IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Starting Five

Weather conditions dictate that the top two story lines will be, “Dustin, The Wind”

1. Stair Masters*

*The judges are like, “That is TOO easy! Too easy.”

Did you hear the one about the No. 1 in the world PGA pro with the gorgeous wife who suffered an unusual domestic injury? Are you wondering what Tiger Woods said when he heard that Dustin Johnson fell down some stairs at his August rental home and injured his back? “Rrrrrrrriiiiiiiiight.”

Was this one of those wife-induced golf injuries?

Was this one of those wife-induced golf injuries?

Anyway, that’s Johnson’s story and he’s sticking to it. The pre-Augusta favorite to earn his first jolly green jacket, Paulina Gretzky’s hubby is now questionable to tee off. You know who else has never won a Masters? Rory McIlroy.

The Magnificent Seve!

The Magnificent Seve!

Two-time Masters champion (1980 and 1983) Seve Ballesteros, who died six years ago, would have turned 60 this coming Sunday (yes, he was only 23 when he won his first Masters), so sentimental fans of Spain—and CBS—would probably love seeing another histrionic Spaniard who has yet to win at Augusta, Sergio Garcia, at least be in the final twosome come Sunday.

2. Mike Farb Is Averse To Trump

 

I don’t know who @MikeFarb1 is, but he enjoys penning Twitter limericks and other poems about The Worst Wing. Here are a few of his better ones:

 

and….

 

 

3. Locker Room Harassment*

*Another Day of Trump (Day 77)

Just the latest incident from The Worst Wing that makes all of this seem like a Blake Edwards satire on the worst president ever. Last week Donald Trump, he of the quote, “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” declared April National Sexual Assault Awareness (and in tiny, tiny letters, “and prevention”) Month. And then yesterday he gave an interview to the Failing New York Times in which he defended Bill O’Reilly without, as usual, having any evidence, saying, “I think he’s a person I know well — he is a good person. I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” Trump added. “Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong

Trying to “have taken it all the way” is likely what got O’Reilly in this mess in the first place.

UPDATE: After posting this I found this tweet/Seth Meyers snippet, so I promise I didn’t plagiarize.

 

4. Shooter Sits Shotgun

You can roll past the first 5:45 and head straight to the singing and the driving….

5. Oh, C’mon!

New Jersey teen Ziad Ahmed had the grades and such, but this is what he wrote as his essay in his application to Stanford. Last week Ahmed learned that he was one of 2,050 accepted out of the 44,073 that applied. If you get a chance, read the last couple of grafs of this WaPo story on it. Funny.

Ahmed's wild idea redefines

Ahmed’s wild idea redefines “radical Islam.”

Music 101

 

Sir Duke

“They can feel it ALL OVER, they can feel it all over…” Stevie Wonder’s 1977 No. 1 hit was a tribute to Duke Ellington in name, but on a wider scale to all of the musicians who had influenced him.

Remote Patrol

Frozen Four

7 p.m. ESPN2

We begin with Harvard vs. Minnesota-Duluth followed by Denver versus Notre Dame, from Chicago. Is a Harvard-Notre Dame NCAA hockey championship too much to hope for? Probably. Here are 10 things to know about the Frozen Four…

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Starting Five

1. No Spinster Zone?*

The judges will also accept “Oh, Really, O’Reilly” and “No Skin Zone” and “Wild Bill (Hi)ckock” and even “Bye Bye O’Reilly” (We really should have put that up top) but draw the line at “The O’Reilly Facked Her”

Will Fox News really sack the top-rated host in cable news, Bill O’Reilly, now that sexual harassment claims are growing daily against him? This in the wake of Saturday’s New York Times piece asserting that he has paid out $13 million in settlements to Fox or former Fox employees?

