IMHO

Here are some of my random thoughts for the day.

1) Britney Spears IS NOT fat, and for a woman who has given birth twice in the past few years, she's downright ripped. Is she currently the leanest she's ever been in her life? Understandably not. Is she worthy of ridicule? Most certainly. From her choice of mates, to her "parenting" style, to her wardrobe malfunctions, to her ill conceived follicular decisions, to her seeming inability to remain sober for more than a few hours at a time, to ... America is a country that just loves to build idols up so they can later be torn down. As a celebrity who should credit sex appeal and slick marketing far more than actual talent for her immense success to date, I consider Britney Spears to be fair game for whoever wishes to mock her. The public has every right to put whoever they wish up on a pedestal, no matter how shallow the reasoning, and equal right to pull the pedestal away and laugh hysterically at the resulting crash landing. Britney can use her millions of dollars to wipe the tears away. But please people, let's not aid the afflictions of anorexia and bulimia by claiming that a woman with an extra pound or two on her frame is Porky Pig. There's plenty more material to work with if you have nothing better to do with your time than make fun of a former Mouseketeer.

2) If I've said it a million times I haven't said it enough. Bill Belichick is an ass. As an NFL addict, I really hope the Jets perform improbably magnificent this season. My fingers are crossed that I do prophetically well in the football pool I'm participating in. But what I most strongly desire for this football season is that it does not end with a Super Bowl victory for the New England Patriots. Even without another ring, I'm sure Tom Brady will have no problem when the time comes to move on from his current supermodel girlfriend to the next one. He won't suffer too much if the Colts repeat as champions and Peyton Manning commercials run 24 hours per day instead of merely the current 23.3 hours. But I'm pretty sure anything less than Super Bowl triumph is pure anguish for Belichick, and that's precislely what a cheater and all around jerk like him deserves. Other than that, since he's never done anything to me personally, I wish him well.

3) Bravo for medical advancement, kudos to the doctors and medical staff who treated Kevin Everett, and God bless that young man who seems to have miraculously escaped a lifetime of paralysis. We were all reminded how little sports means in the overall scheme of things as he lay still on the football field and reports later came that he was probably going to be a paraplegic. It did not initially appear to be a story that would have a happy ending, but an experimental procedure that utilized an ice cold saline injection to temporarily put Everett in a hypothermic state may have rewritten a tragedy into a tale of triumph.

4) It has been tough being a New York Knicks fan these past few years due to their display of ineptitude on the court. The previous general manager seemed to be trying to assemble the least athletic basketball team of all time. The current gm has simply reversed field, going after ballers who jump high and run fast but don't quite manage to play consistently well. They certainly have not been able to play particularly well together in spite of their individual talents, largely because they each duplicate the same skill sets (offense first / defense hardly ever). So they have settled for taking turns having good nights while regularly compiling team losses. They hired a Hall of Fame coach who by all appearances proceeded to try to lose as many games as possible in order to be elevated from the bench to the corporate offices. Only in America does one purposely do poorly in order to be promoted. The Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury has tried to change his image as a selfish player by coming out with an affordable sneaker, but in the process of increasing his interviews and public speaking engagements to promote the shoe, he has further highlighted that he isn't the brightest guy in the world ("dog fighting is a fine sport, is it not?"). As if all of this wasn't enough, now we have the off season distraction of the Knicks gm/coach (as plain old gm he was quite ineffective at just one job, so it was determined he might do better if he had additional responsibilities) being sued for sexual harrassment. Last year he needed to improve the team by an unspecified degree to keep his jobs. This year I believe he merely needs to refrain from flashing his "credentials" to the Knicks City Dancers. It certainly has not been easy to defend being a New York Knicks fan since Isiah Thomas strode into town, but nor has it been boring. If they're not going to enthrall their fans with synchronized championship level play, at least they're entertaining us with Desperate Housewives type theatrics. Go Knicks!!!

5) O.J. Simpson - WTF????? You'd think the concept of keeping a low profile would have occured to him by now. No Johnnie Cochran to save his behind this time around.

I'm out like Members Only jackets.

