Guilt

Big debate going on now, or so I hear.  Is cheer leading a sport?  Christ, it’s on the news this morning.  Big debate. Let me settle this for you.  Again. Cheer leading, like golf and bowling, is not a sport.  These are activities.  Track and field events are not sports.  They are contests.  Nascar is not a sport.  Nascar is a contest about who can outrun the revenooers the best.  Gymnastics are not sports. So, what is a sport, you ask?  Thought you’d NEVER ask..... A sport has a physical component, an offense and a defense, and some method of determining a winner and loser.  Baseball, badminton, ping-pong, boxing. Sure, other activities and contests have a physical component, perhaps a score-keeping method, but no defense.  The concept of full contact bowling would necessarily have defense and would then become a sport, see?  You can be athletic and still not be involved in a sport. You’re welcome.

Movie Notes From The Rust Belt..........Youngstown, Ohio On Neflix, streamed through the ROKU streamer into the 46 inch wide-screen HDTV, I recently caught up with that unsold pilot from 1986, Condor. What a great piece of the 80s.  Coulda been a dandy series, too, but, well.....Like I said--Unsold.  Pity. The basic set-up has Ray Wise (of Psyche, The Good Guys, Twin Peaks, etc., etc.) as Proctor, the heroic agent of that well-known law-enforcement agency, Condor.  His partner is a knock-out blond android of the female persuasion, Lisa Hampton, portrayed by Wendy Kilbourne.  The arch-nemesis is “The Black Widow” played to the aces in black leather and escaping from prison in a jet-pack by Carolyn Seymour. Absolutely no plot to get in the way of the 80s snappy dialog, the robot prison guards, the “TriHawk” tricycle chase scene, the IBM 286 personal computer, the laser guns shooting red and blue bolts of lightning, the toy helicopter drones, the Michael Jackson...

News people (they used to be newsmen, but that was back when we also had “Men Working” signs) seem to be adopting some speech, um, behaviors, for lack of a better word, that bother me to some degree: --Up Talking--You know, where every statement is a question.....Like a Valley Girl. --Fast talking--Usually perpetrated by women.  I can’t manage to make out what’s being said. --And then there’s this “stuttering” crap, where the speaker starts out with uh-uh-uh-uh rapidly. Do these people no longer take diction classes in TV News-Being school? Maybe it’s just me.....

Television Notes From The Rust Belt..........Youngstown, Ohio I started watching Eureka when it was first run, in 2006.  I was hot for Eureka based on the preview ads on SyFy (it was SciFi back then).  In my world it sort of was like the anticipation I had waiting for the pilot episode of the X-Files lo those many years ago. I was giddy.  I had goose-flesh.  My nipples got hard.  I didn’t get disappointed. Eureka was hands-down the pinnacle of SyFy programming.  It seemed to spawn a couple of other dandy programs (Haven and Warehouse 13) that had some legs at SyFy.  The basic premise of the show is this:  Eureka is a secret town in the Pacific Northwest populated by scientific geniuses working collaboratively and individually to make a better tomorrow, better weapons, better food additives--better stuff.  They manage to place the universe in peril frequently and are routinely saved from their own genius by the only non-genius of the gro...