There was a time, in my youth, in which I’d have appreciated basketball games beginning at nearly 11:00 and ending long after midnight.
Actually, I still do appreciate such.
Just… not… the next… morning.
Guh.
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A page-one story in Sunday’s Washington Post describes Virginia as a “purple state.”
I live here… it’s about as purple as the Jolly Green Giant.
The way I’d describe Virginia is a red state with an embarrassing blotch of dark blue at the top, and unfortunately that blotch blotches out the lower 95 percent of the commonwealth where real Virginians (read: real Americans) live. The blue blotch is where Beltway types and various overpaid government employees and contractors live alongside five or six of us who’ve actually traveled through flyover country.
This was one of the many things I didn’t realize before moving here but discovered quickly upon crossing the blue border into enemy territory.
Trouble is the government types are spreading like locusts across the state.
The real part of the state.
Dear Lord, please don’t let us become another Maryland.
If I’m ever so fortunate to have a front-page story about my death in The Washington Post, please do not let the headline read: “Exuding the dangerous appeal of rock music.”
Huh?
How about “Rock God passes to other side of mortality,” or something like that. It’s difficult to sum up deities in so few words.
Perhaps no one described the life of Charles Anderson Berry better than John Lennon, who once opined, “If you tried to give rock-and-roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”
There are literally thousands of other musicians of much greater caliber and renown than I who have called Chuck Berry this and that and the patient zero of rock and the man who got them started, etc., etc. Let me add no more. The thing I have said for years is that if I could go back in time and perform with any musician, living or dead, any band, any act, any setting, I would choose Chuck Berry in about 1956. Getting to play piano with Chuck Berry singing and playing guitar. That’s my dream gig.
I should have included Chuck Berry on my Mount Rushmore of persons born in 1926 who’ve been at their current gigs for waaayyy longer than anyone might have thought (see “Royal birthday”). Chuck was still performing as of very recently, and in fact will have a new album released posthumously later this year.
And through the magic of recorded sound, of course, the Man will never really be gone, right?
Gods have a way of doing that.
If an NCAA Tournament falls in the forest without any buzzer beaters does it still make a sound?
First snowstorm of the year on March 14? Thanks for proving me right, Mother Nature.
About a year and a half ago I posted on this site my theory that a year is not 365 days but more like 367 or 368, and that we’ve gotten off track to the point that we’re now off by several months. It’s actually only December or January right now, so you may still have some more winter to go. You can read the entire text here.
Love being right all the time.
Brackets are out, snow is in the forecast… yes, March is really here.
And was that me watching the end of the Rockets-Cavs game last night? Scoreboard watching?
Don’t look now but my hometown Wizards are but two games out of first.
This is why we keep on living.
Both of my local pro teams are on western road trips these days, making for late nights of TV watching and consequently grumpy mornings.
Tough break? No. I considerate it good practice for several weekends of late night college basketball games, starting…
Now!
The modern world has so few truly classy people left among its ranks, and Monday it lost one of the classiest: Robert Osborne.
Himself an actor and then author, Osborne will be remembered best for his role as presenter on Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel somehow still popular in an era in which one can view pretty much any movie at any time on any device. Why would anyone wait to see a movie on TCM instead?
Robert Osborne.
Like hearing your name pronounced by a great sports broadcaster or perhaps by St. Peter, you wanted your movie introduced by Robert Osborne. Sort of a cross between Dick Clark, Robert Redford, and Vin Scully, Osborne brought warmth, good looks, geniality, and an encyclopedic knowledge of films to audiences on TCM for more than two decades. One of his finest hours came in 2015 at the 20th anniversary of TCM, a retrospective at which I marveled and subsequently chronicled here.
In 2014 Mr. Osborne said in a New York Times interview that he was often approached by strangers who told him he got them through tough times. The movies were an escape for them, just as they had been in the ’30s and ’40s. Perhaps movies have always been an escape for us, there when we need them and still there when we don’t.
And thanks to the many, many hours he spent recording what he did best, Mr. Osborne, though no longer presenting live, is still there when we need him.
There was a much bigger splash last winter when Playboy announced it would no longer show nude pictorials in its magazine than when it reversed that decision last month.
Hefner’s had marriages that lasted longer than this.
With its March/April 2017 issue, on newsstands now, Playboy has gone back to its roots, the non-nude experiment having lasted exactly one year.
A sigh of relief should be our expected response, no? An April Fool’s joke revealed and survived? Was it all just a publicity stunt? Or did the bean counters who seem to run the enterprise now really think it would be a good idea and then reverse course when the new beans were counted?
There are several changes in the current issue one might discover on a second or third reading beyond who’s covering what parts of whose body. I mentioned last week that I’m in the issue and in fact I am, not naked but among the letter writers in the opinion section. There has been a dearth of letters to the editor in recent issues and I’m happy to see this section has been expanded.
Of course I appreciated seeing my own name in this month’s pages. But mine wasn’t the name featured most prominently. That distinction belongs to a certain Mr. Hefner, not Hugh but his youngest son Cooper, 25 years old but now the number two man listed on the masthead, just under his dad’s. His title is “Chief Creative Officer,” whatever that means (read: my daddy started the company), a pretty good promotion from two-thirds of the way down the page last month. Cooper’s got a friendly from-the-publisher-type piece in the issue’s early pages, introducing himself (as though we didn’t know) and his “Playboy philosophy.” Honestly, it reads like a bad op-ed in a college newspaper, but at least he seems to be on the right side of freedom. There are the usual jabs at so-called oppression from today’s political types, and the modern obsession with proving one’s goodness by proclaiming a tolerance to gay marriage (the most pressing issue on Earth, if you haven’t heard). Elder Hefner’s original “Playboy Philosophy” reads more like Ayn Rand than anything else, though for 60 years Playboy has been nominally laughing at the political right. Obviously it’s too early to tell exactly how Playboy will treat the current administration, though I fear it will miss a golden opportunity by siding more with Hollywood and the mainstream media than with the libertarian millennial it professes to court.
I look forward to reading (yes, reading) this new new era of Playboy. It really does look different compared to the past year. They’ve reintroduced content staples such as the “World of Playboy” and the “Playboy Advisor,” and have returned to the scrapbook format that differentiated it from the slick-look magazines it seemed to mimic the past 12 months. (They also stopped that stupid James Franco feature.) The jokes are back, and the one-page “playback” is now an entire section called “Heritage,” highlighting the magazine’s history, the very idea I think should be promoted while concurrently looking to the future. I like that they stuck with the new paper size, a little wider that the issues prior to 2016, and the quality of the paper has improved as well. The only thing I really find disappointing, other than the out-of-place ad and coupons for Harbor Freight Tools (who let that one slip through?) is the quality of the pictures. Yes, the photographs are in fact worse even though, yes, one does now get to see boobs. (This is 2017… they’re not that hard to find.) It seems as though the photographers were trying harder when they were more restricted, and the photos of the past year, most of which had a sort of vintage tint or filter to them, really looked better. Current editors can learn something from that strange year of modesty.
And when they finally get around to including my picture in the mag as opposed to just my name, I’ll insist upon the greatest of care.
On this day 11 years ago I was on a 17-hour bus ride home to say goodbye to my best friend for all eternity, Joe Sullivan.
It was a Friday that day too, probably the worst Friday I’ve ever had.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think about Joe every day… I think about him every 15 minutes, and more on days like this. I can’t even begin to imagine what his life would be like or my life would be like if he were still around. Too sad to even think about.
That’s pretty much it.