No-no, no, NO!

The MLB trade deadline is this week and my team, the Mets, did what was expected that would do by now. They traded All-Star Carlos Beltran to the World Champion Giants for a minor league prospect and cash.
When I first heard the news I said to myself, “no, don’t give up like that.” The trade admits defeat and while I am someone who does live in reality I didn’t want the team to pack it in like that.

Beltran, who the Mets signed at 27 years of age, played nearly 7 years with the team and was going to be a free agent at the end of the year. Rather than avoid the chance that the team not get much of anything in return, they opted for this trade and a major salary jump.
They recently did the same thing with their relief pitcher, Frankie Rodriguez. They traded him for a player to be named later to the Brewers. This was another major money saver for a New York that shouldn’t have to worry about money like this in the biggest market in the world. But since the Mets owners were ripped off during the Bernie Madoff scandal, they find themselves in a position of weakness; not the best position for bargaining, that’s for certain.

The Cardinals and Blue Jays made an 8-player deal with each other yesterday. Colby Rasmus from St. Louis, and Edwin Jackson from Toronto were the main players in the deal. The Cardinals need help in fighting off the Brewers who were bolstered by the Rodriguez deal and also the Pirates who are still just a game and half out of first the NL Central currently sitting in third place.

The Angels Ervin Santana tossed a no-hitter yesterday against the Cleveland Indians to become the third pitcher this year to throw one (Justin Verlander and Francisco Liriano the others.) It was the first no-hitter against the Indians since 1993 when one-handed Jim Abbott threw one against them. It was the Angels first individual no-hitter since Mike Witt threw a perfect game for them in 1984.
While those seem like a long time there are still some teams in existence which have never had a no-hitter thrown by them including my own NY Mets which entered the league in 1962. Guys that came through the Mets system have thrown no-hitters for other teams – Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, for example, but never while wearing the Mets colors.

As of yesterday all of the teams that I picked to go to the playoffs this year would be in the playoffs if the season were to end now. Still the Phillies are screwing up my prediction that the Braves will win the NL East, but all else has fallen into line.

I have been a little busy for a few days and am still in the process of writing a book and helping someone else prepare to self-publish a book. But I make time for entertainment and watch TV at night (so motivated, right?)
America’s Got Talent is in the quarterfinal round and there are two acts that went through to the semi-finals last night that are of note.
The first one is Landau Eugene Murphy from WV. Landau has the best personal story of those left in the competition now. He is a 38-year old singer who has made a living working at a car wash in WV. He has never performed in front of crowds before and he sings like Frank Sinatra. The sounds that come out of his mouth when he sings just simply don’t match his appearance. That’s basically because when you think of guys who sing or sound like Sinatra (think Harry Connick, Jr. also) you get a certain picture in your head. This was why he ended up blowing everyone away on day one because initially it just looked like some delusional homeless guy had just taken the stage and was going to get a lot of laughs for a horrible attempt to try to rise from the gutter.

So Landau is now my current favorite.

Landau Eugene Murphy

 

The other act that is just sick is a guy who calls himself Professor Splash. This guy is 50 years old and the other night set a world record on “live” TV doing a belly flop from 3 stories high into a plastic blow-up pool with 12 inches of water in it.
Now I wondered if this was actually talent. The concept of the show is to find a talented act which would then get a contract to perform in Las Vegas.
Well, as even Howie Mandel (one of the judges) said, Evel Kenevil wasn’t necessarily talented. But both do one particular thing and that is entertaining a crowd. So is Professor Splash potentially a million-dollar act? Well, the judges broke a tie at the end of the show yesterday and did indeed push him through to the semi-finals. He now says that he will incorporate fire into his act. But just how far can he go? He has a few more times to perform and the bar needs to get raised to win the competition. Since he has defied death to get this far, will he need to actually die to win? Perhaps, if Landau steps up his game also!

This past Sunday I did my second show at the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, NJ. During the summer the RCA functions as a religious camp.
Last year’s show there was great and so was this one.
Keep in mind that this is an uber conservative situation and last year I said in a skit that a cute girl was walking up to them and there were all sorts of commotion in the crowd. That skit wasn’t going down a sexual path but I was directed to come to the side of the stage and replace the word girl with squirrel. I did it as asked, but then it sort of sounded a little funny to say that the squirrel was a talent scout which had just walked over to them to audition them for a TV show.
Right before this year’s show a couple of the counselors double checked with me to make sure that I didn’t mention the word girl again this year.
Now contrast that situation to the swingers convention that I did last fall where half of the volunteers got naked on stage ten minutes into the routine simply after hearing the suggestion that it was a little hot in the room.

