The View From the Outback© 2000 Richard C. Rhodes
A great deal of what we read in newspapers, magazines, and books, and what we see in the movies and on TV is written and produced in New York City or Los Angeles. Much of the "political wisdom" comes from the PR machines of the White House, the Congress, and from the Washington media corps. In short, one might conclude that all knowledge, wisdom, and wit are confined to those who inhabit New York City, Washington DC, or Hollywood. I am now a senior citizen. My experience was gained in many cities in the U.S. and in about 30 foreign countries. That experience has included the U.S. Marines, law school, the ATF, the CIA, Fortune 500 executive, writer, public speaker, educator, editor, and publisher - for openers. For over 20 years, I have written articles off and on for various magazines and newspapers. I've had an enormous number of letters published in major national publications. The Outback is the rural area in Northeast Texas where I have lived for the past 13 years. Every couple of weeks I will attempt to post a new set of musings from the Outback. Click on a Topic to go directly to that topic. The "CBS at 75" marathon on TV dealt me a stunning surprise. They did some clips from the "Dallas" show during the time of the "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger. There was my ham-radio friend, Randy Powell, who played Alan Beam, with a line something like "you better get in line" (to shoot J.R.). Randy had left the show when I wandered in with my rented Tux to be an extra in the "Cattle Baron's Ball" scenes - and stayed for three seasons in various episodes. When I introduced myself to Charlene Tilton (his love interest on the show), Linda Gray and others, as Randy's friend, I was warmly welcomed. "Dallas" was so popular worldwide, that twice when I have mentioned to a ham-radio operator in New Zealand that Randy went on a long vacation to New Zealand, people said they met him. One guy said, "Oh, sure. He came to one of our radio-club meetings here in ZL" (the ham prefix for New Zealand). Small world indeed. Hams from New Zealand to South Africa were always asking "Who shot J.R.?" before the shooter was revealed. Few people realize that Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, Patrick Duffy, et al., were the best known people in the world for many years. Foreigners might not know the name of our Secretary of State, but they knew that Larry was J.R. and Linda was Sue Ellen. Just to have been a tiny, tiny part of that TV history is something I will always treasure. Of course, at my age, "always" is a relative and somewhat speculative term. Coach Bill Belichick told Lonie Paxton to snap the ball out of the end zone and take a safety in the ABC Monday Night Football game on Nov. 4th. To read the reports, you would think that Belichick is some kind of football genius who called the "play of the century." If you were paying attention just before the play, Al Michaels in the broadcast booth suggested that an intentional safety might be a good idea at this point, and went on to explain his reasoning. Is there a better and smarter football commentator than Al Michaels? It's the same old stuff from Madden and other color men in the various broadcast booths. Yes, we know that both feet need to be in, that the ground cannot cause a fumble, that you should never catch a punt inside your own 10, that the Dallas linebackers are light but very fast (isn't that better than being fat and slow?), that if you throw off your back foot you risk tossing the ball up for grabs, that wide receivers who go over the middle are going to "pay," and a hundred other observations that any 7-year-old knows by now. Give it a rest, Madden, et al., take a deep breath once in a while - and shut up. And why do football directors still insist on mostly tight shots of the Quarterback and the backfield in obvious passing situations? We would like to see the patterns and the defense developing. We are not watching on 10-inch sets anymore. We can still tell who the players are if you pull back and let us see the play developing. In 30 years the only innovation is the yellow or orange first-down line, which is great. What miracles will the next 30 bring? Each time I hear "I'll tell you what," I pull out a little hank of hair. By the end of the season, I will look like Terry Bradshaw. If you would just tell us straight out, you could eliminate "I'll tell you what." This is like the police dispatchers (about 90 % of them) who say "Be advised that it's gonna be the third house on the right." You don't need to advise me. And spare me the probability that it's "gonna be." It is the third house on the right. "Gonna be" implies that the house will be built between the time the call came in and the time the squad car arrives there. Letterman's losses in the 18-34 demographic are down 40% from this point in the season a year ago. Similarly, "The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn" is off 29% and trails ABC's new entry, "Jimmy Kimmel Live" by a 0.6 to a 0.5 in the demo. Perhaps a large part of Letterman's losses relate to the points I made in "Top 10 Reasons Not to Watch David Letterman" (Outback for June 23, 2003). Now, the few of you who still watch Letterman will have to listen to his contstant yammering about his newborn son. Friends will call his house and