1769 Cassius Clay, Jr.

1769 Cassius Clay, Jr.

Three obviously dangerous men. Muhammad Ali, Jr. (l) Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson. Daily Mail photo.

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Ali. Now please step off the line and come with us.

Yes, yes.  It’s almost sacrilege and fully demeaning these days to refer to Muhammad Ali by what he called his “slave name,” Cassius Clay, abandoned in 1964 when he converted to Islam.  

He was one of the best and most important athletes in American history, and certainly one of the best known.

In fact, it’s almost impossible to find anyone -- even now -- who doesn’t know Muhammad Ali.  With two exceptions.  Two agents for the Homeland Security Farceagency.

Ali, Jr. is a pleasant looking middle aged man who resembles his father, though not as much of a visual stunner. But that name?  Well, it’s gotten him taken off boarding lines at airports twice now, the latest last Friday afternoon in Washington where he had testified before congress about the first time.

So… not only did the TSA guy at Reagan Airport not know the name, but evidently hadn’t heard the story of how he was detained in Florida last month.

According to the Census Bureau, there are more than 40-thousand men named Muhammad Ali in the United States.  One of them’s a cabbie in Manhattan. Another is the manager of a Halal meat market in Chicago (patronized by both Muslims and Jews.)  A third has just gone into the bottled water business in Flint, Michigan.

Most of those guys don’t travel a lot, at least not long distances.  But you have to wonder if they’ve undergone the same kind of emotional roughing up that Junior has.

So, Mr. Ali, for use in airports (and maybe on the highway or walking down a street dressed in a navy blue hoodie and encountering the square badges) may we suggest some form of photo ID that calls you by the name you never had and that your father abandoned more than half a century ago.  Cassius Clay, Jr. may be demeaning.  But better demeaned than trying to educate the airport knuckle draggers and security guards with guns.

Look at the bright side: At least your name isn’t Osama.

SHRAPNEL:

--Money- losing Staples says it will close another bunch of stores, while co-owned iHeartRadio tries to cope with unpayable debt equal to the gross domestic product of Slovakia and no visible means of paying.  And here we thought private equity funds were run by Masters of the Universe. Someone’s getting rich… but it ain’t the stockholders.

--When Preet Bharara refused orders to resign as US Attorney for the southern district of New York, the acting assistant attorney general fired him.  He’s made things too hot for crooked politicians of all major parties, for the snakes of Wall Street and other assorted miscreants.  Next stop is probably Harvard Law where he’ll become the new Dershowitz.

GRAPESHOT:

-I can spell Bhararararara, but I don’t know when to stop.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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1768 Thinking About Joe

Don’t straighten up, I’ll never find anything.

Joe Franklin didn’t make it to his 91st birthday party yesterday, but we celebrated anyway.  A nice little gathering, though it’s gotten smaller for each of the last three years.  

After all, when the birthday boy is upstairs cavorting with Marilyn Monroe, Walter Winchell, Jolson, C.B. DeMille, and anyone else who was anybody in times gone by why come back down to mingle with us?

Joe’s last assignment was with the radio program “Bloomberg on the Weekend,” which was carried in 18 time zones, many of which had few if any speakers of English.

So around this time of year the question always come in: “What was Joe really like?”  There’s a question anyone who ever heard his radio shows or watched his TV shows can answer as well as any of us who worked with him.  What you heard and saw is what you got.

Joe was the most unpretentious household name any household in America has heard or seen.

A small guy with a big heart.  Already old while still in his teens.  Limitless enthusiasm for the good bad and ugly of show biz.  Famous, infamous, people no one ever heard of but with something to offer.  Joe found them all.  Or they found him.

He said he interviewed hundreds of thousands of  people in his decades on the air.  True? Who knows.  It’s a high number in any case.

He’d come into the building and stash some free snacks in his attache case.  Too poor to buy them? Don’t be silly.  The first rule of performance is if someone offers free food or drink, take it.

His six minute and 20 second segment on the weekend show generated a lot of mail and phone calls.  People wanted to know about Debbie Reynolds’ disappointment in Eddie Fisher.  They wanted to know about the new Corvette Jack LaLanne bought himself on turning 90.  They wanted to know whether Liberace wore a toupee… if there were ghosts in the WOR newsroom.  We answered them all.

Joe had the last rotary dial telephone in Manhattan.  And the last radio show that didn’t sound right without static.  And the last TV show that didn’t look right without snow on the black and white screen.

We miss him still.

