It would be a cryin' shame if you bypassed this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth. I would imagine many tears would be shed once you found out what you missed on the Big Show -- and you would find out. I'd make sure of that.
I know where you live.
As you might have deduced, tears is the theme of our first big set on the Big Show. Tears, tears and more tears.
WE GOT folks denying them, attributing them to the Almighty, eradicating them from Earth, drowning in them and counting them. It's a veritable weep-a-thon.
Or not.
Frankly, I can't imagine anybody crying over this particular3 Chords & the Truth, unless it's tears of joy we're talkin' about. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
No, they weren't making that s*** up. At least not when they made Animal House in the late '70s.
Welcome to a slice of Louisiana State University as it was when I attended there. As a matter of fact The Real Animal House (above) was filmed there when I was a freshman. And the film didn't touch on half of the stories we heard about Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity -- the Dekes.
There was the time the Dekes got stiffed by a sorority for a formal, and then they sent over boxes of doughnuts, and. . . . No, can't tell that one.
And then, one time the Dekes. . . . No, can't tell that one either.
But there was the one thing about the deaf school and transistor radios. And the "generic" homecoming display for one (among many) of Jerry Stovall's lesser products as LSU football coach. I think that one got them on probation.
The only thing you have to know about your Mighty Favog, though, is that he considered all this pretty normal. Back in the day.
It's not amazing that Omaha boy Tim Halperin made it to Hollywood on American Idol -- I'm sure the audition for Westside High School's Amazing Technicolor Show Choir was a more arduous affair. No, really. I've seen ATSC in action. It's, like, the real-life Glee.
What will be truly amazing is if young Mr. Halperin survives Idol's relentless campaign to hammer round pegs into square prime-time holes in one artistic piece.
But what the kid has to fear is the giant American Idolizer machine that could turn him into the next big star like that blue-eyed soul guy from a few years back who we never saw again and whose name I can't remember, who last was seen playing an Indian-casino ballroom somewhere in flyover country.
Tune in next week.
P.S.: Oh, wait. I remembered the guy's name. Taylor Hicks.
There is a good reason the entire world hated the British Empire before it hated the American one.
This is it.
Obviously, wot we have here is a typical case of unfortunate British dentistry. It has led to a nasty oral infection, which has gone straight to the collective brain of not only the cast and crew of Top Gear, but also the entire British Broadcasting Corporation.
AND NOW it'll have to come out. The procedure is known by the coalition government as "austerity measures."
Before going under the mallet, however, producers of Top Gear issued the following non-apology apology to the Mexican government, which had condemned the program as "xenophobic":
“We are sorry if we have offended some people, but jokes centred on national stereotyping are a part of Top Gear’s humour, and indeed a robust part of our national humour. Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic; the French being arrogant and the Germans being over organised. When we do it, we are being rude, yes, and mischievous, but there is no vindictiveness behind the comments.
“This stereotyping humour is in itself a factor in the tolerance which the ambassador states is so prevalent in Britain.
“In line with that tradition, stereotype based comedy is allowed within BBC guidelines in programmes where the audience has clear expectations of that being the case, as indeed it is with Top Gear. Whilst it may appear offensive to those who have not watched the programme or who are unfamiliar with its humour, the Executive Producer has made it clear to the Ambassador that that was absolutely not the show’s intention.”
IN OTHER WORDS,"We British are a bunch of pricks. Do you have a problem with that? Now you may resume your siesta."
Next on BBC 1, Gordon Ramsay tells Dago jokes whilst beating his kitchen help to death with a frozen haggis.
It's a windy, snowy and frosty night in Omaha, where the Midwest fades out and the wild and woolly Plains take hold.
A night like this, here in the rolling hills of eastern Nebraska, reminds one of being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox. A day like the one preceding this February prairie night reminds one of . . . being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox.
With the light left on.
Horton, by the way, never defrosts his icebox. He probably should take care of that.
He probably will . . . this spring.
WHENEVER I MENTION life in the Gret White Nawth to family and friends back in Louisiana -- particularly the unrelenting rituals of the dead of a Nebraska winter, like braving the blowing snow . . . dressing in many layers . . . shoveling the snow . . . reshoveling what's drifted -- the reaction is nearly universal. Horror is what it is.
