This week, Lenore is cooking up a Super Bowl oriented column for the New York Sun, this time looking at typical Super Bowl party foods--in this case, chili, dip, and buffalo wings. Why these items? And are there new foods on the horizon? So here's what I sez, I sez...

Football is a sport that's typically reaching its zenith about the time the thermometer is reaching its nadir, which means its cooollllllllllldddddddddd outside and even if we are in our nice, temperature controlled 72 degree homes, we feel the chill in our Super Bowl spirit, and thus partake in foods that are hearty, stick to your coronary arteries, like chili and assorted cheese dips. Plus, chili is rugged. There's nothing foo-foo (or is it frou-frou? who knew?) about clumps of cooked cow meat, tongue searing sauces and beans. Yes, that's right, BEANS. We've all seen that scene in BLAZING SADDLES, you can't get more testoteroni than that. Buffalo wings were conceived in dark recesses of a sports bar so people are used to eating them while watching Keith JACK-son talk about them "big hosses" of the CRIMSON TIDE, so football is part of buffalo wings BBQ-DNA. Is there another food or drink on the rise? Yes. The Chili-Cheese Casserole, served with tortilla chips. Yes, it's the incredible twoheaded transplant, where CHILI and DIP become ONE. Ohhh, Nelly, I tellya, it's a BARNBURNER!
P.S. Be sure to visit www.examiner.com and click on BALTIMORE edition this Super Bowl weekend to check out my Super Bowl "SINGLE IN THE CITY" column!

Mets, Jets, and Giants, Oh My

Dear friend Lenore is writing a column this week for the NEW YORK SUN about what people think about the Jets, the Jets vs. the Giants, the Jets/Mets connection, and other things that New Yorkers want to read about since their team is inexplicably in the Super Bowl this year. So even though the sports scene in New York is about as important to me as the intracacies of insurance law (i.e. NOT AT ALL), I had to reply...

As a native of Baltimore, I hold within my genetic makeup a dark, unrelenting hatred of the Jets, given what Broadway Joe and his team did to our beloved Colts and all-but-elected-to-sainthood JohnnyU, aka Johnny Unitas in that famed Super Bowl of January 12, 1969...Super Bowl III...when Joe Namath, appearing at the Miami Touchdown Club, guaranteed a victory for New York.
Yuck. Ouch. Shudder.
Now how a playboy who would be remembered by more people for appearing in a pantyhose commercial IN PANTYHOSE than for his exploits on the gridiron, how this pot-sparkler (just invented that term...substitute "flash in the pan") beat the Great Unitas, well, it's beyond human comprehension.
So, I could give a rat's intercourse about the Jets. I like the Giants a lot more. One, they had the good manners to lose to our Baltimore Ravens (YEAAA, RAVENS, GO BALTIMORE, GOD BLESS CHARM CITY AND EVERYBODY ELSE CAN GO TO HELL!) in Super Bowl XXXV, many thanks Giants. Second, because I like this Eli Manning. Nice kid. Class act. Having had an older brother myself, I know about the whole sibling rivalry thing and it would be neat if Eli could out do brother Peyton and bring home that shiny trophy this Sunday. Two Super Bowls in the same family, a neat trick. Of course, that would spoil the first ever perfect season in the NFL, 19-0 with a Super Bowl for the Patriots, that would be neat too. So I wouldn't mind if the Patriots won. Either way I'm happy on Sunday.
The Mets/Jets connection? Easy. The names rhyme. That makes New Yorkers smile and laugh alot. You can get the same reaction by dangling keys in front of most New Yorkers. You can have your typical Yankee fan laughing for weeks with the whole "gotchya nose" bit.
Hint: Baltimoreans don't like New Yorkers. It's more baseball-oriented hatred though. If I need to explain it, you'll never understand. I mean, who can be a YANKEE fan? It's like cheering Goliath or the Germans when they invaded Poland. I mean, COME ON...
I know this probably doesn't help you, but I thought I'd share. We do that in Baltimore. More often we're sharing STDS or gunfire, but that's Bawlmer, hon...

Okay, Lenore is writing a column for Verizonsurround.com's Newsroom (http://dslstart.verizon.net/ about what's the dealydeal with all these celebrities being pregnant and how we're all being inundated with it so that we know more about Britney Spears' life than we do our own. So, here's what I had to say...

