In Que Bueno Baila Usted ("How Good You Dance"), the very famous Benny Moré song, the singers call out "Generoso how good you play!" Every Cuban knows whom they are singing about: Generoso Jiménez, star of the Benny Moré Big Band and the most celebrated trombonist in the history of Cuban music.
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In April 1955, Generoso joined Benny Moré as an arranger and composer, section leader and soloist. He remained in the band until June 1959. Even after this he helped Benny with arrangements and musical details. Generoso's own band existed from November 1963 until September 1965. He finished his career as part of the prestigious orchestra of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television.
There has never been a Cuban popular singer like Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré Gutierrez, El Benny. There might never be again. - Ivan Castro
So exulted is Benny Moré, an annual music festival is held in his hometown of Cienfuegos, where, in 2009, his grave was declared a "national monument and the Benny Moré Municipal Museum, which will exhibit the artist’s death mask, will be reopened."
If you had the television on yesterday, even for a few moments, and you could have had it set at, just about, any channel, then you undoubtedly saw the new Nike Ad, with Woods, deer-in-the-headlights-like in front of the camera, as his late father Earl, Lazarus-like, berates him, no doubt reminding Tiger of his drill-sargented-upbringing to be THE WORLD'S BEST GOLFER.
I know his last few films didn't do as well as his earlier work, but did M. Night Shyamalan whore himself out to Nike?
Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are, and did you learn anything?
It plays right into the extra-marital affairs of Woods, on the day he opens in The Masters.
Was the a wet kiss, from Nike, to take away some of the attention, the pressure?
In the context of our enduring global fever-dream, a tacky ad in which Nike and Tiger conspire to exploit the memory of Earl Woods is hardly that big a deal--particularly since if Earl Woods were alive, he would have supported this exercise in grave robbing 100 percent. But the idea that Tiger and Nike would see the incredible turmoil that has engulfed Tiger's life as an opportunity to rebrand Tiger and sell us more swoosh-laden crap is simply sickening. Every single member of the golf media and every fan who has felt sympathy for his self-destructive plight should feel like a grade-A sucker. Every person impressed with his professed recommitment to the Buddhist faith and his family should be deeply offended that it was all just a springboard aimed at cashing in. And every golf fan and pro golfer should be furious that he's shellacked another layer of controversy onto the most prestigious tournament on the tour, the Masters at Augusta.
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I really believed that in the wake of his Odyssey of scandal and humiliation, there would be a showdown inside Tiger's soul between the brand and the man. I couldn't have been more wrong. There is no man, only brand. If he wants to dehumanize himself on his own time then more power to him. But this ad dehumanizes all of us. One thing however is abundantly clear: If Tiger loses this weekend, Nike loses as well. Neither deserve to make the cut, on the course or otherwise. Tiger the brand has now wholly consumed Tiger the man.
All this means, is that some underage kid in Asia is going to have to work a Monty-Python-like schedule("I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed ...") in some Nike Sweatshop, to produce the "Tiger Woods" line of crap.
Not only that, The Wasilla Whiz Kid is going to have to dip her hands in ink barrels, if she thinks she's going to stand up and argue with President Obama over Nuclear Policy.
"It's unbelievable. Unbelievable," said Palin on Wednesday evening while appearing on Sean Hannity's Fox News program. "No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today. It's kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, 'Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.'
"No, it's unacceptable," she continued. "This is another thing that the American public, the more that they find out, what is a part of this agenda, they are going to rise up and they are going to say 'no more.' National security, national defense is the No. 1 job of the federal government."
But wait, the President had the last word on this;
"I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues," Obama said in an interview with ABC News.
Pressed further on Republican criticism that his strategy restricts the use of nuclear weapons too much, Obama added:
"What I would say to them is, is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."
We're working on another post regarding this, which we'll get up later today, or tomorrow, as the Mommy Moose-President Obama slugfest is breaking out into a full-fledged conflagration.