People think I'm nuts. People think the North Pole must be pretty close to Omaha, and that nobody in his right mind is gonna live at the damn North Pole.
And regular snowfall is a sure sign of God's wrath upon the terminally stupid.
Of course, this reaction comes from a state where the last white Democrat will change his party registration to "R" by 2013. That is, if the world doesn't come to an end in December 2012, all life extinguished by a rogue glacier sliding southward from somewhere near . . . Omaha.
Maybe St. Paul. All dem places up Nawth is all de same, cher -- cold, cold.
Frankly, I think the Republicanization of my home state somehow may the be source and the sustenance of the Southern horror at all things cold and snowy. Snow, after all, is socialist.
Think about it: It matters not a whit whether one has the finest, most meticulously manicured lawn in the entire upper Midwest or whether yours is a yard ravaged by crabgrass and unsightly patches of dirt the same shade of dingy brown as a 1950s Soviet apartment block. When the snow comes, it's all the same.
IT'S A PATENTLY leftist redistribution of beauty -- No Yard Left Behind. Every yard is covered by a uniform, regimented blanket of socialist snow.
The finest yard is brought down to the proletarian level of the most humble, and the most meager of lawns is -- via some sort of meteorological affirmative action -- lifted up to the same level as that of a McMansion.
Snow ain't white; it's pink. As in "pinko."
Not only that, ice is a communist plot, too, socializing the placement of asses over heads without regard to socioeconomic status, skill, income, educational achievement or race or national origin. A broken bourgeois foot is pretty much the same as a pretzeled proletarian one.
Likewise, the Northern embrace of socialist ice -- like that of pinko snow -- renders useless the advantages of a solid, upper middle-class Cadillac Escalade over that of a poor-white-trash '82 Chevy Caprice.
While the Escalade may get started quicker on an icy surface, neither it nor the Caprice will fare any differently trying to stop at the traffic light at the bottom of a long hill. Arguably, the advantage here goes to the cash-strapped mope driving the Caprice -- if he T-bones, say, an Escalade . . . so what?
ASSUMING liability coverage, the Caprice driver is out nothing but a crappy old car. The bourgeois pig in the Caddy is out . . . well, he's out the monetary difference between a heavily depreciated, really expensive Caddy and what it costs to replace it with a brand-new one. You could buy, like, six '82 Caprices with that.
Remember, it ain't "black ice" that's your problem, Buster, it's "Red" ice.
And the dictatorship of the Gret White Nawthun proletariat laughs at your pretentious capitalist illusions of superiority, Bubba.
Punxsutawney, Pa., is all snowed in, and Phil, being a sensible groundhog, refuses to come out and see (or not see) anything, so America has been forced to go to Plan B. So . . . Glenn Beck has come out from under the rock where he keeps his survivalist provisions, only to see the shadow of THE COMING INSURRECTION.
It works something like this. Hang on to something.
Tunisia is in flames because the Muslins are unhappy. That spread to Egypt, which is going down. That's spreading to Jordan, where there are riots, and it's going down. Libya's in flames, too, which the lamestream media isn't going to tell you about, because it's run by the Muslins, or communists, or Nazis or something.
Yemen's in flames, and so is Pakistan, but he's run out of little flamey magnet thingies to put on the chalkboard, so trust us on this. Iran's in flames, and that means they're going to come after Saudi Arabia, another of our "frenemies," because them Saudi royals are hardcore scumbags, who you know have to be shaking in their sandals while their camels are scared spitless.
And then you got Lebanon . . . in flames. The Gaza strip . . . in flames. But the Muslin Brotherhood Muslins hate the Hezbollah Muslins who are just like the Iranian Shiite Muslins, so they're canceling one another out or something . . . but they all have it in for the Jews in Israel.
SO YOU GOT the Shiites pushing on Israel one way and the Sunnis pushing on Israel the other, and the Chinamen is thinkin' . . . "WHOA! KNOCK THAT STUFF OFF, MAHMOUD!"
