Wednesday, November 15, 2006

If you're this guy's manager, you're doing a terrible job.

Then again, you just can't shut some people up.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Fox plans to broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson in which the former football star discusses "how he would have committed" the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, for which he was acquitted, the network said.

The two-part interview, titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened," will air Nov. 27 and Nov. 29, the TV network said.

Simpson has agreed to an "unrestricted" interview with book publisher Judith Regan, Fox said.

"O.J. Simpson, in his own words, tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes," the network said in a statement. "In the two-part event, Simpson describes how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade."

The interview will air days before Simpson's new book, "If I Did It," goes on sale Nov. 30. The book, published by Regan, "hypothetically describes how the murders would have been committed."

In a video clip on the network's Web site, an off-screen interviewer says to Simpson, "You wrote 'I have never seen so much blood in my life.'"

"I don't think any two people could be murdered without everybody being covered in blood," Simpson responds.

Simpson, who now lives in Florida, was acquitted in a criminal trial of the 1994 killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was later found liable in 1997 in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Goldman family.

Messages left with Simpson and his attorney Yale Galanter were not immediately returned.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

I used to be somebody.

A Web site I worked on from 2000 to 2003 has been shut down:

http://cartoonorbit.cartoonnetwork.com/

It turns out it has its own Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Orbit

However, there's no mention of my name anywhere. THE INJUSTICE OF IT ALL! I'll have to correct that with some creative editing.

Working on Cartoon Orbit was the best job I ever had. For the first year anyway. Then it got bad. Then it got okay again. But by that time I was already planning to move to Chicago, and I'm pretty sure I pissed off some higher-paid supervisors along with a few coworkers when it got bad, therefore sabotaging any chance of a promotion if I'd stayed, especially after I wrote my Human Resources rep and asked, "Should I have gotten a raise eight months ago when my coworker left and I took on her job responsibilities? My title changed, but my salary didn't, and now my immediate supervisor is on maternity leave, so I'm technically doing three people's jobs."

HR wrote back and said I was supposed to have gotten a raise, but the paperwork never went through for whatever reason. Unlike Yosemite Sam, steam didn't shoot out of my ears when I read that e-mail, but I wasn't happy, because I knew I'd receive the back payments in one lump sum. The same thing had happened to me at CNN, another Turner-owned cable channel based in Atlanta, three years earlier.

Going over my supervisors' heads probably wasn't the smartest move, but I was in my 20s, and much more impulsive than I would be now.

At least that's what I tell myself.

Friday, November 10, 2006

something cheerier

Last week I was told by two friends that my recent blog entries have been depressing. They're supposed to be funny, but it's true that there's a fine line between comedy and tragedy. Or maybe I'm just temporarily tone-deaf.

Anyway, I haven't been rejected by any girls in the past seven days (although my job and its bleak future are starting to depress me), so to celebrate, here's a picture of my niece that should make you smile, unless you're a Republican who's currently licking his/her wounds.

Yes, yes, I know, she's the cutest thing you ever did see. You're welcome.

She turns two next month. If you click on the picture to enlarge it while using the Safari browser, you may see nothing but HTML code, so use Firefox instead.

Speaking of Firefox, why were movies like Firefox and Blue Thunder so popular in the early '80s? Did it have something to do with the Reagan administration's unprecedented military build-up? Let's not forget Airwolf on TV, as well as the short-lived Blue Thunder TV series featuring a pre-SNL Dana Carvey. I was still in single digits at the time, so you can understand the fascination I had with high-tech jets and helicopters, but what was the appeal for everyone else? Say, wasn't Roy Scheider the star of Blue Thunder? I miss that guy. He made some damn good movies in the '70s.

Well, that was quite a tangent. Getting back on track, I'd like to say to all you Republicans—and I'm including you closet Republicans who call yourselves "independent" (who do you think you're foolin'?)—that I'm sorry if you've run into obnoxious Democrats since Tuesday who want to rub your nose in it. It's been a long six years, you see.


I work in an office where everyone's a Democrat, and they won't shut up about the election results. I'm a Democrat too, and although I'm not as clued in to current events and politics as I should be, part of me wanted to send out an e-mail in response to their endless stream that said, "In case you've forgotten, we're still stuck with Bush for two more years." I even felt like congratulating Schwarzenegger for getting re-elected as governor in a blue state.

But I guess we have to celebrate our small victories whenever and wherever we can. As Evan Dando says about the ongoing Bush saga on the new self-titled Lemonheads album, "Let's just laugh / We can never do anything about anything anyway / Whatever will be, I guess we'll see / So let's just laugh." A fine line between comedy and tragedy indeed.