Whenever I was asked about my “walls of inspiration” – which have followed me to each new job, albeit with a changing cast of characters – I always responded that they were a feminist gesture, that I would remove them the day Playboy magazine folded.
Well, Hell has frozen over and I’ll have to remove my men. (Yeah, right. More on that in a bit.) ...
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Goodness, I don’t know how much longer I, an Elizabeth I fan, can hang with “Reign.”
This season, The CW series about Mary, Queen of Scots has introduced another nemesis apart from her ever-hating mother-in-law, Catherind de’ Medici – Elizabeth I of England.
But portraying Elizabeth as a mean girl is so limiting – particularly when the truth is more delicious than the fiction. ...
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“Happiness,” New York Yankees’ owner Col. Jacob Ruppert said in the 1920s, “was watching the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning and then slowly pull away.”
Oh, for those days, right, fellow Yankee fans?
But Green Bay Packers’ fans and those of tennis No. 1 Novak Djokovic understand the sentiment. Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Nole are quite simply on a roll in their respective sports. Yes, the San Diego Chargers could route the Packers Sunday, Oct. 18 while half a world away Jo-Wilfried Tsonga could defeat Nole in the finals of the Shanghai Rolex Masters. ...
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One of the guiltier guilty pleasures of TV, along with the evolution of Don Johnson’s hair on “Miami Vice” reruns – Has there ever been a more beautiful man and more shades of blond? – is The CW’s “Reign,” the story of Mary, Queen of Scots played out as if an American high school were staging a Renaissance drama. There’s lots of mean girls and good-bad girls bemoaning manipulative guys whom they would seek to manipulate in turn. Everyone talks about “cahstles” and “Frahnce” in plummy Brit accents that are phonier than $3 bills – even though the series is set mostly in France and Catherine de’ Medici, Mary’s ever-hating mother-in-law, was Italian. ...
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The latest American mass-murderer – Christopher Harper-Mercer, who gunned down nine people and injured nine more, two critically, at Umpqua Community College in Roseberg, Ore. Oct. 1 – is also the latest example in what I call the literature of rejection, someone with a disproportionate rage at life’s inequities and disappointments who decides to take it out on others. The cast of characters includes mass murderers (Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden), dictators (Adolf Hitler) and assassins (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald).
In Harper-Mercer’s case, he had been rejected by a firearms’ academy – too immature and entitled, what a surprise – and he didn’t have a girlfriend. This would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly. ...
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Pope Francis’ celebration of Mass at Madison Square Garden tonight prompted my friend, sports publicist and blogger John Cirillo, to email me a post on his favorite Garden moments, which got me thinking about my own.
But first, a little history. The Garden, named for President James Madison, really was once a garden – a rooftop garden that was part of an elaborate Moorish-style complex designed by architect Stanford White, who was shot there in 1906 by a crazed Harry Thaw over Thaw’s wife (and White’s former mistress) chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. (She figures in both E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” and the movie “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.”) ...
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In the end, I think Stan Wawrinka did Novak Djokovic a favor. By beating Nole in the French Open final, he took the Grand Slam pressure off of him and enabled him to say, “You know what? The heck with it. I’m slamming that door (pun intended) and going for it at Wimbledon and the US Open.”
All the talk was about Serena, but Nole actually came closer to winning the Grand Slam as he lost in the French final but won the other three (US Open, Wimbledon, Australian Open) whereas she won the French, Australian and Wimbledon but lost in the US semifinals. ...
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