Rant #887: King For a Day

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in most of the United States.

It is a day off for most people, but not me. 

I have never had the day off from work, and I mean never. 

It is a regular day of work for me, so if you have off, count your blessings that you do.

The day honors the Civil Rights leader, who was gunned down in 1968.

The day became a national holiday just a few years ago, and before that, it was celebrated individually by the states as they saw fit.

It is also supposed to be "A Day of Service," where if you aren't working, you are supposed to devote your time to a worthy cause.

Unfortunately, I have to work, so I am devoting my service time to my job so that I can put food on my family's table.

My wife is also working, so neither of us have the day off.

If I did, I am sorry, but it would be a day of rest for me. 

The Knicks annually play the "Martin Luther King Day" game at the Garden, and sorry, that is what I would be watching as I relaxed the day away.

I remember one of the greatest Knicks' MLK Day games, when Trent Tucker hit a shot with one-tenth of a second left to give the Knicks the win. That play sparked a change in how time is handled in the NBA, and with today's rules, there would have been no way he could have hit that shot in the current game.

As it is, I guess I will have to keep tabs on the game while I am at work.

Other people will be spending the day devoting their time to service, and I know that plenty of people will be shopping today.

Sales, you know.

I believe Dr. King was scheduled to visit my old neighborhood, Rochdale Village, way back when, but he never made it to us.

His assassination took the heart and soul out of my old neighborhood, and it really was never the same place again.

Some say that the world hasn't been the same since his death, and I would probably agree with that.

Bu his life, and his work, were certainly a stepping stone for this country having a black President. MLK's life didn't necessarily directly lead to this, but it certainly was one step in the process leading up to Barack Obama not only having the chance, but actually being our President.

And, not just because I have to work, but I think Dr. King would prefer that we worked today, rather than having the day off. 

That may just be me talking, but I think he frowned upon people not working hard to reach their goals.

Whatever the case, and whatever you are doing, have a great MLK day. 

If you need me, you know where to find me.

Rant #886: Size Matters

Sure, there are plenty of things to get upset about today.

Our paychecks are smaller, but our costs are going up.

We have a gun crisis, and people are still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

But now we have something else to contend with.

Subway sandwich shops may be short-changing us on their foot-longs.

That's right, those 12-inch sandwiches might only be 11 inches!

It seems someone started to measure the sandwiches, and found that they were coming up an inch short.

They put their photos up on the Internet, they went viral, and then others started doing the same thing--and finding the same thing.

More importantly to me, at least, is that they were also finding out that Subway has lessened the meat that they are putting on the sandwich, too.

The few times I have gone to Subway during the past several months, I have noticed that.

It seems to be that we are eating more of a bread sandwich rather than, let's say, a roast beef sandwich.

And I have long noticed that he sandwiches that they show in the commercials don't even nearly resemble the ones that they make in the shops.

Subway says that yes, they have lessened the meat on their sandwiches, but that is not the reason that some of the foot-longs are coming up short.

It's because there are variances in size when the bread is baked fresh in the local stores daily.

Evidently, there is some shrinkage involved when you take a prepared product and cook it.

OK, I can buy that, and I guess many people have.

It's like when you buy the bag of chips, and it says right on the bag that the bag may not appear full, but it was until everything in it settled.

OK ...

Buy the premise, buy the flick, as they say.

But then again, your dollar's worth is shrinking again if you aren't getting the advertised foot-longs on top of the fact that you now also aren't getting the same amount of meat that you had gotten previously.

Somebody is double-talking here, and it isn't the consumer.

Subway had better do something about this mess, or people will start to not only bring their wallets into their shops, they will also start to bring tape measures.

Now, competing shops can claim that their sub sandwiches are actually 12 inches.

This could create a sandwich war, second only maybe to the War of 1812, but held strictly in shops like this.

Call it the Sandwich War of 2013.

Maybe the Sandwich Islands can get involved in this battle too.

Oy vey! What a predicament!

I guess size does count--in particular when you are talking about a sandwich.

Speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #885: Hot At 91

Actress Betty White turns 91 today.

There are plenty of 90 year old and over people around today. We have extended our lifestyles, and some people also have good genes.

I think Betty White has good genes, looks good in jeans, and heck, she has carved a niche for herself as the "grand dame" of TV actresses around today.

Her career pretty much started off modestly.

Early on, I guess she had to eat, and she posed for a game card, yes, topless. Just about everybody knows that.

But she persevered, and was one of TV's first stars, starring on some early TV sitcoms in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including "Life With Elizabeth."

But for a good portion of her life, she was in the shadow of her more famous husband, another big TV star.

Alan Ludden hosted one of the best game shows on TV, "Password," for years.

He was as much associated with that show as Dick Clark was for "American Bandstand."

