Sunday Evening Dribblings

Weekend TV is just the pits. Weekend TV is there to remind you and shame you that you are not doing anything. It says to you "Pathetic loser, watch me and rue your existence!"

The time between the Super Bowl and Spring Training needs to be eliminated. Either extend football playoffs so that the Super Bowl happens the last week of February, or make pitchers and catchers report February 1st. I can't take the month and a half of crap sports.

The guy who flew the plane that landed [safely] in the Hudson is going to have a life of hell from here on out. Every time there is a plane crash, some mishap, every time a goddamn kitten gets stuck in a tree, the press will call him. "Sully, should the pilot of the plane that crashed in Buffalo have had his plane on autopilot?" "Sully, what's your take on the election crisis in Israel?" "Sully, what would you do with the bailout money?" "Sully, should I get the chicken sandwich or the Double-Double?" That guy is gonna wish he had never been born.

Let's talk art. I just rented I Vitelloni [which was, apparently some sort of made-up word that was meant to connote an intestine. Or fat calves. Or something. The non-literal translation was "The Idlers." Think "Diner" set in a small destitute Italian town in about 1952.] The movie is about five aimless male friends, all unmarried, all jobless [oddly there is no mention of the war or their service or lack thereof in it] and all of them are about 30. The plot, what there is of it, mainly follows the exploits of Fausto, the handsome, charismatic, skirt-chaser who gets his girlfriend, the young, attractive, somewhat virtuous Sandra, pregnant. So the shotgun comes out [wielded by the groom's father] and the young couple gets married. And Fausto continues to chase skirts. So, at the end of the movie, Sandra has had enough of Fausto, she runs off. Fausto, it is implied, decides to change his womanizing ways and go find Sandra. When he does, Sandra has taken refuge in the very modest apartment of Fausto's father. Who then proceeds to beat his son with a belt. The penultimate scene has the smiling Fausto - with several bandages and cuts on his face - happily reunited with Sandra, and their baby. And Sandra says to him, the next time, I will beat you and it will be worse!

I'm thinking to myself as I'm watching this: score one for good old fashioned corporal punishment.

I have a friend who is fiercely anti-capital punishment. I am not. I am not anti-corporal punishment either. Which may seem odd to my friends who know that I got hit when I was a kid. And not always justly. So there is that problem. But still, the reality remains: when the fear of pain is involved, one tends to learn more quickly. One hopes that the people who dole out justice do it using enlightened good sense.

But to beat someone who is thirty? Wow. You go, Fellini.

Any predictions on (a) will the Ryan Adams - Mandy Moore nupitals go down, and (b) if so, how long the marriage will last? I mean, I can only think of ... Stiv Bators with Debby Boone ... I mean, Mr. Chain-smoking Speedball with the Miley Cyrus of 1999? Wow. Things have gotten strange. The world is right when rock stars marry groupies or models - like baseball players marrying stewardesses and cocktail waitresses. But this - this just shouldn't happen!

Or You Could Have Just Stayed Silent

I write a lot of emails. And a lot of blog posts. And I wind up deleting many of them in their entirety, especially if they are directed at specific people. Sometimes, I'll let them slip through, but I carefully consider it before I do ... lest this happen.