No, he didn’t fly home from the hospital. That’s the title of Lionel Hampton’s big band theme song. Anyway, here is the man of the hour snug as a bug in a rug.
March 24, 2009
Flying Home
March 23, 2009
Gerrard Knows Quality
Here’s Stephen Gerrard indicating his favorite fantasy baseball team with the telltale “W” sign: The WalletFullOfYankeePride. Yes, that’s right, the same team that I founded and have skippered for 4 years now. The defending champs. The team that “did the quad” over the 2nd place team: beating them in all four matchups; three in the regular season and once in the playoffs.
After being beaten by The WalletFullOfYankeePride, the typical reaction is, “…how did I lose to this guy?”
March 22, 2009
Priorities…
Hard to describe how little time there is for really, just about anything. You know it’s not forever, but it’s relentless of course. I watched a bit of the 5-0 drubbing that Liverpool put on a very good Villa side. My attention was diverted but I enjoyed it, nevertheless–going hand in hand with Chelsea’s and United’s losses yesterday. It’s a title race again, and man o man, would I like the refs to answer for that early season 2-pt robbery on the early goal callback. Those 2 points, which were rightfully Liverpool’s would have the race at 2 points even considering United winning the game in hand. Oh well. At least they seem to be getting some calls now. I think the refs are only human and that they too, are tired of ManU every year, whereas in previous years, I thought there was anti-Liverpool backlash tendencies from the 1970s and 80s.
Rafa signing his 5-year deal–well deserved. Still, the Yanks, Hicks and Gillette will be pilloried on Merseyside.
The Champs’ league is alive. The League still looks alive, albeit a long shot and the team is playing better than it has in a generation–2005 Champs’ Lg included.
Gerrard is back healthy and the charges were dropped in dust-up. Torres is healthy. United is stumbling and Berbatov is nicked up now. You’ll Never Walk Alone! –Fog
March 19, 2009
March 18, 2009
The Happy Recap
Here is John Benjamin PineTar. Born at 12:18pm by c-sec 10 pounds, 1.6 oz’s, 22 inches. He’s perfect. Mother is doing great. We thank God and thanks to anyone who prayed for this boy and/or (gasp!) us, even. Now Tommy has a little buddy; a playmate. I told my wife that with 3 boys, counting me, we are just going to destroy the house playing ball–and we are! hoo hoo hoo hoo…
I can’t wait to read Sandra Boynton books to him; or watch Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Nothing but high culture over here! And I will teach him to absolutley revere Carl Kolchak, as I do. Ahh, parenthood…
March 16, 2009
You’ve been lied to
You’ve been misled the entire time. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been manipulated: do you care? Worth the read.
Restaurants are NOT about FOOD!
Toots Shor DVD Review
Click here to view the amazon page for the Toots video in a new window
I ordered this video for a variety of reasons. First, it got a big sendup at some film festivals when it was premiered last year. It was done by Shor’s granddaughter, so you know that access and inside stuff, was promising.
Second, this guy is a unique, one-of-a-kind guy. He’s got a legendary store of anecdotes that mostly include very famous people like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Joe DiMaggio.
Third, if you’re like me, and you read a lot of old-timey sports books, particularly baseball in New York, this guy just keeps coming up over and over again.
So when the thing came out on DVD, I paid more than I’m normally willing to pay, because I was so interested in it. I have to say, that I was a little disappointed. While it does have anecdotes, it doesn’t have enough. I thought that to really have pulled in the anecdotes, it probably should have been done while the patrons were still living. If you had an hour with Gleason before he died, I’ve no doubt that he’d have had dozens of anecdotes. This thing was made probably 25 to 30 years too late to be much use that way. It pretty much relied on Frank Gifford, and while Gif was practically LIVING at Shor’s, he will not tell tales out of school, it’s obvious.
The other thing that annoyed me about it was the overuse of these pompous newsmen: Most notably Pete Hamil. My goodness, what pomposity! If I hear him one more time talking about “New York” this and that, bleah~! The guy buys into that “documentary-speak” and believes his own PR-BS about the hard-boiled, hard-living newpapermen of yesteryear–put a cork in it! Get over yourselves! Mike Wallace and Cronkite too! “Get me rewrite! Stop the presses!” hahaha. What dorks.
What did I learn? Well, surprise, surprise: Toots had a big league drinking problem and gambling problem–even losing his first saloon to a series of bad sports bets. Many, many restaraunteurs and saloon-keepers are degenerate gamblers–they go together. The wise guys are there all day and there’s nothing to do and you’re drinking and trying to be more macho than the next guy–next thing you know, you bet 100 grand on the Zale-Marciano bout.