This means he did other things, but you really couldn't separate Ludden from "Password," not even with a crowbar.

White was the actor in the family, and she had many roles while he did his thing, but the two were definitely inseparable, and she appeared on "Password" dozens and dozens of times, in all of its incarnations.

And she was an excellent player, too.

As an actress, she made a tremendous name for herself as the Sue Ann Nivens character on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," but the character was almost one to pity, so self absorbed in her own endeavors that she could never see the forest for the trees, so to speak.

Later, she was a semi-regular on other game shows, such as "Match Game."

She seemed to excel on game shows, and at one point, I will bet that she was better known as a game show celebrity than she was as an actress.

Ludden passed on, and her career seemed to be at a crossroads. White continued to do game shows, but that genre was fizzling out. She continued to act, but in mainly nondescript parts.

She was an older actress, really with no place to go.

But then she was one of the stars of "The Golden Girls," a show that was about older ladies and their comings and goings. I have to say that personally, I never got into this show, but I know for others, this was a very popular sitcom, one of the last great sitcoms in some people's minds.

America rediscovered this priceless treasure a few years back, when she was the star of a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl.

From that point on, she has been magic to the networks and even off network as one of the most popular actresses today.

Yes, with all the fake breasts, phony egos, and inflated personalities, 91-year-old Betty White has risen to the top of her profession, at least on TV.

She is one of the stars of one of TV's funniest shows, "Hot in Cleveland," which runs on TV Land. The show is raunchy fun, so well written that you almost forget that most of the show revolves around sex.

And yes, that includes White's character too, amidst the other 40-, 50-, and 60-something actresses who co-star with her on the show.

She wasn't even supposed to be a regular on that show. She was originally a guest star, but she took to the role like butter takes to bread, and she was made a regular.

And she makes the show funny.

She also has an irregular TV game show, which the less said about the better, but heck, this lady is HOT! right now.

Finally, after decades in the business, she can basically write her own ticket.

Once best known as Ludden's wife, and then for her crusade for animals, she is now TV's top actress, if not TV's top actor, period.

Here's to Betty White, who is actually older than Popeye, who also celebrates a birthday today.

Heck, I would take White in a minute over Popeye, I really would.

But they share one thing:

The are both "strong to the finish," but White doesn't appear to even see the finish line yet.

Good for her.

Rant #884: This Is Funny?

This Rant is a virtual rerun of another Rant I did some time back, but I want to do it again because it is worth repeating.

Comedy today is horrible, it isn't funny, and well, it completely turns me off.

I would rather see somebody slip on a banana peel--now, that's funny--then the utter garbage that I hear and watch today.

Case in point: yes, CBS's "Mike and Molly," but I am going to add another sitcom into the mix, one that I finally watched, "2 Broke Girls."

Yes, William Paley is turning in his grave at these two shows. What happened to the so-called "Tiffany Network?" They stoop to this trash?

"Mike and Molly" I have watched off and on for the three years it has been on. It is about two very obese people, how they met, how they fell in love, and the dysfunctional family that they live with.

That would be fine and good, but in every episode, they go over the line in taste and decency, exploiting every stereotype, literally sucking the life out of every one of the show's characters.

And the jokes are so wretched, and so predictable.

They fall into just a few categories: fat, sex, drugs, a little more fat, a little more sex, and a little more drugs.

This past episode I watched had two, count 'em, two plots.

First, the two heavyset people--one a Chicago cop, the other a school teacher--decide they want to have children, so they start to change their eating habits.

Isn't that just hilarious?

All fine and good, but honestly, their lifestyle would have to change dramatically for this to work. Each needs to lose a lot of weight--the woman at least 50 pounds, the guy maybe 100--before this could even make a dent.

The other theme of the show is that the heavyset cop's sidekick--a skinny, weasley guy who lives with his grandmother--is being kicked out of his house because he has started to bring a succession of prostitutes into the house at night for to satisfy his own sexual pursuits.

Yes, this is supposed to be hilarious, too. Remember, this is a police officer we are talking about.

And they surround these two themes with constant references to drugs, this time both pot and mescaline.

Again, two of the main characters are police officers.

Sorry, to me, this scuzziness is not funny, not funny at all.

The other show is almost as bad. "2 Broke Girls" profiles two young girls--one sassy, one less so--that are pursuing their pursuits, if you will, whether it be business wise or in the sack.

This time, they win a prize to go to a pricey lodge for a weekend, and one of the girls talks herself into bringing her boyfriend, so one is going to be a third wheel one way or the other.

It ends up that each one of the trio somehow becomes the third wheel, and that is the end of the story.

However, the sexual joke quotient of this show is about 95 percent. Nothing else is talked about but sex, whether it is regular heterosexual sex or gay sex. It really doesn't matter with this show.

