Class Acts

Deb and I are getting into tennis. We’re lousy at it, but we enjoy it. And when Americans get into something, we jump in with at least one foot and a wallet, which means we buy all the crap advertisers say will make us really good at what we suck at. Deb got a fashionably affordable racquet with feminine accents and a manufacturer’s commitment to help cure breast cancer. I got a Velcro thing to cure my tennis elbow. I think that’s what I have because as soon as I started playing tennis my elbow started to hurt where it’s supposed to. On the other hand everything hurts now, but as far as I know they don’t make a Velcro body suit for tennis ass.

The next step is to sit at home and watch other people who’ve dedicated their entire lives to getting good at something so you can later go out and emulate their quirks. Deb actually had the opportunity to attend two days of the US Open with a good friend who’d scored some Craig’s List tickets. Being something of a newbie, she boned up ahead of time on the hot contenders so she could pick favorites based on apparel selection, sense of humor and whatnot. She still can’t keep score, but she knows when somebody shows up at center court in a bad outfit and matching attitude, unlike guys, who gravitate toward, I don’t know, other stuff.

Yet with both genders it helps if one’s favorite player wins a lot. Winning is an important aspect of American culture, which makes it all the more noxious when ex-waterboys with eating disorders go on YouTube diatribes over an athlete’s poor handling of foot fault accusations. Here’s what I have to say to those shlubcasters: shut the hell up, you lazy, pathetic, myopic lizard creatures.

I have no patience for lectures on court decorum. It’s nothing but a lame cover for the animosity a loser feels toward someone who earns more than his entire hometown while continuing to wax on a regular basis the ass of the loser’s chosen idol.

I know why I hate the Williams sisters. They aren’t human. They are Nexus creatures fabricated and programmed by an evil father/maker, physical monstrosities who shriek like harpies as they consume their prey. They are dark as night, which is a scary time to be out when there are predators lurking. Watching either Williams sister dispatch an opponent is like witnessing grizzled whalers bludgeon baby fur seals to death with Louisville Sluggers. The outcome during their reign of terror (they've become a touch long-in-tooth lately), has always been a horrific foregone conclusion.

Now isn’t that more honest than saying Serena tried to kill a line judge with a force-fed meal of fuzzy balls? Certainly she wanted to, but are you seriously suggesting that this was a legitimate murder threat? Of course it wasn’t. It was a flight of fancy, something we all experience on a daily basis. Let us, however, summon the deeply concerned and ascotted officials to the scene of the crime.

Here’s something we all have forgotten. Tennis isn’t tennis anymore. It began as a bourgeois summertime lark intended to unite industry titans with their trophy wives for an exterior photo op while the darkies polished the chandeliers. The days of ankle-length court skirts and respectful silence among the parasoled gallery are gone. Hell, with a couple lessons I could probably have given those old champions a run for their laundered money. Such has been the evolution of the sport.

And it’s money on the wings of global media saturation that has sifted from among billions of hopefuls a handful of gifted individuals. They are not of our kind. They are born and bred for warfare. The meek have been eliminated at the junior level; only the elite carnivores survive. To deny them their spoils with a bullshit call from a mortal with average sensory receptors is a bitter pill, indeed.

Some players do seem to possess among their arsenal superhuman restraint in the face of adverse calls. But make no mistake, all wish to make a meal of the errant caller. Outsized silver tureens are in the offing, but that is only part of the story. Ranking equals sponsorship, and we all know what’s stuffed inside that hallowed grail. Can I get an Amen and a Swoosh from the believers?

A hiss from the peanut gallery: “Suck it up.” How’s about this, Heloise? You forfeit last month’s salary because Payroll says you punched in two minutes late on Monday. You lose all holiday pay and time off for the fault, and you’re demoted to the mailroom till you work your way back to respectability. Let’s forget it was their clerical error. Suck it up. Show some class. And toss in next month’s paycheck for being surly about it.

Those classless athletes have been honing their weapons since they were indentured at an early age by parents, trainers, and a public’s insatiable demand for top talent. They practice while you pontificate, party, and play with your privates. They alone are responsible for their own brief rise and inevitable fall, unless some drone says their Nike Air kissed the service line during a supersonic serve.

You may argue that anger distracts a player, and I would counter that anger is an asset when properly channeled. In any event, it’s their business how they handle the pressure. So pick another favorite, but don’t expect to find any Polly Purebreds on the court anymore. When a guy who makes twenty mil a year to entertain your sedentary ass busts his two hundred buck racquet for failing him at set point, that’s you slamming the fridge door for barking your shin against it trying to score another Bud Lite. So take a chill pill.

