Boston Legal has dropped four cast members: Julie Bowen, Mark Valley, Constance Zimmer, and the woefully underused Rene Auberjonois have all been let go from the show, even as it adds John Larroquette. I don’t remember so many people leaving a show at once since the last season of Boston Legal’s predecessor, The Practice, when Dylan McDermott, Kelli Williams, Lisa Gay Hamilton and Lara Flynn Boyle got the boot, and James Spader was added.
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For those who are already thinking about it, the Fall 2007 schedule.
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Gordon’s right. Mr. Wizard IS a show both he and I watched as kids.
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We are assured that Lost won’t end like The Sopranos did. I’ve never seen an episode of The Sopranos, but I’m convinced that Tony is dead; the screen going to black was Tony’s demise.
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How Kellogg’s Limits on Kids Advertising Could Shake Up Industry
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The The AfterEllen.com Hot 100 List
ROG
21 days
Sometimes, I just need to guess, even when I can look it up. I was trying to surmise why June 14, specifically, is Flag Day. Is it that there are 21 days from June 14 to July 4, inclusive, which seems to have morphed National Flag Week into a nearly month long tricolor display? Is this somehow tied to the 21-gun salute or the 21 steps used at Arlington National Cemetery?
Evidently not: the Continental Congress approved the design of a national flag on June 14, 1777, 230 years ago today. BTW, there have been 27 versions of the flag over the years.
In the Business Review (May 25, 2007), the local business weekly, it was reported that a pizza shop owner in Latham has lowered the American flag to half staff in front of his shop on May 18 to honor the more than 3,400 soldiers killed in Iraq. From the headline, it was also a way to protest the war. The story has angered an Iraq war vet, who wrote in the June 1 issue that he was disappointed in the paper for running such a story on Memorial Day weekend. He also noted Title 4 of the United States Code, Section 7(m) gives the allowable reasons for flying a flag; the protest was not one of the acceptable reasons.
This reminded me of some flag etiquette issues that took place during the VietNam War. There were some who flew the flag upside down. From Title 4, Section 8 (a) of the U.S. Code: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” Of course, I believe those engaged in the behavior believed that the war WAS an “extreme danger to life or property.”
I understand both the pizza man’s protest AND the soldier’s frustration. I recognize that the flag lowering could be perceived as provocative. Yet, the soldier’s point is a bit legalistic, I think, given other sections of the code violated freely:
8 (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Like this never happens.
Oh, and I still stand by what I wrote about flag burning a couple years back.
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Bombs away! Or, as the person sending me this link wrote: Want to see something really stupid? I thought this was just an urban legend, but apparently not.
ROG
World of work
Some weeks ago, I read an article about how some (younger) people who go on an interview wearing what few experts would recommend. I might have taken it as a bit of a joke, except a friend of mine told me that a guy showed up to an interview he was conducting wearing shorts. My friend was inclined to dismiss him, except that he was quite intelligent and qualified. During the Q&A, the applicant asked, “Can I wear shorts to work?” The answer was no, but he was hired and he has worked out well.
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I came across this list of unusual questions to ask in an interview from a usually reliable source, but at least a couple would never get past most Human Resources departments. One was “How about those Yankees?” (or other sports team), which may be perceived as sexist; an alternative, asking about the hot/cold/wet weather, seemed like a better idea.
Then there was a question about asking a really oddball question, just to see the reaction, and if the answer’s not too long or too short (whatever that means), that’s good. One suggestion: asking how many phone books there are in New York City. Of course, if I were answering it, I’d know there are about 8 million New Yorkers, meaning roughly 3 million households, and about 98% of all households have a phone. There are people with only cellphones that may not have phone books, but then there are offices with multiple phone books. Having no real idea, I’ll surmise that there at least as many business phone books as residential, so I’d say 6 million. I would be one of the people that would go on too long.
An alternate question: how do they get the cream filling in a Twinkie? (If you’re ever asked this, BTW, it’s described in the Wikipedia post for Twinkies.)
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When the Job Isn’t What You Expected. As the About.com guide noted: “The thing is, you never really know what a job’s going to be like until you start. I’ve had friends take jobs that wound up having absolutely nothing to do with the job description they’d gotten in the interview. It’s like they wandered into the wrong building and sat down at someone else’s desk, and no one noticed the mistake.”
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For those of you who don’t read Mark Evanier, the lyrics to The New Battle of New Orleans by Ray Stevens, who has performed a wide range of serious and silly songs. Disappointing, to say the least. BTW, he is number 160 in my Billboard Top Pop Singles artists 1955-2002, right between Def Leppard and Gene Pitney, though he doesn’t rank in the Billboard albums book.
ROG
Loving vs. Virginia
It must have been at a short-term internship I had at some point, though I no longer remember the job, but I do remember being engaging by this woman in the office – a secretary, perhaps – in a dialogue about race. She seemed to be a genuinely nice person who opposed the idea of mixed marriage because of the difficulty it would impose on the children.