ask to speak to "Lil' B." And Kilborn's sinking rating may have something to do with people being bored with a pretty-boy narcissist who thinks he is "way cool," when he is mostly "drool." Leno may be winning the ratings battle, but I will not watch him. He never saw a movie he didn't like, if his guests were in it, and he has been corrupted by his liberal guests and friends to where his shots at Bush, Cheney, et al., are simply cruel - and often completely without foundation or merit. Leno is simply a high-paid pimp for the Hollywood elite. Basically, he was a nice guy. Hollywood has ruined him. Of course, I don't watch Kimmel - as the show is too juvenile. But apparently that is what the 18-34 demo wants. This does not speak well as to our future as the leading power in the world. In an earlier Outback, I wrote about keeping cool in the hot summer. I noted that fans were not much help in heat greater than your body temperature, as you might as well blow a hair dryer on yourself. In the past 48 hours all this came home. As I made my move from the house I am selling to a metal mobile home on my "ranch," things were going well. Then, the air conditioning quit on the two hottest days we have ever had in October. But, a cold spell was predicted. Super, maybe I could hold out for two days until the cold spell. Then, the central heat went out. I sat in the house parts of two days with the inside temperature at 98 degrees and a fan blowing on me. Just like a hair dryer. Worthless. It did not take long to realize why so many elderly people die in the hot Texas summers if they don't have air conditioning. I spent a large part of two days sitting in the shade in a lawn chair, drinking ice water - staring at the trees and listening to the Crows. A new fan motor and a cycling timer and all is well with the heat and air. My heart goes out to those who must suffer through Texas summers with only a floor fan, or less. You might as well put your head in the oven, for a couple of reasons. Earlier, I noted that the Presidential Commission on Postal Reform had submitted its report. One main conclusion was that the USPS needs to stick to its core business - which is first-class mail and packages. Now, we see a cardboard display of AOL CD-ROMs in the Post Office, touting the free hours on AOL, and so on. A note in one branch said that they were "required" to put out these CD-ROMS. Shilling for AOL is about as far from the "core business" as one can imagine. Who made this deal? They ought to be fired. Here's a thought. Since the disks are free, grab up a handful with a view to distributing them to your friends who seldom visit the post office. But, you might have a change of heart and toss them in the dumpster. If enough people grab a handful of disk and dump them, it will be interesting to see how many millions of these disks AOL is willing to provide to the USPS. I see no legal problem with this, since the disks are free, and your initial impulse was to help spread the good word about AOL to your friends. Surely it can't be a crime to change your mind? I went to AOL.com and spent 20 minutes trying to see if there was a toll-free number in my rural area, but could find no way to search for applicable phone numbers, as you can at any "decent and reputable" ISP. AOL apparently forces you get through the signup procedure before you find out what phone numbers you can connect to. AOL has always been a company that practices underhanded and borderline unethical marketing practices. One more example is this failure to clearly provide a search box for a list of numbers in your area. Oh, it was only an exercise. AOL could not pay me to use their service. For starters, we went through about 10 years of floppies and CDs in the mail when there were NO toll-free connect numbers in our area to AOL. Some less-than -vigilant people ended up with some very high phone bills. AOL is being sued by the State of Ohio over AOL's alleged failure to honor cancellation requests by customers. A similar action by the FTC was settled by AOL. It would make me happy if someone could catch AOL cooking the books and send the CFO, COO, and CEO to jail. And the guy or gal in charge of flooding America with those damn AOL "Free" CD-ROMS. Just on general principles. Citibank, among others, consistently sends me those blank checks for my credit-card account, imploring me to transfer my "high interest rate" balances to their card. These checks are a security disaster waiting to happen if intercepted in the mail or dug out of your trash (I shred them). After a rash of Citi blank checks within less than a month, I wrote the president of Citi Cards in S. Dakota and pleaded with him to stop sending me the checks. One, I said, I have never used one of the checks to buy anything or transfer a balance. Two, I even suggested that: I really had too much credit for my income, and that Citi was not making any money off of me, given my normally small purchases and virtually never having finance charges. Still, the blank checks kept coming. So, I sent the prez a letter and said that apparently they cared less about what customers want than continuing their predatory (and high security-risk) behavior. Of course, I enclosed my cut-up card and an 24-point-bold message: "Cancel my account." Fight back, let these predators know how much you hate those stupid blank checks. And if