Tennis is trying. It now uses cameras to determine whether a serve traveling at a hundred thirty plus was within a crotch hair of being “in or out”. It’s time for a toe-cam as well. In the mean time take your manners lesson and shove it up your backcourt, Scalia.

I'm An Idea Man

As a cameraman with connections at Food Network, I’ve found myself behind the lens for behind the scenes stuff for several seasons at "The Next Food Network Star", and it has convinced me I could have a successful career in project development. It may in fact be my true calling. And as the axiom goes, “Scratch a cameraman and you’ll find a cable channel programmer.”

Here is a sampling of some of the projects I'd like to develop for F-Net (I’m thinking rework the network name too). I think they’re all winners because we're giving viewers what we think viewers think they ought to want us to give them: the complete humiliation of a stack of humans willing to enter America’s version of the Roman Coliseum.

MY LIST OF SHOWS THAT CAN'T FAIL ON THE NEW!!! IMPROVED FOOD NETWORK:

1. Sabotaged Suppers: With the complicity of the family breadwinner, our home chef is led to believe that an important client will shortly be over for dinner. What she doesn't know is our covert staff has mucked up everything in her carefully maintained kitchen. The spices have been switched, the milk soured, the crucial ingredients tainted. No matter how hard she tries, the meal will be a disaster and our hostess will turn into a quivering mound of Jello (check for sponsorship). They get a new dishwasher if she sheds tears in front of the “client”.

2. Take It Back: We're all familiar with food critic shows. Newly opened eateries are visited by a food critic who typically waxes euphoric over the menu, with a caveat or two thrown in to legitimize the job description. In our show, no matter what's served, our dyspeptic gourmand hates it. Nothing measures up to his or her culinary expectations. The cuisine is derivative, the décor garish, the seats recovered from the Inquisition, the chef a potential serial killer. Each show we also revisit a recently trashed restaurant to see what’s moved in. A dental office here, a head shop there. The entrepreneurial spirit lives on.

3. Eat This! : In this game show we first check with the mothers of our contestants to find out what their offspring couldn’t stand to eat as children. Now as fully-grown adults they're offered up the same fare. The more they eat in the allotted time the more gifts they win. That is unless they chuck it up all over the set. Not a penny if they puke, but we’ll give them a fresh Food Network smock in which to see them home.

4. You Invited Those Assholes?: Guess who's coming to dinner? Your despised neighbors. Whose idea was it? Ours. You might try to get along for the evening, but we’ll make sure you don't. We mix footage of you all trying to pretend you're having a fine time mixed with confessional footage of you all ragging each other out. Bob never returned the borrowed ShopVac, and now he's sucking down our pork tenderloin. With any luck, each show ends in an actual food fight

5. Someone Stop the Frickin’ Clock!: A game show wherein contestants are required to perform typical kitchen duties under impossible time constraints. When contestants inevitably fail to complete a task (hopefully blood will be let in the attempt), they are physically and emotionally abused by celebrity judges. When Connie from Duluth fails to parboil an egg in seven seconds she is called a worthless whore while being pelted with raw eggs by that big Australian-sounding goofball.

6. Mom, Your Meatloaf Sucks!: The whole family gets into the act when mom serves dinner. Without her knowing it, the family has conspired to find fault with anything she puts on the table. Before they've left the table Dad claims he’s having an affair with someone who can pleasure him with food, and the kids leave for the neighbors' barbecue in progress. We follow mom's emotional meltdown, or even better, we find she's been living a dual life and could give a shit about this group of ingrates.

7. Hooray, It's Macaroni Night!!! : What‘s so special about Tuesdays? We find out from our medical correspondent, who describes this week's special ingredient: a controlled substance sure to provide some Must-See TV, as soon as the drug kicks in. Will our family go ballistic or limp? Tune in as they turn on. (Paramedics are standing by).

8. Dining With The Homeless: Our crack crew finds a street person and gives him four bucks for "something to eat". Encouraging him to outperform Rachel Ray ten to one, we tag along on this very special food find.

9. Cockfight Cuisine: A live audience is treated to a cockfight, with the loser served up by a celebrity chef as soon as the feathers settle. Tastes like chicken! Note: No animals will be harmed during this show worse than they would be under normal governmental guidelines.

10. So Sue Me!: We kick Reality TV up a notch. In the course of shooting behind the scenes of the next great Food Network Show, Our crew becomes involved in a non-disclosure imbroglio. Required to sign a "gag" contract before allowing them to proceed with their work, they tell the production company to read and sign a copy of the US Constitution's first amendment.

11. Topless Cuisine: What’s on the menu tonight? I’ll tell you what. A couple of oversized mangoes slung in a 37D Wonderbra. Cook me up some stale oatmeal for all I care, darlin’. Just as long as it comes with the special topping!

