I do film reviews on that show every Tuesday morning at a smidge after 8:00 am.

Frankly, the banter between my host and myself through the years had gotten, well, more than a little testy at times. We used to do a quiz in which he’d play a film clip and I had to ID the flick. He was rarely inclined to give me full credit for identifying the movies. Why? Well, you’ll have to ask Mr. Bickers . . . if you can track him down now.

I would attempt to engage the audience with cultural bon mots. Mr. Bickers lives a solitary life, so most references passed him by. Instead of displaying even the merest scintilla of interest, he would feign displeasure. It was, frankly, not a good feeling.

During our last gig together, Mr. Bickers, out of the blue, indicated the tension that many felt emanating from the studio was simply radio shtick. Imagine my surprise. He never, at any moment during our 8 year run, indicated it was all an act.

Anyway, I guess I need to let bygones be bygones, move beyond my justified resentments, understand I’m not the lowly weasel Mr. Bickers would portray me to be, and forgive. Oh yes, and forget.

Therefore, to honor Mr. Bickers, on his last day on the job. I offer this testimonial.

Sayonara, mon ami. Don’t worry, I’ll lock the door behind you.

I know we don’t talk much anymore. Okay, we’ve never spoken before, but I did try to reach you via email the other day. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Your web site was down, I assume, from so much traffic of all those wanting your ear on the debt ceiling smackdown.

Anyway, we live in the same town, essentially the same neighborhood. I almost built a house several years back right up the hill from your condo. But still live within a jog just a couple neighborhoods over in the Highlands.

We root for the same team, Mitch. I’m talking about the U of L Cardinals we both love so much.

The Cardinal hoopsters haven’t done so well when it mattered the last couple of seasons, in the NCAA tourney. We’re both looking for big things from Rick Pitino and his charges this coming season, maybe even One Shining Moment.

That’s months away.

But your chance for a career defining One Shining Moment is right here and right now.

As I write this early Friday afternoon, it’s looking like your fellow Republicans in the House will pass some sort of debt ceiling continuance/ budget slashing/ balanced budget bill that hasn’t a shot at becoming law. It contains provisions you don’t agree with, that many of your fellow Republican members of the House and Senate don’t agree with, and that the vast majority of Democrats don’t agree with.

So my hope is that you — at this historically critical moment of your long career in governance — will opt to be the statesman you’ve always desired to be. That you will choose a path which will have future historians speaking of you as they have spoken of your predecessor, Henry Clay.

Mitch McConnell’s: The 21st Century’s Great Compromiser.

Has a nice ring to it, eh?

Some time later today, the ball’s going to be in your court. (To continue the basketball metaphor.) If Boehner’s bill does squeak through the House by a margin slim as a dry tea bag, you will have a choice. Actually, you’ll have a choice, even if it doesn’t pass.

Will you continue to bray against the Donkeys at every moment?

Or, will you carpe diem this incredible opportunity to be viewed as one of the great senators ever, one who put aside partisanship at a critical moment for the republic, who reached his hand across the aisle and brokered a resolution for the good of America?

I’ll be honest, Mitch, I haven’t had many kind words for you in the past. We have different outlooks about matters governmental. Yet, I promise this, if you do the right thing today and this weekend, I’ll never speak ill of you again. I know that isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got.

Make Kentucky proud. Make the U.S. of A. proud.

Make me want to seek you out next April across the expanse of the Superdome to shake your hand, when we’re there to cheer our Cards in the Final Four.

Sincerely,

Your Constituent, c d kaplan

It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty to read and slobber over from other sources.

Today I feel compelled to take one last look. Karen Sypher, convicted of federal criminal charges, is now in a federal penitentiary. Where  she will reside for better than the next half decade.

It is a situation that is sad as it is sordid.

I shan’t bore with you with any details, which, by now, should be permanently attached to your DNA.

I’m pissed that Rick Pitino, who is one of the leading citizens of our community. And who is getting paid millions of dollars a year — some of it my hard earned money — didn’t have enough sense and fidelity to his marital vows to get himself in this stew. I’m mad he was never called to task by the president and athletic director of his employer, the University of Louisville.

I’m also sad about Karen Sypher. Make no mistake, I don’t feel bad because she’s in the hoosegow. She deserves it for what she did, which was very wrong.

But I am sad that this reasonably attractive woman evolved into to an all too familiar prototype: she who feels her way through life is by granting sexual favors. I am sad at the extent of her delusion about what she did and what the consequences for such actions must be.

I am really pissed at her most recent doofus attorney, a feckless fellow who wasn’t even in good standing with the Bar when he took the case, because he hadn’t paid his dues. And his sidekicks, who have filled their client Karen Sypher with ridiculously misguided false hope. They’ve been tilting at windmills in a manner so ham handed as to be laughable. I can’t believe anything but they’ve fostered in their client, an absurdly optimistic sense of her future.