And then the Chinamen go "Ching chong ching chong chang bing bong sham-a-lama-ding-dong. . . ." Oh, wait, that's what Rush Limbaugh said the Chinese said, so never mind. . . .
Anyway, you got China pushing one way, and then the flames spread to Spain, which is on fire, and come to think of it, so is Great Britain and Ireland . . . FIRE! . . . and you don't think the radical Islamists in England and France are going to sit on their hands with all that fire all over the chalkboard, do you?
SEE, you got flamey chaos in the Middle East, and China's pushing west. And then you got abject flames on the chalkboard that is Europe -- no, look, there's Europe on a chalkboard -- and Russia's gonna start moving on Europe thataway, because the Muslins blowed s*** up in Moscow, and what that shows us is that what Tunisia really is is Sarajevo 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand got offed by Gavrilo Princip, which started World War I, because everybody's pushing on Israel, and the Jews got the Bomb now.
We'll have more on how This Is All Gonna Blow Up Good right after these messages from Goldline and Food Insurance.
Top-40 radio back many a year, John Records Landecker back in '77, With WLS turning it up to 11 As the Big 89 slams it into gear
Across the glass, the engineer racks up some carts, And your intrepid DJ opens his mike As the "Boogie Check" music starts
Then the phone lines all start to light As callers wait their chance to see If a shooting star of the air they'll be, Or whether their wit will just buy the farm Will the man whose name is Records, with all due charm Just yank their call like a fire alarm?
Greetings from the upper Midwest, where it's a few minutes from February.
The weather outside is frightful; the coffee inside's delightful. I didn't have a chance to stick a digital camera out the door to take a dark, grainy video of what's going on here in the Gret White Nawth, so I swiped this off the Internets.
It's kind of like this, only without the tidal wave and Empire State Building. As a great philosopher once said, "Dem tings happen."
Michael Mitchell is a 30-year-old college graduate, but he's still trying to nail down his dream job.
"Right now I deliver pizzas for a living, but I'm a personal trainer," Mitchell said.
He's found the creative expression of his tattoos are hurting his chances in the job market.
"It turns out a lot more people have a problem with my tattoos than I thought 10 years ago," said Mitchell.
He said a recent job offer to be a personal trainer was revoked. He said the reason is written all over his body.
"It's not like they're discriminating the color of my skin, because I chose to do this," said Mitchell. "I understand they have the right, but maybe they should get with the times."
AND WHILE tattoo dude is waiting for employers to "get with the times," I'm going to hold him to that 30-minute delivery guarantee.
Really, is it really so hard to limit your "body art" to those areas easily covered by a shirt and pants?
We start out this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth with a little Gram Parsons -- "Cash on the Barrelhead" off of his "Grievous Angel" album.
It's a classic. It's also a cover version of a little something Charlie and Ira Louvin did years before. The Louvin Brothers made an impression on young Gram Parsons.
And Gram Parsons would carry the word. Carry it into the Byrds, onto their albums, and then onto his own. Of course, all that also makes its way onto the Big Show.
Ripples. The music of the Louvin Brothers -- of Charlie Louvin, who died this week at 83 -- splashed into our cultural consciousness in the early 1940s, really made waves in the '50s, and stuck around on the charts into the '60s.
Ripples. They rocked the Everly Brothers' musical boat. The Everlys rocked the Beatles'. The Beatles' rocked everybody's.
Ripples. The Louvin Brothers were Elvis Presley's favorite country act.
RIPPLES.Those high harmonies ignited a fierce love of the same in young Emmylou Harris' heart.
Ripples. They keep going out from a long time past . . . from a couple of brothers growing up in north Alabama. They keep rocking somebody's world. Somebody carries the word, and the word -- the sweet harmonies of a long ago song -- inspires yet another generation, one unseen in 1955.
Ripples.That's what 3 Chords & the Truth is all about this time -- ripples of the musical kind.. Elvis, the Everlys, Emmylou, Gram, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Elvis Costello and on and on and on and on. Ripples.
Join us this week on the Big Show, and we'll float -- and rock -- your boat. All to the sweet sound of perfect harmony.
