BREAKIN': I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts in the last three days; if it makes you feel any better, I haven't been to the gym, either. I was just in Philadelphia for Passover and now I'm in the middle of moving across Hoboken, so I've been left with little time for blogging. But now I'm back, with a few thoughts on the day's events, and some other stuff too:
JUST WHEN WE WERE GETTING SICK OF GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY AND COL. DAVID HACKWORTH...: Laci Peterson emerges from the ocean, and with her Cliff Van Zandt, Geoffrey Feiger, and all the other tiresome talking heads we're all still trying to forget from the Chandra Levy and Elizabeth Smart cases. I may be one of America's foremost news junkies, but I will never stop being sick of these damn people, who never have a single new thing to say, ever. As for the crime itself, Scott Peterson's arrest proves once again the veracity of my old journalism professor John Carroll's dictum: In a murder case involving a woman, "it's always the husband."
'RAW' IS WAR: Last weekend I watched Dennis Miller's HBO special, "The Raw Feed," and I was actually surprised by how unfunny I thought it was. Miller has in recent months emerged as Hollywood's most articulate voice in support of the war in Iraq, which seemed to constitute a successful re-invention for the comic after his two-year debacle of announcing on "Monday Night Football." The HBO special, his first since leaving his Friday-night show on that network, should've been the coronation of the New Dennis Miller, for everyone who didn't see the comedian's excellent recent appearances with Matthews, O'Reilly, and (most unseen of all) Donahue. But that's not what happened: "Raw Feed" essentially consisted of 60 minutes of Republican talking points, on the war and just about everything else- and in delivering them, Miller simply forgot to be funny. He used all kinds of jokes he'd already used on the talk shows, and many more that had already been in the atrocious commercials for the special. In the entire hour I laughed, maybe, three times.
No stand-up special on HBO (or anywhere else) has come close to approaching Chris Rock's duology of "Bring the Pain" and "Bigger And Blacker," and it's not likely that any other will until Rock stops making substandard movies and comes back to stand-up. George Carlin and Robin Williams have come close in the last couple of years, and it appeared as though Miller had a chance to join them. Not this time, unfortunately.
RATINGS SPIKE: Apparently giving up on their grand scheme of shedding the Nashville Network "redneck label," The National Network (TNN) has announced that they will soon change their name to "Spike TV," and adjust their programming focus to young men specifically.
When TNN snatched the rights to the then-WWF away from the USA network in 2001, they undertook a radical re-branding, away from NASCAR/"Dukes of Hazzard" fare towards more hip programming, accompanied by the name change. Attached to the asinine "We've got POP" ad campaign, the switch apparently didn't go according to plan, even after the addition of multiple "Star Trek" series and seemingly endless replays of the "Godfather" trilogy. "Spike TV" is said to be an attempt to thwart the planned launch of the Maxim-backed Maxim Entertainment Network (MEN).
So what can we expect from "Spike TV"? Wall-to-wall Spike Lee movies? Videos directed by Spike Jonze? A "Making Of" documentary on the 1989 Elvis Costello album "Spike"? A show hosted by '80s Red Sox shortstop Spike Owen? A big push for runt-ish WWE wrestler Spike Dudley? If not, then, what? Who the hell is "Spike" supposed to be?
WOLVES THROWN TO THE WOLVES: The Minnesota Timberwolves have drawn the Lakers in the first round of the playoffs; Game 1 is Sunday. As then-Wolves announcer Kevin Harlan screamed after a Shaq drunk against Minnesota in the mid-'90s, THE ANVIL HAS JUST CRUSHED THE COYOTE.
'24' NIGHTS: Fox's "24" is rushing towards a climax even more exhilirating than last year's, with Jack Bauer racing to prove that a tape recording is inauthentic in order to prevent President David Palmer from launching a retaliatory strike against three Middle Eastern countries of indeterminate identity (at least they don't make up stupid fake names like "Kundun," the way "West Wing" does).
"24" is a great show, as long as you remember that nothing on the show will ever stand up to any scrutiny. We've already seen Jack Bauer in two plane crashes, getting shot at in almost every episode, and sitting what appeared to be a couple hundred feet away from a nuclear blast. But last week's episode contained perhaps the biggest stretch of believability so far in the series.
We already learned that National Security Adviser Roger Stanton (as well as the President's former wife) had led a conspiracy to undermine the president by allowing the bomb to escape federal oversight, and it's been hinted that members of the administration were involved with the bomb plot itself. In last week's episode, the latest plot twist was that the Vice President had assembled a majority of the cabinet in a coup attempt against the president, supposedly their right under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
Leave aside that that amendment is generally in place in case the president is incapacitated, or in a coma, etc. To assert that, about a year into the president's first term, the cabinet that he appointed would, on a dime, try to overthrow him is implausible, to say the least. Though not quite as unbelievable as a black man being elected president. Or, for that matter, a candidate dumping his wife mid-campaign, and still winning the election- Palmer did that too.