Chrisco Spins

In case you were wondering why I was missing The Daily Show so much the other day.

Here’s a few things I read this week that I thought interesting enough to pass along:

1) An LA Times writer talks about her “so-called glamorous life as a foreign correspondent.”

2) In the same spirit, I regularly check in with the NY Times Baghdad Bureau’s blog. A really interesting look inside the coverage of the war.

3) A Washington Post article on a new restaurant in the process of opening. The interesting part is that it is being opened as an open-source project. Basically that means that the people bank-rolling the project are leaving all the decisions up to a group of people who have expressed interest in contributing ideas. The idea is called “crowdsourcing.”

4) Newsweek article on shifting Taliban strategy in Afghanistan.

5) Fun entry at the great web-site How Stuff Works on why eating polar bear liver can kill you.

Michelle Wie is going to play in another PGA tour event against the men. Apparently this upsets some people, including Beth Ann Balry who took it upon herself to bash the teenager for swerving out of her lane.

People do this with Wie and I don’t understand it at all. So what she’s never won an LPGA event? So what some girl named Paula Creamer is better than her? So what she gets mashed every time she tees up against the guys? None of that is any of our business. If some PGA event sponsor wants to hook her up with several hundreds of thousands of dollars to play three or four days of golf then why shouldn’t she take it? She never wins when she plays against the women either and they don’t even bother to pay her an appearance fee. So what gives?

Sportswriters in this country have an odd outlook on how athletes should behave. Athletes should do what’s best for their sport and for their game and for their fans. Why should they do that exactly? I work in television news. If I happen to be pumping gas outside a station and someone runs in and robs it, should I grab my cellphone camera and make sure my station gets the first video of the robbery? That would be the best thing for my network, for my viewers. If I chose instead to call 9-1-1 and chill across the street drinking a milkshake at Chik-fil-a while watching what goes down, should I be called out in the journalism press? Why should I be required to do anything other than what I feel is best for me and my family? Why should Michelle Wie?

Maybe she’s not out to build the LPGA into something that rivals the NBA or NFL. Maybe she couldn’t care less about breaking whatever career records currently stand in the LPGA. Maybe she just likes playing golf, happens to be pretty good at it, and can make a bajillion dollars without ever winning because she also happens to be a 6-foot-tall cutey. And at the end of the day, what’s wrong with that?

As the New York Times noted in the process of dogging her out, Michelle Wie has made upwards of $30 million playing golf and endorsing products, and not at all in that order. I’m sure she wants to be a really good professional golfer. After all, don’t we all want to be considered good at what we do? But does she have the drive to become the best golfer? Only she knows that. And you know what? It doesn’t matter if she does or doesn’t. We would all like to believe that everyone is driven to be the best, but that just happens not to be true. Some people want to do what it takes to make their money, take it easy, and enjoy their lives. And that’s just as valid as the other outlook. Michelle Wie may be the Anna Kournikova of golf, but Anna Kournikova is living a pretty good life off the proceeds she made being a first-rate cutey and a third-rate professional tennis player.

Why is it always folks who didn’t develop great talents who bash those who did for wasting them? If you’d worked as hard all your life as Michelle Wie to become a great golfer, then you would do it differently. Maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. At the end of the day, you didn’t work that hard and she did. So she gets the option of wasting her talent or not. It’s hers to waste. She earned it. Just like she earned those $30 million.

A few things I read this week that I liked enough to pass on:

1) A quick rundown in The Economist of how Al-Qaeda will ultimately be defeated by Muslims. Here’s the short version and here’s an in-depth special report they did on Al-Qaeda that is well worth the time you spend digging into it.

2) Interesting Slate article on video game technology being used by the military. Great title also, “War is Halo.”

3) Remember the FISA law that Obama’s most vehement supporters got all worked up about him flip-flopping to support? Smart political move no doubt, but it pissed off his most lefty backers. Anyway, the ACLU has filed suit to block the measure’s implementation. Check that out and their very good primer on the FISA act in question and why they hate it.

