March 18th. Seven months later, I'm still standing by it.
Holliday's boner
This year's October baseball coverage on the CM Blog may wind up being abbreviated. The Cardinals have dropped the first two in the best of three series against the Dodgers.
No one could have written last night's story that Matt Holliday, the fantastic slugger whose arrival in August catapulted the Cardinals to the National League Central Division title, would lose a fly ball in the lights with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 2. I confess that the value, or lack of value, of Holliday's glove ability never even crossed my mind during the last two months. Is he a good fielder or is he a liability in left? I never even weighed the question. It's like losing a game because Chris Carpenter ran the bases badly.
Is Holliday's dropped ball, which opened the floodgates to a two-run walk-off Dodgers rally, the Cardinals' "Bartman" moment? It's an interesting question. I say it is only if we acknowledge that a Cubs' "Bartman" moment is not the same as a Cardinals' "Bartman" moment. The Cardinals, for example, do not have a 95-year-old championship drought in 2009, as the Cubs had in 2003. The Cardinals have a three-year championship drought. The Cardinals were not a game away from the pennant last night, as the Cubs were in Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS. And Steve Bartman did not hit a home run during the same game that the inauspicious baseball clanged off his glove, as Holliday did.
I've got a knot the size of a grapefruit in my stomach this morning, and nobody feels worse than Matt Holliday, but the Cardinals still survive, and Holliday, a Hall-of-Fame-caliber player, can make it up to all of us by busting out offensively yet in this series and then signing a long-term deal with the Cards this winter. He shouldn't have to worry about any death threats either way.
2:30pm addendum: On the bright side, it will be a golden moment in the history of Cardinals fans when Matt Holliday gets a standing ovation in his first at-bat of Game 3 Saturday night at Busch Stadium.
An anniversary this week in Afghanistan
The Bush/Obama War on Afghanistan rages on now after eight full years. President Obama has ruled out a paring-down of forces in the region, and was meeting this afternoon with advisers on
whether to orchestrate a major "surge" (re: "escalation") of violence instead-- an increase of up to 40,000 additional troops. Leading the charge on Capitol Hill for the escalation is Senator John McCain, who was roundly rejected by the American people in his bid for president in 2008. His foreign policy agenda is about to be adopted part and parcel anyway.
Meanwhile, national security advisor James Jones
said of Afghanistan recently, "The Al Quada presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies."
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Fired by whom? David Letterman doesn't work for CBS. He works for Worldwide Pants. CBS doesn't have the authority to fire the host for unpopular actions. He's not Tommy Smothers. The network doesn't produce the Late Show, and here's how you can tell that from watching: It doesn't suck. If it did, the Late Show would be focus-group-approved crap with beholden hosts like the Tonight Show or the Jay Leno Show. Incidently, CBS head Les Moonves dated a subordinate himself, and then married her-- network news reporter Julie Chen. Life happens, it seems, even when you're on the job.
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A woman has been appointed to the Supreme Court, the Philadelphia Phillies are defending World Series champions, and now
Terry Branstad is considering a run to become Iowa's governor. 2009 is the second coming of 1981. If Yes splits up again, I'm gonna be pissed.
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Who killed the 2009 New York Mets? It's all here in
a timeline whodunnit from Vanity Fair. The cold case investigation involves Bernie Madoff, a relief pitcher whose last name is "Putz," the reputed
Sports Illustrated cover jinx, paranoid and vindictive team executives, a woman who got her arm caught in a stadium toilet, Bababooey, and sadly, even for Mets haters, the federal treasury.
Just a little more Dave
There's a modicum of outrage in the national media and in internet comment threads (my favorite medium) about David Letterman's having sex with Late Show staffers (at least one) prior to his wedding in March. I would put that percentage of outraged news consumers at a very unscientific 20% or so. The other 80 seems to be yawning-- from a moral standpoint, even if they find the details of the affairs and especially the extortion plot, moderately to wildly interesting. I call bogus on my own statistical estimates. Somebody needs to say this: That 20% would be down to probably just 4 or 5% if we subtracted all of the people in definitionally-monogamous relationships who have to
feign outrage so that their significant other doesn't think they're cheating themselves.