It makes for interesting stories around the entertainers lounge later. It does appear that I’m taking the show to a new level of clientele soon also as I am just about booked for a bi-sexual swingers convention.

I’m going to try the squirrel routine at that one.

Little Changes

With the AC on in my house last night the temperature was still 83 at about 9pm.
So, while sitting as still as humanly possible, I decided to watch an on-demand movie after watching one of the hot girls on Big Brother get the boot.
My choice last night was “Little Darlings” with Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol listed as stars. Others of note in the movie included Armand Assante, Matt Dillon and Cynthia Nixon.

The premise of the movie is that O’Neal is a rich kid and McNichol a poor kid and they go away to summer camp. A contest between those two develops at the prodding of another camper, a very loose hoe, to see who would lose their virginity first.

I had a thing for Tatum O’Neal when I was younger (one of many such "things" I had back then of course) so I decided to watch this 1980 movie.

There were a bunch of things that jumped out at me while realizing that this movie was now 31 years old.

First, I noticed that my joints hurt and that it’s much tougher to move around these days and that I had a bunch of other ailments that remind me that I am now close to 50 years old.

I noticed how bad most of the story telling was in this movie and wondered just how some movies got made then and even now.

I saw that gas was .68 a gallon.
Cars that were in this movie, mostly GM made, were awful. No wonder that company hit the slump that it did that from which they never have really recovered (and are quickly heading back down the toilet these days.)
The pledge of allegiance was said in its entirety (mentioning God) not just once, but twice. Today those two scenes would be removed by censors for being offensive.
O’Neal’s character is 15 years old in the movie and she wants to bag Assante so she could win the competition. Assante is a camp counselor in the movie.
Later in the movie Tatum (Ferris is her movie name) lies and tells her bunk mates that she had this wonderfully romantic interlude with him to win the bet.

She ventured over to his cabin wearing a white night gown late at night and he let her in to talk to him. She tried to get him to kiss her as they were sitting on the couch together with him, for some reason, with his arm around her.
Now, Assante was not a teenaged counselor in this movie; he was in his 20’s. I found myself laughing, not because this was actually funny, but because there would be no way a normal counselor these days would let that girl cross the threshold while she was clearly on the prowl for penis.

Later, Assante gets in some sort of trouble, but it’s not the kind where the police are dragging him away screaming that he was innocent, but rather the kind where O’Neal can simply apologize for the “stunt” and everyone went on their merry way. Today just the accusation that something inappropriate like this happened would practically ruin a dude's life and have him on an internet searchabale sexual predator's list.

In Assante’s cabin, I should add, there is beer on his desk where he was working, and a bottle of wine. He was typing on a manual typewriter on a desk where there was a rotary phone.
Not a single computer was seen nor was there a cell phone in sight. This meant that we could see kids faces as they were walking around the grounds of the camp.

There was a lot of smoking in the movie too. On the way to the camp, McNichol’s 15-year old character was smoking IN the bus. Now we know that kids smoke and drink (as she also did with Dillon in this movie later) but to see a bus driver allow smoking on his bus was almost shocking.
I found myself longing for some of those younger days for a variety of reasons. I never did go away to camp like that when I was young. My mother, raised in Queens, was forced to go to day camp when she was young into New Jersey a place which New Yorkers basically refered to as the "swamp" on the other side of the river. Her experience was terrible and she hated it being the city kid but later raised her two kids in NJ anyway (and the swamp became The Meadowlands that we all know now.)  

I was wondering how Matt Dillon ever actually landed an acting role back then because he was horrible. He became much better later with lots and lots of practice (as anyone would I suppose) but working next to McNichol who was really pretty good in this made him look absolutely terrible.

I still would do Tatum O’Neal, if given the opportunity, to this day. While searching for an image to post on here it was clear that even at 47 she is still hot.

The Phillies made a big change and sealed their doom this week as they signed relief pitcher Aaron Heilman who was released by the Diamondbacks earlier in the week. The Atlanta Braves now will fulfill my pre-season prediction and win the NL East in MLB.
The Phillies management must have short-term memory loss. Heilman is an ex Met who pretty much single-handedly blew three seasons for the Mets including the 2006 NLCS game 7 where he gave up the series winning HR to the Cardinals Yadier Molina. He then went on to help blow probably ten games all by himself in 2007 when the Mets folded down the stretch eventually losing the division and the Wild Card on the last day of the season. He also had a huge hand in their 2008 fold allowing the Phillies to somehow actually win the division again and a World Series for only the second time since the WS began in the early 1900’s.
Aaron Heilman is a high school caliber pitcher at best who will find a way to tank the Phillies high hopes. All by himself he will neutralize the deals for Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay and I think that if this does happen it will be the funniest thing I will have ever seen in MLB history.

