by John Walters
Starting Five
“Listen, I got an in-law or two who’d like to be on ‘Celebrity Apprentice'”
1. Yeezy Pass
Yeah, I dunno. Kanye’s come a long way from this moment:
2. E.T, Drone Home
George Orwell checks watch, grins, recognizes that he may have gotten the exact year wrong, but everything else is right on schedule
The first Amazon drone delivery to a home took place today, in Cambridge, U.K. It took 13 minutes from shipping center to front door. . Is this progress or the apocalypse? What must birds be thinking?And remember that friendly UPS or FedEx driver? What’s he going to be doing five years from now? And at what point will we realize that “making life easier” is not synonymous with “making life better?”
Okay, I’m done. I’ll return to my porch and to the sipping of my Country Time lemonade (and, no, that’s not Ice-T). (Full disclosure: Despite my misgivings, I own stock in Amazon. Yo’ mama didn’t raise no dummy!)
3. Sandy Hook: Four Years Later
I remember this day vividly. It was a bright, sunny day in New York City and I was working my former gig at the steakateria. On this day my job was to work a private lunch for Fox and Friends gang in our main floor dining room. A Christmas party. Guests included Gretchen Carlson, Steve Ducey and Brian Kilmeade, whom I recall treated us servers like pros. They were genuinely gracious.
Anyway, what makes this tragic day ironic is that across the street from where they were sitting is the Fox News ticker (if you’ve visited our fair city, you can see it on the corner of 48th and Sixth). So as lunch is nearing completion, the news of the tragedy in Sandy Hook begins running on the ticker, but because we have partitioned off their area, they cannot see it. We servers walking in and out of their room can see it, but they don’t. Eventually, I noticed many of them becoming preoccupied with their phones as colleagues were sending them alerts. The party broke up soon after that.
Sandy Hook is a pristine western Connecticut town. It’s precisely the type of place you move to shelter your kids from the monsters of the world. It’s kind of like a real-life Stars Hollow. But monsters lurk wherever men do, sadly.
4. Wake Forest Gumption*
Tommy Elrod
*The judges will accept, “WTF, WF?” and are even considering “Elrod Blues” but only the latter because we know Greg Auman would have thought of it.
Following a weeks-long investigation in Winston-Salem, Wake Forest athletic officials have concluded that former Demon Deacon player and assistant coach and current team radio analyst Tommy Elrod was the source of WakeyLeaks. Elrod ““provided or attempted to provide confidential and proprietary game preparations on multiple occasions, starting in 2014,” according to a statement released by school officials Tuesday afternoon.
If this is true, the question becomes why would the married father of three betray his alma mater? Was he binge-watching Turn on AMC? Or was he perhaps in deep in a gambling debt? And it’s still very early, but if Elrod did reach out to other programs, why did not any of them alert Wake Forest that it had a traitor in its midst? And of course the obvious, Who needs to know Wake Forest’s plays to defeat Wake Forest?
Elrod has been fired from his radio gig and banned from all Wake Forest facilities.
5. Life On Mars
Bruno Mars is cool. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
Music 101
Go Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42kzEA9l8Q
This song, released in January of 1965, was the first commercial hit for a Birmingham, England-based band named The Moody Blues. Originally recorded by a soul singer named Bessie Banks, The Moody Blues covered it and took it to No. 1 in the U.K. and No. 10 over here. This is also one of the first “promotional films” for a song, later known as “music videos,” ever shot. The lead singer here, Denny Laine, would leave the band before their big Sixties hits (“Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights In White Satin”) and join Wings, Paul McCartney’s band. So Sir Paul has been associated both with Penny Lane and Denny Laine (my work is done here).
Remote Patrol
Dial M for Murder
TCM 10 p.m.
One man’s opinion, but the best Hitchcock films take place in one room. Specifically, Rear Window and this 1954 classic starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. If you’ve never seen this whodunnit (better put, HowSolvedIt), do yourself a favor. At the very, very least, it’s peak Grace Kelly (p.s. This entire movie would no longer work, as cops would simply trace the call).
There’s a big lesson in foreign policy in this special, not that Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld ever paid any attention to it.
Also, if you’re a kid, have kids, or a kid at heart, TNT has back-to-back classics beginning at 5:45 p.m. with The Wizard of Oz and at 8 p.m. with the wise and wonderful How The Grinch Stole Christmas, narrated by Boris Karloff. I grew up in an era before DVDs, streaming, etc. Shows like this came on once a year and if you missed it, too bad. The rarity of it was what made it spectacular. Yes, I’m in a serious GOML mood this morning.