- Barbara Walters used to have dignity, self-respect and credibility, but in her latter years, the woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Rod Stewart and has interviewed more famous people than just about anyone appears to be on a path spiraling rapidly downward. When you spend your days bracketed by the likes of Joy Behar, Star Jones and Rosie O’Fat, that’s a good indication that you’re going the wrong direction in life. The clearest sign yet, though, came when Babs was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and her star was placed between that of the man-blouse-wearing, androgynous metrosexual, Ryan Seacrest, and one of the most annoying and worthless dance/pop girl groups of all time, Destiny’s Child. Didn’t it used to be an actual honor, reserved for truly noteworthy people, to get a star on the Walk of Fame? Now they’re giving them out to effeminate, hair-frosting freaks who host televised karaoke contests? Why even bother “awarding” them anymore, why not just auction them off to the highest bidder? Even that would lend more dignity to your “honor” than giving them out to Seacrest and his man blouses or the group who claims “Bootylicious” as its biggest hit. You need to pull out of this tailspin, Barbara, because if you don’t, you’re not going to be remembered as a respected broadcaster but as the woman Donald Trump cited for making a colossal mistake in bringing Rosie O’Fat to The View and having a star on the Walk of Fame next to the surly British judge’s butt buddy on American Karaoke.
- Thank the Lord, the NBA Finals are mercifully over. If I didn’t live in the Northeast Ohio area, I would have been saying that four or five days ago like the rest of the country, but at least I had the novelty of my hometown team making its first Finals appearance to make the small segments of the series that I forced myself to watch tolerable. Still, fans were subjected to four atrociously bad games, two of which featured San Antonio blowing out Cleveland, losing interest and allowing the Cavaliers to make the final score more respectable with a pointless late-game rally, and two of which featured some of the worst offense in basketball history. When ABC is showing graphics in the fourth quarter about what the record is for fewest points in an NBA Finals game, you know there’s some bad offense being played. It didn’t help matters that the Cavs were out-talented, out-hustled, out-hearted and out-smarted by the Spurs from the players all the way to the head coach. All in all, an abominably bad effort by the Cavs and one of the worst NBA Finals ever, so be glad it’s over and realize once again that college basketball is far and away superior to the NBA year after year.
- The members of the Traveling Wilburys were all better known for the individual careers, be it as solo acts or with the main bands, but on those all-too-infrequent occasions when these four men came together to record an album, the result was almost always pure musical magic. The Wilburys consisted of famed recording artists Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne. They all adopted, for purposes of the group, the uniform surname concept of groups like the Ramones. Now, the Traveling Wilburys are back, sort of, with a self-titled best-of collection that also contains a DVD. This album is a great reminder of the high level of music fans of the group came to know and expect and it’s one of the best I’ve heard this year. Among the standout tunes on the disc are favorites like Inside Out and New Blue Moon. Although the group is no more in the official sense after Harrison’s passing, but this is a great chance to relive the magic. If you’re a fan or hearing about the Traveling Wilburys for the first time, this is a two-disc slice of musical nirvana you’ll love.
- I could waste an entire paragraph coming up with sarcastic, mocking suggestions for the name of Britney Spears’ new album, which she has asked her “most diehard” fans to help her name. However, I’m going to take this in a different direction: Instead of a naming contest, why not let everyone vote on whether they want Brit to release another album, ever. Sounds like a good idea to me, mostly because 99.238% of Americans would vote an emphatic “no” based on my in-depth research. If you need any evidence as to why, go back and try listening to those awful pieces of musical drivel Spears calls her previous albums and you’ll understand why. Her only appeal, ever, was physical, and let’s be honest and say that after two kids and several years of hard partying, she looks nothing like the hot 18-year-old in the Catholic school girl outfit she initially sold herself as. She has bargain basement vocal skills, no songwriting talent and no depth to her material. Plus, in the interim between her last album and the time her new one comes out, several dozen other better-looking pop tarts will have emerged and taken Spears’ place. Stay gone, Brit, because no one misses you and you never contributed anything of worth to the music industry anyhow.
- The content meetings at People magazine have to be much, much shorter than they were five years or so ago. The reason for this trend is simple: there is no time wasted on what to put on the cover of each issue, as that has already been decided. A photo of a shirtless Matthew McConaughey will be fronting people magazine again this month for the umpteenth time in the past couple years, because apparently People’s editors are absolute Matt McConaughey whores and they don’t care who knows it. They could be talking about new summer blockbuster movies throughout an entire issue, they could be previewing the fall TV season, they could be talking about Jolie and Pitt adopting their forty-eighth foreign infant, and even though M. McConaughey has nothing to do with any of those topics, People would still stick a photo of him, sans shirt, on its cover. Zero points for the effort, People magazine, next month try putting actual thought into your cover photo and maybe you can come up with something we haven’t seen 34 times the past three years on your cover.
- Hmm, what to do if you’re single-handedly responsible for creating, starting, prolonging and sustaining an indefensible, idiotic, pointless, directionless abomination of a war and people won't stop ripping you for it……what to do, what to do. Oh, I know! Spark a debate on an unrelated, less important issue and hope that everyone forgets about that whole war thingy. Our intelligence-poor leader W. has taken to beating the drum of immigration reform and silently hoping that everyone forgets about the Mess O’ Potamia that he’s created over in Iraq. W. is now trying to revive an immigration bill in Congress that has stalled out and drawn harsh criticism from many congressional leaders. The bill calls for greater border security and a crackdown on the hiring of illegals, but also contains provisos for those same illegals to eventually become citizens despite their initially entering this country in unlawful fashion. W. even went as far as to make a rare visit to Capitol Hill to speak to senators directly, using short sentences and mostly monosyllabic words so as not to confuse himself, and tried to pump life back into the bill. Meanwhile, countless American soldiers were dying needlessly in Iraq and a multi-billion dollar unneeded war raged on, but what the heck, let’s focus on illegal immigrants instead! The leaders of both parties in the Senate announced that the bill could indeed be back on the agenda in the chamber as soon as next week. Meanwhile, still no timetable for leaving Iraq and no sign that we actually have a plan for what we’re doing there…………
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