 Done.

Hibernation

As the heat rises my appearance outdoors decreases. My preference is for much cooler weather so I hibernate in the summer.

During the summer I am also much less busy and even less so than usual this year. So hibernating is a financial necessity also.

So this means, as usual for me, that I have time to plot new projects and new plans to try to implement while simultaneously trying to find more places where I can perform my hypnosis shows.

Currently the project is now a book and I am a little more excited about it than when I was when I started a couple of weeks ago.

Traditional methods for getting a book published are now obsolete and that is why I am excited. The new technologies available online make self-publishing easy and far less expensive. I published a local sports newspaper for a while back in 2000, but it was very costly because in order to get a decent price per paper, I had to order many more than I really wanted or needed to print. This isn’t the case now. I wouldn’t have to pay for a printing of 100,000 copies of the book that I am writing. This is important for another reason besides price – I have a very niche target with this one.

This concept of online self-publishing makes me feel better about the fact that my sports video production business is about dead now. Since practically every computer sold features video editing software and the price of HD video cameras is so cheap, more people are creating their own projects of the sort that I do for them selves.

The same holds true for major media networks now. With the internet at our fingertips we have the world at our fingertips also. This was why we launched the podcast show in April (the Dungeon of Manlove) and our second show starts taping in a couple of weeks. Had we tried to pitch these shows to networks we would have had to find an agent which probably would have meant a move to NY or LA 15-20 years ago. Now we can produce the shows that WE want to produce for next to nothing in cost and we can reach the world in no time, if we do things right (produce good material, market properly, etc.)
We have been doing some things right with our first show as evidenced by the fact that we have now been heard in 40 different countries. How that would have been possible just 10 years ago? It wouldn’t have been possible; that is the answer.

The internet even made it easier to get involved with the production of creative projects than the laws that made public and leased access available on cable networks. That was where I launched my TV show in 1995. But that had a lot of expense. One of the guys on the Marshcast staff was talking about producing TV shows on cable as one of our projects. But when we start talking about the expenses and the lack of access for potential viewers, it makes much more sense to use the internet.

For just these reasons alone we have to be very careful that we don’t let big businesses and the government mess around with pricing and regulating the internet.

The internet definitely helps my hibernation habits though. I can follow just about anything and anywhere. I am now watching Big Brother on CBS and during the day I can check in with their website and watch the cameras to see how my favorite hot girls are doing in there and what they are doing. What better way to spend some hibernation time?

3000 Dragons

I don’t think that Derek Jeter needs me to congratulate him for getting his 3000^th hit yesterday. He doesn’t have a clue who I am nor will he ever read this. But congratulations anyway.
Jeter became the 28^th MLB player to reach this magical milestone. He did so in a grand way going 5-5 in the game, smacking a homerun for the 3000^th hit, and his last hit of the game was a game winner.

With his third hit of the game he passed Roberto Clemente, who had 3000 career hits exactly, and jumped into 27^th place all-time.

He was the second player to hit a homerun for his 3000^th hit. Wade Boggs was the first to do so in 1999. Ironically, both of those players are not known for their homerun hitting prowess.

Jeter was also the second player to have 5 hits on his milestone day. Craig Biggio was the first to do that.
Jeter becomes the 15^th player to have 3000 hits with one team and the first-ever Yankee to do it.
Jeter at 37 years of age is also the 4^th youngest to reach that mark behind Ty Cobb (34) Hank Aaron (36) and Robin Yount (37.) He was 8 days younger than Pete Rose when Rose stroked his 3000^th hit.

Just three players who have reached the 3000 hit mark are not in the Hall of Fame- Rose, Biggio (who is soon to be eligible) and Rafael Palmeiro.
Next up on the all-time hit ladder for Jeter to pass is Al Kaline with 3007.

Jeter accomplishes this feat in an era of steroids and the long ball. Eighteen different times during Jeter’s career a player hit 50 homeruns or more. That was more that every other year in MLB prior to that. Jeter has been a model of consistency and honor during this particular period of baseball history.

Thankfully there was no doubt about whether Jeter’s 3000^th hit was a legitimate hit or not since it was a homerun. Jeter’s 2000^th hit was a dribbler down the third place line (against whom I forget) and the throw by the third baseman was a little high. He was awarded the hit. In the stands were his parents and the video of them during the play showed his mother mouthing the words, “That was an error.”
No matter though, it went down in the books and so have the next 1003.