SHRAPNEL:

--HBO is going to make a mini series about the 2016 election.  They expect us to pay to see an event in which we’re still living?  Open auditions coming soon, with special consideration given to talking Cheetos, pumpkins and Alec Baldwin.

--The current political climate with its higher than ever lie count, the Trumpcare debacle, the Russia connection, the wire “tapp” and so on make us long for the good old days when the worst among us worried about kiddie car crises like the John Birch Society, the Dulles Brothers and missiles in Cuba. Today, we’re getting ready for a new affliction.  It’s called Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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1767 Kill the Credits and Other Time & Space Savers

When a live TV show runs out the clock and they just have to get in that last 30 seconds of Martha’s “How to Barbeque Asparagus” segment, they make time and space by dropping the credits scheduled for the end of the program.

No one reads them anyway.  Except of course second assistant boom operator Harvey Finklestein’s mother.  If the program is recorded -- most of them are -- they split the screen and run the credits at mach speed on the lower quarter while starting the next thrilling episode of Honey Boo Boo on the upper ¾.

In print, when a last minute fender bender with no injuries takes place on deadline, they “spike” some other item, like the fight that broke out at a ham pot pie fund raising dinner for a returning soldier. The story that was ready to print but didn’t make it is called overset.

By the time the next day’s edition goes to press, the fund raiser for Pfc. Finstermeister is outdated and unless a crazed gunman opened fire and destroyed the kitchen at the Legion Hall there’s no follow up.

And even that depends on whether Clark Kent got there with his notepad and iPhone before the Fairborn, Ohio SWAT team arrived, restored order and returned to police headquarters along with the “overset” unsold ham pies that somehow became evidence.

Popcorn sales at the moviehouse rise sharply as the credits roll.  So does the number of moviegoers falling asleep.  So why bother with them?

Sometimes it’s “in the contract.”

But mostly, it’s ego.  Ego. In show business?  Who knew?

So a small suggestion for writers of short stories and novels and who have trouble coming up with the names of characters.

Whut?

Freeze the TV during the credits and write down names before pushing “play” again.  Repeat.

Before long, a list appears in your notebook, first and last names.

Here are two from the movie Cloud Cult:

Propmaster: Ray McNeill

Assistant Production Buyer: Alexandra Marden.

Take one from column A and one from column B and you get Ray Marden.  Sounds like a good hero.

From another movie where the standby property assistant was Lydia Farrell and the property petty cash buyer was Carly Parris, you can get the name of your damsel in distress by naming them either Lydia Parris or Carly Farrell.

So there’s use for Ray, Alexandra, Lydia and Carly beyond their mommies.

Granted it’s an obscure use.  But it’s still a use. (And what is a “standby property assistant?”)

The number of people it takes to make a movie is startling. You wonder if they have to rent a stadium to hold staff meetings.

SHRAPNEL:

--Final Credit: RIP, Freddie Weintraub, 88, a hero to those of us who picked and sung at his “Bitter End” on Bleecker St. during the New York folk scare in the early 1960s. The club was one of the most important talent incubators of its time. When he’d had enough of the Village idiots, Weintraub went to Hollywood where he made a star of Bruce Lee.

--Here at the secret mountain laboratory, we’re working on a filing system that combines the best of the old and the new. It’s electronic -- the new. Here’s the old: the files eventually turn yellow and you can set the percentage of items that get lost, and when you lose them.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WRJ 2017

1766 Self Driving Bagpipes and Other Drones

Time was that “drone” was associated with bagpipes, banjos, Senate filibusters, Uncle Al’s war stories and professor Hildebrand's lectures on the pre-Caesarian epic poetry of Nagadocious Depresum.

No more.  Now drones are everywhere. It’s not just the pipes that don’t change notes on the bagpipe or the short string on the banjo.  Now “drone” is used to describe unidentified flying objects, crewless warplanes, motorized kites and self driving cars.

Those cars are just around the corner.  But the corner they’re talking about is on Neptune.  The unmanned planes we have pretty much down pat. The unidentified flying objects… ahah! There’s the problem.

One of these, reports the Associated Press, flew through a 27th floor window in a Manhattan apartment building.  Fortunately the window was closed at the time thereby slowing the aircraft and preventing more extensive damage. Other than the flying shards of glass and the overturned Ming vase now in pieces on the slightly scratched parquet floor.

Another one, this one launched by the army, freelanced a rogue flight from Arizona to Colorado where it crashed into a tree.  No one hurt, but the damage was estimated at $1.5 million not including the tree, says PC Magazine.