What we're talking here is Hear Nebraska, a new website covering -- and promoting -- all things musical in the Cornhusker State. It launched Monday and the goal, according to founder Andrew Norman, is to "be a interactive social-media site that we hope will be your favorite time suck."
So far, so good.
Besides, you have to give a major shout-out to a website that not only posts music videos by Omaha's Matt Whipkey, but music videos by Omaha's Matt Whipkey shot entirely in Super 8 and featuring the statue of Mary Richards (throwing her hat into the air, of course) on Minneapolis' Nicollet Mall.
(Kids, just go ask your parents -- on both counts.)
Gov. Bobby "Jimdel" (Timdel?) laughs. Louisiana weeps. (Then again, ma-bee nout.) And "Soutehrn University" is soooooo screwed.
I don't know what to say about this. Explication is so superfluous right now, considering the overwhelming nature of just the unvarnished reportage.
So here you go. The latest on the proposed merger of Southern University of New Orleans and the University of New Orleans. From The Times-Picayune . . . or is that Tha Tymze Picounne . . . or Thee Teyems Pickeyun . . . or . . . oh, screw it.
I'm really sick and tired about
graduation rates. Graduation rates mean nothing. Southern University was not developed to graduate people.
Starting with a fiery invocation and continuing with a long line of angry speeches Wednesday, speaker after speaker voiced support for Southern University of New Orleans and condemned the proposed merger with the University of New Orleans. In the prayer that opened a town-hall meeting in a packed SUNO gymnasium, Darryl Brown, a professor of English, asked God for guidance but said: "If this merger goes through, this will be the end of SUNO. We're not going to let that happen. We are here to fight."
In a voice that rose steadily throughout his invocation, Brown concluded by saying, "We stand in vision for one goal ... to retain SUNO forever."
That set the tone for the meeting at the 52-year-old historically black university. "They want you gone. They don't want SUNO here," said W.C. Johnson, a community activist.
"SUNO," he said, "is going to be a thing of the past unless you stand up and be counted and do your share."
The rest of his comment was drowned out by long, loud cheering, which was the response most speakers received from the several hundred spectators sitting in bleachers and in folding chairs on the gym floor.
AND WHAT are folks tryeing . . .tryyng . . . treyying . . . and what due do folks want to save? This.
Several speakers Wednesday emphasized the importance of historically black colleges such as SUNO for the work they do to nurture students who are poorly prepared for college work while in high school.
One criticism of SUNO has been its low graduation rate, which most recently was 9.28 percent, according to SUNO records. The most recent number from the federal Department of Education is 5 percent.
SUNO officials contend that the federal figure undercounts the number of people who earn degrees there because it counts only full-time freshmen who finished undergraduate work at the same institution within six years.
This is not possible for many students because they have to juggle jobs and family responsibilities, several speakers said, and many return to college after years away from academics.
Anthony Jeanmarie, a 35-year-old senior, called SUNO "the only place where a 35-year-old ... who walked away from college and came back can earn a degree. If not SUNO, where?"
As God is my witness, I'd never heard of the '70s British group Omaha Sheriff.
Apparently, I'm not alone -- Omaha Sheriff's first album in 1977, "Come Hell Or Waters High," made it up to No. 175 on the Billboard album chart but couldn't get arrested on the retail front.
ONE OF the band's founders, Bob Noble, however, did come to play in the band of Judie Tzuke -- someone I had heard of . . . and purchased her album "Sportscar" -- later in the '70s. He also did an album and a couple of tours with Dexy's Midnight Runners.
Go figure.
In the early 1990s, Noble moved his family to the States -- first Seattle and now Lake Worth, Fla., where he writes music, produces, arranges . . . and plays in an Irish band? (Isn't a Brit playing in an Irish band grounds for resumption of the Troubles or something?)
Anyway, it seems to me the least the man could have done was settle in Omaha.
When you're young, you tend to stagger through life, thinking you know it all, that you're all that and then some, and that there's not a damned thing you can learn from the old folks.
