Starting Five

1. It’s a Boy-al!

All of England was pulling for Duchess Kate yesterday, while her physician at St. Mary’s Hospital was telling her, “Push!” Kate gave birth, as reports said, “to a baby boy”, though as someone wondered on Twitter, isn’t the word “baby” rather extraneous here? That cheeky tabloid, The Sun, renamed itself for the day.

There are now three potential male HRH’s alive –Prince Charles, Prince William, and The Prince Formerly Known as Fetus. Speculation is that the name will be George or James, and that you may rule out North and Barkevious.

 

The youngest male to ascend to throne of England, in case you were wondering: Henry VI, who did so at the age of nine months in 1423. For multiple reasons, then, he never sang, “Oh, I just can’t wait to be king!”

You’d expect Kate to be a stay-at-castle mom, and for William, the father, to become the next reigning monarch in England. After all, his grandmother, who currently has the gig, is 87. Who does she think she is? Vin Scully?

2. Braun is Gone

Milwaukee Brewer slugger Ryan Braun, the “Hebrew Hammer” and winner of the 2011 National League Most Valuable Player award, has been suspended for the rest of this season due to “violations of the Basic Agreement and its Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.”

Braun skated by on a technicality last season –thanks, FedEx–but Major League Baseball apparently assembled enough information to compel him to step down without a fight. He’ll cede about $3.25 million in salary. Last year Braun defiantly denied ever using PEDs. Yesterday he admitted, “I am not perfect. I realize now that I have made some mistakes.”

Although this was not one of them.

With Braun shelved, Milwaukee native and baseball commissioner Bud Selig can now turn his attention to investigating Bob Uecker. I mean, look at this guy. He’s 78!

 

3. Carlos Hyde Will Likely Miss Ohio State’s Key Games Versus Buffalo and San Diego State

Things Ohio State football has beaten this summer so far: Cancer and, allegedly, women.

Starting running back Carlos Hyde, a senior who rushed for 970 yards last season, was “suspended indefinitely” after he was named a “person of interest” in an assault at Sugar Bar 2 in Columbus early Sunday morning. Why can’t B1G players just bark at dogs (“S-E-C!” S-E-C!”). Whether Hyde actually struck the female or, as video may suggest, simply patted her on the cheek after she struck him (and what did you SAY, Carlos?), is still being investigated.

Teammate Bradley Roby, an All-American cornerback who is a likely top ten draft pbick next spring, was arrested in Bloomington, Ind., that same evening. Roby was charged with misdemeanor battery after an altercation at Dunkirk Bar. At this point all we know is that Roby has been scratched from attending next week’s Big Ten media days in Chicago, which is actually a reward, not a punishment.

4. Another Banking Failure

Adam Silberman, 47, a Wall Street banker and president of Solas Investments, attempted to leap to his death yesterday from his 7th-story apartment. According to Silberman’s wife, Monique Ender Silberman, Adam was distraught over constant battles with their building’s coop board over the family’s three French poodles. We’ve all been there.

Anyway, a second-story awning broke Silberman’s fall and he survived. Apparently, both stocks and Silberman can plummet and rebound.

5. Jahar

I read the news today, oh boy. Okay, not the news but I did read the Rolling Stone cover story on the Boston Bomber by Janet Reitman. I urge you to read it and decide if you agree with some of the larger points being made about the brothers and their descent into being dissidents. One quote that really struck me, from Tom Neer, an analyst at the Soufan Group, a strategic consulting agency: “A person is angry, and he needs an explanation for that angst. Projecting blame is a defense mechanism. Rather than say, ‘I’m lost, I’ve got a problem’, it’s much easier to find a convenient enemy or scapegoat. The justification comes later.”

 

The older brother was a stay-at-home dad who’d just had his housing welfare cut (that evil America! How dare they stop giving me handouts!) while the younger brother was a stoner who was flunking out of a college that he was largely paying for on his own. Yes, there were family problems, but who doesn’t have them? Instead of facing their problems –character is how you react to the bad times — they opted to blame the country that provided them freedom. Kinda the way miserable adults blame their functional and loving parents for all their problems, yaar?

Or, as Uncle Ruslan so aptly put it, “Because they’re losers.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts State Trooper Sean Murphy (I know. A cop in Boston named Sean Murphy?) released the above photo and others to Boston magazine as a rebuttal to the RS cover.

“I hope that the people who see these images will know that this was real. It was as real as it gets,” Boston magazine quoted Sgt. Murphy as saying. “This guy is evil. This is the real Boston bomber. Not someone fluffed and buffed for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.”

Reserves

Louis CK on The Daily Show. You even have to ruminate about clicking this? Louie on appearing in the upcoming Woody Allen film: “That’s all I wanted to do, was to meet him before he died.”

Six Flags at Half Mast?

The good news for Six Flags corporation? Yesterday it reported record earnings for the first half of 2013. Yayyyy!

The bad news for Six Flags? Over the weekend a 52 year-old woman, Rosy Esparza, fell out of one of its rollercoasters and, as we’ve been reporting since the inception of this blog, gravity won. Booo!

The good news for Six Flags? They have $100 million in liability insurance coverage so go ahead, Esparza clan, bring your best suit forward. It’s what they refer to as “an insured loss.”

The Annotated “Newsroom”: Episode 2

If there’s one thing that the second episode of “The Newsroom” taught us, it’s that bars in New Hampshire and New York have not updated their playlists since 1982. We get “Take It On The Run” by REO Speedwagon (1981), “Hold The Line” by Toto (1979), “Head Games” by Foreigner (1979) and Willie Nelson’s incomparable version of “You Were Always on My Mind” (1982). Is Aaron Sorkin exposing his personal preference or is he trying to tell us something?

1. “How long does it take New Yorkers to stop giving people shit over a mistake?”
     “Ask A-Rod.”

Zing! Jerry Dantana –and is his surname a reference to Robert Urich’s “Vega$” character?– asks McKenzie McHale the morning after the Cyrus question mark West ellipses debacle. A great line for a New Yorker to say, even if she’s a Brit expat.

2. Sylvia Plath

Sloane and Maggie decide to take the 7 train to Queensboro Plaza to hunt down the blogger/YouTuber who exposed Maggie’s ridiculous rant. Sloane drops the name of the Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poetess. This scene is one of the most unbelievable in Sorkindom, as no news anchor would ever be seen on the 7 train unless, and only unless, he or she were headed to a Mets game or the U.S. Open.

3. Salvador Dali mask/Guy Fawkes mask

Two of the MM’s (McKenzie Minions… my coinage) debate the type of mask they are seeing during the arrests at the “Occupy Wall Street” rally. The female calls it a Salvador Dali mask, while the male corrects her and informs her that it is a Guy Fawkes mask, which sends me to Google to search “Guy Fawkes.” Do you think it is a coincidence that within the first minute of Season 2 Sorkin sets up a moment in which Will MacAvoy calls out an attorney for searching a term he just used on Google? I don’t. That’s Sorkin saying that he is MacAvoy and all of us are the attorney and that, well, he just knows things. “Some people call it a gift; I call it a burden.”

5. “John Dillinger said that the problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have the protection of it.”

“That doesn’t sound like Dillinger.”

Will gets the first line, and Charlie gets the second in this battle of “I’m not an Actual New York City prosecutor, but I’ve played one on TV”. My Google search informs me that Charlie is correct. Apparently it was Truman Capote, most of who’s crimes were fashion-related, actually said this. So now we know.

John Dillinger was shot and killed while leaving a theater in Chicago. The movie he had seen, which is ironic considering the show to which we are devoting this annotation, was Manhattan Melodrama.