Starting Five
A-Men… Oakland completes a three-game sweep of Texas to win the American League West. The A’s, who went on a 57-26 shredding of foes in the last three months, were NEVER in first place until after the final out of the final game of the regular season. Tom Verducci has a terrific piece in SI.com on Oakland while we are left wondering if Hollywood will release “Moneyball 2: Coco Crispier!”
Detroit may be dread’ing a divisional series versus baseball’s hottest team
2. Romney defeats Obama in the first presidential debate in Denver. The forensics display took place on the Obama’s 20th wedding anniversary, leading presidential scholars to research whether or not the term “sweetie” had ever before been uttered in such a forum.
3. Sports Illustrated puts a 75 year-old attorney on its cover (eight days after we did) and it is the mag’s most inspired cover in recent memory. Steve Rushin pens the cover story while his bride flits back and forth between Seattle and Minneapolis covering the WNBA playoffs. Who’s watching the young’uns!?!
SI’s bakeoff, an editorial gray area, inspires this black-and-white cover
4. Michele Caruso Cabrera Melky Cabrera Miguel Cabrera wins the Triple Crown aboard — oh, you knew that joke was coming, too — the first player to do so since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. If past is prologue, a New Wave band named Miggy will surface in about 20 years and release a critically acclaimed album entitled “Upstairs at Enrique’s.”
Did the last Triple Crown winner inspire the band that released this album?
5. Red Sox fire Bobby Valentine and –wait, what’s that? Not yet? Oh. But soon, right? Very soon? The Sawx looked worse at season’s end than Jeremy Penner did in the final scene of “The Town”, losing eight in a row and 12 of their last 13.
Reserves
Quite the load of ballyhoo made about the Yankees potentially blowing a 10-game lead to cede the A.L. East to Baltimore –the Pinstripes prevailed — while much less has been written about the Texas Strangers gagging on a 13-game lead they held back on June 30.
Facebook scalees the 1 billion users plateau, but still trails marijuana. Don’t think so? Ask this attorney. Do you want to do the “joint custody” joke or should we?
Fat Anchor Lady debate: The Today Show aired an item on the contretemps between La Crosse, Wis., anchor Jennifer Livingston and viewer Kenneth Krause, then immediately went to Al Roker for a weather update. It was so quiet in the studio you could hear a Snicker drop. Al, after all, lost about 700 pounds in the last decade.
Our thoughts? One, while Krause’s letter was completely impolitic and perhaps ignorant to a degree (Is obesity a choice? Gray area on that one…), he wrote Livingston privately. He did not bully her. He stated an opinion and if Livingston does not believe that appearance matters in television news — and its ratings — we’ll FedEx her our DVDs of “Network”, “Broadcast News” and “Up Close and Personal.”
Livingston, we might argue, bullied Krause by using her forum to air his letter publicly without his permission.
La Crosse anchorwoman Jennifer Livingston… or rather someone with a similar name who will drive more page views
Second, unless you haven’t noticed, people watch television. And viewers have a choice. If your physical appearance is costing your affiliate viewers, that is a relevant issue. Is it necessarily fair or right? I don’t know, ask David Hasselhoff as soon as you climb up the mountain of dollar bils upon which he is perched.
We spent almost two years riding the same elevators the Fox News anchoresses did. There were times we weren’t sure whether we we were at a media companyor the Miss Universe pageant, but of course we were at both. And how is Fox News doing in the ratings?
A female friend of mine, an Ivy League grad in the same business as Livingston, recently went on a job interview and spent much of it having her physical appearance appraised by her prospective boss. Fair? No, but that’s not the point.
And it works for both sexes. My friend Josh Elliott is smart and savvy, but people in the business will tell you it’s a veritable miracle to not have to clamber up the chain of affiliates to become a co-host on “Good Morning, America.” But then Josh is six-foot-five and certifiably dreamy, so that helped.
Lastly, we loved the photo Today showed of the viewer, Kenneth Krause, a cycling enthusiast who has offered to assist Livingston lose some adipose tissue. Was that directly from his Match.com profile?
(Between that pic and the Hochuli cover, this entire post shoud be titled “Old Guns”)
Mea Culpa Cabana: The Big 12 apologizes to Mike Gundy and Oklahoma State for ruining any shot the Cowboys had at a BCS bowl failing to notice that Texas fumbled on its game-winning touchdown in Stillwater on Saturday. Oops.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison plans to turn his private island in Hawaii into a “little laboratory” for sustainable living. Say it this way: “la-BORE-a-tory”. Haven’t we all seen this movie before? By the way, Mr. Ellison, we’re no billionaires here at MH (yet), but we happen to live on an island that is the world’s foremost little laboratory for sustainable living. It’s called Manhattan.
We’re dedicating this next classic tune to Houston Rockets rookie Royce White, who wants to bus to as many games as he possibly can due to his fear of flying (we totally empathize, although our fear has more to do with having to spend time in airports with self-entitled jackalopes).
Great Moments in Bus Tours: The Partridge Family, the band Stillwater, the 1993 Sugar Bowl featuring Notre Dame and Jerome Bettis, and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose motto was, “You’re Either on the Bus or You’re off the Bus.”
Speaking of rockets, these Brits are developing a rocket car that they hope will travel at a speed of 1,000 m.p.h. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to text-and-drive that vehicle?