We've been behind on the monitoring of Ignorant Dolts lately, as, during the recent Healthcare Reform debacle, it was going off like a dump truck, stuck in reverse.
So, we just happen to turn the volume up a tiny bit this morning and, it as "BEEP ... BEEP... BEEP ... BEEP... BEEP ... BEEP ..."
In an uncharacteristic bit of theater alien to the Augusta National culture, Payne, without prodding, singled out Tiger Woods in a harsh rebuke, saying the world’s top-ranked golfer did not live up to role model expectations and had “disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids.”
Reading from a statement, Payne added: “His future will never again be measured only by his performance against par, but measured by the sincerity of his effort to change. I hope he now realizes that every kid he passes on the course wants his swing, but would settle for his smile.”
Say What?
Unless there's a clause in the contract, that says you have to be clean-as-a-whistle to play the Masters (as opposed to having the skill), Mr. Billy Payne should just STFU!
And it is particularly odious of Payne to be going around throwing mud on anyone.
Shorter NYT: the Chairman of the prestigious country club located in Georgia that somehow still doesn’t admit women in the year 2010 rebuked some guy for disrespecting women rather than being a role model for our children and grandchildren.
This is touching--perhaps Mr. Payne's great-grandfather pleaded with Shoeless Joe Jackson to "say it isn't so"--but I confess to feeling that Mr. Payne's outrage might better be directed at many of his fellow Club members, described by the Times as "chief executives from many of the country’s biggest corporations and investment banks as well as business leaders worldwide." And, of course, every single one of his fellow members is male, since Augusta National is notorious for being a bastion of sexism. But Mr. Payne is apparently shocked and outraged that Mr. Woods, along with being possibly the greatest golfer of all time, was, off the golf course, fucking lots of women other than his wife. But there is, to put it mildly, no similar outrage directed at his fellow Club members, i.e., the heads of "the country's biggest corporations and investment banks," who have, for many years, not only have been totally oblivious to the insult of maintaining Augusta National as an all-male institution, but have also been fucking their employers (metaphorically, of course, though, one suspects, in at least some cases, quite literally) and, in the case of the investment bankers especially, fucking the entire American (and worldwide public) amd using their ill-gotten gains to pay whatever it costs to maintain one's membership at August National Golf Club.
Ahh, but the Ignorant Dolt stage is a bit crowded today, as Thomas Boswell, of the Washington Post, insisted he wasn't going to be denied entry to our Ignorant Dolt roster.
In his column today, he argues that Tiger Woods, for the fact of committing adultery, doesn't deserve to win the Masters;
AUGUSTA, GA. If Tiger Woods wins the Masters on Sunday after all the damage he's done to golf, I plan to rob a bank on Monday; maybe then I'll win a Pulitzer Prize.
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We know that bad things happen to good people. We cope with it. But when great things happen to people who have acted badly, especially if the bonanza comes fast and arrives ringed with robes of glory, don't we have to draw the line? I'm forgiving, but my brain hasn't turned into pimento cheese. If Woods has a tap-in to win the Masters, I hope his conscience helps him yip it and lip it. Win any other week. But not here. Not now.
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Still, a Woods win would be an awful fit among our great "comebacks" in sports. Such a victory would feel like vindication of oblivious self-centeredness. What a perverse lesson. On the bright side, it might kill the term "role model" for a generation.
Damage he's done to golf?
Unless Tiger was, in addition to dozens of mistresses, was running around to the golf courses of the country, and fucking the holes on the course, I don't see any damage.
If it wasn't for Tiger Woods, golf could very well be regulated to the Versus Network, or worse, on some other high number cable channel, squeezed in between blocks of infomercials.
It's the age-old canard of sports athletes having the burdensome job of having to be "role-models" on top of everything they do.
I, personally, don't know anyone, family, friends, coworkers, their children, etc, that has every looked up to an athlete as a "role-model".