4) Check out the winners of Smithsonian Magazine’s 5th Annual Photo Contest. Some really wonderful images.

5) A great article from the Harvard Business Review on what it takes to become an expert at anything.

Julian sent me this and since he won’t ever post on his own I’ll post this for him. Enjoy.

Here’s a few things I read this week that I think are worth passing on. Enjoy:

1) What if John McCain and Barack Obama spent less time pandering to ill-informed and unemployed Rust Belt voters and instead based their economic appeals on the things that would get economists excited about their candidacy? What would their economic policies look like then? A New York Times article explored just that question.

2) The International Criminal Court is considering charges against Sudan’s president for crimes against humanity related to genocide in Darfur. The Economist looks at how the tradition of immunity for sitting national leaders is being reconsidered and what that might mean for the Bush Administration’s record on torture.

3) True or false: bottled water is better for you than tap? BusinessWeek lays out the pros and cons.

4) Jesse Helms died this week. That left a lot of people in the media with the task of remembering a man who many of us considered an icon of intolerance and hate. The Root summed it up nicely for us all. And Mike Luckovich put together the funniest comic/obituary that made me realize he’s just as much of a morbidly cynical bastard as the rest of us.

5) Does our almost constant interaction with the internet change the way we think? The Atlantic asks the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid”?

6) I’m sort of a space nerd. I’ll prove it by recommending the Bad Astronomy blog’s primer on Saturn’s rings. I think it’s really interesting.

Television is all about ratings. You have no idea how true that statement is until you work inside the industry for long enough to reach a certain level. I read ratings because they are the most important measure of how my show is doing. In my perusal of ratings this week I ran into something that made me happy even though it didn’t relate to my program at all.

For the June ratings period, Spanish-language programs ranked as the top two early morning newscasts in the L.A. and New York markets. If you don’t know, L.A. and New York are important media markets (and you are an idiot).

This news comes in the same week that I sat at a restaurant and silently railed against the closed captions of Lou Dobbs’ program. He was taking Barack Obama to task for suggesting that it might be a good idea for English-speaking children to learn Spanish at the same time our schools are working to teach Spanish-speaking children English. He cited some statistic that said 80+% of Americans support English being named the country’s official language. I say that makes 80% of Americans morons.

So hats off to the folks at Univision who own and operate the stations that got the ratings win. And Lou Dobbs… suck it.

George Carlin died yesterday. I always loved him because he made me laugh at the same time he was making me uncomfortable. If you haven’t heard him riff on religion and felt just a bit of unease then you’ve missed a real measure of your faith. Everyone knows about his 7 words routine. But here is one of my favorites that’s not quite as famous.

And of course, here’s the 7 words.

“The next time I see that ‘bleachy-haired honkey bitch‘  I’m going to wring her scrawny little neck!” Ced didn’t even look up from the notebook where he was working on a Sudoku puzzle. By now he was used to me bursting into rooms and hurling insane declarations. I call it starting a story “in medias res”. I learned that term in my 12th grade AP English class while studying epic poetry. Epic poems start in medias res (in the middle of things) so that the reader is thrust into the action of the story. The details of the past are filled in later, like poetic flashbacks. It’s more dramatic that way. As soon as Mrs. Stevenson wrote it on the board, it became less of a literary term and more of a credo for me. Ced understands, so now it doesn’t phase him at all. That and he really really likes Sudoku.

“Who are we murdering now?” He asks, taking a sip of coffee. “I just want to make sure I have the right size trash bags.”

“Hollis FUCKING Gillespie! Who else?”  I then had to explain to him how Chrisco has been prodding me to compile my columns into a book for years, because, according to him, I’m like the rap Hollis Gillespie. I had shrugged it off at the time because I knew the book wasn’t really selling. What’s the point, I thought. Who wants to read about one odd chick’s quirky observations about life? Then I find out that she’s touring to promote her third book and her - get this - TELEVISION DEAL! What the hell? “What’s she got that I don’t have??” I demanded.

