For God's sake, call the police!

I'll tell you the first Top Ten list I saw David Letterman read. It may have been the first one ever. It was before they did it every day.

An ad for English muffins at the time claimed they were one of "life's simple pleasures". But the ads for Van de Camp's Pork & Beans said the same thing.

So. They had a top ten list. Life's top ten simple pleasures.

And one of those top ten simple pleasures: Reporting people to the police.

We need to teach young people this.

Thirteen years ago, a grad student at Penn State walked into a locker room and found an assistant coach raping a little boy in a shower. If the grad student had run to a phone and called 9-1-1, the cops could have been there in a few minutes. Instead....

Instead, he called his father. His father said to tell the head coach. He did, and nothing happened. Why didn't he call the police???

I know that cell phones weren't as ubiquitous then. And now they don't allow cell phones in locker rooms because they all have cameras on them. But the guy couldn't run to a pay phone? He couldn't run to an office and made the call? Couldn't walk in and stop the assistant coach himself?

What's wrong with these people?

Herman

Herman Cain...well, it would be nice to see a return of the name "Herman" to general use.

Several years ago, I received a CD produced by a local middle school. The entire school sang on it. They wrote the songs themselves, about the importance of good nutrition---I can't remember what else. Something about the principal. An anti-racist song.

The name of each student was listed in the liner notes. I looked through the list. There were dozens and dozens of girls name Jacqueline, spelled various ways. It seemed like every fifth boy was named either Zack, Zac, Zach, or Zachary.

There wasn't a single boy with a regular name. Not a single one named John, Paul, Peter, Roy, Phil, Steve.

Andy Rooney

I remember Andy Rooney. I remember him pissed off that people felt bad about the death of Kurt Cobain. Cobain had committed suicide at age 27 after a struggle with heroin addiction and depression. Rooney ended his piece on 60 Minutes by reading the obituary of a man who died of natural causes in his late 80s after a long successful life.

"Save your tears for him," Rooney said.

I don't know if he continued to hold the view that the death of an extremely old rich person was the worst possible tragedy, far worse than the death of a guy in his 20s.

Well, too bad.

Lousy Swedes

The Swedes are getting worse and worse. The danger of Julian Assange being extradited by England to Sweden isn't that he'll be prosecuted for what one can safely assume are phony charges in Sweden. The Swedes apparently intend to hand him over to the United States so he can be prosecuted for exposing the U.S. government's treachery.

It turns out Assange hasn't even been charged with a crime in Sweden. He's just wanted for questioning, which the Swedes didn't bother doing when he was in Sweden.

Justin Bieber, DNA test

Doesn't seem like a paternity suit is that big a deal in this age of DNA testing. There's nothing to argue about. Just wait for the results.

A couple of family law attorneys commenting on Justin Bieber's case shrugged. If he knows he's not the father, he should take the test. It'll end any speculation. In fact, it's the only thing that would end speculation.

Of course, even if the boy knows he's not the father, his mother and lawyers and everyone else making decisions for him might not be entirely sure.

Now they're reporting that Justin's taking a DNA test and suing the impoverished unwed mother in question. I don't understand why he didn't simply take a DNA test to begin with, and I don't understand why he's suing someone with no money.

Hell, maybe he is the father.

Obviously he wouldn't use a condom. How would he get one? If I worked in a drug store and Justin Bieber came in looking for contraceptives, I'd take the tape from the security camera and sell it to the Enquirer. I don't know if he has a trusted personal assistant who could get him some. He should talk to his pediatrician about it next time he sees her.

Kim Kardashian, $2 million ring

Aging whore Kim Kardashian is upset. She's divorcing her "husband" after two months of marriage and he wants the $2 million engagement ring he gave her back.

Kardashian's pimp of a mother went on TV and used the racist slur "Indian giver" against her son-in-law for wanting his property back.

Kardashian's husband, Kris Humphries, is a basketball player by trade. The money-grubbing Kardashians were angry because the players were locked out in a labor dispute. Now Kim would be the only breadwinner in the family! He would be living off her "work". But now these parasites are stealing $2 million from him.

Of course, that's the whole point of "reality" TV, to show us rich people who don't deserve to be rich. They hit their zenith with My Super Sweet Sixteen, horrible rich children throwing their big 16th birthday parties, spending millions, throwing tantrums.

"Don't you love me?" one asked when his father balked at buying him jewelry. What kind of 16-year-old boy wants diamond jewelry? In my day, teenage boys were humiliated by direct expressions of paternal love.

There was a South Park episode based on a girl on My Super Sweet 16. She threw a tantrum because the Acura her mother bought her was the wrong color, was only an Acura, and she should have given it to her during the party. The poor girl will have to live with that shame for the rest of her life, if she's capable of shame.

To be fair to some of the rich kids, they're the focus of attention in extremely big events. Most adults would fall apart planning functions like these, and these kids are only 15.

There was one where the rich girls were handing out invitations to a large crowd at kids.

"Uh. We didn't get ours," a couple of boys said.

The poor girls froze. They didn't say anything. They weren't stonewalling, they just didn't know what to say to the kids they weren't inviting. They should have planned ahead for this eventuality.

Film strips

I'll tell you an interesting fact. You know film strip projectors? Like they had in school? I don't know if schools use them anymore. But they were a popular toy in The Soviet Union. Children all owned them, had them at home. Children's books were put out in film strip form.

One time, I was watching Siskel & Ebert. Siskel felt that a movie about the American Revolution was boring. He said that film strips about the revolution---not films, but film strips---were more interesting!

Later, I was sitting in a theater. "This would be pretty good as a film strip," I thought.

Well. It's probably too late to explore the film strip as a narrative form. Although you could probably do the same thing pretty well as a You Tube video.