Thangs up an’ got turnt in this up in here, Torn Slatterns and Nugget Ranchers

55 years after writing “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Harper Lee has written the sequel. It’s called : “Dude, Where’s My Mockingbird?”

The weather today is 55 and cloudy. Just like Brian Williams.

After partying in Aspen, Lance Armstrong hits two parked cars and tells the police his girlfriend did it. What a coward. But at least now we know why the LIVESTRONG bracelets are yellow.

Tiger Woods had to withdraw from the Farmers Open in San Diego before the end of the first day. More bad news for Tiger. The Colts are accusing Tiger’s ego of being underinflated.

There was a “Saved by the Bell” reunion on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” but the actor who played Screech, Dustin Diamond was not there. They were afraid he couldn’t cut it.

Harvard has banned professors from having sex with undergraduate students. In a related story, ten poetry professors, six philosophy professors, four literature professors, three drama professors and a sex-education professor all immediately resigned.

Today Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy. They filed via a Xeroxed facsimile that listed their attorney’s beeper numbers.

My sports and entertainment heroes were, roughly in order, Bill Cosby, OJ Simpson, Bruce Jenner, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen and Brian Williams. I am starting to think I might be the problem.

Observations on Brian Williams's ilk

The October 2007 Witch Creek wild fire in San Diego was horrible and terrifying quickly destroying over 2,000 homes. The hard-blowing wind at our house – many miles away -  was thick with smoke and embers and we were evacuated for a couple scary nights.

Things died down considerably after that.

Sadly, a concentration of the damage occurred one street above my good friend Mark’s house in a gorgeous section of Rancho Bernardo. The hill above Mark’s house was where a valley ended and the fire roared up that valley quickly taking out many extremely nice homes in its path. (Mark’s house was spared except for his doormat. That is how fickle this fire was)

So that street is where the national media descended like locusts and set up camp, two days after any real danger. It was a dramatic-looking suburban war zone of smoking destruction with eerie tombstone-looking charred stone and brick chimneys and fireplaces.

It was roughly a three-block area and all of the national media was there. Along with the parasitic freelance self-proclaimed reporters were big shots like Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Scott Pelley and all their affiliate local wannabes.

To reiterate, there were three levels of quality to the press. The aforementioned freelancers, whose only qualifications are a cameraman and a face. Then there is the local press whose professionalism is in direct proportion to the size of the city. And there is the allegedly most professional, the national press.

For example, San Diego is the eighth biggest city and so we have the eighth best local media. And, with the exception of some horrible sports radio broadcasters, the local media is good. 

But the myriad of cable networks have now muddied the difference between the three levels of the press

In one concentrated neighborhood all of these overly-quaffed hairstyles, wearing too much make-up and affecting wildly over-modulated morning deejay voices, bumped into each other telling the same stories and interviewing the same people over and over again. 

“Governor Schwarzenegger, could you repeat, for the 100^th time, how this is a tragedy and you are doing everything you can?”

"Ya vull, dis ess dah tragedy, unt vee are . . . vhat vas dat seckunt thing again?" 

What made these haircuts and suits masquerading as big shot journalists even more disingenuous was they were trying to bend and weave this story into one that was current rather than the obvious truth, to all whom were there, the fire was over. They were desperately trying to make the story a rescue when it was clearly a long, slow recovery.

This is not about liberals or conservatives, "Fox News" or "MSNBC." This is about shills whoring-out inflated stories to make money. 

Whoever dubbed the media a circus deserves a prize for accuracy. The circus had come to town and it wasn’t going to leave until these clowns fed its elephants with over-dramatic stories and then the gorged elephants pooped out sappy near-fictional tales of heroics.

“Sir, tell us again how you raaan into the burning house to saaaaaaave your puppy.”

“Actually, we, uh, had the puppy with us the whole time, so I didn’t have to . . .”

“ . . . I’m sorry, (finger to ear) we have a breaking story, back to you, Ted.”

That is the phony, hoary beast on whose teet Brian Williams suckled. All reporters start as overly-ambitious, pretty-good-looking fame whores, just the good ones - and or the prettiest ones - like Williams, get promoted.

So why are we surprised when they turn out to be utterly full of crap? Crap is all they’ve feasted on their entire professional lives.