Ced furrowed his brow, then rotated his pencil to erase a misplaced 6. I would not have reacted, except that Ced never messes up on a sudoku puzzle. He’s sort of a savant. I had struck a nerve. The last time I asked that question, we were sitting in a coffee shop just like this one. I had just left my 7-year-old daughter at a play date with my friend’s son who is in love with her. When I left, they were planning the menu for the “cat wedding”, a touching union of his new Siamese kitten and my 16-year-old spayed calico. The little boy wasn’t that interested in the feline nuptials, but he liked to get practice in, since, according to him, he and my daughter would be planning their own wedding one day. The theme, he said, would be Spiderman.

It was stupid, of course, but it made me tear up anyway. My 7-year-old had found true love, even though she was oblivious to it at the moment. Even my old-ass cat could manage a May-December romance of sorts. I, on the other hand, was doomed to spend my days roaming the earth alone, unwanted, unloved. I panicked and begged Ced to meet me at our usual coffee shop, where I later stormed into the place, and right in middle of everything, demanded that he stop dicking around with his chickenhead girlfriend and marry me already.

He didn’t appreciate it then, either, and he told me so, the first and only time I have ever heard him raise his voice to me. The other coffee shop patrons, of course, didn’t know why. They were just coming in on a dramatic scene. They didn’t understand how us heroes of epic poetry get down. See, epic heroes are extraordinary figures, usually with superhuman qualities. They can accomplish amazing feats, but in every epic poem the hero is eventually brought down by the classic fatal flaw, hubris. I knew Ced had always had a little crush on me. I taught him things, I made him laugh, I could read his mind, and my smile is like angels fucking. Yet, I had failed to consider that no matter how superhuman our friendship was, expecting him to forget that he loved his girlfriend was the arrogant blow that mortally wounded his respect for me.  She was a sweet girl with a good heart. She had stood by him faithfully to make their relationship work. Failing to respect that only showed why I was alone.

It took us a long time to find another coffee shop after my outburst got us ejected that day, but here we were again. I lowered my voice and calmed down. He looked up at me, finally, but he didn’t have to say anything. As usual, I read his mind. Yes, Nat Porter’s got an extraordinary pen game, and her insights are downright heroic, but banking on her talent so much that she doesn’t see she needs to respect hard work, that just might kill her career.

“I know. I’m  being stupid. I know I’m a decent writer, but Hollis Gillespie actually put in the work and made it happen for herself. Of course she deserves everything she has.” I sighed and sank back into my chair.  Ced leaned over the table and kissed me on the forehead. “You’ll get there. I know you will.” He handed me his pencil and notebook.

Next time I see Hollis Gillespie, I’ll probably hug her. I won’t even introduce myself or explain why or anything. Sure, she will probably be confused being thrust into the middle of some stranger’s professional epiphany, but that’s how we epic heroes do. It’s more dramatic that way.

This morning I opened an e-mail from my boy Doug in which he had forwarded a link for the lead-off single for the new Roots album, a track titled “Birthday Girl”. He briefly prefaced it by saying that, even though there had been some negative reviews, he thought the video would be a hit. He asked if I thought it could get regular play.

I really need you to just watch this, please, so you can understand how very silly that question is.

Of course it will get regular play!!! Dorky teen boys getting their “gifts” unwrapped by a mischievous-looking barely legal chick(en head?)* and the implication that as soon as a young lady hits that magic number, she’s smash-appropriate? Yes, Doug, I’m afraid this just may be a hit, if for no other reason than that the video features porn star Sasha Grey. This video is wank fodder for so many reasons. It will probably never matter that Black Thought is actually rhyming about THE TOTAL EFFING OPPOSITE idea.

I dunno, man. I’d say it was a “no-brainer”, but that term just feels oddly inappropriate in this context.

*Do we even use that word anymore? Is it fair to categorize her as such, just because she graduated from high school with dreams to break into the porn industry? Hmmm…