My Consistency and Your Feedback

This is pretty amazing.

As I get farther into this blog, I become more and more convinced that my stories are getting stale, or banal, or not interesting enough to waste everybody's time by even passing them along. I mean, damn, I actually wrote about my dog running away two weeks ago!

But when I check through the website's stats, to my surprise, I find that more of you are opening this blog every week than ever when it lands in your inbox every Thursday. Yeah----as many of you are opening "Modern Day Zelig" NOW as you did when I first started this whole shebang with my Bruce Springsteen story a year ago!

Of course, I don't know if those of you that are opening them are actually reading the blog. You could just be opening them, saying "Ugh, this looks boring" and moving on to your next email; or you could be a step ahead of me and are simply opening them so it'll register as "open", just to make me feel good.

Either way, it worked. Whether you're opening the blog to read them, or you're just clicking on it for statistics' sake, thank you---- I appreciate your loyalty!

As a matter of fact, I got some really good feedback on the last two columns, so let's dedicate the next few paragraphs to your comments:

Two blogs ago, I wrote about Lolo running away due to the fact that I was in my garage searching for something totally useless while he sat out in the alleyway. I said that if I hadn't found him, it might have been the most irresponsible thing I had ever done. To that, lots of you wrote in, telling me not to worry about it and that "at our age, we do stuff like this all the time..."

But Jorge from Texas had a good observation: "You should be sainted if, in fact, leaving your elderly dog unattended on your front porch for a few minutes is 'one of the most irresponsible things I can ever remember doing.' Or your memory is going."

I thought about that for a while, recalling my lifelong irresponsibility with money as my most clueless behavior....that is, until I was reminded about the multiple times that I put chicken on the stove for the dog (if you remember, I have to cook chicken for Lolo at least twice a week) then went upstairs...and fell asleep!

Or the time I forgot the chicken was cooking at all and left the house...for like four hours! When I came home that time, I could actually hear my smoke detectors going off from down the block as I drove towards the house. When I got there, the downstairs was filled with smoke, the chicken stuck to the bottom of the blackened pot. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had stayed away for another hour...

And I wasn't all that old then!

So yeah Jorge, hold off on that 'sainthood'. I have indeed done far stupider things. Thanks for helping me remember!

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After reading my story about trying out for "Jeopardy!", David from Port Townsend, Washington shares the fact that he did the same:

"I too have tried out for 'JEOPARDY!' back in 1990 at a TV station (KTTV-11) near Sunset Boulevard. I was visiting a college buddy in San Diego and had to rent a car to drive to LA and got stuck in traffic and barely made my appointed time to sit for the test. I even tapped the car in front of me in stop-and-go traffic on the interstate. 

I believe I took the test while sitting in the actual 'JEOPARDY!' set.

The test was incredibly hard, asking questions about opera, prior Academy Awards, poetry etc. I did not get enough questions right. I asked one of the staff members why the test was so hard. She told me that the test consisted of the hardest questions, what at the time were the $800 and $1,000 questions. She said the idea was to ensure that all three contestants ended Double Jeopardy with positive dollar amounts. Makes sense...."

I appreciate the story, but I don't think that answer makes sense at all. They want to make sure that all three contestants end Double with positive dollar amounts, so they make the questions harder? Wouldn't it guarantee higher scores if they made the questions easier?

I get the idea: they're no doubt attempting to get three contestants every night of the highest quality, so that they all get to the Final with positive totals. But intelligence on this show does not always guarantee that this will happen: How many times have you seen contestants end up 'out of the money'?

As a matter of fact, one of the most embarrassing moments in all of TV, I've always believed, is when the camera zooms in on the poor contestant who's in the negative, as Ken (and Alex before him) sympathetically announces that this idiot will not be on stage for Final Jeopardy, but thanks for being here... It's one of the reasons I'm kinda glad I never made it on the show!

Another quick "Jeopardy!" note: last April there was a multi-day champion on who was only 20 yeas old...he was born during Ken Jennings' historical run in 2005. Jennings of course, is now the host of the show and has been for a few years now.

Feeling old yet?

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One of our newer readers, another David, this one from Connecticut, reached back into the archives and found my story about being at the church when my childhood hero, David McCallum, got married:

"I read the McCallum blog...enjoyed it a lot. Elisa and I get easily hypnotized by NCIS, so we’ve enjoyed seeing Ducky (McCallum) do his stuff. On our system, NCIS is on some channel almost all the time. 

Did you happen to see the show where someone asked Gibbs, 'I wonder what Ducky was like when he was younger?' 

Gibbs responds, 'Illya Kuryakin.'"

OMG, I've never really watched the show, but now I HAVE to find that episode...what a great line!

(And if it needs an explanation, you're on the wrong blog!) :0

On that same subject, I was rummaging through my attic this week (No, I did NOT leave the dog alone outside as I was doing that!) and I came across an Illya Kuryakin card game! Everything seems to be intact.

Now I just have to find a way to bet on it!

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OK, what does Irv have for us today?

Well, part of this week's title is "Irv's Consistency" and the following examples prove this point:

I happened to be scouring the internet the other day (a favorite time-waster for us retired folks!) when I decided to check on a website called "Bleacher Report". If you're a sports fan you might know of it. A few years ago, I sent them a sample of my writing, and they gave me the okay to send them any articles I wanted to about sports. (Actually, I don't think they really cared how well I wrote. They just wanted to make sure I could put two words together....)

Anyway, there were some things going on in the televised sports world at the time that were bothering me, so I wrote two or three articles for them just to get it all off my chest.

And the other day I checked the website to see if my articles were still accessible----they were! So of course, being the egomaniac that I am, I looked them up and re-read them.

It was amazing. They were so much like the blog I posted last week ("Why I Hate Watching Sports",) discussing things I despise about televised games. The writing style, the phrasing I used, there's even one sentence saying exactly the same thing that I said last week----and I wrote those columns like 15 years ago!

Consistency? Or am I just rehashing the same complaints that I've had for almost two decades? Either way, I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing them. (The dates on each of them say '2018', but that's wrong. That might be the year they re-posted them, maybe? From the events I discussed in the articles, I'm going to say they were written around 2010-11.)

So if you have the chance, take a look at them----you don't have to read them all the way through (they're both pretty long, even by my standards!) Just check out how my pet peeves haven't changed much since then, especially in the first article.

Here are the links:

What Hath We Wrought?

"Sports Media Whining Again!"

And in the meantime, the 'little surprise and 'big goodbye' that I promised last week will post next Thursday.

Talk then.

IG