you actually use one to transfer a "high-interest-rate balance," the chances are that you have too much debt. Is it any wonder that I have so little faith in the Federal government and virtually no faith in the media? On their Web page, MSNBC was bragging that they ran a story that Black Hawk choppers were patrolling the Washington, DC restricted airspace zone only 16 hours a day. Now, because of this revelation, MSNBC says that the patrols are 24/7. Wonderful. Except that unless something has changed since I wrote about this on Feb. 8, 2003, the Black Hawks are unarmed, which makes them virtually useless in an attempt to intercept a terrorist suicide aircraft - or to get fighter support in a timely manner. Since I wrote my piece, the military has dispersed some surface-to-air missiles, but they seem to trot them out only in times of high general alert. Please read the Outback for February 8, 2003. It seems to me that MSNBC missed the point entirely, and discovering that the air cover is or was only 16 hours a day is hardly breakthrough investigative journalism. All you had to do was look up in the sky and notice the absence of helicopters. I am thankful I no longer work in the DC area. I would constantly be looking up and bumping into things. (www.home.earthlink.net/~rickhgtx/outbac76.html) It was big news that a Princeton Ph.D. candidate published a work-a-round for a music CD copy protection scheme developed by SunnComm Technologies. You hold down the Shift key, or disable Autorun (for CDs in Windows), to prevent the copy-protection software from loading. I have said repeatedly, that; I do not condone peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted materials, but that I would not buy a CD for which I could not burn the music to a dupe for my truck and rip as MP3 files to my computer (for local listening as I work). First, SunnComm was going to sue Mr. John Halderman, the Princeton student. Then, they changed their minds. You can find Mr. Halderman's dissertation on the subject at: www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/. John points out that if you have already let the copy-protection software load, you can disable it by disabling a driver found in Device Manager. I don't buy the kind of music that is likely to have copy-protection in the near future. But, I applaud Mr. Halderman for one more step in preventing the industry from penalizing legitimate music buyers for the lawless conduct of those who use P2P and the servers and web sites that support it. We are not the problem. Here in the Outback, dialup Internet connections are pretty slow, ranging from about 26.4 to 37.2 kbps. Spurred by an article in Smart Computing, I looked into the new breed of Web accelerators. In the past, these programs were more flash than dash. Of the three programs reviewed, I decided to try Propel (www.propel.com) because it is used by Earthlink, the number three ISP. Earthlink used to charge about $7.00 a month for what it called Earthlink Plus. Now, Earthlink Accelerator, powered by Propel, is free to anyone with an unlimited dialup account. Most any recent computer, used on most any ISP, can benefit from Propel, at a cost of $7.95 a month. Propel uses a combination of caching, compression, and persistent connection to deliver Web pages up to five times faster than a standard dialup connection. My average is three times faster, which is still remarkable. You can choose between the fastest page loading, which degrades the graphics pretty badly (but I think there are too many useless graphics on Web sites), or you can surf a little slower with better rendition of the graphics. With an average 28.8 modem connection, I had cut way back on surfing and reading my daily news briefs. With Propel, I am once again rocking and rolling. Propel does not increase the speed of downloaded files, so your virus and windows updates, et al., will still be as slow as molasses. It works with Internet Explorer and Netscape on my machine, although you have to manually set a proxy setting in Netscape (which is explained on the Propel support pages). (Update: I cancelled Propel because it kept changing settings capriciously in IE 6, making it not useable, plus I was moving and getting a cable modem. I had no interest in "working with the support people to resolve the problem." It either works with IE 6 or it doesn't. I had no problem with Propel working in Netscape 7.1) Quite a number of NFL players, particularly it seems defensive backs, beat their chests after a good play - with both fists in a Gorilla-like manner. Do the black players who do this not appreciate the symbolism or the implications of these breast beatings? I played six sports, including linebacker and fullback in football, and never felt the need to beat my breasts like an Ape. There is too much Neanderthal posturing and celebrating in the NFL. When these folks grow up, they will realize that you do not have to beat your chest or do a rain dance over the fallen body of an adversary in order to prove your masculinity. A setback to the gun-control lobby came Oct. 2 when the Centers for Disease Control released a review of 51 published studies about the effectiveness of state gun-control laws. The CDC report found “insufficient evidence” that increased gun control lowers crime rates. What was your first clue? Increased enforcement of existing laws lowers