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Erin's blogs
[friday] entertainment editor and Kokomo Tribune diva Erin Shultz adds her candid and offbeat comments on happenings around the globe and around the block.
11:11 a.m. Monday 12.12.05 — Bob Barker, come on down!
Today it is a time to salute one of our nation’s finest.
We’ve all grown up with him.
We’ve seen him through his highs and lows, his triumphs and his stumbles.
He’s a man we look up to. A man we can trust. A man who plays a mean game of Plinko.
Happy birthday, Bob Barker.
He turned 82 today, and he’s still going strong. He's 82! I don't know what I'll be doing at 82, but I'm guessing it'll involve cream of wheat, a bib and nursing home.
The Price is Right first aired on Sept. 4, 1972, and Bob was right there. It’s America’s longest running game show, now in its 34th season.
I did extensive research on Barker while in college, for a course titled “Win, Lose or Change History: How Game Shows Became More Important Than the Evening News.”
Little known fact: Bob Barker actually died in 1985. Yup, it's true.
But wildly popular, even when rendered mute by death, Barker was not a character the producers were ready to let go.
He’s been hosting the show ever since — using the same technology that fooled those wacky criminals in “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
Through it all, he's been giving away cars, making people guess retail value, playing that game with the yodeling hiker and spinning that giant wheel.
And come on, what other 82-year-old man would be surrounded by the likes of Barker's Beauties? That is a man with talent.
So Bob Barker, today I salute you for being television’s longest-running game show host.
And remember: Help control the animal population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.
December 12, 2005 11:16 am
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11:18 a.m. Friday 12.09.05 — Let it snow.
Oh, snowfall. How I miss you.
It almost feels like home to me today, surrounded by all this snow. This is my second winter in Kokomo, and I’ve realized that I’ll be surrounded by the white stuff until it all melts.
Why?
The entire city of Kokomo employs one part-time guy to clear the snow.
With a single shovel.
No, I’m kidding. I know the area has a bunch of plows — I just don’t know what they’re doing with them. It’s been done snowing for hours, and yet there are main streets I drove up to get to work still untouched by any snow-removal device.
I know “limited resources” and “not much annual snowfall” also factor in this equation, but I was never very good at math.
In a way, you have to admire the plowing technique in Kokomo.
It’s kind of the teenage boy approach to cleaning bedrooms: As long as you clear a vaguely distinguishable path, you’re golden. Much like mountains of dirty clothes, the snow will erode away with continued traffic.
That was, in fact, how the Grand Canyon was formed. That’s science folks — and one day that might be a Jeopardy answer. Never say I didn’t do anything for you.
December 09, 2005 11:23 am
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11:50 a.m. Dec. 7 — Glassesgate, Day 1.
I feel like I’ve had the strangest and most painful vacation ever. I’ve been out of work for five days. I half expected them to have hired someone else, or to have cobwebs covering my desk at this point.
Neither has happened. I’m strangely disappointed in both.
It’s Day 1 of Glassesgate. So far no real instances of awfulness, but I’m finding it’s funny how much my personality changes when I have my specs on.
Normally a little “loud and “raucous” (read: makes Fran Drescher seem meek), I am super quiet with my glasses on, kind of like Clark Kent. We know I don’t have X-ray vision — I’ve only got one good eye at this point, but I doubt I can fly — and the suicide-proof windows at the Tribune don’t open anyway.
This brings me to a larger point: what prompted the newspaper to install suicide-proof windows? Were they thinking ahead in case they wanted to push us to suicide?
December 07, 2005 12:08 pm
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7:40 p.m. Dec. 6 — The worst is yet to come.
The sun is down, and I can actually get a little work done without squinting or whimpering about the light hurting my eye.
Something has just dawned on me though — something even grosser than Giant Eyeball Syndrome.
I have to wear my glasses in public for the next week.
Yes, people. I’m sorry to have to put it to you this way, because I know some of you may be eating, have weak livers and/or may have lost their spleen last time you were sick.
It’s not that I don’t like glasses — I have a lovely pair of reading glasses (dubbed my “smart girl glasses”) that I love to wear.
It’s a different story with my regular glasses. I have better eyesight with my eyes closed than with them open, so my eyes are magnified to the size of dodge balls with my glasses on.
Four eyes? More like 37 eyes. It’s that bad.
December 07, 2005 12:07 pm
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2:23 p.m. Dec. 6 — Doctor, doctor, give me the news
I feel like a sissy. I stayed home from work because of an eye infection.
Given, I couldn’t really drive anywhere because of the swelling and horrible sensitivity to light, but still — I stayed home because of an eye infection. That’s like staying home because of a hangnail.