On the positive, Toots seems to have understood how to pull people into his room from early on. Even when he was a nobody, he got around. He knew that if he comped the meals and drinks of cheap athletes like Whitey Ford, they would keep coming back and then the average Joe would be dying to go to the same watering hole as their idol.
Letting the underpaid (cheap) newspapermen hang out and drink with Gleason and Sintra, his pals, was brilliant, in that it made them feel like BigShots all the way. And the players were there drinking also; so it created a kind of club that fed on itself, like the super-cool guys room in the frathouse where everyone went before they went out and after they came back to talk about the night– a big boys DMZ of entertainers, writers and sports guys. I’m fairly certain that sports was the linchpin and the entertainers just hitched on when the buzz got big enough.
The brilliance of comping the players while letting the players comp the writers, was that the players then had a hold over the very guys that could rip them in print if they hiccuped in their jobs on the field. How could you rip a guy who bought you 4 double scotches at Toots’ last week? You couldn’t.
And Toots got hooked up with all sorts of tickets and I’m sure that he handed them out like candy to the others he was pulling in to impress. And he admitted that early on in his career, he knew how to get his joint placed in the gossip columns of the day. Once people read about it, they then wanted to be there and get mentioned, thus, creating a self-feeding, boozy cycle.
In this age of internet and TV, I don’t think people understand the sheer, raw power of the old newspaper gossip columns. It was a press agent’s DREAM to get a mention in Walter Winchell’s column. Just enormous. It was worth thousands of dollars and I’ve no doubt that envelopes changed hands on these things. Toots didn’t have to give you an envelope, he just comped you and your guests a major night out where he might have swung by your table and made you laugh and made you feel like a million bucks and introduced you to Dezi Arnaz or Frank Gifford or Mel Ott.
The most telling line in the whole thing, I thought, was the line that said, “…people don’t go to restaurants for the food…”, they go to a place where they can count on being treated a certain way. And it is so true. Now I’m not talking about the strict utilitarian meal where you are just trying to get McNuggets down your kid’s hatch so you can go to Aunt Blabby’s. I’m talking about going someplace for YOU–for your ego.
I laughed at the idea that some really big shots got blown off by Toots because they didn’t know or care to observe “the code”. Any place like this has a code, and you’d be a dope to ignore it. Even my little pizzeria down the block has its code. You don’t buck the pecking order. Everyone is some degree of an insider. There are people who walk right into the back and people who wouldn’t dream of it. There’s a question of how long have you been coming there–do you know Ciro’s kid’s names? You have to know to wait until they goof on YOU first, before you can cut on them. How well do you know the cast of regulars? Just to nod? Do they know you?
When a restaurant is a cult of personality, all these little things matter, or you better be just a big shot, to where it doesn’t apply anymore.
Over all, it was a decent, but not great, watch. If you know nothing about Shor’s then you would like it I think, but wait until the used ones turn up on Amazon for less than 10 bucks.
I enjoyed thinking about how places like this work in actuality. It’s a grown-up popularity contest really, not unlike what goes on in every high school in the country. Many people come to the altar for phony reasons–to bask in, gain and trade popularity and noterity. Others, like Frank Gifford, were true friends and went to see Toots when he was dying of cancer, years after he lost his drawing cache. How many of you would go to visit the most popular kid in high school, TODAY? Then you weren’t really friends with them, were you?
March 15, 2009
The Draw
The draw is Friday for the quarters. This is my very quick and not-thought-out-too-much hunch. I subscribe to the rigged theory and the theory that UEFA hates Liverpool going to the finals while not being able to win their league or even finish above 4th. Also built in, is an anti-English bias. This format, bunching all the English teams into one side of the draw, ensures the automatic removal of 3 English teams before the finals, and a chance of NO English team hoisting E-Cup. It also places the strongest teams in Liverpool’s way thus giving the greatest chance that they go out quietly in the quarts. But, these things have a way of backfiring and Liverpool has a strange hoodoo on these big European nights. Just having fun with it. We’ll see how I did on Friday.
Chelsea – Arsenal
Liverpool – Manchester United
Villareal – Barcelona
Bayern Munich – FC Porto
Semis:
Liverpool over Chelsea
Barcalona over Bayern Munich
Finals:
Liverpool over Barca