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If you think that Letterman, a late night comedian, must be held to the same ethical standards as a public employee/politician to avoid being labeled a hypocrite, then you're just not getting it. A TV comedy host is not there to provide moral leadership to the nation. He or she is not paid in tax dollars. (The Worldwide Pants production company hasn't even applied for a federal bailout.) Dave did not ride to his Late Show hosting gig in 1993 atop a family values platform. His job is not to save our souls. His job is to be funny on television.
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It would be hypocritical for me to condemn Dave for dating co-workers over the years, as I have done it on two different occasions, and have pursued it numerous other times (without success). Dating a superior or employee may make things even more complicated, but any criticisms from Dave's Late Show staff (even from former lovers) have still not been forthcoming after almost a week since the public disclosure. If you didn't know that Dave dated staffers, you haven't been paying attention or watching the show. Twenty-seven years ago, he was publicly involved with his first head writer, now-noted author Merrill Markoe, when he began the "Late Night" show on NBC in 1982. I refuse to believe that having a sexual relationship or encounter with an employee or an employer is, in and of itself, a crime or even an ethical breach. This goes beyond the restriction of any workplace conduct code into the protective realm of basic human rights. The heart wants what it wants.
What the wild card hath wrought 2009
This is an annual blog feature in which we highlight the annual wreckage caused by the wild card system in Major League Baseball. This year's edition is sponsored by the popular VHS release
"Larry 'Bud' Melman Shows You How To Play Pool Like a Champion".
Some people enjoy watching 2nd place teams battle it out in the post-season after the 162-game regular season has been deemed insufficient in settling the standings, but I don't. Baseball commentators, in support of the wild card, routinely make the mathematical mistake of measuring what the wild card adds to the pennant race (i.e. keeping more teams in contention) but failing to subtract what it often robs from us (i.e. classic pennant races between 1st and 2nd place teams).
This year, again, is no exception. Not that there were many good playoff races anyway, but there were a couple. The wild card winners in each league, Boston and Colorado, won handedly, and of course, their seasons have been extended by the wild card, which baseball loves, especially (only?) in the case of the Red Sox, but there were two great divisional races that came down to the final weekend and the wild card system robbed us of one. In the American League Central Division, the Twins and Tigers are headed towards a one-game playoff on Monday, and that will be great fun for both clubs, but the National League Western Division also came down to the final weekend, and if not for the wild card, not only would the Dodgers and Rockies have been unsettled until the second to last game of the season (the Dodgers clinched last night), but they were matched up head-to-head for the final three games on the schedule. Instead of the dramatics of a head-to-head showdown between western rivals this weekend, with elimination at stake for the losing club, the Dodgers and Rockies instead had to decide whether they would each go full-tilt through Sunday for home-field advantage or simply rest up for the playoffs, and now there's only a 25% chance (in theory) that the division rivals will even face each other in October.
Only an entity like Major League Baseball would be stupid enough to have a(n ideally-sized) 16-team league (the National) and then divide that league into three divisions, instead of 2, 4, or even 8. Four would do quite nicely, of course. Then you'd have four first-place teams duking it out in October in the NL.
The American League has 14 teams, of course, which is as fucked-up a number as baseball deserves for all of its wild expansion over the years. But the Junior Circuit is a necessary evil so if they want to keep three divisions and a wild card winner over there, that's up to them. It would still be three rounds of the post-season for both the National and the American. Why does the NL have to suffer with 3 divisions?
Of course, we'll never see any sensibility of this stripe, especially in the American League, because that association contains what baseball incorrectly assumes to be its greatest financial asset-- the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry. No, it's not enough to have New York and Boston battling it out on the field all summer long, up to 20 times head-to-head. They also have to be able to go mano-y-mano in the playoffs every other year, and maybe someday, if we're lucky, in the World Series too. This rivalry is the secret
real reason that the wild card exists.
You'll find Yankees and Red Sox logos and images on all Major League Baseball advertisements, post-season promos, Mastercard commercials, and even those annoying Pepsi-Cola ads this summer, in which the only important baseball figures throughout history, evidently, are former and current Yankees, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson. (Fuck you, Pepsi. I like Coke, anyway, and it's #1. Isn't Pepsi really just the New York Mets of the soft-drink industry?)