My dear misguided Lenore. It is not that WE, if we are defining WE as the general public, that is so fascinated by celebrities' pregnancies, it is why are MAGAZINE EDITORS so fascinated with celebrities' pregnancies? Can't a single issue of US or ALL YOU or ME or ME MYSELF AND IRENE come out without some alcoholic, straggly blonde haired 20something socalledcelebrity stumbling out of or into rehab clutching a baby upside down by the foot, adorning their glossy front cover? Evidently not. Do these magazines and entertainment programs run these stories because they think we care or is it that we care because we're constantly being bombarded with these stories? It's that chicken or the egg thing...which the magazines would cover to let us know that the chicken was unmarried and high when the rooster came calling and will be there when the egg hatches to report that the chick inside was born addicted to crack. Anyway, it's a theory. Otherwise, I think people are just fascinated by the fact that CELEBRITIES CAN BREED TOO. It makes them just a thimbleful more human, and by making them human, we can relate to them. So when Eunice in the trailer park with 57 kids and another 29 on the way tunes in and sees Britney Spears with a baby in one hand and a Budweiser in the other, she can sigh and say, DAMMIT CLETUS, I TOLD YOU TO STOP A'HITTIN' YO SISTER WITH YOUR DADDY'S RIFLE! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M WATCHIN' MY STORIES ON DA TV! Yes, Eunice and Britney share a common bond, and that's why we care.
Again, it's a theory.

Taken Out of Context

This week, Lenore of the New York Sun is writing a column for tomorrow, Jan. 15th, about how statements by political candidates are being taken out of context and blownup up into pretty explosion of hoopla designed to help or hurt a candidate's chances for election. Like that whole Quayle-potatoe scenario. As for my two cents, well, that's what the media does. Forget PR, we folks got NOTHIN' on the media when it comes to spin. Of course, we're expected to rotate like a 45 LP, it's what we DO, but the media, well, they're supposed to be unbiased and just REPORT. But that can make for boring news, and besides, there are so many outlets now and so few real reporters left those who aren't running our VNRs as their own news packages find themselves pressed to MAKE news. One editor with a large metropolitan daily that shall remain nameless once told me that he and his colleagues had no interest in educating the public. "We're here to stir controversy," he said. Strange, I thought their job was to tell the truth, or at least a reasonable facsimilie thereof. Personally, I think if we got rid of private programming tomorrow, went completely federal-funded, i.e. everybody but PBS off the air, this would stop immediately. But we all know THAT isn't ever going to happen, so the media will continue to take things out of context because it gets everybody riled up and gives people things to blog about, talk in bars about, waste time in the office chatting about, and, so the media hopes, continuing to read their newspaper or watch their news program or listen to their radio talk show. We've stepped back in time to the 1800s, the days of Horace Greeley and yellow journalism where newspapers (which was the media back then) had no qualms about being aligned to particular parties, candidates, and causes. There is very little NEWS any more. It's really all OPINION. And so it goes...

There's No Crying in Politics

Now back from the holidays, Lenore is taking on the issue of Hillary Clinton and her recent crying jag. Is all the controversy because she's a woman? Or because she reminds people of their demanding mother, and people just don't want to cop to this? Well, here was my response...
First, I think you're dead wrong. People are MORE than willing to cop to their prejudice against older, female, empowered public figures who want to be President of the United States. In fact, people love to hate'em and are more than willing to say so in blogs, in 7-second soundbites on the CBS EVENING NEWS, in specially created MYSPACE pages and by aspiring Spielbergs on YOUTUBE. Unless you're 20something and subscribe to WIRED magazine, you're fair game. "Don't trust anyone over 30, especially if they're running for political office," should be the saying. However, I debate whether the public reaction to this whole Hillary-crying thing is somehow misogynistic...misogynetic?...I like Miso soup...um, against women. Remember all the hoohah about Edmund Muskie's waterworks back in the Reagan years? Got him booted right out of politics. Male, female, doesn't matter. It's like that line from A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: "Are you crying?" Tom Hanks' character asks one of his girl-ballplayers. "There's no crying in baseball!" Or in politics. Crying means you are weak, or worse yet, swayed by your emotions which, as we know, is a bad thing to be when you've got access to that little black briefcase with the big red nuclear-exchange-Armageddon button. That makes voters...nervous. Anyway, as a PR professional of 24 years, I can say that I think Hillary's problem isn't that she reminds people of their Mom or that she's a woman or that she cried or that she's old...or older. It's that she's not genuine. There's something very ORCHESTRATED about her...these interviews where she tries just a little too hard to loosen up. It's like, hey, I'm a woman, I'm okay with laughing and crying and being in touch with my feelings but at the same time, being a disciplined, hard working professional, so take notice, I'm a human being but I can get the job done and I have real emotions and you should appreciate all this about me because it means I'm a good, normal person who is worthy of your vote. It's just a bit, well, FAKE. One senses she just wants all the CRAP that's involved with becoming President--having to actually TALK to people and coo at babies--to get the $**%#@ over with so she can claim her birthright to the American Throne, I mean, Presidency. Obama on the otherhand, comes off, if anything, as GENUINE. And people like that. As the late great George Burns once quipped, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you got it made." Hillary needs sincerity lessons. And so it goes...
As for me, well, if I had a bumper sticker it would say, "DON'T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR MICHAEL BEDNARIK." And if you know who he is, you win a cookie.