How long will it be before a flock of drones flies into the engine of a jetliner on takeoff from Starling International Airport causing it to crash into the south Pacific and forcing the Perth Olympic Long Distance Swim team to dogpaddle to shore?

How long will it be until Little Billy’s drone runs out of juice over Yankee Stadium and plummets onto and destroys Mickey Mantel’s memorial buried flask at third base?  Or even worse, crashes into Mrs. McGinty’s lap, spilling beer and hotdog chunks across the ten contiguous seats.

The recreational drone flyers will have to face off with the recreational kite flyers in mini dog fights.  It’s Snoopy and the Red Baron or the skiers vs. the snowboarders all over again.

As for bagpipes and banjos… you can authentically reproduce the sounds of either or both on one of those computers that masquerades as the keyboard of an organ.

And some of them, the Yamaha Tyros 5 first among equals, can be made to play both at the same time.

SHRAPNEL:

--Ratings for the Tonight Show “Starring” Jimmy Fallon have fallen 18% since inauguration day while Stephen Colbert’s Late Show’s are skyrocketing.  Fallon is the least funny guy ever to host NBC’s 11:30 broadcast and Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno are rotating (even though Leno remains on the up side of the daisies.)

--The White House has become the poster child for finger pointing, ignoring one of the main ideas of the Republican Party, “take responsibility for your decisions and actions.”  Nothing ever is their fault.  What is it like to live a life of blamelessness?

--A major international auto company with an unmatched reputation for unreliability is developing conjoined twin mini-cars.  If successful, when (not if, when) one breaks down the driver can switch to the other.  One remaining hitch: the prototypes’ shared electrical system is inclined to blow fuses which causes the cars to stall at the same time.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1765 Attack of the Killer Pollen

Dept. Of Homeland Security Illustration

You getting that tired rundown feeling?  You blaming Trump or overwork or lack of sleep or traffic jams or long lines at the checkout register?  Or your blood pressure meds, antidepressants, your idiot boss, your idiot spouse or your idiot children?

Nah.

The allergy season has begun.  And with the spring-like winter we’re having in much of the country, you have lots of company.  

Is there a way to differentiate between the “normal” tiredness of winter and the early onset of the sneezies?  No.  Not until you do something about any of those factors, eliminating one at a time.

But allergens -- pollen, dust, mold etc. -- conspire. Yes, we’re endorsing one of the least known but most realistic conspiracy theories ever.

These little grains, hardly big enough to see until they coat your car and windows in yellow are out there no matter what the pollen counters and pollen forecasters tell you.   A good wind gust and your breathing mechanism is disabled for 12 hours.  And usually that happens when it’s way too late in the day to take the non-drowsy pills and risk a sleepless night.

These mini terrorists can slip through a window that’s open only a crack.  And you feel silly wearing a construction mask around the house, let alone while you’re out walking the dog.

Nothing close to an extended winter frost this year at least in the eastern third of the country. And that means not only more and stronger pollen but more and stronger insects.

Winter often keeps much of the bug population from ever getting out of the egg stage.  This year, your little crawly friends will be an army that could conquer the entire country if it only could get organized and read maps.

If this goes on for more than one season, Old Man Winter is going to have the biggest fan club since Elvis or Sinatra in their primes.

But for now, he’s charged with pollenius assault.

Today’s Quote:

-“Of course not, dear.”  -- The only acceptable answer to your wife’s question “Does this outfit make me look fat?”

SHRAPNEL:

--Beauregard Sessions has recused himself from investigations of the Trump campaign.  That means there probably really isn’t anything to hide or maybe anything that is insufficiently hidden. Alas.

--The Washington Post, the newspaper that took down Nixon, and has won almost 50 Pulitzer Prizes, has a new earth shattering controversy in its crosshairs. It is the leading source for information on a story almost every other news outlet has missed. Wessays (™) takes a stand now, by saying Garfield the cartoon cat is male, not genderless, thus echoing the character’s creator, Jim Davis.

Grapeshot:

-First Lady Melania Trump read some Dr. Seuss books to kids at a hospital in New York, and at no time claimed she wrote them herself.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1764 Out of the Booth

Think about it.  There are no more phone booths.  And there are no more token booths.  

New York is trying to replace the former with free wi fi hotspots which will allow you to use your cell phone on the city’s dime and at higher speed than you can  buy from any commercial carrier.

The new facilities combine three beloved features of olden days:

--Seventy five percent of them will be out of order at any given time.

--Street noise won’t abate so you won’t be able to hear anything even though you’ll be not hearing it at the highest available speed.

