FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Breaking News: Mannix Marathon on Cloo until 6 a.m. Eastern Sunday, DirecTV Channel 308. Be there!
Back in the day before we all knew what CSIs and mass spectrometers were, all you needed when you were in a real tight pinch was to call your ex-Army pal from Korea out in LA named Joe Mannix. Mannix would get us the answers we need!
Mannix wasn't just a crime-fighting gumshoe, a top-shelf detective with a keen eye for clues, beautiful women and people who got the shaft from the system, but someone who wasn't afraid a of a fight. Joe Mannix also had a deeply ingrained sense of integrity and righting wrongs. Remember that, integrity?
Joe Mannix for Broward Sheriff, Al Lamberti for Media Photo Ops!
If you play the extended version above now for any half-normal kid in elementary school -like one of my teachers once did at Fulford Elementary in North Miami Beach, back when the show was still on the air- I absolutely guarantee you that their eyes will light up.
So, you're asking yourself, why did I run the Mary Tyler Moore Show videos here of the famous MTM theme song, "Love Is All Around" by Sonny Curtis, in the middle of Alyssa'sTouch NFL apparel photos? The purple #10 Fran Tarkenton Vikings jersey Mary wears! (At 0:24 while washing her Ford Mustang) Always one of my favorite parts of the opening credits!
Compare and contrast with Alyssa at the top of the blog, or here: Above, Miami Dolphins Full Zip Velour Cheer JacketTouch by Alyssa Milanohttp://www.fansedge.com/ Trust me, I knew some of them and the "Dolphin Dolls" were never like this!
New York Times Suiting Up in Jerseys Suitable for WomenBy Tanzina Vega August 25, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/media/26adco.html However strange it may seem to actually read in print, the more you pay attention to such things, the more you know that in some very fundamental ways, the current reality is that Alyssa intuitively "gets" the new media universe MUCH better than the McClatchy folks running theMiami Herald and the Tribune Company people running the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.That's our reality.
Last night at the same exact time on their 11 o'clock newscasts, Channels 4 and 10, i.e. CBS4 andLocal10, each ran stories on women having surgery, plastic and laser.
Sadly for viewers with a public policy bent, these sorts of stories are the longstanding bread-and-butter of Miami TV stations, but are also part of the reason that so many Men aged 25-49 find it so easy to forgo the local newscasts at 11 p.m. and switch to ESPN's SportsCenter, because they know from experience that there will likely be at least one if not two dopey, chick-centric stories that center on women with some very serious self-worth problems and high-degree of shallowness.
That there are so many women like that living in South Florida is NOT exactly Breaking News, of course. What is is the number who honestly think that anyone else cares about their self-worth issues or their flabby arms or whatever.
Leave those private discussions to your family and friends, please. The rest of us just don't care, comprende?
Screenshot I took 10/5/09 of Local10's teaser during ABC-TV'sCastle.
Some free advice for the female reporters assigned to these stories that always center on somewhat vain and self-centered women with more money than sense, who are only too happy to have TV cameras follow them into their doctor's office.
The next time you get stuck on one of these stories, right before you close, look at the subjects and say: "You're not alone because of your looks, you'realone because of your superficial personality."
Think of it as your doing a good deed for the larger South Florida community. Because you are!
ABC-TV's Castle is one of my guilty TV pleasures. I'm happy to see that in its second season, airing opposite CSI Miami, the show really seems to be getting better and more nuanced, as the writers become more confident of what the characters would say or do in various circumstances. http://abc.go.com/shows/castle
For me, last night's episode, Inventing the Girl, was the best effort yet. It featured a great back-and forth volley between co-stars Susan Sullivan and Nathan Fillion sitting on the sofa of Rick's great apartment, perhaps the best-looking living room on TV.
At one point, after talking about her grudging acceptance of the fact that she'd been cast in a Broadway show as the grandmother and not as the fetching ingenue she once might've been, Rick throws her a lifeline by saying that she can now show "wisdom" on stage,
Martha suddenly pulls out from behind the couch this 8 x 10 b/w glossy of herself, below, which nearly caused me to jump off the couch from a severe case of déjà vu.
Screenshot I took 10/5/09 of Susan Sullivan during ABC-TV'sCastle. When I was living at Briscoe Quad my first two years at IU, I had a male friend who was a huge, huge fan of Susan Sullivan, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0838360/ who was then a star on CBS-TV's hit Falcon Crest. He had this same EXACT photo of her in hisdorm room! If I remember correctly, I think he'd seen her on Broadway before or something.
I mention this because of both the shock of seeing that photo I recognize pop-up on my TV screen completely out-of-the-blue, and also because my friend was probably one of a handful of persons I knew at IU who was hip to whatever was happening on Broadway, plus the scuttlebutt.
In his case, it was the result of his having parents who were ardent live theater fans who saw everything, no matter how obscure or Off-Off Broadway.
He knew what actor and actress had played what character in what show -or been anunderstudy- as a result of growing-up with a treasure trove of Playbills in his parents living room, arranged alphabetically within the year the show had opened.
I was so envious listening to him talk about it and the shows he'd seen, while I'd had to make do with cast albums.
(If blogging had existed back then, I have no doubt that his parents would've surely had one of the most popular and influential -and profitable- blogsor websites around on the subject ofBroadway, on-stage and off, includingfinancing, because they quite literally seemed to know everyone who was anyone.)
Listening to him describe their collection of souvenirs sounded a lot like me and my perfectly preserved collection of Dolphins, Hurricanes, Floridians, Gatos/Strikers/ Orioles game programs, going back to 1968, complete with used game tickets.
In a sense, my friend was sort of like the theater version of me, and my keen knowledge of American sports and sports trivia, that often swamped others who were older who thought they knew a thing or two. The benefit of having a very, very good memory.
FYI: In real life, Susan Sullivan is married to psychologist and author Dr. Connell Cowan, who co-authored with Dr. Melvyn Kinder, only two of THE best books I ever read, Women Men Love, Women Men Leave and Smart Women/Foolish Choices. I actually bought copies for friends when they came out in paperback.
To end this unexpected tangent on Broadway, The Jackson 5 from the early '80's performing "Corner of the Sky" from Pippin, a wonderful song from their Skywriter album,
Along with a host of other songs, my friends on the floor and I played this a lot on Saturday mornings and afternoons at IU on game days, with our stereo speakers propped up in the windows facing towards AssemblyHall and the football stadium, so fans downstairs on 17th Street walking over there for a game could get in the spirit of things.