You only have to look as far as the National Football League to see how much this marketing strategy hurts baseball. It's not the amount of money that teams spend on players that separates franchises financially, it's how the teams are disproportionately promoted. There are jaw-dropping sales disparities between teams when only a small handful are promoted as "national teams." Sports fans in Kansas City, as just one example, believe that Major League Baseball couldn't give a bigger shit about them, and they're right. Meanwhile, Kansas Citians love their football team, and the NFL, even though the Chiefs are equally as lousy each season as the baseball Royals.
In Major League Baseball, the television networks and the corporate sponsors wag the dog, and FOX television and Pepsi want the Yankees, and they want the Red Sox. Fans of the other 28 teams are all forced to dance to that tune. So hurray for the American League wild card winners, your 2009 Boston Red Sox! It looks like they're on a collision course with the Yankees once again.
Late night confessional
It wasn't my intention to blog from work today, but it annoys me that I got scooped on this David Letterman story. Not scooped, exactly, but the headlines everywhere else today are about Letterman's on-air confessional last night, and the top story on my blog this morning is still last week's late night Nielson ratings. I hereby announce that the popular Chrisbits feature is being discontinued indefinitely.
From a television standpoint, the talk show host's admission that he has had sexual relations with female members of the Late Show staff had the curious effect of providing an extraordinary hour of television Thursday night. The Associated Press is
calling his performance "brilliant" this morning, and said that Letterman took viewers "on an extraordinary journey that was part confessional, part entertainment, and wholly, if jarringly, hypnotic." It wasn't the first time.
Thursday's Late Show goes to show what an extraordinary broadcaster Letterman is. This is an opinion that's been expressed many times on this blog. Letterman is nothing if not brutally honest, and he has an extraordinary capacity to feel the mood of his audience. The honesty reveals the irony here, and Letterman's insistence on tackling this issue head-on, over-the-air, and in the immediate aftermath of yet another bizarre and frightening extortion plot against him. After being stalked by a mentally-deranged woman who broke into his home pretending to be his wife, and then a kidnapping attempt against his son in Montana a year or two ago, has any entertainment celebrity seemingly so detached from the actual glamour of Hollywood ever been so routinely harassed by the American populace. It's very strange, and might in some bizarre way be actually fueled by the unique way people connect with the star. None of his competitors come remotely close to combining humor with pathos, sometimes bordering on terror, in the compelling way that Dave does. One could never say that his network's most highly paid star has not given his life completely to his television show.
It reveals a lot about the nature of Letterman's job as well. Even a sitcom star could hide behind a comic persona in character, but Letterman has to face his audience, as himself, every night. There's no hiding when something like this erupts. Yet it's impossible to even think of Leno or Conan taking their viewers on a ride like Letterman did last night, and that's not because they're necessarily living their private lives more virtuously than he is. Dave seems to ground himself by his peculiar ability to unburden himself to his public. The late night veteran was also fortunate Thursday to have a good-natured talk-show champ like Woody Harrelson to bring out from behind the curtain in the aftermath of his narrative. "I'm happy to be here on such an auspicious evening," Harrelson quipped.
The television host's admission will put him back in the crosshairs of some of his detractors-- fans of Sarah Palin coming immediately to mind. Letterman seems to be viewed increasingly as a political commentator, a target of the right, which may say more about how the right has decided to cast itself against all of showbusiness than it does about anything else? But what has actually transpired here? The news reports are of a consenting, at-the-time-unmarried adult having sex with other consenting, presumably unmarried adults.
TMZ is reporting that staffer Stephanie Birkitt, who Late Show fans will recall from her many appearances on the air (She always seemed to me a female version of Dave), was the other-- or at least
one of the other-- consenting adults in question, and that the affair occurred not only before Letterman got married to his long-time girlfriend in March, but before Letterman's son Harry was born in 2003. It was revealed not because Birkitt took the affair public (I'm putting a lot of stock in TMZ's reporting at this point), but because some scumbag extortionist stole her diary.
There's not really much news or controversy here. It's just a bizarre reason to watch Letterman work his on-air magic once again.
Chrisbits
Yes, Chrisbits.
Screw you too.
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It's
all Dave now in late night.
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Is the Jay Leno Show really
going to kill prime-time network television? Maybe, but there are now three different series editions of "CSI," two of "NCIS," and
two of "Criminal Minds". Is prime-time network television worth saving?
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I love it when Roger Ebert
waxes nostalgic for old city Chicago.
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This is why you can't stop watching baseball even when your team has been eliminated.
