Bad Dog

So the days of what we used to call "slow news days" are behind for the moment as are the days of setting this blog in a comfortable archive mode. Between Twitter and here, I'll do my best to keep you all abreast of Bad Dog's current situation as time allows. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

Patience being the key as all of a sudden your life goes from "just another day" to "Oh my God, now what?" If you are just tuning in, here's the deal. Bad Dog has been diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. Or AML as it is known in these circles.

Like you, I freaked out on the news of this. Then I settled down and began to absorb all that I could about the condition and the specific situation we are looking at.

The nuts and bolts of this disease are quite simply stated as "cancer". Scary, ain't it? At first it certainly seems that way, but in reality, the scary part is getting passed the the third word of the disease, leukemia.

In the past 20 years or so, there have been astounding advances in treating and beating this thing. So that is on our side. So is the simple fact that it has been determined Bad Dog has not had this for very long. A few weeks, to be as precise as possible. So that is on our side too. Add to that his amazingly upbeat state of mind and continued sense of humor and it looks now that we have a very positive situation on our hands.

Just today, the doctors put him into isolation. This is simply a way of preventing the outside world with all of it's illnesses from catching him with his immune system down. This is good, this means that so far, the chemo protocol he is on is working in the right direction. This coming Friday should be the last of the initial chemo and the hardest part of fighting this thing will be behind him. A few weeks of recovery and the next thing you know, he's back on the air with yours truly.

No doubt there will be some minor changes to this routine as we go along and understandably these changes are expected. Everyone being different in the eyes of a cancer patient.

Long story short, Bad Dog is expected to be back in true form, on the air and ready to come back full time around the 2nd week of December. What a great holiday gift that will be for all of us. In the meantime, it will be business as usual (as best as I can pull it off) around the radio station, on and off the air and I will give short bursts of updates as they come in from my Twitter. The link is on the right of your screen. When I can elaborate, I will do it here and on the air.

Rock 103 (link also on the right) has a place to post good will messages and the likes to him since he has access to a laptop and he can read your messages. Otherwise, should anyone have any questions you can contact me directly through this blog or my email through the station.

He's counting on your support and he knows you all are there and I for one, am most confident that he will be back sooner than you know and in full form ready to get back into the game.

Thanks for all your continued support, your thoughts and prayers and we'll be around. Until then...

Stay Tuned....

Something Local

So, last Thursday, the 15th was our local election for mayor. There's no need to go into the nitty-gritty about they whys and hows and all of that. It was a million dollars spent on a special election and something is bothering me about this.

Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining because my candidate didn't win, I have met Mayor Wharton on numerous occasions and he has always been very nice to me and has never given me any reason to think otherwise about him. Quite frankly, he's a nice guy.

So, my question is this... just how did he win? Some polls suggested that Myron Lowrey had the best shot. He was after all, the interim mayor and had a running start at cleaning up the mess left behind by Herenton. And yes, he was doing a fine job with that. The Dalai Lama debacle aside, he would have been a shoo-in as the existing incumbant. But he couldn't get anywhere close in votes.

How about Jerry Lawler? Several polls had him as a legitimate candidate or a spoiler at the very least. Yet, he barely managed four thousand votes. This after all the poeple I have heard said they were going to vote for him. If they did in fact vote for Lawler, he may very well would have won the election.

And then there is Carol Chumney, lovely lady and smart to boot. She ran a rather quiet campaign and spent very little money in the race. Polls and surveys had her not doing so well, but she managed a sizable percentage of the voters. Where did she get those votes?

Obviously there is a problem with surveys and polls. Or is there a problem on a more sinister level?

The only numbers left are the vote tallies themselves. Here's what I deduced:

There are about 400,000 registered voters in the city.

100,000 people voted.

That means some 300,000 people didn't vote and that is truly sad.

A serious investigation by a third party could figure this out. Even if it was determined that everything was on the up and up. That would be acceptable. But, I'm telling you, and this is strictly MY opinion, something stinks.

Unless there is some monkey business going on at the election commission and that wouldn't surprise me in the least. Given this city's notorious history of dead people voting and the high likelyhood someone could tinker with the ballots, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to think that maybe... just maybe... this election could have been fixed in a broken sort of way.

Perhaps someone ought to look into this.

Maybe we should ask Herenton himself, he was seen at Houston's the night of the election having a nice dinner and then heading over to the Wharton party to celebrate. Maybe I'm wrong about this prediction but given the circumstances beware the following scenario:

Herenton loses the congressional election to Cohen and runs for Memphis mayor in two years and serves eight more as mayor. What do you think?

Then again, why bother? Nobody in this city seems to care.

Stay Tuned...

That's Entertainment

It's amazing to me that over the years, we as a people have had some rather dramatic changes in what we found and find entertaining. For me, it's runs from the simple to the elaborate and sometimes the downright stupid. Hey, at least I am easy to entertain. As an entertainer, I have to be cautious of what is truly "entertaining".

Buddy Hackett once said that if a joke doesn't offend at least one person, then it's not a joke. How true. Since I tend to wallow in the offensive end of humor. Not by design, it just sort of happens that way. To me, there are some inherent humor to be found in the stupid. But humor is NOT the end of all entertainment. Take a look at previous decades and how we as people have "evolved". Our tastes certainly have changed over the years.