There is joy in Pittsburgh as the mighty Pirates are in third place at the All-Star break just a game a half out of first.
Considering that they are chasing the Brewers and the Cardinals for the division lead one would think that this chase will have a short life, but its fun to watch a team that struggled so mightily for well nearly two decades still in the race at this point of the year.

I have dealt with naysayers all of my life who have told me that I shouldn’t or couldn’t do certain things in my life. So when I decided to start a podcast show (of questionable taste…hehe) as part of an eventual network of shows, again I was told that I shouldn’t and that I couldn’t.
Our first show, the Dungeon of Manlove (of completely questionable taste) has been heard in 36 different countries now, can be found on ITunes and has a growing subscriber base now in the hundreds.

Sure, “hundreds” isn’t a great deal yet, but we’ve only been for three months and our audience is specifically for adults with “questionable taste” and a bit of a dark side.
There is a second show already produced and running although we have not yet combined them into the network yet. A third show begins taping this week and two more are in a pre-production phase.

Never tell me that I can’t do something that is physically possible to do. Of course, people have been right a couple of times about some ideas that I have had, don’t get me wrong, but I only use lessons learned from those to make other things happen.

Success at these things is in the eye of the beholder though. This project is not yet developing any revenue for me or anyone else involved so I really only consider this 25% successful for me. I was told that even getting it off the ground was not doable in the sense that I could get an audience. Well…we have a growing audience and as it gets larger the chances for financial success grow as well.

With my HBO and Showtime services back I have spent some time getting my money’s worth out of them.
I just finished a “Game of Thrones” marathon on HBO.
It’s a fantasy medieval-times show with no historic background. This left the creators and writers able to do some interesting things with the story lines.
One of the things that I don’t like about these medieval types of shows is that they are always done with actors using a British accent. There are more scenes than I can remember where I simply needed subtitles to understand what the hell they were saying.

But, it was good anyway. There is some unpredictability in the writing which I love also. A couple of the main characters in the show, and one with a star-rated credit, got killed off in this first season. That, to me, makes a show good. I don’t want to be able to predict everything that is going to happen. Well, I guess an example of what I mean is a scene where the hero is just about to get killed and some completely implausible miracle happens and the hero is saved. I love fantasy and science fiction and I am completely fine with the presence of dragons and other mythical creatures. But there has to be some measure of reality mixed in with them at the same time. For example, let’s say that the dragon has the hero in his clutches and then eats him whole. If the hero escapes the stomach of the dragon by cutting his way out of its belly with a hidden dagger given to him by his father on his death bed 20 years ago strictly to be used in only just such an occasion, I have a problem with that.

I am currently in training for the Delaware Senior Olympics which run over the span of two months or so starting next month.
The Senior Olympics are open to those 50-years of age or older. I turn 50 in December but they figure your age on December 31^st of the current year, so I am eligible for the first time.
Because of my schedule I can’t do as many things as I wish so I have simply chosen to compete in two specific events – Bench Press and Bench Press for repetitions.
The other day I was feeling pretty good about myself as I lifted 315 pounds one time. This was not my best-ever lift but it was my best since I tore the labrum in one of my shoulders a few years ago.
So, there I was all proud of myself until I watched the guy who spotted me proceed to do three sets of 8 each with 315 pounds.
Thankfully he was only 41 years old.

That competition is coming up on September 24^th. I’m going for the gold.
I wouldn’t tell me that I shouldn’t or can’t do it.

Done.

Crime Pays!

A friend of mine said in a conversation about a week ago that when he got older and if he didn’t have a way to provide properly for himself, that he would commit a serious crime and go to jail. Here is where he said he would simply spend the rest of his days comfortable in the knowledge that he would have meals provided for him, a place to sleep and free health care for the rest of his life while in prison.

I only caught glimpses of the Casey Anthony trial mainly because it was unavoidable to miss. I don’t have any opinion about her guilt or innocence.
What I do know is that this girl is about to become rich selling her story to interviewers and in a future book deal and movie rights.

Casey Anthony

I am sure that you can tell a story off of the top of your head about someone you know who was making money doing something illegal.

When I was younger I worked as an investigator in the retail sector. During my tenure there I fought in the streets with regularity, was shot at, stabbed once, developed a hard-core drinking problem partially to deal with the stress of that and did so for peanuts. During that time I heard all sorts of stories about how lucrative it was to simply lie, cheat and steal.