I mention that today because this is the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down the laws that banned interracial marriage. The full text can be found here. Incidentally, though no longer enforced, some anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books until the end of the 20th century.
Miscegenation. First time I ever saw this word, probably in Ebony magazine when I was fairly young, I didn’t know what it meant, but I figured it was bad, not only because of the prefix, but because of the less than positive spin it got in many of the articles.
I’m not 100% sure of my heritage, but there is this woman, my maternal grandmother’s grandmother, who was English or Irish. There are either Dutch or German (a/k/a, Pennsylvania Dutch) in my background as well.
In any case, there has been a steady increase in the number of “mixed marriages” in the last 40 years; some numbers are available here and at this PDF. There have a number of prominent mixed race people in the American culture, from Tiger Woods to Barack Obama, that – perhaps – makes it more “acceptable”. This is not to say that mixed race kids don’t get hassled or are asked to “choose” in which tribe they belong. But, as a composer once said, “It’s getting better all the time.” Or so I choose to feel.
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I wasn’t looking to go there, but, in looking up some citations, I found a couple articles that suggest that the precedent in Loving vs. Virginia reflect an “evolving society” when it comes to gay marriage. A quote from this article:
The rationale used by religious and political leaders in an attempt to ban same-sex marriage in the United States is being compared to the arguments used to support discrimination laws in the landmark civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia.
Seven or eight things about me
I believe it was Gordon who noted seven things about him that you may not have known. Then Scott tagged me, with these instructions:
“Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them that they have been tagged.”
1. When I first picked up the album Magical Mystery Tour in the store back in 1967 or early 1968, I simply could not read the words “Beatles” in the yellow stars. I knew it WAS a Beatles album from the song list, but it was a full five minutes before I sussed out the group name. (Confidential to Fred Hembeck: November 27, 1967.)
2. My favorite mixed drink is 45% orange juice, 45% cranberry juice, 10% ginger ale. The cranberry cuts the OJ’s acidity, the OJ cuts the cranberry’s tartness, and the ginger ale is just to give it that faux alcohol sensation. I’ve ordered the mixed juices sans ginger ale in restaurants, and while some places seem to take it in stride, others act as though I want them to cross a desert barefoot to get liquids from a cactus or something.
3. My favorite cereal combination is spoon-size shredded wheat and Cheerios. But I won’t buy either of them unless they’re on sale. So when they ARE on sale, I might buy four or six boxes. I might even use coupons, which I seldom use otherwise.
4. In the spring or summer of 1976, I was in a production of Godspell in my college town of New Paltz. My solo was, initially, “We Beseech Thee”, a song I could sing and I liked, but got changed to “All Good Gifts”, which I was never fond of.
5. When I lived in New York City in the summer of 1977, I lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, but I worked in Manhattan. I took the #7 train, then the E or the F train. I was a telephone solicitor five nights a week from 6 pm until midnight. Who was I calling at 11:30 at night? People on the West Coast, of course. The folks I called were people who had once expressed interest in the product – people with lapsed subscription to TV Guide, people who owned the Encyclopedia Americana who might want the Annual. As a result, I’m very polite to phone solicitors; I say “no, thank you,” right before I hang up on them.
6. During that summer of 1977 (which, not so incidentally was the Summer of Sam), I met this young woman from the Unification church (yes, that’s the Moonies) and would have dinner with her group once a week for a couple months at their place in the Bronx. I was invited to go to their complex upstate; I always declined.
7. Once that summer, for no particular reason, I walked from the Bronx to the New York Public Library, some 160 blocks. Another time, I walked from the library to Wall Street; don’t know how many blocks that is.
8. I once successfully performed the Heimlich maneuver on a 70-plus-year-old woman in May 1995. This was at my church of the time. I had been in a pretty sour mood, actually, because of resolving some old affairs of the heart stuff. This woman, who I did not know, was off to the side, looking as though she was turning blue. Then someone opined that perhaps she might have eaten something. I recalled my training from high school, never utilized. Some piece of meat flew at least 15 feet. The pastor, always one to come up with a smart-aleck remark, said to me, “If you see ME choking, just let me die.” (Confidential to MRR – yes, he’s the one.)
I’ve always been loath to tag – though I don’t mind being tagged – so, only if you want to:
The Scribe at Peace X Peace
Uthaclena at the Hydrogen Jukebox
and the Weird Monday person, Kelly Brown.
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Oh, here’s another thing about me: I recorded two programs last night – and neither was the last episode of the sopranos. One was The Tonys on CBS, which we like to watch because we’re generally unfamiliar with the productions, ironically, the reason nobody ELSE watches them. The other is Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions band live in Dublin on PBS. We’ve actually watched neither, but hope to before the fall.
ROG