crime. Note the operative word "Disease" in the CDC. The CDC has no business in the gun-control debate and/or research. A few words of advice to the CDC from real experts on gun crime and criminal law: "We won't tell you how to manage medical epidemics if you will not attempt to tell us how to administer criminal justice." World Series MiscellaneaWhen I am Commissioner of Baseball, I will fine any player who adjusts the Velcro straps on his batting gloves while taking his turn at bat, unless the gloves fall off. What a silly habit and a waste of time. One more delay in a game that takes way too long to play. Millions of us played baseball and pounded out hundreds of millions of hits without wearing gloves. Are the poor babies afraid they will get a stinger in their hands if they hit the ball off the sweet spot? Is their hand strength so poor that they need gloves to get a decent grip on the bat? A few players still bat barehanded, Jorge Posada of the Yanks, among them. Good for them. Long live real baseball. Baseball players who cross themselves before they come to bat, and cross themselves after they get a hit, are offensive to many. As if God cared if a baseball player got a hit! He (or she) has more important matters to deal with. In addition, the act of crossing yourself in the midst of a public event is an insult to other religions. It is as though the players are saying: "I have a special relationship with God, which you do not." Knock it off, pea-brains. Keep religion off the playing field. A lot has been written about Don Zimmer, the Yankee's bench coach, charging the mound to go after a pitcher that he thought was head hunting. Zimmer had been beaned, and it nearly ended his career and possibly could have killed him. I had a vague recollection that he played for the St. Paul Saints in the American Association when I lived there. The Saints were the farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Their park was not far from my high school, and I saw many games there. Roy Campenella, the great black catcher for the Dodgers played in St. Paul when I was growing up, and we got to see him play many times. It took about 45 minutes of searching on the Web to find a clear explanation of the Zimmer beaning. He was hit in the head, before they had protective helmets, on July 7, 1953, while playing for the St. Paul Saints. He was in a coma for nearly two weeks and had a long rehab process. The report, from a baseball archive, says that Don did not have a steel plate placed in his head, but rather four "bone-substance buttons" (like corkscrews) drilled into his skull. In 1956, Zimmer's cheekbone was fractured by a pitch form the Red's Hal Jeffcoat. Again, Don was hospitalized for several weeks. After I mentioned Roy Campenella, "Campy," I did a quick search on him. It is alleged that Branch Rickey sent Campy to St. Paul to break the color barrier in the American Association. Campy's father was white, but as is the custom (prejudice) in this country, if you have any black blood at all, you are regarded as a black person, or more PC, an African American. As I have noted at length in several articles in the Outback, this is ridiculous. One recollection I had of Campy was that he could throw out a runner at second base without ever rising from his catching crouch. This was something that I tried to emulate over the years. One day in high school, I was catching our star pitcher in a warm up. The coach came by and asked me not to throw the ball back so fast. He said that I was throwing it back faster than it was coming in. Years later, when my ex-Marine friend was pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies, he arranged for a tryout for me at catcher. I turned that invitation down, as I was then a Federal agent and loathe to give up my career. So, I will never know if I could throw out a major-league runner from a crouch. But, since at age 71, I can still whip the ball at a pretty good clip, I would not have bet against me had I played in the majors. As Yogi, or some other wit said, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it." Sunflower seeds seem to be the snack of choice among baseball major-league players and managers. But, if you are going to eat them, pop a handful in your mouth and store them under your upper lip. One-by-one you bring the seeds down with your tongue and crack them between your teeth - and spit out the hulls. Eating Sunflower seeds one at a time is somewhat like drinking tea with your pinkie extended - just too dainty. Sunflower seeds are an excellent choice. They are loaded with minerals and nutrients and help scrub your teeth. I have been eating the delightful seeds for about 60 years, first buying them with paper-route money. I carry a pack when I mow the four acres closest to the mobile home at the "ranch" and chomp and spit my way through my chores. The World Series has brought out the hordes of camera users who don't have a clue as to the effect of their strobe lights. Kodak's Web site says that the average range of a strobe light on a film camera is about 15 feet. On a digital camera, the strobe will help illuminate a subject from about 6-10 feet! So, hundreds of people sit in the nosebleed sections of the baseball park and fire flash after flash - at subject hundreds of feet away. These flashes are distracting to the players and a disservice to them. If