I am one of those people who will sit on a fence through hell or high water until I have fallen on one side or the other, and then it will take an Act of Congress or overthrow of the government for me to change my mind and go to the other side.
One of those things that I firmly believe in is that the start of the new millennium, the new century, the new decade started in 2001 and not 2000 which is what most people believe and so the next new decade starts in 2011.
Who cares you say? I don't know. I certainly don't. But all of this is just to finish off this season and say.....Happy New Year!!!! and I'll see you on the other side.
Since it's Christmas I was going to talk about everyone being merry and jolly and everything while people in the Côte d'Ivoire were dying in the streets because of election results and that there were wars going on and poverty and disease was still rampant elsewhere in the world. Then I was going to compare it to the original Christmas Story where people will often speak about peace coming to world because of the birth of the Christ Child while forgetting to mention the accompanying Massacre of the Innocents, the mass slaughter of first born children ordered by King Herod. The good and the bad. The yin and the yang.
After that I was going to wrap it up by saying something about, "good times," a line from a book rather than the TV show. And by the book I mean Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities where he starts off with, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and then go on from there. It might have turned out nicely, but I think it would have been too much work to do well, or well enough before Christmas. So I'm just going to show a bunch of video pieces.
I don't know if Joan Rivers is still doing that show where she goes into the houses of rich people who got there because of some idea they had, but I remember part of a show where she went to the home of the man who invented the Snuggie or the Slanket or something. Well actually I don't remember the house or even really the show, but I do remember thinking to myself was how does someone selling a cheap polyester blanket with sleeves cut or sewn into it become a millionaire? And how does someone get silly white girls to flash there boobs in front of a home video camera and make a mint out of it, and why don't I have the ability to make money out of nothing?
Well apparently this ability seems to be happening to everyone except me.....Roll the tape please because its starts here and now....
It's time for the annual gripe and even though I’ve been doing it since I was eleven, I don’t really like flying. There is too much stress involved.
I had just arrived in Nashville TN an hour late doing that airport hopping thing that people do when they’re trying to get from one city to another but have to change planes at behind “God’s Back” county 30 miles east of nowhere. The airport at Nashville seemed to fit the bill. It looked dark and dingy and dismal and I thought, “If I’ve missed the last connecting flight to Philly, there’s no fucking way I’m staying overnight in this place.” I swear a lot when I’m talking to myself; somehow it seems more poetic and insightful. Call me crazy.
While I was leaving the plane from Florida, trying to figure out which gate I should go to and where the flight information board was, I noticed that I was a behind a man in a wheelchair who was tipping the person who had helped him off the plane that I had just left. In fact there was a whole bunch of people sitting there in their wheelchairs waiting for another flight or for someone to take them somewhere and I realized why the flight attendant on the plane had asked passengers in wheelchairs to be patient since there was only one person who would be able to help them disembark.
I passed the group, carry-on luggage in hand and I was hit by the stench of what can only described as the smell of raw sewage and baby shit. “Oh God, this must be some sort of decrepit persons wheelchair convention,” and then I wondered how long it would be before I joined them. But I heard over the loud speakers, “Last call for flight blah, blah, blah to Philadelphia at Gate 25 please come immediately to the gate.” “Freedom!” I thought and made a quick dash to the right only to stop and do a u-turn after 20 yards when I realized I was heading in the wrong direction.
Anyway after arriving at gate 25 panting and wheezing feeling the sweat start to trickle down my back, I really do need to quit smoking, they took my boarding pass and closed the door of the airplane 20 seconds after I had boarded. Last on board as usual. This seems to be becoming a habit.
I don’t think I really like flying, there’s just too much stress involved.
Normally I don’t even care about award shows. They are all about people or things that I know nothing about and don’t want to know, or if I do, will forget about before the end of the next commercial. In fact because I love movies, the only show that I will watch is the Oscars but that’s only during the commercials of whatever else is on another channel. I used to say that the only thing that would make television worse would be to add another stupid award show, that was until someone discovered the reality show and TV and my life took a turn for the worse.
Anyway, for some reason I was going down the list of award nominations for the 2011 Golden Globes and under the category for Best Supporting actress in a TV movie there was a bunch of people listed but no Brenda Vaccaro. Brenda Vaccaro? Who’s Brenda Vaccaro you ask? Well let me tell you about Brenda Vaccaro. By the way, have I mentioned the name Brenda Vaccaro yet?
I first came across Brenda Vaccaro in Airport ’75 or maybe it was ’77, it was a while ago, and then again in the Jacqueline Susann film Once is Not Enough which she had done before the Airport movie. I had heard that she was once the older lady in Michael Douglas’s life when he was young enough to have an older lady. But Since then, nothing, Nothing that is until I saw her earlier this year, big as a Buick and just as ugly, in the Dr Death, Jack Kevorkian bio-pic You Don’t Know Jack.
In the movie she plays the role of Jack’s vibrant and yet caring sister that goes tits to forehead with Al Pacino with conviction and believability. She steals scenes when she has to and subjugates herself when she needs to, which was most of the time because she was dealing with Al and let’s face it no one can really go up against Al Pacino. She isn’t the star but she helps the movie move along when the movie needs to move along. She made my experience good and that was worth a mention I should think.
So it looks like…don’t you just hate it when people start off a sentence with the word so. I was watching CNN the other day and the guest started every thought with the word “so.” After a while it became so annoying and I realized that I had noticed it before with other people on TV or on the radio and that it must have become a trend or something. Either way I hate it. It’s now one of my pet peeves like people riding bicycles on the sidewalks only to risk life and limb to young pedestrians and old people as they go about business. But I’m going off on a tangent now and ranting. As I was saying...
So it looks like there will be no need for me to watch the Golden Globes next year and I wish I can say that they will miss me, but since I’ve never watched them before, my guess is that they won’t.