- Roy Pickering (author of Feeding the Squirrels: A Novella)

http://www.synergebooks.com/ebook_feedingthesquirrels.html

http://www.coffeetimeromance.com/BookReviews/Feedingthesquirrels.html

Don Imus sticks foot (and leg and torso) in big mouth

I do not listen to Don Imus' radio show, other than catching a few minutes of the televised version here and there. So I found it interesting, though certainly not surprising in lieu of recent events, to learn upon doing a google search that over the years Imus and characters on his radio show have:

* compared the appearance of black NBA players to apes
* called award-winning black New York Times journalist Gwen Ifill "the cleaning lady"
* referred to award-winning black New York Times journalist Bob Herbert as a "quota hire"
* referred to residents of Harlem as "molignans" (the Italian equivalent of "coons")
* referred to the black wife of former Secretary of Defense William Cohen as a "big-haired ho"
* called tennis players Venus and Serena Williams "animals"

And in a July 19, 1998 interview on "60 Minutes," Imus admitted to hiring a producer specifically "to do nigger jokes" for the show.

Somehow he managed to get away with all of this relatively unscathed. He may be the only "shock jock" with name recognition reasonably equivalent to Howard Stern, who is no friend or fan of Imus, but also no stranger to censorship. As a writer, I'm not a big fan of censorship myself. As a human being, I'm not a big fan of racist, anti-woman rhetoric. As a guy who appreciates a wide range of humor, I understand that insensitivity may not be politically correct, but it can often be damn funny and not especially mean spirited. I'm not a big fan of women's college basketball (I don't even watch the men. When it comes to sports, I typically stick to watching professionals), so perhaps I cannot speak intelligently about the Rutgers team. But if I was to make a blind guess, I'd say that probably not every one of their nappy headed players is a ho, that not every ho on the team is nappy headed, and that a pretty high percentage of them are probably neither nappy headed nor ho'ish. In fact, my research shows that the team includes includes a class valedictorian, a future lawyer and a musical prodigy.


Repercussions are coming fast and furious. Sponsors such as American Express Co., Sprint Nextel Corp., Staples Inc., Procter & Gamble Co. and General Motors Corp. have pulled ads, the televised simulcast was dropped, Imus has been suspended without pay for two weeks, he has suffered the indignity of issuing a multitude of insincere public apologies, and he has become precisely what he likes to deliver - a punch line. Yet this is not considered by some to be ample punishment. They want Don Imus to be fired. His apologies ring false to them, and the assertion that his cruelty was unintentional holds little credibility. Perhaps Mr. Imus has a point. We all know how easy it is to accidentally refer to someone as a nappy headed ho. I'm sure I've done it at least three times today. And someone who merely gets paid an enormous amount of money to speak on public airwaves can't possibly be expected to pay attention and be held accountable for every little thing he says, right?

Don Imus may be too much of a money maker to be fired by CBS for a faux pas they're surely praying will quickly go away once something even more ridiculous takes place, like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton becoming a televangelist duo. Or the resurrection of Anna Nicole Smith to proclaim that her daughter has no biological father, but was the result of an immaculate conception. And if enough outside pressure is mounted to force the network's hand, Imus will no doubt land on his feet with someone else in no time flat. He has already stated that he's sick and tired of apologizing, the one piece of honesty that I'll give him credit for. But if he expects me to believe he isn't a bigot, he may as well try to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge while he's at it. And if he expects anyone to side with his decision to make derogatory comments about a group of college girls who were fresh off the sting of defeat in the NCAA championship game, he may need to search long and hard among his most ardent supporters.

I bet he thinks that if a black comedian said something equally offensive about white people, not merely as much grief would result. And you know what? He'd be right. Is this fair? Maybe not, but plenty in life is unevenly distributed. Call it reparations or affirmative action or whatever you wish, but after being dragged from Africa, enslaved for generations, followed up by decades of separate and unequal treatment that has black people perpetually scrambling to reach equal footing in this country (great strides have surely been taken to date, but have we arrived in the Promised Land that Martin Luther King Jr. saw in his fantastical dream? Not quite), the right to tell a few jokes at the expense of the oppressor has certainly been earned. Just try not to overly paint with too broad a stroke.