This role-model thing is meme of the media, as they huff-and-puff over it, all the while repetitiously writing about it, running it on a loop, all in the name of building ratings, selling ads and making money.
Scandals sell, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Masters gets it's highest-ever television ratings this year.
You want disappointment Payne, or damage Boswell?
Maybe, considering the attack on Woods, at the opening of this tournament, that he decides on a "Fuck You", and pulls out.
What story, then, will dominate - some nobody winning the tournament, or Tiger Woods?
Perhaps Boswell, you can share that pimento cheese out of your brain, with Payne, as the two of you cry into your beers at the 19th hole.
So, drop the pious bullshit, Mr. Payne, and Mr. Boswell, and get your sorry asses up here to pick up our Ignorant Dolt loot.
MSNBC said Tuesday that it had suspended for an indefinite period one of its highest-profile anchors, David Shuster. The decision came days after the revelation that Mr. Shuster had participated in a test of a new show for CNN, a competing cable news channel.
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According to The Observer, the CNN test episode featured Mr. Shuster and Michel Martin of National Public Radio. It is unclear how long ago the test took place, or whether it was well-received within CNN; a spokeswoman for that channel declined comment on Monday.
And now MSNBC is all, “You are dead to us,” and he is “suspended indefinitely” and well, if his wish was to be on ninth-place loser cable-news channel CNN, his wish may have come true! And he’ll just have to take whatever CNN offers (forty bucks a week and whatever hairs fall off Wolf Blitzer’s beard).
With, apparently, the new rules of Scrabble, you can use the proper name "Snagglepuss", which will net you a whopping 15-points(maybe more, if any of your tiles are on a double, or triple, score).
The decision, by games giant Mattel, will allow the celebrity, geographic and sports worlds to invade the most popular word game, leaving many a Scrabble fan bemused, or as the regular player may prefer, bumbazed.
For why memorise some of the 30,000 eight letter words in our rich and quirky English language when the names of pop stars such as Jay-Z or sportsmen like Zico may get you many more points
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Mattel defends its decision to make the game easier by saying it will level the playing field between experienced players and novices.
But the announcement has caused outrage among regular players with accusations that the company is 'dumbing down' the game.
Keith Churcher, chairman of the Reading Scrabble Club, was dismayed.
He said: 'Players like myself have spent decades memorising words in the dictionary.
'To be trumped by someone with knowledge of the current top ten pop chart is not a welcome prospect.
I'll get the smelling salts ... Proper nouns? Why, that would be like letting the rook move diagonally in chess! Building a hotel before you've bought all the houses on Monopoly! Installing elevators in Chutes and Ladders! Playing quarters with dimes!
But wait, as Williams points out, there's a catch!
But not so fast. Writing in Slate, Stefan Fatsis, author of "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players," told lexicon addicts across the land to call off their dogs. The poorly disseminated real story was that "Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, is introducing a game this summer called Scrabble Trickster. The game will include cards that allow players to spell words backward, use proper nouns, and steal letters from opponents." In other words -- it's just a spinoff. And American Scrabble, which is owned by Hasbro, isn't even affected.
So how did this latest games marketing gimmick turn into a global foofaraw? A combination of deceptive corporate shilling and media incompetence. The news of the game, I'm told, first appeared as four lines in a toy industry trade magazine. Then the British media started calling Mattel, and the company appears to have done nothing to disabuse gullible reporters of the idea that a Major Change is occurring. In the Daily Mail, a Mattel spokesman implied that the rules of the game had officially been changed. Mattel would still sell a Scrabble with the "old rules," but this new and improved game would help "level the playing field" between "experienced players with a vast vocabulary" and "players with a love of celebrity or football." Reporters didn't bother calling the Mattel executive in London who oversees competitive Scrabble play outside North America. In the United States and Canada, reporters mostly didn't even make the distinction between Mattel and Hasbro, the game's dueling corporate overlords.
Hmmm ...
Competing Scrabble owners?