This is why, when you get a little older and know a little better, you tend to tread wistfully through a youth-obsessed culture and mutter about youth being wasted on the young.
When I was young, the above masterpiece by the Louvin Brothers was known as "hillbilly music." We wadn't about no damn hillbilly music. Well, at least we couldn't admit to being "about no damn hillbilly music."
Unless one was at the Cotton Club, just north of LSU on Highland Road, and you were just a little bit liquored up and oyster po-boy'd up, and it was a mixed crowd -- in other words, not your typical college bar -- and your resistance to all those Patsy Cline records on the best jukebox in Baton Rouge just fell to pieces.
And you had to admit it: Yes, Don Kirchner, there was musical life before the Beatles.
ABOVE, on film from the Grand Ol' Opry, is a vintage 1950s performance of one of the greatest musical acts of all time, the Louvin Brothers. Here is another, straight off the record:
WHAT COULD WE possibly learn from the likes of the Louvin Brothers?
As it turns out . . . plenty, as recounted today in Charlie Louvin's New York Times obituary:
Mr. Louvin achieved his greatest fame with the Louvin Brothers, the popular duo that modernized the close-harmony singing of Depression-era acts like the Blue Sky Boys and the Delmore Brothers and that anticipated the keening vocal interplay of the Everly Brothers.
Typically featuring Mr. Louvin on guitar and lead vocals and Ira, his older brother, on mandolin and high tenor harmonies, the Louvins’ 1950s hits also left their mark on the country-rock of the Byrds and others.
“I just could not get enough of that sound,” the singer Emmylou Harris said of the Louvin Brothers’ music in an interview with The Observer, the British newsweekly, in January 2010. “I’d always loved the Everly Brothers, but there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers.”
Ms. Harris’s breakthrough country hit was a 1975 remake of the duo’s “If I Could Only Win Your Love.” Resolutely traditional in approach, Mr. Louvin and his brother, who died in an automobile accident in 1965, were proponents of the high, lonesome sound of the southern Appalachian Mountains, where they grew up. Some of their best-known recordings were updates of foreboding antediluvian ballads like “In the Pines” and “Knoxville Girl.” Other material centered on the wholesome likes of family and religion, including “The Christian Life,” an original that later appeared on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the landmark Byrds album featuring the singer Gram Parsons.
Also falling under the duo’s sway were alternative-rock acts like Elvis Costello and the band Uncle Tupelo (which recorded a version of the Louvin Brothers’ cold-war plaint “Great Atomic Power” in 1992).
Despite their conservative cultural and musical leanings — their initial ’50s hits were recorded without drums, which were then commonplace in country music — the Louvins’ greatest acclaim came with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, when rebellious sentiments and loud backbeats were in ascendance. Their biggest single, “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” was a No. 1 country hit for two weeks in 1956. They also reached the country Top 10 with songs like “When I Stop Dreaming” and “Cash on the Barrelhead” during this period and were headliners in a touring revue that included Elvis Presley.
CHARLIE AND IRA LOUVIN were giants during an era of young titans who recognized the greatness of a couple of purveyors of "hillbilly music." Who decided there were things to be learned from the masters.
Now Charlie Louvin is gone, and one can hope a great, great act has been reunited on the other side of life. One also can hope that the Louvins' legacy will live on, passed down from those who were brave enough to embrace it in the first place. Who were smart enough to realize that beauty is timeless and oughtn't be wasted on a museum.
This early-1970s TV commercial shows some Magnavox iPods docked for your home listening enjoyment.
Very stylish, no?
And this is a 1970 Magnavox Micromatic iPod undocked and ready to take with you wherever you go.
Young people back in my day were much stronger than today's youth, now more accustomed to toting around today's wimpy little iPod models. Any questions?
Unbelievably, Jim Suttle survived his own campaign. Not to mention Tuesday's mayoral recall election in Omaha.
This is testament to the basic decency and even temper of the local electorate, as well as to fate handing hizzoner such an obviously self-interested and vaguely creepy lynch mob. It helped that the recall campaign's money man blatantly wanted Suttle's job for himself.
And the prospect of Dave Nabity as Omaha's mayor is enough to drive a man to . . . Council Bluffs.