Heck, one girl is top heavy, the other skinny as a rail, and they go that joke route, too.

Again, this is what goes for funny today?

Look, I am definitely not a prude. I can go for lowbrow jokes as much as anyone.

But getting pounded on the head with this type of stuff is excessive, and it certainly isn't funny.

I like shows such as TV Land's "Hot in Cleveland," which have attractive, veteran casts that know how to pull this type of thing off. The writing is crisp, the stories are generally warm, the characters are well defined, and you can laugh with the characters, not at them.

These other shows are horrid, and I simply don't find them funny--not funny at all.

People rave about these shows. Please.

If this is what passes for funny nowadays, thank God I have stations like Antenna TV and Me TV.

Those shows are funny.

Sorry, but "2 Broke Girls" and "Mike and Molly," are not.

They are trash. Pure trash.

And their popularity clearly demonstrates that I don't think too many people know what "funny" is today.

We have all gone into the toilet, we really have.

Rant #883: Bubble Up

So I see that Coca-Cola is the first major soft drink brand to produce a TV ad laying out its plan to offer lower-calorie soft drinks.

The ad, which aired on various cable news outlets like CNN, puts forth the company's record to offering drinks with fewer calories. It also notes that weight gain and obesity are not just the result of drinking too much soda, but of intaking too many calories all around via what we consume.

I don't have a problem with the ads. Plenty of major corporations put out ads that don't necessarily urge you to buy their product, but bring up a certain issue or point that they want to get across.

But let's be honest about it. Coca-Cola is not going away. It has always linked its sodas and other drinks to happiness, good times, and fun. It has been doing that for more than a century, and it will continue to do that for the foreseeable future.

To put out an ad like that is almost like answering people who are saying that we are too fat, too large, and that we eat and drink too much, and trying to save face while doing it.

Coca-Cola is saying that weight gain can be linked to an overuse of its products, but it doesn't necessarily have to do with their company's products alone.

Yes, it is kind of like putting a Band-Aid on a bigger problem.

Look, if you want to lose weight, the onus is on you to lose that weight. You can't blame Coca-Cola or any other company for your weight problems.

We have been through that phase already. Remember all the lawsuits that were lodged against McDonald's and other fast food places by people who claimed that they ate their food and it made them fat? I think just about every one of those suits was thrown out of court, and for good reasons.

You want to lose weight, then lose weight. Don't blame Coca-Cola or any other company for offering products that won't help you to lose the pounds.

People like these products, and people will buy these products. You can't expect manufacturers to stop making sugary and full-of-fat items.

So, the onus is on you. If you want to lose weight, fine.

But personally, I am sick and tired of people blaming these companies for pushing their products, leading to weight gain.

Do it yourself, I say, and stop holding others to account for your own eating problems. There are plenty of products on the market to help you lose the weight you want to lose.

Not everybody wants to lose weight, and we, as a society, should stop forcing people to subscribe to this.

If you want to lose weight, fine, but stop putting it on everybody else's head.

That's a weight that everybody really shouldn't have to bear.

Rant #882: Yesterday and Today

I was seven years old, a little kid with my eyes full of wonder and excitement.

We had just moved into a new housing development in Queens, brand spanking new Rochdale Village, named after the first cooperative project in England.

I didn't know anything about that at the time, all I knew is that we had moved into a place that seemed larger than anything I had ever known.

We lived in Building 9 of the project, and the other buildings were going up before my eyes. I remember building 12 being built just across from me, and eight more buildings would follow ...

As would parks, schools, shopping areas, and everything anyone would seemingly need to live a nice, almost suburban life right smack dab in the middle of one of New York City's five boroughs.

And thousands of families, like mine, moved into the development.

By 1965, all the buildings were built, all the other facilities I talked about were either built or getting there, and my family and I felt comfortable in our new neighborhood.

There were seemingly a million kids my age there, although really, there were "only" hundreds in my general age group. Most of our parents were blue collar union workers, although for many, that wasn't the case. There were plenty of school teachers, office workers and the like who lived in this development, too.

And it was racially mixed. If you know anything about the site in which the project was built, you know that Jamaica, Queens, is one of the largest ethnic neighborhoods in the U.S. It was at one time called the black Greenwich Village, and it earned that name by being the home of many artists, such as James Brown.

The development was racially mixed, too, but there was about a three to one ratio of whites to blacks during the early years of the development.

But what did I care? We just needed as many kids as we could to make up two complete teams when we played punchball.

But this was the mid to late 1960s, and the world was changing, and so was our development. There were rumblings from the beginning from people who didn't want to see the place built and with the racial makeup it was going to have. This was exacerbated when black construction workers were prohibited from working on the project.

