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Showing posts from 2014

(Not) Getting Carded

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So how many Christmas cards did you get this year? Are they adorning the wall? Do you have so many that they outline the closet door frame? Or are they stuffed in a holder on the coffee table, bursting? No? Not at our house, either. The Christmas card is a dinosaur---like drive-in movies and transistor radios. Nobody sends Christmas cards anymore. It's another example of how Americans today just don't like to slap a stamp on anything and ship it via the United States Postal Service. Sending Christmas cards was a feeling of accomplishment but not of gratification. I mean, you were never there to see the recipient open yours. But getting Christmas cards? Now that was some fun. They would start to come, slowly at first, usually the week after Thanksgiving. Those cards were sent by the early bird folks. But as the month of December moved along, the Christmas cards moved along with it, filling the mailbox more voluminously as the days ticked down toward December 25

A True Miss America

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Today's Miss Americas serve their term and then they're never heard from again. Or so it seems. There's no prerequisite, of course, that the winner of arguably the most famous beauty contest of all time needs to stay in the limelight when she hands the crown over to her successor. But there was a time when Miss America was often the springboard to bigger and better (or, at least, more profitable) things. Mary Ann Mobley was one of those Miss Americas who stuck around in our consciousness long after she sashayed down the runway. Mobley, 77, passed away the other day after a battle with breast cancer . She was the first Mississippian to win the legendary contest, and she parlayed that distinction into a pretty decent stage and film career as an actress. Like so many other women of her era, Mobley was able to star opposite Elvis Presley on screen, and like her brethren, she out-acted him. Mobley had a smile that went from ear-to-ear and her dark beauty was a star

Alco-Haul

My bar-hopping days are long gone, so maybe I know not of what I type. So call me naive, but do we need bars to be open until 4 a.m.? A hurried-through bill by the Michigan State Legislature would allow some bars to stay open until 4 in the morning on weekends. According to the bill's sponsors, it's a matter of competition. Senator Virgil Smith (D-Detroit), the bill's sponsor, says the measure is needed so Detroit can compete with other big cities, like New York. Come again? We are going after the lush crowd? Tourists will decide their destination based on bars being open further into the wee hours? Another legislator said that the bill merely gives businesses that serve alcohol the option to stay open later. "Who are we to tell bars how late they can stay open?" was the quote. OK. That seems to be a shocking display of being short-sighted. I mean, we are talking about alcohol consumption here. There figures to be some degree of consequence to

Cos and Effect

In 1984, Bill Cosby helped save an entire television network. Thirty years later, he's toxic to an entire industry. It was in '84 when NBC, lagging far behind brethren CBS and ABC in ratings to the point of being a national joke, brought in Cosby and built a sitcom around him. Cosby was 46 years old and though he'd been canceled in the past with other television vehicles, his star power on TV was still heavy. Viewers still had "Fat Albert" and Jell-O commercials fresh on their minds. The sitcom idea was novel. NBC decided to cast Cosby and his TV family as well-to-do African-Americans living in a tony brownstone in upper Manhattan. This was no "Good Times" scenario. The presentation on TV of blacks living a life that wasn't in poverty wasn't new (witness "The Jeffersons"), but Cosby was a doctor and his wife was a lawyer. With all due respect to dry cleaner moguls, this was different. Plus, Cliff and Clair Huxtable had kids---

Keep on Truckin'

Why does the ice cream man have the market cornered on driving trucks around the neighborhood, selling his wares? Think about his clientele---six-year-olds, who aren't exactly loaded. How much disposable income does a first grader have? This may seem like a strange time to bring this up, because we're hardly in ice cream truck season, but I say this is the perfect time to discuss this. With ice cream no longer a viable purchase option at your curb, why not consider other items that a grown up would run out of his/her house to snatch up? Liquor, for one. Can you imagine if there was a liquor truck that cruised the neighborhoods? The driver would make a mint. Adults would be lined up down the street as far as the eye could see. The possibilities are endless. How nice would it be if you could purchase an apple pie from a truck in front of your home? Or a dozen doughnuts? The items for sale wouldn't have to be limited to food stuffs. I'd have killed at tim

Wing Cha-Ching!