Don Imus does not have any problems catching a cab or being offered a job after acing an interview, and he probably does not make little old white ladies in the elevator extremely uncomfortable simply by his proximity. He is not considered to be less intelligent or articulate or even an inferior swimmer simply based on his melanin count. So no, he has not earned the right to call someone he has never even met and whom he knows next to nothing about, someone who could be my mother, or sister, or daughter a nappy headed ho and expect to get a laugh from me.

The line between playful tease with comedic intent and a personal hang up about members of a different sex and race is not all that fine. My advice to Don Imus is this. If you're too blind to see the line and distinguish which side you're on, don't go anywhere near it.

This Super Bowl Sunday Is No Ordinary Day

The first Sunday of February 2007, aka Black History Month 2007, is fast approaching. Super Bowl XLI will be played on that day, not your average run of the mill Super Bowl, but one of historic proportions. No, I’m not saying this because Prince will be performing at half time, though I do find that to be pretty cool. The reason I’m excited about 2/4/07, even though it will be one more Super Bowl Sunday that does not feature my beloved New York Jets, is because African-American men will be patrolling both sidelines as the respective head coaches of this year’s participants – the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears.

Black men are certainly not in short supply on NFL fields of play, in fact, they constitute the vast majority of those in pads and uniforms. But when it comes to the skin tone of their bosses, there has been shockingly little rise in melanin count from the league’s earliest days when Vince Lombardi and his pack ruled supreme. One could reasonably cite racism as the cause of such a slow rate of progression. How else to explain the rationale behind Richie Kotite being hired to run more than one team over his career while a large number of qualified African-American head coach wannabes have had to wait and wait and wait for their shot?

The 2006 season began with 7 Black head coaches in a league of 32 teams. Two of them have since been fired and one team (the Pittsburgh Steelers) recently hired an African-American to be the man in charge of the troops, bringing the current total to 6. Two of those six, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, will face off against one another in this year’s Super Bowl. The odds of this happening were probably better than the odds of someone named Lovie ever being a professional football coach, but still, it makes for quite the story, an even bigger one than the castaways (This is not a Survivor reference, sports is my reality television) finally getting off of Gilligan’s Island.

Tony Dungy has clearly paid his dues, overcoming what would seem to be debilitating personal tragedy with the suicide of his son and fielding a football team that was finally able to get over the hump and make it to the big show. For this reason, coupled with the fact that Peyton Manning slings the rock with precision abandon and shoots some pretty funny television commercials, my rooting interest is swayed towards the Colts, especially since this season’s version of the Da Bears is no where near as entertaining as the last team they sent to the Super Bowl back in 1985 (has it really been 22 years since America experienced its love affair with William “The Refrigerator” Perry and I was pledging Delta Phi during my freshman year at NYU?). If I was a betting man, I’d gamble that years of getting so close without grabbing the cigar is enough to give Indy the advantage over Chi-town, even if the latter is my kind of town, Chicago is.

History in the making by a couple of class acts on the sidelines, the purple reign of Prince at halftime, at least one television commercial featuring the “talents” of Kevin Federline (who has somehow ended up looking like the classier half of his televised marriage to Britney “no need to put my baby in a car seat cuz I’m country” Spears), and a great offensive team going up against a great defensive one should make for quite a game. Since the NFL is famous for being a copycat league, perhaps numerous teams will go in search of a qualified black guy to be their head coach, much like many of them tried to copy the success of the west coast offense or the 3-4 defense in years past. Or will the NFL prove itself to only be a copycat league when the cat is a white feline rather than one who evokes fear simply by crossing your path? We’ll see soon enough.

My hope if not quite my prediction is that the appearance of Tony Dungy and Lovie “the millionaire’s wife” Smith will lead to social progress. If the Rooney Rule required any vindication, consider this year's Super Bowl to be it. Perhaps in the not too distant future the number of African American head coaches will reach double digits. Or maybe the impact will be even bigger than that. This historic Super Bowl may actually have enough impact to finally convince the powers that be to move the celebration of Black History to a month with more than 28-29 days.

- Roy L. Pickering Jr.

P.S. - Being that Dungy and Smith are such classy guys, some might find them a bit on the boring side. So visit the link below if you wish to see a head coach demonstrating that he epitomizes the last three letters of class.

http://nfl.aolsportsblog.com/2007/01/23/belichick-shows-his-lack-of-experience-with-being-a-gracious-los/