Nobody's THAT Goode

As you may or may not know, I love 50's and 60's rock and roll music.

I love early Elvis, I love Jerry Lee Lewis, and I think that in a perfect world, Christmas would be the holiday where we celebrate the birth of Chuck Berry!

(It'd be called Chuckmas, and it would be much the same as Christmas, but with MUCH better carols.)

However, I need to address something that's been gnawing at me for some time now...

In his timeless classic Johnny B. Goode, Chuck sings that this Johnny could "play the guitar like ringing a bell..."

When, in truth, it's just a lie!

First of all, it takes two hands to even HOLD the guitar! A bell can be rung with a simple flick of one wrist!

A bell has never needed to be re-strung!

You don't need a strap on a bell!

A guitar has an infinite number of notes organized into scales, keys, modes, etc... while a bell produces merely one single note.

I could go on, but you see what I'm getting at.

Chuck, I don't care about tax evasion, I don't care about moody behavior, and I don't even mind if you want to open a restaurant so you can put a camera in the bathroom and watch women as they shit...

just don't insult my intelligence.

Revenge of the FAN

The six sweetest words on earth have to be "I NEED you, love Natalie Portman..."

But sadly, I'll never know for sure. I'd say that the six sweetest words I really have a chance at hearing have to be "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" - and hear them I will, quite often I might add, over the next few weeks.

The buzz for the last of the Star Wars movies surrounds us like a chorus of chainsaws, and I know that I can't get enough.

For many people my age, this saga was our first love. Don't get me wrong, I've progressed to shamefully dirty sex with women each more beautiful than the last, but it is where many of us first got that spring in our steps.

Actually, as a part of my own personal hype for Episode III, I spent last weekend re-watching all 5 of the Star Wars films, and while I was doing that I realized something:


I am a fucking dork.



... but I also realized that doesn't bother me.

As the biggest fan of these movies that I know, I am the receptacle for all the "you know the prequels sucked, and really so did Return of the Jedi" that people feel like tossing out. And, for a time I felt a little bad or almost responsible. It's always an awkward position when people trash something that you think is great.

But the more times I heard the words "Jar-Jar Binks" preceded with "oh, come on" or followed by some variation of "fuckin sucked," the more I realized that, no matter how many people hated these movies, I don't have to feel like the village idiot for enjoying them.

When people try tried to engage me in conversation about why these movies did or did not suck, I never really felt like I had a solid argument to justify my love for them. My usually surgically-precise gift of articulation failed me worse than trickle down economics.

And, I have to admit that it bothered me to not be able to defend something that I held so closely to my heart, especially in the face of valid criticisms. It plagued me until the second that I remembered that sometimes you are just a fan.

It's the same as rooting for a sports team. Maybe you liked the color of the team jersey, maybe you lived in the same city the team claimed to be from, or maybe they won the Championship the first year you watched, and even though they haven't won a single game since, it doesn't matter. You're a fan.

Being a fan is a lot like an old friendship; there is enough good stuff in the bank that you can look past whatever ups and downs you find yourself in, and I think that's where a lot of Star Wars fans find themselves these days.

For crying-out-loud, these movies formed the foundations of my morality! Much to the chagrin of my Mom and Dad, the countless hours of religious training didn't do half as much for my ability to tell right from wrong as seeing a green lightsaber clash with a red one.

I still don't live in a "black" and "white" world! Every issue has always been either "green" or "red" with me. (I'm sure it will also come as very little surprise that, in my head, the Election of 2004 was the Red States versus the Green States, but getting back on topic...)

I'm glad that there is one more Star Wars movie on the way.

Will it be a cinematic masterpiece? No.

Since this IS peoples last time to get a new Star Wars movie, will it get more favorable reviews than the other prequels got? Probably.

Will it change the lives of people the way A New Hope did in 1977? Doubtfully.

Am I going to be there at the midnight showing smiling like a retarded kid who accidentally brushed his hand against his penis for the first time? Yes!

...because, simply, I am a fan of these movies.

JAG-Offs!

Oh NBC! You cancel Alf, you give David Letterman the biggest slighting in the history of the medium, and then you have the nerve to NOT AIR the death of Catherine Bell?

Its like you feed off my misery!

Alright, I might have gotten a little ahead of myself here, so lets start back at the beginning - the fall of 1995.

We were in the middle of those carefree years we called the Clinton presidency... It was a time when the NASDAQ soared… a time we saw the New Jersey Devils win their first Stanley Cup… a time when we saw Superman fall off a horse and land in a wheel chair..

1995 was a time where we saw a grown man struggle to put on the leather gloves that he wore to kill his wife… a time where we saw the opening of Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Hall of fame, and a waning of our fascination with Jamiroquai.

And, it was in the salad days of 1995 that NBC launched an hour long drama about a little-known department within the United States Navy called the Judge Advocate General, or JAG for short.

And, it was in those same salad days that NBC cancelled the show! They even filmed what was to be the last episode of the show, where the male lead, “Harm,” gets a visit from his girlfriend, (played by Catherine Bell,) who speaks three lines and then is murdered.

And that should have been that. There would have been no pieces of paper printed at my parent’s house with the scheduling of every JAG episode that will be splashed across TV screens that week… There would be no Christmas mornings spent with my parents, siblings and televised Naval Officers. There would have been no doubt in my head that my parents love me more than ANY TV show…

BUT – the episode never aired!!! Even worse, during the summer of 96, JAG found a new home and new life on the Tiffany network. As a part of JAG version 2.0, producers decided that they wanted a new female lead, and old Cathy Bell heard the call.

In a passing nod to continuity, we find out that this character, nicknamed “Mac,” looks an awful lot like Harm’s dead love… and, I’m sure you don’t have to be Danielle Steel to see that an uncomfortable romance will ensue…

And ensue it did! For another 9 seasons these two love-birds saw people hop in and out of each other’s beds with out ever feeling the need to point out that the agony of watching the person you're in love with go off with someone else must make you die the pain of a thousand deaths… No; somehow that never came up.

It’s this kind of tired will-they-or-won’t-they nonsense (and, of course the sibling rivalry I’m made to feel with a TV program in competing for the attention of my parents) that makes me question: Where would the world have been without JAG?

Sure, The covers of “TV Guide, July 6th 2002”, “STUFF Magazine, October 2003” and “Golf for Women, April 2005” would have been blank…. But there would have been other ramifications too.

I have to admit that people needed JAG. It was a show where the good guys wore white, and it’s run lasted through times that have not been easy for our country. JAG was there during the largest terrorist attack on US soil, it was there during the military campaigns in Afghanistan and in Iraq: the Sequel. It’s been there to provide entertainment to the stereo-typically-proud-Americans, (and while I side with the people who think we have as much to change as we have to celebrate,) I think that the flag-waving people of this country deserve at least one program where they can sit down and feel that the commies haven’t completely taken over the country they love…

And if JAG had only lasted that one season, then it never would have made it to cable syndication, and I would have never gotten to know the pleasure of flipping through the channels late at night hoping to stumble across that precious piece of what-could-have-been.

The moment when I gleefully admit that “it tolls for thee, Ms Bell,” and enjoy the episode where Harms girlfriend bites it… which DOES air occasionally during the cable repeats.