My business proposal for Man-Ram, birthday wishes for O'Fat and Gus Johnson gets the heave-ho

- Let’s say you’re having a six-nation summit on halting the nuclear capacities of Nation X….wouldn’t it be good idea to have Nation X in attendance? That would seem like a given, but apparently not for the six countries meeting in China to discuss putting the brakes in North Korea’s development of nuclear capacities. North Korea is boycotting the meetings because of a dispute over $25 million in sanctions that have been imposed on it by the international community. So basically you have six other countries sitting around discussing another nation and what it should do, but all that nation is going to do is ignore whatever those six countries say and keep doing what it wants. It’s akin to staging an intervention for a friend who’s an alcoholic, only that person won't go anywhere near the intervention. Kudos to those who have made the obvious observation that North Korea boycotting the talks “severely diminishes” the chance that they will help in the quest for disarmament. I suppose these insightful geniuses would also agree that the exclusion of Northwest Oklahoma A&M University from the NCAA Tournament “severely diminishes” the chances that NWOAM will be winning this year’s tournament. Good work, people, good work all around on this one.

- By now, the Manny Ramirez story about him selling a top-of-the-line grill on eBay for $3,000 is ubiquitous. Everyone has heard it and has an amused reaction to it, but it got me thinking about ways to capitalize on this “Manny on eBay” phenomenon. The affable, erstwhile outfielder for the Boston Red Sox can cut throws from the center fielder, disappear into the Green Monster to take a leak during games and wear sunglasses with an MP3 player in them during a game, so the following scenario isn't all that far-fetched. Why not offer a service on eBay whereby you could rent Manny out to pimp your eBay items, for a small fee of course? Reportedly, the grill he is hawking isn't even his; it belongs to a neighbor that Man-Ram is trying to help out. So why couldn’t you plunk down $50 bucks for Manny to pose with your digital camera, used TV or exercise bike and then throw it up on eBay? You’d make back that $50 easily with the extra cash people would bid for your item now that it’s Man-Ram endorsed. Throw in that autographed baseball he’s offering with the grill and you might even triple your original asking price for your item. Call me, Manny, I think we could have something here……..

- A very happy, calorie-heavy birthday to Rosie O’Fat, who turns 45 today. As a gift to the ginormous, gargantuan, bloated daytime TV talker, I’m going to pass along a helpful piece of advice I like to call the 6-to-1 rule: if you are over the age of 35 and your weight is more than six times your current age, it’s time for a drastic alteration of your eating and exercise habits. Yet I get the feeling that I’m going to be seeing images in the next few days of a porky, fooded-up O’Fat shoving her fat, ugly face (Donald Trump’s words, not mine) into a birthday cake as horrified onlookers try to get out of her way, lest they lose a hand in her rush to wolf down the entire freakin’ cake. The only possible upside to all of this is the potential that the Donald will be motivated to unleash another round of verbal mortar shots at O’Fat, because that’s the best present any of us could hope to get on this day.

- In the down time between the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament and the upcoming Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games, one of the hotly debated stories has been an announcer, namely Gus Johnson of CBS. If you’ve watched any of the tournament, then you’ve undoubtedly heard Gus’s enthusiastic, borderline-nervous breakdown style of calling a game. His excitement and energy are at an astonishingly high level during games, to the point that you wonder if his head is going to pop right off his body with steam pouring from his neck. Well, normally Gus gets to call games beyond the first weekend of the tournament, but with CBS fawning over James Brown (why, I don’t know - this is, by the way, the broadcaster James Brown, not the now-deceased Godfather of Soul), Brown has been given one of the top broadcasting positions for the tournament in order to secure his services for hosting CBS’s NFL pregame show. Brown made that demand, and CBS caved in, so he gets to announce this weekend’s games, Johnson does not. I’m not one of those pro-Gus Johnson honks who thinks the guy is a basketball announcing savant (Bill Raftery is my guy for that), but I do think it’s a negative for CBS and for basketball fans to not have Johnson around for this weekend’s games. A lot of the buzz around this story is some conservative, stick-up-their-butt pundits who feel Johnson’s uber-enthusiastic persona is a bad thing on broadcasts. As someone who has pissed off a media member quite recently on press row for being too enthusiastic, I tend to side with Gus on this issue. I’d rather have him announcing than a pompous, arrogant, self-centered blowhard like Billy Packer, whose surly, caustic, bitter demeanor not only ruins the games, it makes you wonder if he’s even enjoying the game or if he just enjoys being a whining horse’s arse. If CBS were smart, it would ditch Packer and his flat-lining partner, Jim Nantz, and give Gus Johnson and Bill Raftery the primo assignments for the tournament.

- Have I mentioned how pissed off I am about the jacked-up nature of thus year’s TV schedule? It’s as if the networks are intentionally trying to jerk us around so we don’t know when our favorite shows will be on and when they will have new episodes broadcast. There was the prolonged hiatus starting right after Thanksgiving, a break that lasted varying amounts of time for each individual show, even within a certain network. So you had shows coming back at random intervals during January and February, and you were never sure if your shows were back to new episodes yet or when to expect them. Then, just as we started to settle back into a decent rhythm, POW! In come a bevy of new shows (most of them crap, i.e. the Pussycat Skanks reality show, the newest installments of American Karaoke and America’s Next Top Runway Bimbo) and then you had some shows showing new episodes, with others taking another extended break to make room for these new shows for eight weeks or so. Then, for example, most every regular show on a network like the CW was on break from new episodes except Smallville, which just returned from its winter break on March 15, just in time to collide with the first night of March Madness. Thanks for nothing, TV networks, you’ve taken your normal moronic hijinks to a new level, and in the process you’ve managed to confuse and discombobulate the very people you supposedly want to watch your shows each week.