I can’t imagine what the conversations were like in the drive from Louisville to Florida where she surrendered for her imprisonment today? In her deluded mind, she was debased by Pitino. Then by her trial attorney, who, by all accounts, did the best he could with a nothing case. Truth: She’s also been deceived by her latest gang of “protectors.” Perhaps more than any other players in this saga.

Karen Sypher is in prison now. She soon will be little more than a fleeting anecdote in Louisville’s cultural history, a subject of the query, “Whatever happened to  . . .?”

Rick Pitino is still around, his presence a constant reminder  that being a good coach doesn’t mean you’re an admirable person.

That aside, let me say this.

David Nolan is an idiot. And he may be incompetent. For sure he certainly isn’t providing legitimate counsel to his client.

Why? Gee, I dunno. He’s got a client who has been found guilty in federal district court of some pretty serious crimes, for which she is to be sentenced next week. Barrister Nolan, having admitted he has not read the entire transcript of the trial, and having said “I don’t pretend to know what transpired over seven years, but I smell a rat,” stated at a called press conference that his client was the victim of a “runaway federal justice system.”

Really, counselor, and what might be your basis for that statement?

Setting aside for a moment that the attorney is blowing steam without all the facts, how about his boffo strategy? A week before his client is to be sentenced, he calls in the media for the sole purpose of lambasting the very institution before which she is to appear.

There is a word that come to mind here. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, here it is: malpractice.

* * * * *

It’s nice to see that the University of Kentucky has made a bold stand in favor of education and the First Amendment.

After refusing to do so at UK’s last home football game, it will now allow the school student newspaper, Kentucky Kernel, to be distributed once again outside the stadium before games.

How darned magnanimous of the school. Which might have to renegotiate some multi-million dollar contract with a marketing firm, which apparently claimed some exclusivity.

How about a big Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah for the university?

* * * * *

Rand Paul continues to hammer his senatorial opponent Jack Conway, over the latter’s ridiculous strategy of giving Paul shit about some college prank.

Meanwhile Conway actually criticized his foe about a legit issue yesterday — Paul’s support of a national sales tax. And announced that he’s bringing in the heavy artillery on election eve. That would be Bill Clinton.

Conway is never going to be confused with John Sherman Cooper, but he’s sure better than Dr. Paul. But I’d be very surprised if the GOP doesn’t hold onto Jim Bunning’s seat.

* * * * *

And did you read about the Oldham County physician, who diddled his client in the guise of a “PAP smear examination” then performed oral sex on her while treating her for an abdominal abscess?

The M.D. claims the last incident happened because he was “distracted.”

Hmmmmmm.

Anyway, the good doctor can still practice his profession in his own inimitable style, having been cleared by the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure.

So, if any of you ladies out there are looking for that extra special attention from your physician, give a call to the South Oldham Medical Clinic, and press #4 for the “Intimate Treatment Unit.”

]]> http://www.culturemaven.com/blog/2010/10/22/syphers-stupid-lawyer-uk-retreats-other-friday-fragmentary-figments/feed/ 0 http://www.culturemaven.com/blog/2010/06/25/steve-jobs-to-customers-eat-cake-you-dumpkopfs/ http://www.culturemaven.com/blog/2010/06/25/steve-jobs-to-customers-eat-cake-you-dumpkopfs/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:37:31 +0000 mail http://www.culturemaven.com/blog/?p=1021 As it turns out the iPhone 4 does do everything a customer could possibly want it to do.

With two exceptions:

1) It won’t scour the toilet in the bathroom when your cleaning service doesn’t show up.

2) Its reception — sketchy already with AT&T’s lack of enough towers and bandwidth — is further compromised when you hold the phone in a normal manner.

Since there came an avalanche of complaints about the latter from first day customers — Apple acolytes disinclined to utter a discouraging word — Mahatma Steve Jobs came out from his cave and pontificated.

To paraphrase The Holy One: “Get over it, dumbasses. Hold it differently.”

So much for the oldest adage in commerce, “The customer is always right.”

Seems the problem hasn’t a thing to do with a possible design flaw — the antennae is in the metal edge strip where 99% of users hold a cellphone. It’s the fault of customers who stayed up all night to be first in line to plunk down hundreds of dollars and be the first on their block with the latest of Jobs’ gadgets. They simply didn’t read the manual to learn how to properly hold the new smart phone.

And what a contemporary device it is. Tens of thousands of apps. It does everything. (Except scrub the tub.)

It does everything, that is, except connect speedily to its network.

Am I missing something here? Isn’t that the baseline?

