Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Appreciating
Sunday
September 3, 2006
Labor Day weekend is an underrated time. Excitement for sports fans is high, with the first season of college football underway (and, occasionally, the NFL season begins this weekend as well, though that might have been done away with as it hasn't happened lately.) Miami vs. Florida State is on every conceivable ESPN channel tomorrow night. Bill Simmons' idea of a channel providing alternate commentary of a sports game has been co-opted by his own parent company, albeit with the disappointing choice of the uninspired Colin Cowherd calling the game. It would be much better if we could have Reggie Roundtree (a Miami fan who I worked with at WTSP) and Tom Bean (Bubba The Love Sponge's agent, who is a FSU guy) in the booth trading barbs. It's not too late, ESPN. I could make it happen.
One question that must be answered: what are the middle names (respectively) for Oklahoma University RB Adrian Peterson and Chicago Bears RB Adrian Peterson? You'd think information like that would be easily available online, but I haven't been able to find it, and I'm usually money with finding info quick via Google et al. I tried typing in his name with middle initials inserted to try to find it the hard way, but all that provided me was information about an unrelated Dr. Adrian M. Peterson, who I don't believe plays pro ball. Though, with that name, maybe he should.
The whole NASCAR contrived "Race For The Cup" concept never appealed to me until recently. Making a pretend playoffs is silly, considering that the rest of the field continues on as well, merely getting in the way and tainting the process. However, the chase to get into the Race has actually been interesting, with several drivers in striking distance to make it in. As I understand it, you have to be in the Top 10 as of the end of the Richmond race next week, though there's some technicality to allow drivers within a certain number of points of the leader to also make it.
This probably only cracks me up, but I can't help but see that driver Matt Kenseth is sponsored by DeWalt and think to myself, "They sponsor him because Kenseth is a tool." Then again, I think Carl Edwards is a crybaby, which makes me start to fear that I'm actually getting drawn into this whole NASCAR thing when I start to have positive and negative opinions about several drivers.
You know what would be fun? If they started Tony Stewart in the back every week, just to see him dart through the competition and still make it to a Top 10 finish. Not only is he a nice guy, he's a driver who makes a legit major difference for his race team. He went from 15 to 9 suddenly at the end of today's California race. It's like he has the racing equivalent of Jerry Lawler pulling down the strap to go for the finish.
I tried unsuccessfully in the first draft of this paragraph to compare Tony Stewart's teammates to the post-expansion Cleveland Browns. In short, Stewart's teammates are good for the occasional upset win, but you wouldn't want to be counting on them in the clutch.
Yes, it's 2 AM and I'm rambling. But not intoxicated. Interestingly, this whole long weekend the only alcohol I've had was on Thursday night in the beer I had at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Mississippi State/South Carolina game. Of course, it's just me down here, and drinking alone isn't too much fun.
Tonight I watched one of the six movies I bought recently from Amazon.com in the Warner Brothers "Gangsters" box set collection. Mostly I wanted it because I wanted to hear them use 1930s lingo, much like was the running inside joke with me, Co-Co, Craig, and others at the BTLS shop toward the end of my run there. "Look here. It's real simple, see. It's like this, see. You come blasting into my facility..." As it turns out, five of the six movies received high praise in online reviews I read (and the sixth, The Petrified Forest, was more panned for not fitting into the set logically than for the quality of the film itself.)
Tonight's movie choice was the chronological second-to-last one in the box set (The Roaring Twenties, released in 1939), but it was probably the one I wanted to see the most. Why? I find the 1920s to be fascinating, between post-war America, the Prohibition failure, and the stock market crash of 1929.
Priscilla Lane, who had a supporting role in the film, had a definite Naomi Watts beauty to her, only without the modern-day Hollywood anorexia (it was 1939, after all.) Interestingly, I read that Priscilla Presley was named after her. It's easy to understand why.
|  | Left: Priscilla Lane. Right: Naomi Watts.
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I tried finding a good picture that looked similar of Watts and Lane, but I kept finding photos of Naomi Watts in those sensual scenes from Mulholland Drive with Laura Harring and getting distracted. Time to move on...
Yet another reason to be glad to be out of the TV news business: tomorrow (Labor Day) is a holiday. There are no real holidays in TV news, but merely days that are battled for amongst your co-workers. I think I appreciate holidays more now as a result.
One cool thing they do here in Alabaster is put up American flags alone U.S. 31 on the holiday weekends for Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. It is one of those subtle reminders to me that Alabaster hasn't yet entirely lost the charm of being a small southern town, even as construction crews prepare to build an entirely new, massive shopping plaza near the interstate here. Birmingham South is coming, expanding like The Blob, but for now there's still some of that small town charm left in Alabaster.
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