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It takes about 15 seconds to eat one, from start to finish. They cost about 79 cents a pound, raw at the supermarket. They are made up of bone more than meat. So why are chicken wings at the restaurant so expensive? I like a chicken wing as much as the next person. You can do a lot with a chicken wing, in terms of preparation. Chicken wings play nice with the various sauces and batter that coat them. That's all fine and dandy, but does that equate to $9.99 for a dozen? I use $9.99 as an arbitrary price, but that's in the ballpark. I think we're being gouged on chicken wings. The easy answer, of course, as to why the markup is so high, is that we consumers are willing to pay it. Let's face it. Properly cooked chicken wings are a sight to behold. They are slathered with sauce, which envelopes the crunchy skin, which is deep fried and/or baked deftly, so the meat inside stays tender and moist. But when not done right, the chicken wing can be slimy, gummy

Smile! (Or not)

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Allen Funt created television's  Candid Camera . But he was not the star. If Funt were alive today, he would concur. Funt, who took the idea of a roving microphone capturing unguarded moments from the days of radio and turned it into a TV phenomenon, also never liked the notion that his show made fools out of unsuspecting people. Funt preferred to think that Candid Camera was more of a series of case studies on human behavior, rather than a gag-filled half-hour. Regardless, the star wasn't Funt, though he hosted the in-studio segments and often appeared during the hidden camera "case studies." The stars of Candid Camera were always the people---the folks whose behavior was being chronicled in a very unfiltered and unscripted way. Therefore, the laughs that resulted were always from the audience's glee at the reactions of the unwitting, caught by Funt's hidden camera. But that was then. TV Land has trotted out a new version of Candid Camera, hos

Getting Festive, PC or Not

I wonder if you could get away with calling them "Ethnic Festivals" these days. I've kind of lost track of political correctness. I don't know what is acceptable terminology anymore. But what I do know is that, as a high schooler and into my college years, my buddies and I would descend on Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit and partake in "ethnic" food, people watch, and maybe have a nip or two. Yes, it was before we were of legal drinking age. Amazing how enterprising teenagers can be. Anyhow, they called them Ethnic Festivals and they would rotate throughout the summer, on the weekends. You know---Greek, Italian, Arab-American, etc. The Plaza would be host to live music, vendor stands/kiosks and underneath, in the below-ground portion of the Plaza, were loads of food nooks. Imagine an underground food court, like they have at the malls. All you needed to do to find the food vendors below was to follow your nose. The food was yummy. There was also

It's the Response, Stupid

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There's some sad irony in the Ray Rice conundrum as far as the National Football League is concerned. The NFL is a league that has a legacy of toughness and images of "real men" doing battle on mud-strewn gridirons, snow and other unfavorable elements. It's a league whose players like to throw around the word "respect," whether it's not getting enough or giving too much. "Real men" and "respect" don't fit Rice, the ex-Baltimore Ravens running back who was caught red-fisted via security camera, cold-cocking his fiancee in an elevator last February. This blog is expressly for my non-sports rantings, but just because the first several paragraphs have been littered with NFL references, the Rice situation has nothing to do with pro football, per se. Real men don't hit women. And that's not how you gain respect. It is, however, all about not having any of the R-word for your fellow human beings, let alone the woman to

Avoidable Tragedy the Worst Kind

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In a perfect world, Derek Flemming would have been able to march up to the driver of a car that cut him off, express some anger, and get back into his own vehicle---without fear of losing his life. The 43 year-old husband and father of two young children would have vented his anger and frustration and still lived to re-tell the story to friends, co-workers and family at every opportunity. We do that a lot, you know---turn storyteller when we are wronged, whether it's from poor service at a restaurant to being incredulous at a retailer's return policy, among other things. But then we get it out of our system and we move on, until someone else relates a story that fires your mental file cabinet into gear and your story gets retold yet again. But Flemming paid the ultimate price in an act that unfortunately will have people---like yours truly---getting into "blame the victim" mode. Flemming was gunned down at a traffic light near Howell after he allegedly comp