There were many other things going on, both internally and externally, which hit at the very foundation of the project, and by 1968 or so, things went from OK to bad via the actions of one man.

When James Earl Ray murdered civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King, it is my opinion that the heart and soul of the development vanished, and the place was never the same.

Due to the lack of safety, the schools falling apart before our eyes, and other factors, many of the original tenants moved away between 1968 and 1976. My family moved in 1971, and the last time I was in the development was in 1976.

However, years after the downfall of the place, it continues to hold strong, pretty much blending into the surrounding area as one of the largest minority housing developments in New York City, if not the country.

And its original cooperators, both the parents and their kids, many of whom are now likely grandparents and parents of their own children, continue to stay strong, and communicate with each other via Facebook and face to face. Many of the friendships started nearly 50 years ago have endured to this day.

We all have incredible memories of the place--both positive and yes, some negative--and it has drawn us together, even when we argue like cats and dogs.

That is where I get to the point of this Rant.

Since the old neighborhood will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in December 2013--its first cooperators moved in just scant days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--a group of us felt that it was time to look back at the old development as we look ahead at our own lives.

I am on the committee to try to put together a reunion of all the old Rochdale Village people. I am one of five people on the committee, and we have worked out a Reunion that should be "the mother of all reunions" of Rochdale folk.

There have been other reunions--I have talked about two that I have had at my house in the past, and there have been both large and small reunions literally since the late 1970s--but the committee wants to make this one the best one possible.

Like any reunion, some people definitely want to be there, others hesitate, and others really don't want or need to see people they haven't thought about for 40 years. Some people have other things to say about the Reunion, both positive and negative, but the feedback thus far has been greatly positive.

We have a venue, a time, and a caterer. Other things will fall into place shortly.

I am really excited about this, and that is why I volunteered for this endeavor.

For me, it really is something I have wanted to do for a long time. My years spent there, between the ages of seven to 14, saw me go from a mere babe to a young teenager. I learned a lot of things while living there, saw a lot of things, and the place really has helped to shape me, to a certain degree, during my life.

I have wonderful stories of the place, some bad stories, and I am active on the several Facebook groups (and previous Delphi group) that have been created to celebrate our old neighborhood.

We are a very feisty bunch, don't often see eye to eye, but we share one thing: we grew up in Rochdale, had many of the same experiences in Rochdale, and Rochdale is part of our soul.

So it looks good for a great reunion later this year.

And I am really, really looking forward to it. It should be fun, allowing us to look back as we look ahead.

Being able to do that is the magical thing about the old neighborhood, and the reunion will give us a chance to speak with people that we haven't had a chance to speak with for decades. It will give us all a time to catch up, to compare notes and to see where we've been and where we're headed.

I guess the theme of the reunion, the unofficial theme of course, is "Yesterday and Today," and that should be enough to satisfy anybody who attends.

I personally can't wait.

Rant #881: Shedding Bras and Panties

No, this post has nothing to do with strippers, but some might think it does.

The Lingerie Football League is no more.

Well, not entirely no more, but the league is shedding its image.

I will bet many of you didn't even know that such a league existed, but it has been around for the past few years.

It featured scantily clad girls playing football, and was supposed to titillate the masses, or at least masses of men who had nothing better to do than to watch this type of thing.

The league didn't really prosper, but it did survive, somehow. I think it had some off and on pay per view events which maybe made them some money. I know there was a team that played at the Nassau Coliseum for a brief time, but I couldn't tell you much else.

Anyway, the specially designed bras and panties are done with.

The league announced that it was rebranding itself as the Legends Football League, or something like that.

It was going to drop the titillation for something it feels is more valid: girls playing football.

Really playing football.

Yes, you won't see those bras and panties anymore if you watch this stuff.

Participants will be wearing real equipment, and will be playing for real. Logos will be changed to reflect the new direction.

It's the next step in the globalization of football, according to the league.

Yup. I will bet it is.

Women's football has been around for ages, but what the original Lingerie Football League did was mush this concept together with professional wrestling, where divas prance around in specially made, but very revealing, costumes as they pummel each other in the ring.

Here, the same thing happened, but on the gridiron.

And, of course, the payback to the males who watched this stuff was that you got to see a lot of the participants, if you know what I mean.

Personally, I don't think people will buy this. Without the bras and panties, this is just another women's football league, and probably another failure.

The bras and panties set this league apart, but honestly, does anybody really watch this stuff, anyway? The league claims to have played to sellout crowds, but heck, they themselves are something of a sellout, so what do they exactly mean?

Maybe if you are a die-hard football fan who is participating in a bachelor party or a frat party, but did anyone else try to buy into what the league was doing?

And why would anybody buy into it now?