Most of us beat our heads on the wall trying to figure out how to survive honestly. We toil, we sweat, we cry, and we bleed to do whatever it takes to make it that way.

It never ceases to amaze me and during a period where times have been tough for me personally, this all makes me very discouraged.

I was told growing up that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, not to say anything at all.

Can’t find anything nice up above this, so I apologize for that, but that also now means that I am….

Done.

Follow Your Dreams?

The Voice concluded this past week with Javier Colon grabbing the top final vote over Dia Frampton who had the most downloads of her original song performed on the show’s final performance show.
I ended up liking The Voice, obviously since I watched all of the episodes. I would hope for a couple of tweaks in it for next season, which begins in September but for a first season it was fine.
One of the odd things I saw on the show was a final-show performance by the judges/entertainers Christina Aquilera, Adam Levine, Blake Shelton and Cee Lo Green.
While all of them are certainly fine entertainers and great singers (well Cee Lo isn’t really that great a singer, although he has a great stage presence) their voices shouldn’t necessarily have been mixed together in a song. They simply didn’t blend at all since they were all so unique. It really sounded bad.

But, the judges did all sing with their finalist and that worked out a whole lot better. Beverly McClellan singing with Aguilera on her own song “Beautiful” was fantastic. Even though I am not a fan of Michael Jackson’s music hearing Levine and Colon sing “Man in the Mirror” was well done also.

I hadn’t done any research into the show during the season though. I later found out that Colon had already cut at least two albums with Capitol Records and recently released another album. McClellan has two albums for download on her MySpace page although she is apparently unsigned.
Frampton had been part of a band with her sister Meg (The Meg & Dia Band) and released an album through Warner Bros. Records in 2007 before being dropped in 2010.
Vicci Martinez, the other of the final four on the show, has recorded 8 albums (six are listed on her official page) although it seems as if they are all independent. She had a successful American Idol audition and was invited to advance to a second round in the first season, but thought the contract was too restrictive.

It was rather obvious after a while that the four finalists were very talented. But it wasn’t like any of them were undiscovered talents, although arguably Martinez since she has never been signed was a relative unknown.
The show sort of made it seem like all of these competitors were just rank amateurs who came off of the street with a dream and such wasn’t the case. Colon, for example, worked with Darius Booker and even Martinez shared a venue with Sting, Annie Lennox and Avril Levine at some point in her young career.

That’s all fine if its known in advance. But if your co-worker in the stock room says that he going to try out for The Voice next season and has never been on stage or in front of a microphone, let him know what his chances of success are going to be. And seriously, unless you want to play a practical joke on him, don’t encourage him to follow that particular dream without a whole series of caveats.

I have heard rumors that American Idol is like that also, but have yet to find much proof of that. There seems to be more of a chance that a regular, amateur singer can actually get in front of the judges to audition; at least more so than The Voice.

The one main exception to this was the 16-year old Xenia, who made the final eight on The Voice. She literally had zero professional experience yet made it to that final eight (with a big lift from Shelton, her coach) and believed that most people in her own high school wouldn’t have known that she was singer.

The more I watch America’s Got Talent the more I appreciate it since people of all ages are eligible (The Voice is too, I should add, but AGT features other acts also.) There was a great example of this on this past week’s show when 42-year old Cindy Chang had a Susan Boyle moment and was instantly embraced by the judges and the audience.

Now I know some of this gets staged as well. Everyone is pre-judged before they get to the main judges. That’s all fine. The production staff knows in advance who they are putting on stage and why. But people like Cindy Chang literally did not have a singing career at all and was able to be discovered on this show.
Chang’s performance was inspiring since it was her own parents who kept her from trying to become a singer. In her 20’s she started taking voice lessons though and then made her move to take this chance this past week (or whenever it actually happened.)
She was overcome with emotion, crying and shaking on stage after she gave her operatic performance in response to the overwhelming positive response she received from the crowd.
If you haven’t seen and heard it, it’s easily found by searching her name online. It will blow you away that this was the first time any of us have ever heard of her.

Done.

Entries here might be a little fewer and farther between for a while. I am in the early stages of writing my first real book now.

I have notes all over the place from books I have wanted to write. This one though is about Comedy Hypnosis so it’s a whole lot different from the fantasy books I have started and stopped a dozen times or so.

Hopefully I will finish this one and relatively soon. Since it is a how-to book it won’t have general appeal but I have been asked a few dozen times if I have training material. I do train people, but I do so in person. I need my own training process and lessons learned from experience written down to handle those requests from people who would rather just read the book.