Actually I’m an old school guy. I understand that smart phones are the future. The present actually. Pretty soon they’ll be able to safely drive your SUV, so you can text without worry while speeding down Shelbyville Road. But I’ll only have one when it’s the only type of cellphone available.

My current phone can send and receive calls. Period. (Okay, it has rudimentary texting capabilities, which I never use.) And that’s it. No internet. No email. No travel directions. No videos. No camera.

I bought this particular model because all the reviews said it had the best voice quality incoming and outgoing.

It wasn’t an easy purchase. When I hit the Verizon store, my trusty and helpful rep had never heard of the model. “Customers could care less about speaker quality.” She found one on a bottom shelf in the corner. The box was dusty. Literally.

I don’t have an innate dislike for cellphones. Except when people use them for any purpose when driving or at the dinner table or when I’m trying to talk with them face to face. You know, in person. I sit at a computer most of the day, so I don’t feel it necessary to have www access when I’m away from my desk.

Besides everybody else has one. So when I was at my daughter’s birthday party last night and wanted to know the draft status of UK’s Fab Five, several guys scurried to show they could connect the fastest.

As for my response to Steve Jobs: “Rotate on this, dude!”

Hopper’s an icon of the Baby Boomers. His loss hurts, confirms our mortality.

He was Billy in “Easy Rider” for chrissakes. There isn’t enough time and space here to explain what things were like in ’69. Or why this seat of the pants, making it up as they went along flick about a couple of guys, flush with cash from a drug deal, taking off across country on motorcycles, still resonates.

It both instilled the rebel in my generation, and certified why it was legit. There was a basis for our paranoia, things needed to change, and with a little help from our friends, human and chemical, we could get it done.

Or, as the movie so adroitly taught us, maybe not.

By the by, that is Phil Spector with whom they did that deal at the movie’s beginning. And Jaaaaaaaaack Nicholson as a lawyer on the lam, talking about “Venutians” around a campfire.

But, Hopper’s career didn’t start there. He was in “Rebel Without A Cause.” And “Giant.” He acted in over 200 movies. “Red Rock West” is one of my faves. You surely know him from “Hoosiers” and “Blue Velvet.” Or, maybe, “Apocalypse Now.”

Not a bad career for for an egocentric, out of control druggie. Which apparently Dennis Hopper was for a long time.

By the time I ran into him at Churchill’s Turf Club one Derby Day, he seemed sort of quiet and subdued. And short. He was supposedly sober by then.

Dennis Hopper also directed one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies, “The Hot Spot.” A noirish steamer, it features Don Johnson, and Virginia Madden and Charles Martin Smith and comely newcomer, Jennifer Connelly. Rent it some time, it’s a fun one.

It’s worth it, if only for the soundtrack. John Lee Hooker moanin’ and groanin’ over his guitar and Miles Davis’ horn. It smolders.

Dennis Hopper. You mighta been a rascal, but you done good, dude. R.I.P.

I consider body building a somewhat silly endeavor, certainly narcissistic and way too much work. But there was always something about Schwarzenegger that was greater than all that.

The guy was/ is brash and boastful. But he’s also bright, self effacing and funny. Yeah, he smokes cigars bigger than my forearm, but not when I’m in the room, thankfully.

I loved in the documentary “Pumping Iron” and how he psyched out Lou Ferrigno as they were preparing for the Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe competitions. How he willed himself to victory through hard work and affirmations.

I loved him in the piffle of a movie called “Stay Hungry” which also featured Sally Field,  Jeff Bridges, Scatman Crothers, Fannie Flagg and Robert Englund before he went Freddy Krueger.

And I’ve admired how he’s remade himself at several points along the way, always defying odds. He became an actor of considerable Hollywood clout. He married a Kennedy. He was elected governor of the most populous state in the Union.

Like most politicians, he is way imperfect. He doesn’t have nearly all the answers. Unlike most politicians, he appears willing to listen and adapt. He admits he doesn’t have all the answers. He is willing to fail.

He gave a well-received commencement address at Emory University in Atlanta Monday morning. The grads included the Film Babe’s youngest, Samuel.

Ahhnüüld was funny.

“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me back to Austria.”

“This is my first law degree. Finally, the Kennedys will think I’m successful. And Maria can finally bring me home to meet her family.”

He mentioned how he’d had his people poll some students to see what they wanted him to talk about.

“17% wanted me to be inspriational. 23% wanted me to give some practical advice. And 30% just wanted their money back from “Jingle All The Way.”

Self effacement is a marvelous character trait.

Schwarznegger went on to advise the grads to “stay hungry,” and “to not only do well, but to do good.”

He was inspiring. It was a darn near perfect commencement address.

I’m glad I was there.