the lights at the stadium are bright enough so that a player can follow a 97 m.p.h. pitch, then doesn't it seem reasonable that your camera will likely capture the subjects on the field without the use of a flash? Duh. But you have a 10X telephoto, or a 50 X telephoto on your Pentax 35mm film camera. That brings the object closer, but it has no effect on the range of your strobe. Light decays inversely proportional to the square of the distance, if my memory serves me. That means that while a flash may be blinding at 10 feet, by the time that light reaches even home plate, a candle would provide more illumination. Once again my favorite "strobe" story. On the island of Kauai, Hawaii, I once saw a lady taking a seaside photo of the sunset using a strobe. I forget how many miles it is to the horizon. More than 15 feet. Save your batteries. Find the menu item that says "Flash (or Strobe) OFF." As I write this, I have my DVR on pause during game 5 of the Series while the Yanks are at bat in the ninth - threatening to tie or go ahead. I am getting so tired of people blowing big leads in the late innings in the playoffs and now the series, that I will now fast forward to see if the Marlins went into the tank after having a substantial lead in the late innings. I quit the 12 inning thing in the 9th and only saw the game-winning HR on a later replay. Guys, our attention spans are limited. Nine innings is pushing it, and 12 innings or more is night-night time. I can only nurse my two beers or two glasses of wine - and my Sunflower seeds - so long. Get some "closers" and finish games in 9 innings. Drive-By Shots at the VA HospitalNot all government entities continue to do things the way "they have always been done," no matter how inefficient. The VA Hospital in Bonham, a town with a population about 7500, conducts "drive-by flu shots." They set up a computer under the portico of the building. You drive up and get in a line of vehicles. One person walks the line with a clipboard, asking the obligatory questions about allergy to eggs, etc. and notes the number on your VA ID card. As you move up, a nurse sticks an instant-reading thermometer in your ear. Move up again into the lead spot. A nurse shoots you in the arm with the flu vaccine (through your open window) and hands you a tiny scrap of paper with instructions on what to look for as to possible after effects and when to call your doctor or report to ER. The whole process, on a beautiful, sunny, Fall day, took about 15 minutes. Viva VA. David Blaine's 44-day Fast Was Pushing the EnvelopeDavid Blaine, the magician, has completed his 44-day fast, which was apparently a true "water only fast." Forty-four days is pushing the envelope pretty far. Under medical supervision, in an isolated and dedicated facility, I once fasted for 26 days - and never felt better. I wanted to lose weight, and lost nearly 30 pounds. We were told that somewhere around 30-plus days, your body would start using up your organs to sustain life. Normally, you can go only about three-days or so without water! So all this "miracle survival in the woods for 20 days" is pure hyperbole, if the person had water or snow to eat - and did not freeze at low temps. David Blaine may have suffered some nearly irreparable damage, but that is his problem. Various religions fast on a regular basis. Europeans have fasted for eons while sick, partly on the theory that digesting food uses energy that your body needs to get well. I can attest that this probably works as advertised. An unsupervised fast of about three days is probably safe for most people. With an extended fast, being monitored by your doctor or a nurse practitioner is well advised. For the semantically-correct record, a "fast" is subsisting without food and taking in only WATER - or a short fast without water. Drinking juice is a "juice diet," not a fast. Muslims fast for the month of Ramadan, not eating from dawn until sundown each day. This is more like "missing two meals a day," than fasting, but whatever. Jews conduct a 25-hour fast on the eve of Yom Kippur. A one-day fast is not much of an impostion. I once had a doctor friend who fasted every Monday, so that he could have chocolate cake on Tuesday, and so on. I do not mean to denigrate either the Muslim or Jewish religions, but what they call a fast does not come close to the real privation of a true fast for upwards of 30 days. So when you hear about these particular religious fasts, you don't need to shed a tear or call Sally Struthers and ask her where you can send a food donation. These folks will be just fine. The symbolism of depravation feeds their spirit, and that is a laudable goal. One miracle of an extended fast is that you finally find out what "hunger" actually feels like. It is not that grumbling in your gut that you feel if you miss your double Whopper at lunch. My recollection is that it takes three or more days to begin to feel true hunger. Then, you reach a new plateau of feeling little or no hunger and having virtually no interest in food. Based on my own experiences, and conversations with many others at our facility outside of San Antonio, the after-real-hunger plateau brought on a near euphoria and sense of well being. After any fast, it is a good idea to reintroduce solid foods very slowly. After my 26-day fast, I was presented with one-half of an Orange. Words