Amusements

Why won’t Dick Wolf pay for scissors?

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

You know, after 18 years you’d think the writers of “Law & Order” wouldn’t have to rip things from the headlines anymore. I mean, what’s the rush? Shouldn’t this be pretty routine by now? Just take out a pair of scissors and carefully clip the article out of the newspaper and paste it into your story idea scrapbook.

Or nowadays, really, aren’t the writers all probably using LexisNexis or Google News Alerts to dredge up interesting real-life crime stories to spin into fact-based teleplays? So why are the promos so misleading?

I guess “ripped from the headlines” sounds better than “mouse-clicked from the headlines.”

Overcoming

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Wow. What an incredible night. Millions of Americans went to the polls and were able to overcome this country’s ugly history of prejudice.

It’s no secret what the barrier was tonight for the Democratic ticket. Would Americans be able to put aside the sneering, misguided, hateful jokes and elect a man with hair plugs as vice president? And they did. Truly a national turning point.

RedEye: A worthwhile alternative

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

There are some who say, and I quote here, that “RedEye sucks.” Indeed, a Google search for that phrase yields my long-ago post as the No. 1 hit. Cool!

That said, I am glad that I’ve a RedEye newspaper box within a block of home. Why? Without RedEye, I’d have to pay 50 cents for a paper to scoop up the dog’s poop on those rare occasions when I forget to bring along a plastic bag.

Thank you, RedEye!

Had me rolling in the aisles!

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

This amusing Los Angeles Times article about how studios use Larry King’s one-line reviews to promote their movies features a hilarious blurb story. King says he doesn’t like to bad-mouth movies. If he doesn’t have anything nice to say, he doesn’t say anything at all. But …

… it turns out that King sometimes will even blurb a movie he didn’t like. At lunch, he told me of the time he and Shawn Southwick, his sixth wife, took their two boys to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

“I had no idea what was going on,” he says. “I turned to my wife and said, ‘What is this movie about? I don’t get it!'”

But when I dug up King’s old blurbs, guess who was at the top of the ad for the movie, enthusing: “Finally, a Movie Worth Seeing Over and Over Again!”

Larry! I thought you didn’t like the movie! “I didn’t,” he explained. “I told the CNN person to tell the studio, ‘I didn’t understand the damn movie at all. I’d have to see it over and over again to figure out what happened.’ And then they went and used it!”

Heh, heh. Man, would I love to have Larry King’s job. He doesn’t do research for his interviews. He doesn’t even have to write full-length reviews yet gets blurbed (and, presumably, paid) all over the place.

The Friedman biodoc stunk

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Thanks to work, I wasn’t able to make it over to the memorial service held in honor of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago yesterday. So I was really looking forward to watching “The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman” on PBS last night. The program started off with a tedious examination of life in post-Soviet Estonia that had the peculiar virtue of being almost entirely Milton-free, and it never got much better.

Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience for this picture, but I wanted to see old film of Friedman at his feisty best testifying in Congress, being interviewed on TV and lecturing around the world. I wanted to hear other economists talk about the impact Friedman’s scholarship had on their thinking, how it shaped economic policy, and how certain ideas such as ending drug prohibition or breaking up the government education monopoly seem to have hit roadblocks. There was very, very little of that. Instead, there was an overlong segment about the Chilean wine industry.

The filmmakers clearly were trying to ape the success of the “Free to Choose” series by illustrating Friedman’s impact in different areas of the world, but without Friedman there as our enthusiastic guide these segments came off looking like they were produced by the local chambers of commerce.

Moreover, the actual discussion of Friedman’s ideas was so spare that I defy anyone whose only knowledge of them was this documentary to tell me (1) what monetary theory is and (2) why untrammeled inflation is so dangerous to economic growth and human liberty.

On the personal level, there were a lot of interesting facets that were left unexplored. What impact did Milton’s poverty-stricken, son-of-immigrants childhood have on his worldview? How was he able to form such strong working relationships with women, both his wife Rose and Anna Schwartz, during an era of rampant sexism? How did Friedman balance the dual roles of economic scholar and advocate for freedom? How was he able to maintain such a friendly disposition toward his intellecutal opponents while advocating radical views?

The only Friedman book I’ve read is “Capitalism and Freedom,” so it’s not as though I’m an expert on his work and so bound to be disappointed by a TV documentary. The filmmakers had a whole hour and a half to cover this material, and they fell down on the job plain and simple. A real disappointment.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)

My favorite mistake

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

I bought a used treadmill and I’m already regretting it. You can never trust used equipment, you know, and I think the damn thing is broken.

I keep trying to use the treadmill for its intended purpose — as a coat rack — but my bulky winter jacket just slides right off the handlebars!

This I believe …

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

There’s this annoying recurring series on — surprise! — National Public Radio called “This I Believe,” where people from the proverbial “all walks of life” talk about some belief central to their lives (e.g., Tony Hawk, “Do what you love“; Brian Grazer, “Disrupting my comfort zone“).

Yes, rather trite. I couldn’t possibly explain — in the length of a blog post — why I believe liberty is the best system for organizing human affairs, why Bob Dylan means so much to me, or why the New York Yankees are so evil. So here, I present some random, mostly trivial, beliefs of mine.

This I believe …

  • It’s OK — wise, in fact — for a man to carry a change purse.
  • There is a delicate balance between cheese and cracker.
  • Don’t put ketchup on hot dogs.
  • Don’t leave before the game is over.
  • Don’t ask acquaintances how they’re doing — they just might tell.
  • Write things down — memories are meant to be forgotten.
  • Syrup should be served warm. Needless to say, there is a delicate balance between butter and syrup.
  • Sleeping is superior to most of the activities that require being awake.
  • There’s no need to see the new movie this weekend. It will be just as good, or just as bad, a month or a decade from now.
  • Depend on the indifference of strangers. Expect the same in return.
  • Give others the benefit of the doubt. Put the burden on them to prove they’re jerks. For politicians, flip that.
  • Living now, in the United States of America, puts us ahead of 99.9 percent of the humans who have ever lived in material terms and in nearly every other regard. Just keep it in mind.
  • Lying is a chore.
  • It’s OK to sit on the floor while waiting in line.
  • Bring something to read.
  • If something’s not in its usual place, then it’s probably lost, so give up the search. If a thing doesn’t have a usual place, then it’s not really lost. It’s certainly not misplaced!
  • Life is not short. Act accordingly.
  • Wherever you go, there you are. So why put up with airport security?