Iowa, that is.
Gamblin' joints, trailer parks.
Suttle lived to fight out another couple-odd years at city hall -- or a couple of odd years, take your pick -- by 51 percent to 49. It shouldn't have been that close. (See "Recall People, Creepy" and "Nabity, Dave.")
But it was that close, and it would be hard not to lay that one right at the clay feet of Forward Omaha, the moniker for Suttle's anti-recall effort, and its insane scheme to round up the homeless at local shelters, bus them to the election commissioner's office to register and vote, and then pay them $5 to "train" as "canvassers." Wink wink, nudge . . . know what I mean, know what I mean?
That a move as smooth (not) as that was a godsend to the recall forces is evidenced by the election mailer above. Several of those went out in the campaign's waning days. And ads like this one began to flood the Omaha airwaves:
SEE WHAT I mean?
Without Suttle's political "friends" handing Nabity's Citizens for Omaha's Future the baseball bat it used to bludgeon the mayor, the spread -- again -- really shouldn't have been just 2 percentage points. Not even close.
At the outset of the recall effort, an Omaha World-Herald poll found that only 47 percent of respondents favored recalling Suttle, despite his 33-percent approval rating. Some 39 percent in the survey favored ousting the mayor, while 14 percent just didn't know.
Not only that, but according to the World-Herald'spoll story Oct. 24, just about everybody had at least some misgivings about the whole thing:
If a recall election were held, Suttle might benefit from uncertainty over his potential replacement. The poll found that a large majority was concerned “somewhat” or “a lot” about voting in a recall election without knowing who the next mayor would be.
That concern was expressed even by about half of those who said they would sign a recall petition or vote to remove Suttle.
THAT WAS A LOT for the anti-recall forces to work with. They squandered it. More precisely, Forward Omaha squandered that public-opinion largess -- all in one swell foop, as a popular Omaha disc-jockey used to say decades ago.
If all the mayor's men had managed to pick up just half of the undecided vote -- which you kind of figure could break that way unmolested -- Suttle wins in a cakewalk. Instead, the undecideds went roughly 10 percentage points to 4 percentage points for the recall-istas.
When Forward Omaha showed up at the homeless shelters with those school buses, the only bum's rush ended up being that of undecided voters into the "throw the bum out" camp. No doubt that brought a smile to even the angriest recaller's face.
In the end, though, the anti-Suttle camps garnered fewer votes by Tuesday night than signatures collected on recall petitions, and just 8,000 more votes than the final number of names verified by the Douglas County election commissioner back in December. Basically, the Mayor Suttle Recall Committee and Citizens for Omaha's Future didn't accomplish too much during the electioneering phase of the recall effort.
NOT ACCOMPLISHING much, however, beats beating yourself every time. Except in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, where the Good Lord watches out for little children, fools, drunks . . . and Jim Suttle.
"Where's the beef?" Wendy's restaurants once famously asked through its advertising, a swipe at its competitors' burgers.
The same question is now being asked by a California woman regarding Taco Bell's beef products, which she claims contain very little meat. So little, in fact, that she's brought a false-advertising lawsuit against the huge fast-food chain.
The class-action suit, which does not ask for money, objects to Taco Bell calling its products "seasoned ground beef or seasoned beef, when in fact a substantial amount of the filling contains substances other than beef."
It says Taco Bell's ground beef is made of such components as water, isolated oat product, wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, anti-dusting agent, autolyzed yeast extract, modified corn starch and sodium phosphate, as well as some beef and seasonings.
Just 35 percent of the taco filling was a solid, and just 15 percent overall was protein, said attorney W. Daniel "Dee" Miles III of the Montgomery, Ala., law firm Beasley Allen, which filed the suit.
Color Louisiana State University's chancellor, Mike Martin, the most surprised man in Baton Rouge -- at least until he got to Page 6A of his morning newspaper.
Meanwhile, ProvostJack Hamilton -- the school's former dean of mass communications -- might be forgiven for fervently praying that The Advocate didn't employ as many LSU journalism grads as it used to. Having Lizzie Borden in the governor's mansion is bad enough without the Ol' War Skule getting blamed for the "Why try harder?" ethos of the state's No. 2 daily newspaper.