--The hotspots will be a barrier against privacy that hasn’t been seen on the street since the demise of the old full size models you could use as temporary shelter in a storm.

But what of the token booths?  Subway tokens got the axe at the end of 2003, replaced by the MetroCard.  Token clerks then became card dealers.  But most people buy from vending machines only 63% of which are out of service at any given time.

Full size phone booths get scrapped or sold to collectors.  (Yes, there are people with collections of phone booths and many of them have stockpiled extra folding doors because … uh… well, you never know when you’re going to need a spare folding door.)

Token booths just get scrapped.  So 11,214 square miles of bullet resistant Lexan is sitting in stacks in a warehouse in Canarsie that started life as a synagogue, became a movie house, then a Korean church, then a Pentecostal church and finally a warehouse with glass enough to cover over both Los Angeles and Cuyahoga counties and extra to build more than two dozen transparent tree houses.

Where are the preservationists?  Or the recyclers.

Not once in all these years has anyone broken into the warehouse and stolen a square foot of this treasure. The spirit of enterprise is dead?  Lexan is too heavy to build a homeless shelter when there are so many available refrigerator boxes?  

SHRAPNEL:

--The so-called President intimates that bomb threats against Jewish centers nationwide may be carried out by Jews trying to “make others look bad.”   Intimations like that use the kind of phrasing that says something without saying it.  Like, for example “some Washington bigshots have been more than parents to their adult children.”

--Steve Bannon, who combines the slithering of Karl Rove with the cartoonish pseudo- intellectualistic pomposity of Newt Gingrich, once had an internet radio program.  On it he interviewed now Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Sessions told his listener that the WWII era law that prevented Jewish people fleeing Hitler from coming here was good for America.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“Pretty Ugly.”  Former president George W. Bush when asked to describe the climate in DC during the first month of the current administration.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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1763 The Entropy of Competence

City Hall, where ideas go to die.

Mayor Bill de Blastoff of New York is a well meaning guy who doesn’t know what the job of mayor is and proves it every day.  But New York is used to incompetence.  We had Giuliani, O’Dwyer, Jimmy Walker, Impeliteri and Beame.  Some were screwups. But some were crooked. And it looks like Blastoff may join that elite club.

Something about pay for play and stocking the swamp.  But we’ll leave that up to the US Attorney Preet Bharara, St. Preet to his followers, and the Royal Canadian Mountie to others. No, he’s not Canadian.  But like the Mounties he “always gets his man.”

Even without the crook possibility, this guy Bastoff has been in office since 2014 and has yet to find the light switch in the City Hall men’s room.  

Before that, he was “Public Advocate” whose job is to hold news conferences about things he knows nothing of and complain.

In city government, everyone should be the “public advocate.”

You can forgive him for having his head in the clouds.  He’s almost 6 and a half feet tall. What you cannot forgive is not knowing where the lightswitch is.

Incompetence in office is spreading.  So without further picking on the poor mayor, let’s look at how this virus is spreading throughout the country.

In rural Pennsylvania a bloated and bumbling member of Congress has thus far refused to hold town meetings. He’s not alone in a district gerrymandered into something that’s shaped like psoriasis.

But in this case, his constituents held one without him.  If there was a spy in the meeting, he probably was there to write down license plate numbers, not to bring word to the boss about what his constituents were saying -- none of which was pretty.

In Tennessee, the legislature is considering a bill to rename the state’s Cordell Hull office building. Hull was Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and held that office for longer than anyone else. Roosevelt? That immediately makes him a “socialist” in one of the reddest of red states.  Oh, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945.

In New Jersey, Chris Christie has become a punchline ending in the word “bridge.”

And there’s nothing to say about the 45th President who can’t go a day without… Well, you know.  I’ll leave 135 of the next 140 spaces blank so you can paste in the latest tweet.

__________ __________ __________ __________

__________ __________ __________ __________

__________ __________ __________ __________

__________ ______.Sad.

Be sure to eliminate the spaces, to bring it down to size.

SHRAPNEL:

--The deportation police are going after a lot of illegals with American children. Where do the children go?  It’s a tough decision… Crips or Bloods.

GRAPESHOT:

-When Bannon says Trump is a “good blunt instrument for our purposes” just what purposes does he mean?

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“But ‘La La Land’ won the electoral college.” -- Retired CBS News Executive Producer Charlie Kaye after the presenters at the Oscars announced “La La” as winner of the best picture, when the real winner was “Moonlight.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017