The 80's were full of bad fashion and worse music. (some exceptions apply) The 70's brought the amusement of a pet rock. The 60's... drugs were the amusing thing. At least, that is what I have been told... The 50's in all their puritanical ways gave us Wally and the Beaver.

And then there were the 40's. Witness below the Ross Sisters from 1944. The music was standard of the day, peppy and upbeat, fashion simple and fun. But the major difference for audiences of the day were seeing a singer or band and the usual song and dance routine versus the downright bizarre.

This clip culled from the internet displays a virtual circus act of the likes you don't see to this day. Imagine this on Dancing With the Stars ... you won't. Simply because the TV people these days don't find this sort of thing entertaining.

Here's a test... watch this. Then answer the following question...



Were you entertained?

Stay Tuned...

Hello, Again.

Sorry, it has been awhile. Sometimes the pursuit of the general things in life can get in the way of something as soulfully important as updating this blog. I was hanging with the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud. No, seriously. The circus surrounding His Holiness' visit to our fair city had taken, at least in my mind, a certain place in the order of things. Think about it, update the blog or spend some time thinking about more important things with one of the most influential people on the planet?

We went to see him at the convention center and it was a great experience even though our esteemed Mayor introduced himself with a fist bump and, "Hello, Dalai." (No joke.) He had claimed he got permission from the Tibetan officials to do that, however, I have it on my own authority (and forever unnamed sources) that he was NEVER given permission to address him in the manner of which he did. I consider this whole scenario nothing more than yet another example of why we can never have anything nice when any politician shows up.

Well, speaking of deep subjects, and in a strange way, bridging a strange gap between the Dalai Lama and other really cool things, I found this little gem on the web featuring another super guy. (Two of them, actually) In a fantastically creative use of the auto-tuner and some old video, let me introduce to you Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking in something so hypnotic it may make you ponder your own existence in this vast universe.



Now, think for a moment... and Stay Tuned...

Where's Bob?

What a fascinating tale of a marketing campaign gone horribly wrong. Or right... depending on what you hear or read. Those late night TV ads for the "male enhancement" product Enzyte have been around for awhile. Now, here is the long and short of the story behind greed and Smiling Bob.

Steve Warshak and his mom Harriett were behind our friend Smiling Bob and were ultimately sent to prison for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering. Harriett got two years while her son was sent up the river for twenty five years. This after thousands of complaints from customers who claimed the penis pill didn't work. (among many other complaints) That is the short of it... no big deal (if you will) as this kind of thing happens all the time, it seems.

But my interest into this was behind finding out just who Smiling Bob is, or as the case may be, was.

The picture above is the famous if not ubiquitous Smiling Bob. Bob, as the well endowed mascot for Enzyte, was apparently played by actor John Larson. So where the hell is he? Was he typecast into oblivion as "Mr. Big", too large for any other work? As it happens in the world of advertising, Bob was merely an actor hired to play his part, cashing his checks as the advertising campaign wore on. But, the founder of Enzyte ran into his legal troubles and John Larson was left... er... hanging, if you will.

Now for the meat of the mystery. It seems that just before Warshak got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, there was talk of a new mascot being sought to replace Bob with the old proverbial "...we're going in a different direction" line. But, before all of that could happen, Bob apparently vanished.

How can you make an iconic figure as Smiling Bob merely go away? Where does one hide such an enormous figure in the world of advertising? Did Bob possess more than what was being let on?

Unverified stories show that actor John Larson has been reported missing or dead since June 12, 2008 apparently the victim of a boating accident off the coast of Martinique in the Carribbean. What we do know is that since that date, no one has heard nor seen Larson aside from this undated photo.



To this date, no one knows anything about the "accident" or just where Larson went. Moreover, there has been no word from any friends or family as to Larson's whereabouts. If he was alive, you would think a guy of his stature would certainly have found work doing something... anything. If he were dead, then you would certainly hear about that mystery somewhere on the air or on the internet. Very little exists in either place and if you paid any attention to the advertising campaign, there has been no new production including Smiling Bob in quite sometime. Even the usual internet conspiracy nuts are strangely silent on this one. Where's Geraldo when you really need him?

Gives one pause to think Smiling Bob was, perhaps, killed off in a more literal way. After all, Warshak had planned on renaming the company and finding a new spokespenis. Now, Warshak and his mom met the hands of justice in prison leaving behind an apparent wake of thousands of under-endowed American men. Not to mention one missing big guy last seen living large in the idyllic scenery off the coast of Martinique.

After the Feds did their duty to the Warshak empire, Enzyte somehow survived and is still going strong, after a new company acquired the brand and enacted a change in operating practices. Bolstered by the immortal image of Smiling Bob still coming through the late night TV airwaves. As for John Larson, we may never know the truth.

As for the complaining customers, remarkably very few of them bothered with getting a refund, settling instead with being born with a ding instead of a dong after the snake oil inventor and his mom went to prison and what may have been TV's greatest pitch man slipped under the waves of the beautiful blue Carribbean.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: Since this piece continues to get so much traction, I felt it necessary to do some more research. Guess what? Most of what I wrote here (so long ago) is not accurate. Here's why. I hope this clears things up a bit. (Ric)