My guess is that it’s going to take a little more pressure than what is currently surrounding him. And let’s not forget where we were one week or so ago. O’Reilly was in hot water because of his comments surrounding Maxine Waters (“the James Brown wig”). I imagine the NYT had been working on the story long before that happened, but man, karma is a bitch, eh, Bill?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuCkX1AAVgA

Fox can easily weather the lost sponsors to The Factor because it earns so much on the cable subscription rates. And my guess is also that not a small amount of Fox viewers are chauvinists or misogynists who believe those sweethearts should just deal with or go back to doing USO shows or being nurses. Whatevs. I do love that O’Reilly chose to mix it up with Don Lemon, of all people, a gay man of color against whom he’s got no weaponry. Dumb tactic, Bill.

2. Rudy Can’t Fail

He's really that big. The last Frenchman this large was Inigo Montoya's sidekick

He’s really that big. The last Frenchman this large was Inigo Montoya’s sidekick

As we head nearer to the end of the NBA regular season, there are a few dudes who are in the top five in the league statistically in two categories: Russell Westbrook and James Harden are both in the Top 5 (Top 3, actually) in Scoring and Assists. John Wall is in the Top 5 in Assists and Steals. Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan are in the Top 5 in Rebounds and FG%, while Anthony Davis is in the Top 5 in Scoring and Blocked Shots. Hassan Whiteside is in the Top 5 in Rebounds and Blocked Shots.

Only one player is in the Top 5 in three categories, however: Utah’s Rudy Gobert, who is in the Top 5 in Blocked Shots (1st) , FG % (2nd) and Rebounds (4th). The 7’1″ fourth-year Frenchman is someone to keep an eye on in the playoffs, when he’ll likely have some good battles against DeAndre Jordan.

3. Stay Coke

So I once worked with a good dude at Sports Illustrated who, when our managing editor called a meeting to solicit fresh ideas for the swimsuit issue, suggested we pose a black model at Jackie Robinson’s grave (like I’d make that up). Anyway, this Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad may be a worse idea.

And right now there are two writers at SNL working on a parody of it, you can bet.

 

4. Season’s First Steal at Fenway Goes to Gronk

This had to be staged, but who cares? It was fun. It’s a long eight weeks in New England between Super Bowl Sunday and Opening Day. The fans deserve to celebrate spring.

5. Another Day of Valley of the Sun

Okay, I’m totally over high school kids asking celebrities to prom—or I thought I was until I saw the video Scottsdale Arcadia High School student Jacob Staudenmaier made on Sunday (while all of us covering the Final Four missed it). A few things that are great about this besides the video itself:

A. He alludes to it in the video, but yeah, Jacob does kinda look like Ryan Gosling (especially when they were both that age).

B. Emma is right from the Arcadia neighborhood. She probably would have attended Arcadia (perhaps Saguaro High?) had she stayed in high school (as it was she started out at Xavier Prep, an all-girls school in Phoenix that for decades has welcomed young lasses from the orange-grove Arcadia neighborhood).

C. You know what filmmaker before Staudenmaier DID attend Arcadia High School? Steven Spielberg. So, Emma, it might be against the laws of Hollywood to deny a filmmaker from Arcadia High. Besides, it’s not as if someone is asking you to spend a night in Paducah. It’s Scottsdale in April. (pssst: I’ll throw in the hotel room at the Valley Ho on the MH staff).

Where In The World?

Music 101

Tesla Girls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4z24GZd-eA

Loved Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, or OMD, the unofficial house band of every John Hughes film. Roam the floors of Dillon Hall on any Friday night when I was in college, and you’d hear at least one room playing OMD (Is this why I’m still single???). This 1984 song, while not a big radio hit, was a big club hit at the time and also appeared in Weird Science.

Remote Patrol

Inside World War II

7 p.m. NGC

I’m a sucker for a good WW2 doc, and this three-hour special on NatGeo promises to deliver the goods. Spoiler Alert: We win…at least for the first 72 years.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 6 Comments

by John Walters

Final Fourgasm

IMG_1906

1. Be True To Your School

I spent two hours before Monday’s game roaming the cavernous University of Phoenix Stadium, testing my cynicism versus the top row-of-the-stadium $107 seats. And this is what I found: the staffers, both for paying customers and those who assisted with the media, were ineffably helpful and friendly. Fire them a smile, and they fired one right back at you.

