We had to put Jesse to sleep on Tuesday. She had a tumor on her spleen and it was getting the best of her. She was a great dog and a wonderful companion. It's harder on Kathy, who Jesse was bonded with as a soul mate, they were a pair for so long.
I like to leave the memory of Jesse as the companion that transitioned Kathy, and later me, into family life. She was the first dog I "owned", even though I had dogs as a kid, Jesse was a dog that Kathy and I took care of singularly (no parents to fall back on). She loved snuggling in bed on Sunday mornings, eating kleenex and mopping up the floor after Kaitlyn had breakfast/lunch and dinner. Marvelous dog who will live on in our memories. This is one of the time that I really want to believe reincarnation does exist, so that Jesse is out there making another family happy as she did us.
Update on the Late Night Wars Part 2: NBC is offering Conan $30 million to return the Late Show to Leno. A lot of people who've supported Conan through this see it as a sell-out. I see it from a different perspective. Conan's already been put in a bad situation, NBC obviously doesn't believe in him, so what's he supposed to do. I think he should take the $30megabuck and get out of dodge, seems like the most reasonable thing to do. He can take his money and get back to his routes script writing sketch comedy or sitcoms - he'd be a huge bonus to a show like "30 Rock". Even better, like I mentioned in my previous article - he could go native and start writing sketches for the guys at funnyordie.com and say buh bye to network TV altogether. I'm not worried about Conan, I think he did what was right and they called his bluff...I just hope he takes the golden parachute uses it as seed money for something even more spectacular. This would be the time for the reinvention of Conan.
I'm with Coco, for several important reasons (or at least important to me). Before reading my list - you might want to read up on the current Late Night battle that is being waged by NBC.
Leno is an ass - is he not? Of course people will be dumbfounded when you attack them in the streets with bright lights and a camera crew. And who really cares about typos in advertisements, I spend my day copy editing stuff, I really don't need to see it as entertainment. I want to see funny, edgy sketch comedy. Convince me that Jack Paar or Johnny Carson would have done "Jay Walk All Stars".
Leno moving to the 10 o'clock spot on NBC canceled my favorite TV show "Life". That alone made me want to hurt Leno in a bad way. They killed several shows in the Leno decision, but "Life" was a refreshing crime drama, well produced, yet quirky. Damien Lewis - from Band of Brothers fame - was a real delight to watch, the story was well crafted and the technical work of filming was top notch. If you cancel a good show it shouldn't be because someone is upset that he made a mistake six years earlier.
Conan deserves to be treated better. I would think NBC would learn from their mistakes with how they treated Letterman, ousting him initially for Leno in the Tonight Show spot. Letterman went over to CBS and has really given NBC a run for their money with the late night crowd. The situation now with Leno and Conan seems like a repeat of that mistake. Take a young, talented, popular late night personality and screw them. What's going to happen - Conan goes to Fox and makes NBC look like a bunch of fools, or better yet, creates YouTube channel and continues the demise of the broadcast networks for on demand content.
Jimmy Fallon deserves to be treated better. Here's a guy who is extremely young, in touch with a new generation of late night audience and you want to push him even farther back into obscurity by ruining that franchise as well. C'mon NBC, do you actually think you'll attract any A-List talent if you treat your two young demographic stars this way? Plus Jimmy loves the muppets...how could you treat a guy so badly who loves the muppets?
Cut the baby boomers loose. Advertising is king in network TV right? Who has a larger disposable income, retirees or 18-35 years olds?
Leno is an ass - yes, it completely comes down to that. A guy has a golden goose gig, signs up for planned retirement, then has cold feet, gets a show based on fears that he'll go compete with NBC, then gets cancelled and tries to muscle into his replacement's gig. That's about as lame as show business gets.
Last night I caught the second half of the PBS American Master's series episode about Dalton Trumbo. I'm a big fan of Trumbo, but didn't really know it until last night. He was blacklisted in Hollywood in 1947, but wrote under "fronts" or pseudonyms winning one Academy Award for the "Brave One" in 1957 under the front "Robert Rich" and later being posthumously awarded the Academy Award for "Roman Holiday". In 1960, 13 years after being blacklisted, he finally received on screen credit for both "Exodus" and "Spartacus" bringing an end to the blacklist.
The thing that amazed me the most was not his perseverance throughout the dark times of being blacklisted, but what seemed to be his unshaken belief in what he considered the true face of America, which was not the artificial hysteria of McCarthy. He blamed government for overreaching its bounds with the "Red Scare" and wrote many an essay against the abuse. In an age where everything is partisan and a person's views could easily be drowned out by the tyranny of the majority, whomever that majority may be, I found the last piece in the documentary to be very inspiring. I made me affirm my notion that America is filled with Americans, and each and every on has the right to pursue happiness (not be happy), write and speak their minds free of the abuse of government and their peers. They may be politicians and lawyers, or the underbelly of society, but no one person has the right to tell another, whomever they may be, that they have to be silent.
On Saturday, June 13th at 12:01 am, Facebook allowed people to create a unique username for their accounts. This is very similar to what many other social networking sites have done, i.e. Flickr, myspace, etc. Facebook up to this point required that you supply a real name as the account identifier, so searching for a singular persona like "Ken Dirkin" worked like a charm, but finding your friend "John Smith" was difficult at best. Seems like a great idea.
Personal
We had to put Jesse to sleep on Tuesday. She had a tumor on her spleen and it was getting the best of her. She was a great dog and a wonderful companion. It's harder on Kathy, who Jesse was bonded with as a soul mate, they were a pair for so long.
Update on the Late Night Wars Part 2: NBC is offering Conan $30 million to return the Late Show to Leno. A lot of people who've supported Conan through this see it as a sell-out. I see it from a different perspective. Conan's already been put in a bad situation, NBC obviously doesn't believe in him, so what's he supposed to do. I think he should take the $30megabuck and get out of dodge, seems like the most reasonable thing to do. He can take his money and get back to his routes script writing sketch comedy or sitcoms - he'd be a huge bonus to a show like "30 Rock". Even better, like I mentioned in my previous article - he could go native and start writing sketches for the guys at funnyordie.com and say buh bye to network TV altogether. I'm not worried about Conan, I think he did what was right and they called his bluff...I just hope he takes the golden parachute uses it as seed money for something even more spectacular. This would be the time for the reinvention of Conan.