"Fred Preaus is an honest man. If I were buying a Ford car, I'd buy it from Fred Preaus. He would give me a good deal. If I had trouble with the car, he'd give me a loaner while he got it fixed — that's just the kind of man he is. But if I was buying two Fords — well, he's just not big enough to handle a deal that size."
"BUT DATDON'T make no sense," you might say.
Sure it does.
Uncle Earl may have been crazy, but he wasn't dumb. Some things just don't change much, you know? And you can substitute a lot of names for that of ol' Fred Preaus.
THAT'S ALL, everybody -- apart from the requisite apologies to the late Janis Joplin, et al -- because Lisa de Moraes pretty much has said all that needs to be said about Oprah Winfrey's "big secret" in The Washington Post:
Lest ratings lag this week, Oprah announced on her show Monday - after her triumphant visit to Australia - that she has a half sister she never knew about.
Modestly billing it as "the miracle of all miracles," Oprah Winfrey said that she learned last fall about Patricia, her half sister who was given up for adoption by their mother shortly after she was born in 1963. Oprah and Patricia met on Thanksgiving Day.
Winfrey was just 9 and living with her father when her mother gave birth to Patricia and gave her up for adoption. Oprah told her studio audience this on the show in its final season of making her queen of syndicated daytime talk TV.
Oprah said she never even knew her mother was pregnant.
Winfrey made "home video" of her first meeting with her half sister; she and partner Stedman Graham drove to Milwaukee to finally meet Patricia, she explained.
Well, that could not have worked out more neatly if one of the pair had been some kind of queen of daytime TV.
And speaking thereof, Winfrey told her audience that she chose to make the announcement herself - so that the media would not exploit it.
We'll give you a minute to savor that one. (snip)
The "new" Patricia looked so much like Oprah's other, deceased half sister named Patricia that "it was 'a "Beloved" moment, if you know what that means - a daughter who comes back from the dead in the movie 'Beloved,' " Oprah explained.
A move that stars: Oprah Winfrey.
And which was produced by: Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah got choked up when she began to tell her studio audience about how this Patricia differs from the other Patricia, who, Oprah reminded the crowd, sold Oprah's teen-pregnancy story to a tabloid.
Oprah also got choked up as she told her studio audience how so many people have betrayed her since she became a celebrity, and that it really moved her that this Patricia kept the secret of her relationship to Oprah quiet all this time - until it best suited Oprah's final-season scheduling plans.
LISA DE MORAES, I bow down before thy truth-telling abilities. American TV viewers, meantime, are bowing down before something else entirely.
You know how people are always asking "What were they thinking?" when something incredibly stupid happens somewhere?
In this case, I think we know exactly what the chyron operator at Louisville's WLKY television was thinking when he -- or she -- did the sports graphics Sunday night. And that, friends, is the problem.
I admit, I bust a gut over this one, though the sentiment that would prompt some alleged television professional to type in "Jew York Jets" isn't funny at all. The ROTFLMAO factor in this probably has something to do with a) it's Kentucky, b) the responsible party's name is Bubba, isn't it? and c) picturing, in your mind's eye, the aftermath of this one.
But the more I think about this thing, the madder I get.
For another thing, it's 2011 -- do you realize how many people there are out there flat-ass out of work? Do you realize how broadcasting has been shedding jobs like it's the newspaper industry or something?
Do you realize how lucky the jackwagon idiot responsible for "Jew York Jets" was to have the job he (or, again, she) used to have (one hopes) and so cavalierly threw away (again, one hopes)?
You know how parents of a bygone era used to tell their kids to think of the starving children in China and clean their plates? In other words, be grateful for what you have and don't waste it.
Well, some jackass at WLKY never got told that by his or her parents. And a lot of "starving kids in China" probably aren't amused . . . except, perhaps, about the position that might be opening up at a TV station in Louisville.
P.S.: Do you think this thing just might cost WLKY a sponsor? Just wondering.
I know where you live.