cannot describe how wonderful it tasted. Then came some salads, and so on, before being released back into "the wild." In Hawaii, a beautiful German lady in a sarong, introduced me to the "Hawaii cleansing diet." It goes by many names, depending on where you live. It is fresh lemon juice, real Maple Syrup, and Cayenne pepper. Add some water like you would for any lemonade, and that is ALL you ingest for several days. Once, I had a bad chest congestion that antibiotics did not cure. After several days of the special lemonade, my symptoms went away. The Maple Syrup provides some nutrients, and the Cayenne shakes up your sinuses and your gut and helps the cleansing process. This potion also will clean out your digestive tract, if you stay on it for several days. LIPITOR Continues to Cite Dubious FactsIn an earlier Outback, I voiced my vehement contempt for the LIPITOR commercial where the beautiful lady alights from a car and falls on her face, presumably from the "ravages" of high cholesterol. The message was to take LIPITOR and avoid falling over (and dying) in public. I wrote the low-life president of Pfizer about that one. He has done it again. Now, LIPITOR is running a commercial that shows a lady who is a vegetarian with a cholesterol of 265 (I think it is). The implicit message is: "No matter how much you watch your diet, you will still have high cholesterol and need LIPITOR." Twice in recent decades I have been a total vegetarian, a vegan. At one point, my total cholesterol was 150! I have done an enormous amount of research about the relationship of a vegetarian diet on cholesterol. I challenge the despicable president of Pfizer to find a significant number of vegetarians who have a cholesterol above 200. Most are probably in the 130-180 range. And ask Dr. Dean Ornish, who advocates a vegetarian diet for reversal of clogged arteries, what level of cholesterol his patients have - and followers of his diet. I hope the FDA calls Pfizer's hand on this one. I am going to write them and suggest that Pfizer has no significant scientific data to back the claim about vegetarians with high cholesterol. If you would like to write the president of Pfizer about LIPITOR lies or other ads they run, he is: Mr. Hank McKinnell, Chairman & CEO You would be on solid ground if your salutation is: Dear lying bastard: On TV, You Can't Tell the Players Without a Current ScorecardIt used to be that when a character was dropped from a TV show, they often went to considerable lengths to "write the character out," that is, provide a plausible explanation for their departure. Not any more. That would be too much work for the drugged-up writers and producers in Hollywood. They have an early tee time. In "Good Morning Miami" last season, Suzanne Pleshette played Jake's Grandmother. To those of us in the geriatric set, Suzanne Pleshette is the elder Fox of all foxes, and as funny a woman as ever breathed. This season, Suzanne is gone. Unless I missed an episode, not one word has been spoken about Grandma being gone. Not, "Gee, we were all sad to see her move to San Diego to work with the Dolphins." Nothing. Hit the road. You're history. We need a younger babe with firmer breasts. On "Becker," Bob, the hyperactive nitwit who hung around the diner is gone, at least so far. Not a hint of where Bob went. Just poof, you're toast. And replaced by a very portly kind of dufus, who now hangs around the diner. This is a step up? J.A.G. has been one of my favorites for years. Harm got fired from J.A.G. for not being a team player. He ends up flying covert missions for the C.I.A., with fades from a courtroom scene with Mac and the others to Harm and some sexy lesbian babe flying into Libya to snatch a C.I.A. agent from the jaws of death. Which is it? A show about Navy lawyers or a show about C.I.A. covert air ops? Why are these two being juxtaposed in the same show? Beats me. Given my work with C.I.A. covert flying ops in Laos, if I had to choose, I would take the covert ops and dump the courtroom "drama" of J.A.G. The show did push pretty hard to explain how Navy lawyers ended up flying fighter jets and raking terrorists with AK-47s, but it nowhere near stretched the truth as far as "Alias," which I do not watch. As far as I can tell from the promos, and the 20 minutes total I have previewed of "Alias," it is mostly Jennifer Garner running around in her bra and panties kicking people and firing an Uzi. Frankly, she is not that hot, even in her bra and panties. She's okay, but nothing to lose sleep over. There is, for example, a much prettier and sexier lady in a nearby town (pop. 25,000) who works as a grocery cashier. If I had a choice of taking Jennifer Garner or the grocery cashier to dinner, I would choose the cashier. Hollywood is 90 percent hype. Before long, people begin to believe it. COPYRIGHT 2000 Richard C. Rhodes You are welcome to quote sections from this page - or the whole page, as long as the source URL is included. Of course, I would be flattered if anyone linked to this page. It is very hard to be the writer, editor, fact checker, copy editor, and publisher of anything. So, I beg your forgiveness for the many mistakes that creep in. Suggested Reading From Past Columns Click Here for Suggested Reading List Archive of Back Issues Media List of Addresses and e-mails Postal Service State Abbreviations, etc. Richard C. Rhodes End |