So Alan goes in late on Mondays, and on this particular Monday “Today” had given way to the 9 a.m. hour of chat/Judge Judy/etcetera. Alan had chosen chat — Regis and ol’ what’s-her-name. This morning’s musical guest was a reggae/rap fusion artist named Shaggy. “Talk about a culture clash,” Alan said, speculating what a nation of Celine Dion fans was thinking of Shaggy’s tune, which included the line, “You stood by me during my incarceration.” (No, I don’t know what the rhyme was.) Sort of like when the Stones played Ed Sullivan. Even as a young’un, I recall thinking, huh?
Or it could be that Alan’s the one with a cultural disconnect. Someone’s buying all those records.
But whatever his or our disconnect with the world of hip-hop, it’s not as severe as the Journal Gazette’s, which had a piece in Sunday advancing a concert by the Baha Men. The Baha Men, you may or may not know, hail from the Bahamas. So what did they Journal call them throughout, including in the headline? Bohemian.
Did our self-appointed local media critic pick up on this, the way he pounces on the slightest mispronunciation by a weather person (who is, after all, doing an extended improvisational ad lib)? Nah. Guess the headline wasn’t big enough. Speaking of media criticism: Dr. Laura was cancelled, finally. I’m shocked she hung on this long, as her show was particularly merciless in capturing her essential personality, described by an LA Weekly writer as having “all the warmth of a staph infection.”
Today was the first business day of Daylight Saving Time in the rest of the civilized world. Here, it’s always Eastern Standard Time, which meant this was the first day of adjusting to the new pace of things. It will take approximately a week or more to settle in. I can read the Jon Carroll column earlier, watch TV earlier. I won’t be seeing “King of the Hill” until October, because it’s on at the formerly inconvenient/now impossible hour of 6:30 p.m. Sunday. But I’ll catch more Letterman. At least until it’s warm and light enough to start the 5:30 a.m. exercise thing again. Frankly, I’m looking forward to it. I got a 10-mile ride in today after work and felt great. The labored huffing I suffered Saturday was not in evidence. I was the wind. All you skaters, just step aside.
I forgot to mention Friday afternoon’s entertainment. I was flipping around looking for news and stopped on Fox, which was covering a car chase live. In Atlanta. The perpetrator was not a murderer, rapist or other dangerous-to-humanity felon, but … a car thief. This went on for about 20 minutes. Apparently the thinking was, we’ve got the technology. Let’s run with it. So a nationwide cable channel gave over a third of an hour to a story that might not even have made Page One in Atlanta. They report. You … go figure.
An entertaining e-mail exchange today with a regular correspondent who checks in often, but who shall remain nameless because he might be job-hunting soon, and God knows what a search engine might find. We were talking about drugs: I always love it when I’m around a bunch of guys, and they’re complaining about how fucked up their past relationships were. I tell them “I can top all of them”, and then sit back and listen to their little geek stories. Then, when it’s time, I pull out about the girl in New Orleans that slowly went from casino blackjack dealer to crack user to crack head to turning a trick with a dealer IN MY HOUSE IN MY BED for some rock. I then collect my bets and the conversation continues.
That girl is in the same place as the guy who played the father on “Alf,” captured today on the cover of the National Enquirer sucking on the glass dick, apparently on home video. (“Hey, you brought a camera? Great! Let me get out my crack pipe and you can get some pictures!”) Same as Robert Downey Jr. Same as Daryl Strawberry, working to see what will kill him first, drugs or cancer. Meanwhile my very own congressman called a man who testified before his subcommittee, who’s trying to get medicinal marijuana for cancer and AIDS patients, “evil.” It’s a public health problem, folks. Deal.