Since I moved to Kokomo over a year ago, it would be logical to assume I would have procured a doctor by this point.
Clearly, you have not read my column. I’m not responsible enough to match my socks. Maybe if you gave me another 14 months, I would have found a doctor on my own.
But odds aren’t good.
So there I was — no doctor, can’t drive, with Giant Eyeball Syndrome.
Luckily, a friend of mine was here to cart me around and tend to my wonky eye.
So today I found a doctor (higher productivity rate than most normal days) and then came back here to both work from home and make sure that I wasn’t going to be contagious to my coworkers.
For the first four hours though, I lived the stoner lifestyle. Straight out of “High Times” magazine. Except without the special brownies.
The light bothered my eye, so I couldn’t type or do any work at first — so what’s the logical solution? Read? Clean? Watch television? Screw that — Sleep.
I slept the entire afternoon as if I were a nocturnal creature like a wombat or vampire, waking up only to feed and check to see if “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica” was on. (It was not.)
December 07, 2005 12:05 pm
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10 a.m. Dec. 6 — Eye do.
I’m out sick from work today, so I’m writing my blog entry from home.
Sick isn’t really the word, actually.
“Sick” is usually used to describe someone huddled under the blankets, coughing up his or her spleen.
That’s not me.
I’ve managed to get some sort of eye-eating disease that has caused just my right eye to turn the color of the Kool-Aid Man and swell to about the same size. “Oh yeeeeeah!”
Off to the doctor. Cross your fingers that I won’t have to wear an eye patch, mateys.
December 07, 2005 12:04 pm
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ERIN: Say it isn't so.
Years from now, we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the news.
Me? I was scanning the latest headlines from the Associated Press, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It shook my soul.
Last week’s news made my heart feel heavy, as if under the weight of some extremely dense object. Like a piano. Or a very large can of tuna.
I mean, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson have been my rock.
If a washed-up boy band star and a stunning pop star who makes “The Goonies” character Sloth look like a MENSA candidate can’t make it work, what chance do us real people have?
See, in America, we don’t have a royal family. We don’t have cultural icons. We have celebrities.
We identify with them because they’re like us. Only prettier. And with really expensive handbags.
Here’s the thing: I hated “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica,” and yet I watched it as if my life depended on it.
Interior, my apartment: 10 a.m. on a Saturday: I flip to MTV and watch — for the fourth time — the episode where the waiter spills water on Jessica’s butt.
Why do I watch? No idea. I’m like something out of the “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Yet, now that their relationship is over, I’m bummed. We all knew it was going to end, but it was like a train wreck — you want to look away, but you’ve got a morbid fascination that makes you keep watching.
My idea? They should keep doing the show. I mean, as a nation, we’ve all watched their slow spiral into in inevitable breakup (Didn’t we all want to divorce her a few times for her “Chicken of the Sea” moments?) Why shouldn’t we also get to watch their ugly and — I can only hope — really dimwitted and entertaining divorce.
The custody battle with their yappy dog is reason enough to keep viewers coming back.
People seem to say things like “No, we wouldn’t want to watch this private and troublesome time in their lives.”
Yes. Yes, I do.
Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the last three years? We’ve watched as Jessica belched and farted her way into the minds and hearts of the American public and Nick looked at her like he wanted to hit her with a blunt object.
Now, that’s good television.
So, MTV execs, if you’re reading, let me be the first to pitch this idea: “Alimony: Nick and Jessica.”
December 01, 2005 05:58 pm
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Techno? Heck, no.
The powers that be say they want me to blog here at the Tribune.
Blogging is one of these new technofangled things that people with high-tech equipment like “printers” and “cameras” seem to do.
Me? I use my computer as a paperweight with e-mail capabilities. A typewriter would serve as much purpose, really, and it has the added bonus of that cool sound it makes when you get the end of a row of type.
*zip, fling*
See, I’m not tech savvy. I just got on Friendster.com about three months ago, and all the people I know on there have congratulated me for making it to the 21st century.
Now, I’ve always thought blogs were — what’s the word? — stupid.
They’re silly and self-congratulatory and make the assumption that people care what you’re saying.
Wait, that sounds a lot like me.
*zip, fling*
I’m a perfect person to do this.
I’m going to be writing whenever I feel like it, I guess.
Bored at work? I’ll blog.
Chilling at home? I’ll blog.
Because really, what else do I have to do? My 8-track player is busted, and the rabbit ears on my television only pick up Telemundo.
Welcome to the 21st century, Kokomo.
December 01, 2005 02:18 pm
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