Rather abstruse on why they would create this discombobulation, leaving all of us in quite the discomposed state.
But not the “Crossfire” of 2004. CNN overreacted to Jon Stewart’s jeremiad, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The show was years removed from its Michael Kinsley/Pat Buchanan glory days, and its liberal hosts at the time, Begala and James Carville, really were Democratic Party hacks. (The conservatives, Carlson and Robert Novak, were much more independent-minded, but the constant need to rebut partisan talking points took its toll on them as well.)
Whoa, hold the phone!
The liberals are hacks, but the conservatives, Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak, are not?
Something was not right about the elderly man in the wheelchair, the check-in agents at Liverpool John Lennon Airport thought when he showed up with his wife and stepdaughter for a flight to Germany on Saturday.
For one thing, he appeared not to be breathing.
But efforts by the two women to claim that the man, 91-year-old Willi Jarant, was just resting were thwarted when it turned out that he was, in fact, dead.
[snip]
Some reports suggested that Mr. Jarant might already have been dead for 24 hours and that Mrs. Jarant had been trying to smuggle his body back to Germany, where the couple is from, to avoid the considerable expense and hassle of formal repatriation.
But in various interviews on Tuesday, Mrs. Jarant and Ms. Anusic, who live near Manchester, said that Mr. Jarant had definitely been breathing when they left the house and that, unbeknownst to them, he had expired in transit.
“He was alive,” Ms. Anusic told the BBC. “He was pale, but he wasn’t dead.”
You could say this guy was on some kind of "No Fly" list.
The age-old maxim "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper" may in fact be the best advice to follow to prevent metabolic syndrome, according to a new University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study.
The study, published online March 30 in the International Journal of Obesity, examined the influence exerted by the type of foods and specific timing of intake on the development of metabolic syndrome characteristics in mice. The UAB research revealed that mice fed a meal higher in fat after waking had normal metabolic profiles. In contrast, mice that ate a more carbohydrate-rich diet in the morning and consumed a high-fat meal at the end of the day saw increased weight gain, adiposity, glucose intolerance and other markers of the metabolic
[snip]
"The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day," said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease. "This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat."
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk." Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties. Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge? Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true. Dr. Melik: Incredible.
While, officially, the season began last evening(and what planet has a baseball season opener at night? Aim your rotten tomatoes at MLB and ESPN), the full slate begins today , in daylight, under afternoon sunshine (hopefully).
And, if you attended, or watched, last night's game, and felt like a polka-playing accordionist time-warp-thrusted into a discotheque, not understanding the game of baseball, not knowing the lingo, or positions, incumbent on being a member of the official fandom of "our national pastime", then you need our essay;
There are various breeds of relief pitchers. You have long relievers and short relievers. The title refers not to their size but to the length of time that they pitch. After all, you have long relievers that are short and short relievers that are tall.
Sometimes a relief pitcher will do so well (he’ll have his stuff) that he gets credit with the win.Other times (not having his stuff) he’ll get pinned with the loss. On some occasions, he’ll only get a save, with the win going to the starting pitcher who didn’t have his stuff and couldn’t finish the game, thus being relieved. It even happens that relief pitchers get relieved by other relief pitchers.
We have a fine Easter Sunday morning to contemplate such tomfoolery here in the Northeast, with sparkling sunshine, and bizzaro world 75-degree-plus temps.
What was I going to say? I couldn’t lie to the guy! Besides, I had a hangover that showed me about as much mercy as an infomercial full of insurance salesman. The last thing I expected to deal with on Easter Sunday morning was to find Jesus Christ Himself lying on my living room floor.
He sipped his Ovaltine and sat quietly for a moment. Almost an hour had passed since I stumbled out from my bedroom and shouted “Jesus Christ”, only to receive an affirmative response. Now I found myself obsessed with what I was going to serve Him for breakfast.
Read through, as you dismember your chocolate bunny. Happy Easter!