Related Content: JDubs’ piece on the game in Newsweek.

The students who drove from the North Carolina and Gonzaga campuses—I met 10 Tar Heel students from the same church who drove 35 hours together in a van, and on the off day, Sunday, they took a side trip to the Grand Canyon, five hours away—were infectiously enthusiastic and giddy and passionate.

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The players and the coaches? Wonderful. From Mark Few and Roy Williams, to tall dudes in both locker rooms who were classy and helpful and humble. Loved them all.

IMG_1877

(The gang from Summit Church in Chapel Hill. Safe travels home, kids.)

The only things that made me cynical? Some of my fellow media and the way the NCAA is happy to ruin something as simple as playground hoops by over-officiating the game and by compelling teams to play in an environment that is so foreign to what they practice and play in all year long.

On Saturday I watched a writer trying to take his soda out onto press row—which he is permitted to do, and he had it in the proper NCAA-designated cup—but the staffer made an honest mistake and asked him to stop. She was confused and she wasn’t belligerent, but it took all of five seconds to sort out. And this was before tip-off. As the writer walked away, hardly under his breath (hell, I heard it), he muttered, “Retard.”

Huge turnoff.

And then, after properly officiating the game in the first half Monday night, The Ref Show began in the second half. Of course we fouled out Zach Collins and made Przemek Kanowski and Kennedy Meeks spend the final eight minutes playing on pins and needles. Because that’s what 76,000 people had paid to see, no? At one point we even got dueling free throws between Kanowski and Joel Berry II—the game had literally devolved into a free-throw shooting contest.

IMG_1884

(Objects in photo are even farther than they appear.)

But for all of that ugliness, in the final two minutes, when Meeks clearly had one hand out of bounds while tied up with two Zags and the ball on the floor, and with a ref two feet away, the officials ruled jump ball (possession, Carolina). And nobody reviewed it. So what’s the purpose of all this punctilious adjudication if you miss the biggest call of the season? Or is someone emailing the NCAA this morning to have that call overturned and penalize Carolina four strokes?

Kind of a big deal

Kind of a big deal

 

THREE AND OUT

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by Michael DePaoli

BREXIT 

Congratulations, Germany!

A thousand years from now (assuming humanity lasts that long), the history books will record that Germany was the eventual winner of World War II. The USA and USSR won the battles on the battlefield, but in the end Germany became the real winner when it consolidated its economic control over the European Union.

The UK did not have the intestinal fortitude to make the EU work, so it has triggered a divorce through Article 50. That leaves Germany as the major power in the EU, with the German banking system and the German manufacturing system being powerful enough to dominate all the other nations in the EU.

Arguably speaking, the old Britain had the greatest and the most powerful empire in the history of the world. The new Britain is just a coward, afraid to compete in an open European market.

EARTH 

At risk

At risk

The Republicans are trying to destroy the Earth. Could someone, anyone, please explain why? (Ed. Note: Because money talks and bullshit walks?)

I have narrowed down the causes of environmental destruction to the following list: 1. Stupidity, 2. Meanness, 3. Suicidal ideation, 4. Satanic influence.

Does anyone have a better explanation? (Ed Note: Because the prophecy of the final scene of The Planet of the Apes needs to come true?)

DOCTORS

In this photo, taken from the top of the San Diego Convention Center (Ed. Note: Or higher) in the morning, you see San Diego Bay , and in the distance Coronado Island. Behind me, inside the Convention Center, there are six thousand internal medicine doctors taking continuing medical education classes on how to better treat their patients. The topics range from cardiology, to dermatology, to diabetes, to gastroenterology, to Federal health care regulations. It is all part of the annual convention of the American College of Physicians.

This is not play time. This is not party time. These doctors are really studying.

I am pointing out the commitment and dedication of these doctors because doctors are the people best situated to solve the problems in health care. We need to recognize their effort.(Ed Note: It almost seems mean to bring all of them to San Diego to study; might as well bring them to Fargo, where there are fewer temptations).