WBZ, Devils, Wizards, Crips, Whatever

MY WIFE is usually a reliable source, so I'm going to run with this. She told me that this morning, on the WBZ (Channel 4, Boston) news, they were decrying the fact that Barbara Walters told all in her new autobiography.

(The back story: Barbara Walters alleges to have had an affair with former Senator Edward Brooke [R - MA] in the 1970's. Thus far, Mr. Brooke [now 88] has declined comment.)

Anyway, the anchors at 'BZ had some issues with this revelation. They wondered aloud if anyone had any decorum these days, and whether Ms. Walters might have had just as good a book if she had stuck to speaking only about her news career. One of those doing the complaining said something to the effect of, "Well, I guess that's what sells these days."

Where do I even begin? With the obvious, I suppose...

If WBZ News reported only the news, their show would be about five minutes long. Every show is filled with scandal, supposition, scare mongering, and silly (yet still tremendously unfunny) banter. Even though this should be obvious, I'm going to say it, anyway: If they only reported "The News", then they wouldn't have been talking about Baba Wawa's book, or her extra-marital affairs, to begin with.

It's a good thing half of Bob & Ray is dead. They wouldn't be able to make a living these days. It seems to me there's little left that can be satirized beyond its own idiocy. I don't know. Maybe somebody dropped acid in my Cream Of Wheat and I'm just now realizing it. The world seems way too bizarre to be reality-based. For instance...

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays no longer exist. Oh, there's still a baseball team in Tampa, and they're owned by the same folks as they were last year. They play in the same hideous stadium. They even wear pretty much the same uniforms as they did a year ago. But they aren't the Tampa Bay DEVIL Rays. This year, they're just the RAYS.

Tampa owner Stuart Sternberg says the name change to just RAYS is because he wants the team to be identified with the Florida sunshine, "... a beacon that radiates throughout Tampa Bay and across the entire state of Florida."

Well, stick a toy surprise up my ass and call me Crackerjack! It didn't have anything to do with religious groups pressuring the ownership to drop a reference to Satan, did it? No, of course not.

(By the way, I'm all for dissing Satan. He's been an asshole for eons now. But when your team is actually truly named after a fish indigenous to your region, I see little reason to kowtow to paranoids. I suppose we should be happy that they didn't change their name to the Tampa Bay Born Again Rays.)

(Or, maybe I can just kid myself into thinking they changed their name to honor Ray Goulding, the deceased member of Bob & Ray. Yeah, that's what I'm going to go with. And let me have some more of that acid-laced Cream Of Wheat, please.)

Changing the name of a franchise is always a slippery slope. The Washington Bullets changed their name to The Washington Wizards, supposedly because they wished to de-glorify gun violence in DC. The natural assumption is that they concurrently wished to glorify the practice of sorcery, but perhaps they were just going for the alternate definition of great ability or adroitness in a pursuit of a goal. If so, it doesn't explain their logo:Somehow (although I'm too lazy to tell you how, exactly) this all ties in with Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics being fined for making a gang-related hand gesture.

NBA Commisioner David Stern has fined Pierce $25,000 for supposedly making a threatening gesture towards the Atlanta Hawks bench. Pierce comes from L.A., and he's black, so of course every time he does anything with his hands, it has some sort of hidden evil intent.


The fact that he runs a charitable organization with one of the stated purposes being that of keeping kids from joining gangs? Means nothing. He's black, he's from L.A., he was making a threatening gang-related hand gesture. He was telling The Crips to bust a cap in Zaza Pachulia's ass. No doubt about it.

I'd try to tie all of these idiotic threads together, but I don't have nearly enough intelligence. Maybe if I have a few more spoons of that Cream Of Wheat...

In other news, Crystal McKee is still a gargantuan writing talent. However, she still hasn't been signed up by some savvy literary agent. I've taken the liberty of ordering three books from the library on the subject, and I will be devouring them. If nobody else grabs her, I'll do so and try not to screw up her chances royally.

Let's see... Have we accomplished anything here today? No, not really. You've been saved from me running another re-print, but that's obviously just a temporary reprieve, as I ran out of original ideas ages ago.

See you soon.

(I'd say, "... with more better stuff", but I've already asked you to swallow an awful lot, and I wouldn't want you to choke.)