"Whose Class" Action

Labor Day was always my least favorite holiday. I'm sure I was hardly alone. Of course, I'm talking about when I was a kid, and so just about every other kid likely joined me in that sentiment. Labor Day meant the unofficial end to summer, though the calendar says that the season runs until September 21. No matter. The calendar didn't give us kids that long; classes in Livonia, where I grew up, always commenced the day after Labor Day. It was a final three-day weekend before the baseball mitts and swimming suits were to go back into mothballs, in favor of notebooks, pencils and rulers. There was one day of excitement, however, in the weeks leading up to the first day of school, and that was the day the class lists would be posted in the school window by the front door. This was for grade school, not beyond. I'm not sure how we found out that the lists were posted. Probably some sort of loosely designated sentry or Paul Revere type would spread the word. This w

Tears of a Class Clown

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" I try to keep my sadness hid Smiling in the public eye But in my lonely room cry the tears of a clown." I don't generally like to start blog posts or columns with quotes or song lyrics. I have often looked at that sort of thing as a cheap, hackneyed stunt. But the first thing I thought of upon hearing the news of Robin Williams' death by suicide was the iconic song by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Tears of a Clown." So I thought it would be appropriate to lead this post with a portion of Smokey's lyrics, because how can you read them and not think of Williams and the many comedians before him who made their living making us laugh while at the same time battling inner demons? Williams, 63, apparently hanged himself at his California home, sometime between 10:30 p.m. Sunday night and 10:30 a.m. Monday morning. His manager said Williams was battling "severe depression" lately. It is fascinating to me, how many

Tall, Dark and Oklahoman

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James Garner was once asked if he'd ever do a nude scene on camera. "I don't do horror movies," he said. Rim shot. Garner, who died on Saturday at age 86, was a Hollywood leading man but a humble Oklahoman at heart. "I got into the business to put a roof over my head," he once said. "I wasn't looking for star status. I just wanted to keep working." And work he did, especially in the 1960s, when Garner was often teamed with the biggest female names in movies, such as Doris Day (Rock Hudson is more famously connected with Day, but Garner did his fair share with her as well), Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and Kim Novak. The film boom for Garner was set up by his work in TV's Maverick, in which he starred from 1957-60, playing old Western card shark and ladies man Bret Maverick. The show went toe-to-toe on Sunday nights with The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show, more than holding its own. If you were a casting director

Rockets' Red Blare

I'm beginning to think that the celebration of Fourth of July with fireworks is carrying on longer than the Revolutionary War itself. In our neighborhood, the pop-pop-pop of things with fuses starts in late-June and is still going on, and this is nearly a week after the 4th. Granted, the pace is slowing, but why are we still hearing things that go boom? If people still possess these firework-like items, what are they waiting for? Maybe I'm more sensitive to this because we have a dog, and he's not unlike many other canines who don't appreciate the rockets' red glare. Last night we set out for our evening stroll and just five minutes into it, something went boom and just like that, our pup was making a beeline for the house. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but do we need to hear the commotion (sometimes past 11:00 p.m.) for a three-week period? I could go into the accidents, some tragic, but that's piling on. It's unfair to take pot shots be

You Couldn't Better Fretter

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Before the commercial airwaves on television were taken over by ads for prescription drugs, lawyers and car insurance companies, there was the wild and crazy pitchman. Every city had them. The products being pumped were usually electronics, appliances and used cars. The ads were low on productions costs---usually all we saw was the pitchman screaming into the camera with an occasional glimpse at what he was hawking. The emphasis was on the supposed insanity of the pitchman, because the deals were so good, you see. New York had Crazy Eddie, who pitched electronic gizmos while shrieking maniacally at the viewer. And Detroit had Ollie Fretter. Fretter, who passed away Sunday at age 91, blanketed the TV and radio ad space with commercials for his appliance store, starting in the 1960s and continuing for about 30 years. He promised five pounds of free coffee if he couldn't beat your best deal. The appliance wars in Detroit were hot in the 1970s and '80s. Fretter went