We're All Going To Die

In 1938 a group of actors staged a radio adaptation of a story written in 1898 by H.G. Wells. It was called “War Of The Worlds” and depicted an attack on planet Earth by a band of marauding aliens. Martians, I believe they were. They’re the worst.

The show was broadcast on Halloween night, and despite a precautionary introduction and admonitions at station breaks that the play was a work of fiction, Americans went bonkers. Well that’s understandable. We’re a touch gullible, with short-term attention spans, and most surely some of the Philco dial-twiddlers had missed the briefings.

But the truly sad aspect of the story was not that people wigged out like a coup full of chickens picking up the scent of fox. The pathetic part was that Americans looked out their picture windows and saw the Martians with their own damn eyes.

In 1986 the respected “news magazine” 60 Minutes aired its own brand of hocus pokus entitled “Out Of Control” wherein the show’s producers purported to reveal how the Euro-automaker Audi had conspired to kidnap owners of their 5000 Class car by causing the vehicles to spontaneously shift into drive and then forcefully accelerate without the consent of the driver. The show’s technicians, in preparing for the story and to assure that some good video would be had, rigged the test car to behave as reported for the cameras. Now that’s entertainment!

Naturally, it wasn’t long before anyone involved in an accident involving an Audi 5000 was looking to blame it on the car’s evil intentions. You know what came next, right? Enter the shysters.

Why do I mention these two seemingly disconnected events? Because I’ve reached my mid-fifties and have my fair share of medical anomalies. And I love the taste of Crystal Lite.

Crystal Lite is a powdered drink mix that makes use of the synthetic sweetener aspartame. Aspartame has pretty much no calories, and it is an ingredient in several products I enjoy because of my genetic heritage. I am drawn to fat, salt and sugar. Aspartame makes things taste fabulously sweet without the oft-cited concerns for problems like diabetes and dental caries. You know what comes next, right? Enter “Dr. Janet Starr Hull”.

In my attempt to acquire rational information on the possible medical side effects of aspartame, I kept running into this human roadblock: “Dr. Janet Starr Hull.” She seemed to own the copyright on the word “NutraSweet”. How is it that one person could come to wield such power? I Googled her name but only came up with her own entries. How could she not exist beyond her own carefully coiffed resume? How could no one have anything to say about her but she herself?

I lost my interest in aspartame and went in search of this doctoral degree recipient from Clayton College of Natural Health, a now defunct institution of once questionable learning in Birmingham, Alabama known on at least one occasion to have certified a dead cat as a member in good standing of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants. Perhaps the feline had met the school's requirements while still alive.

I began to lose patience tracking down any critical investigation of this crusader for the common consumer, she who claims to understand all the intricate and dynamic conditions that govern the human body. She seemed to be making money hand over fist on simpletons she’d whipped into a sucrose frenzy, while beating Google at its own game. She’d scrubbed the Internet clean of any contrary opinion of her.

Then it dawned on me: On her websites she constantly hawks the lid-blowing expose/diary she’d written, entitled “Sweet Poison: How The World’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Is Killing Us – My Story”. Odds are if you make it all the way through the title your aspartame consumption rate is relatively low, and you may have some time left.

Amazon carries the book, along with actual reader reviews. Real criticism! And sure enough, there among the doubtlessly planted ad copy (You owe it to yourself…) and uncritical dotings of soccer moms (This book saved my little Jordie’s life!) were the lonely voices of informed thinkers who smelled the stink of a snake oil salesman and called her on her faux science.

Hull’s panacea comes in the form of a “detox” kit, an elixir of pixie dust and pep talk CDs. She has claimed to heal herself of Grave’s Disease in thirty days all by her lonesome simply by giving up aspartame. You will need her kit, though, to do it yourself, an autographed form of which you may purchase for $59.95, plus shipping and handling. 


You may also have your hair analyzed by the good doctor online for $180. I assume there is more to that than shoving your head up against your laptop’s USB port.

Hull claims on one of her websites that there are “… over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption. It seems surreal, but true. How can one chemical create such chaos?”

No shit, “Doc”. I have an even better factoid for you. Breathing oxygen is associated with every health side effect known to mankind. I know! It seems surreal but true!

Hull is not alone in the wilderness. No, it’s a crowded wasteland out there. Synthetic bad! Natural good! Electromagnetism bad. Magnets good. Homeopathy, healing crystals, Reiki, guardian angels…

You want to know what’s bad for your health? I'll tell you what's bad for your health. It's lending your ear to any self-proclaimed Messiah out there with a mail-order degree, Photoshopped mug shot, and one more goddamn bridge up for sale.