Getting Tanked

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Today I found out something new and potentially very helpful. As often happens, lessons learned are done so the hard way. I used to be a charcoal guy when it came to outside grilling, but in 2008 I broke down and bought a gas cooker at Kmart. If nothing else, my lovely bride would have a much easier time when she had a hankering for tossing some steaks on the barbie before her husband arrived home. I have come to accept the lack of charcoal cooking in my life, but there was one thing about gas cooking that stymied me and until today, continued to do so. How the heck do you know when your propane tank is running on empty? It has happened more than once, where I've been midway through some steaks or chops or chicken and the flames grew perilously smaller and smaller until they finally went out altogether. And, more than once, yours truly has had to turn off the burners, disconnect the tank and hurry it down to the local U-Haul or Home Depot for a refill---not unlike a pit

The Bradys' Glue in Blue

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The wise-cracking maid/butler/servant in situation comedies has been a trope for nearly as long as folks first started flicking on televisions in the 1940s. So by the time Ann B. Davis showed up to help stay-at-home mom Carol Brady in 1969, she was hardly the first of the hired help in TV history to get some funny lines. But Davis, who played Alice in "The Brady Bunch" from 1969-74, will go down as one of the most memorable, if not the most memorable, live-in helpers of all time. We lost Davis yesterday at age 88, the victim of a fall in her home. Unlike some of her brethren on screen---before and after the Bradys---Davis' Alice wasn't snarky or mean-spirited and didn't try to steal the scene. Her lines were delivered with a dose of humility and with a good heart. Davis was more like Sebastian Cabot's Mr. French in "Family Affair"---subtle but omnipresent. You knew Alice was always around, even if she wasn't chewing the scenery and alwa

Safety in (Recall) Numbers

The recall of a car seems to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of proposition. General Motors is recalling cars almost as fast as they're making them, but what is worse---recalling cars or ignoring the problem? If anyone knows both sides of that sword, it's GM. Nearly 14 million GM cars have been recalled in 2014, and the year isn't half over. The latest mulligan for General Motors is the Chevy Aveo, which the other day became the 30th GM vehicle to be recalled in 2014. The 218,000 subcompact Aveos brought the grand total of recalled GM cars to 13.8 million. The latest recall involves Aveos in model years between 2004 and 2008. The daytime running light module in the dashboard center stack can overheat, melt and catch fire. Of course, nothing is worse than a recall born out of deaths, and GM knows all about that, too---with its infamous ignition switch debacle from earlier this year that is responsible for at least 13 deaths (accord

Movies No-Longer-On-Demand

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The corner video store has turned into the city video store. Time was that you couldn't walk much more than 500 feet in any direction without running smack into a joint that rented VHS tapes. Then, you couldn't walk much more than 2,000 feet without running into a place that rented DVDs. Now, you can drive for most of a Sunday afternoon without seeing more than a couple video stores. They close all the time these days, but locally there is a closing that might tug on some heart strings. I used to go out of my way to venture into Thomas Video. So did everyone else, because there was only one Thomas Video---literally and figuratively. Thomas Video, the favorite of the intense B-movie fan, is closing up shop. To many, this is like the news of a loved one with a terminal disease passing away. You knew it was coming. Thomas Video has been located in Royal Oak since 2009, but I remember visiting when it was on Main Street, south of 14 Mile Road, in Clawson. Like I said,

Mustang, Untamed

Our daughter just turned 21. And, parked in front of our house as I write this, is the car in which we drove her home. I remember strapping her tiny, 4-lb. body into her car seat and securing her in the Mustang's back seat that day in June, 1993 in front of Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. She was born two months premature, and thus weighed just 2-lb, 14-oz. when she was born via emergency C-section. The Mustang was purchased in September, 1992, just before my bride and I were betrothed. Little did we know that some 21-plus years and 115,000 miles later, we'd still own the car. But that's OK. It's been a good car. How could it not be, if it's old enough to legally drink alcohol? It's starting to come apart at the seams now, which is to be expected. Rust is spreading like cancer. But the Mustang still runs and it gets me front Point A to Point B. We just make sure that the distance between those two points isn't too far. We have a 2003 Mercury Sable

Utash: We Can Only Hope

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Sometimes the 24-hour news cycle gets extended. Sometimes it's a 48-hour or 72-hour news cycle. And, on occasion, a story manages to stay in the public's consciousness for a week or more. News stories anymore are like pieces of pasta thrown against the wall. Only some stick. The Stephen Utash beating has beat the 24-hour news cycle, by far. Now the question is, Will it matter? The Utash story is right out of a novel or a made-for-TV movie. White suburbanite hits a young black boy with his pickup truck, in the city. The suburbanite stops to check on the condition of the boy and is then beaten senseless, perhaps to death (that's a part of the story that has yet to be resolved), by a mob of black men. It's a story that almost had to happen, to provide the most recent litmus test of where we are as a society, particularly when it comes to violence and race relations. The elements are all there, and if they weren't, the story wouldn't work as well. It w

See You Later

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It's not easy to be a trailblazer when so many of the trails have already been blazed, but David Letterman somehow managed to blaze one anyway. You may think that late night television was an already-mined resource by the time Letterman, 66, came along in 1982, hosting "Late Night with David Letterman" on NBC. It's true that TV at the witching hour was nothing new in 1982, having been first attempted some 30 years prior and being refined for 20 years by Johnny Carson when NBC gave Letterman a late night slot, following Carson's "Tonight Show." But it turned out there was still plenty that Letterman found to do that not even the iconic Carson managed to discover. Letterman announced today, somewhat shockingly during the taping of "The Late Show with David Letterman," that 2015 will be the year of his retirement. "This (retirement) means Paul (bandleader Shaffer) and I can finally get married," Letterman said to a crowd that s

Sugar, Spice and Puppy Dog Tails

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Timberlake Christian School (TCS) in western Virginia buried the lead in their letter to the guardian of eight-year-old Sunnie Kahle. The last sentence was the most true and the most telling. "We believe that unless Sunnie as well as her family clearly understand that God has made her female and her dress and behavior need to follow suit with her God-ordained indentity, that TCS is not the best place for her future education." No kidding, it's not the best place for Sunnie's future education. Like, I'd pull that child out of there yesterday. Sunnie is an eight-year-old girl, but by her own admission and her grandmother's (Sunnie's legal guardian) own acknowledgement, Sunnie likes a lot of "boy stuff"---such as autographed baseballs and hunting knives, according to CBS-TV affiliate WDBJ. But Sunnie also digs jewelry and stuffed animals, too. "It's fun," Sunnie says of her varied interests ---some of which don't seem

Life Outside the Bun

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I admit it. I love Taco Bell. There are so many reasons. I have mocked it before , but I have been secretly in admiration of how the fast food entrant can make so much with such few ingredients. Give the folks at Taco Bell a tortilla, some sort of meat, refried beans, rice and cheese, and stand back. And they do it all without breaking the bank. I can walk into a Taco Bell, order food for our family of four and still get a few bucks' worth of change from a $20 bill. Try that at McDonald's, Burger King or Wendy's. I like a good old-fashioned taco for 99 cents. A bean burrito (with extra onions) for $1.49. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to find anything on the menu for more than four bucks. And the quality? It's not a matter of "you get what you pay for." For the price, I think the food is pretty damned good. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. I don 't pretend that Taco Bell is Mexican "cuisine." But I also don't expe

From Lion to Lamb? WHEN?

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It's been a long winter, yet it's already mid-March. Such a dichotomy. It's been a winter that most of us would like to forget in Michigan, but it will likely be among the most memorable. And the calendar keeps flipping. It didn't always feel that way. Back in mid-January, which both feels like an eon ago and like yesterday, with Arctic temps and snow slamming us alternately, there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Depression began to set in at the thought of a bad winter merely getting started. As the pounding continued, with precious few moments of respite, as January turned to February, you felt like a hamster on a wheel---running but getting nowhere. The only objective at that point was survival. Just getting through it. Then, just like that, it's mid-March. Baseball season is just around the corner, which ought to provide hope and a feeling of spring's renewal. But it's hard to feel that with temps in the 20s and the sidewalk