Lyric of the Day: Where the Hell have you been, Lex? Edition

So, when you're super-busy (a very good thing in Michigan these days, mind you), what's that called?

"Both ends burning /

And I can't control . . . "

Olympics lovers, pay attention

The Chicago 2016 Olympic organizing committee made its presentation this past week.

A leading authority, unfortunately, sees them in last place at the moment.

Damn. As a visitor to the last nearby Olympics -- Montreal in 1976 -- Chicago winning would be sweet.

More info here.

Quote of the Day: Detroit Needs to Get Its Business Mojo Back Edition . . . and Bettman Still Sucks

Yesterday at the National Economic Summit in Detroit provided another reason that I, not even a BlackBerry owner, admire Jim Balsillie: "I think what Detroit did at different times in its life was massively unconventional, and now you've become prisoners of convention."

The other key reason of the moment? His trying to save the Phoenix Coyotes and bring them home to Canada.

BTW, in looking around for links on this post, I found this great take which, though a bit Wings-bashing, is a great contribution to the canon supporting the theory that, indeed, Bettman Sucks.

Detroit: Economic and social devastation as a travel hot spot

An interesting take from the Chicago Reader: ain't no ruins like Dee-troit ruins, 'cause Dee-troit ruins don't stop.

The piece actually namechecks "Beyond Thunderdome."

Yikes.

Why didn't Michael Eisner ever greenlight a "Pollyanna" movie?

I enjoy Esquire magazine, especially its "What I've Learned" feature. Going through the magazine pile, I caught up with ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner's take in the April 2009 edition, wherein he opined:

--- snip ---

The auto industry situation is incredibly complex, and it would be a little silly of me to try to reduce it. But you could say it was like the entertainment business. They didn't make movies that people wanted to see. They had the infrastructure, they had the technology, they had the manpower. They just didn't make vehicles that enough people wanted to buy. They ended up trying to protect their existing business and not concentrating on the future.

--- snip ---

Why, yes, that was silly. That's all easy to say from a guy in a business where new product development is a fraction of that for car companies, outsourcing animation is a bit easier than outsourcing car parts, and the health insurance legacy costs of the car industry have proven to be an ultimately debilitating quirk of post-World War II history, because our country has never realized that the U.S. and China are the only car-making countries where the government does not acknowledge that being healthy is a citizen's human right.

Talk about competitive disadvantages.

I've thought from the beginning of the auto company assistance: if the Feds had offered to take every employee and retiree the Big Detroit 3 auto companies cover with health insurance, and move them over to Medicare or a new subsidiary of it, the carmakers probably would have jumped at that, it would've been cheaper, and it would've been a good base for moving forward on long-overdue national health care.

Above: "Don't breathe too deeply. Those costumes? Cheap -- recycled asbestos. At least they're green, right?"

Penalty Killing as a Metaphor in Life

I proudly live in Detroit, where the economy is imploding, bigwigs gather annually in Mackinac to fiddle navel gaze meet to discuss solutions while the region burns, and hockey fans know enough to give a standing ovation to an ass-kicking penalty kill.

Darren Helms was the #1 star in last night's game, but he is a metaphor for what Detroit does best: persevere.

Behold:

Lions sign Stafford as #1, perceived organizational suckiness continues

So, contrary to their fans' wishes, they Lions got the guy they apparently wanted all along. Like I was saying, it's like putting chrome spinners on a rusted-out K-car -- the team needed a chassis and motor first, and that was defense or offensive line.

So young Mr. Stafford will get almost tens of millions of dollars -- while also setting the league record for guaranteed money before playing a down -- to learn his new job in the middle of America's financial Armageddon and newly-crowned most dangerous city. Assuming he hires good boydguards, of course he's pumped:



The feedback begins:

=> Some teams don't even think Stafford's the best QB in this draft;

=> The first thing to do with this expensive new investment is don't use it for a good long time (good luck with the unemployed locals screaming to put him in when the losing begins re-starts);

=> The Lions didn't use their leverage and the contract is absurd (even when people thought they did have leverage); and

=> The Lions have totally blown up the rookie pay scale (endearing them to the league, no doubt).

Who know what the future will hold, like, if they get quality defense with their #20 pick. But today, way you look at this deal -- PR, on the field and financially -- this deal's not looking good.

My belated (as usual) thoughts on the start of the NHL Playoffs

• So many divisional series (San Jose-Anaheim, Boston-Montreal, Detroit-Columbus, Philly-Pittsburgh) which, I bet, will generate more heat that the cross-continent mash-ups (St. Louis-Vancouver, Chicago-Calgary). May we now re-align and go back to playing your way out of your division, please?
  
• Nice to see Chicago and St. Louis back in the playoffs, but I do miss the Leafs.
• BTW, speaking of the Blues, I would like finally to publicly apologize to my sorority formal date (c. 1984) for being a jerk when I watched the Wings go 3- or 4OT v. the Blues across the river at the Joe, instead of being a proper, attentive date at her event which she paid for. In the current vernacular, I was a tool, and I'm sorry.
  
• Why are the Ontario teams the black hole of the Canadian teams' playoff contingent?
• Of course, if you're the Sens, you have some nice shoulders to cry on, but don't wear those awful new third jerseys [above], or they'll run away screaming.
  
• When the NHL were only able to go to picked Versus, were they clear that Vs. would only be taking feeds from TSN and plugging in their own commercials? If they're going so cheap, why should the rest of America be denied the full Canuckian hockey experience, with Dave Hodge at the intermissions, and Canadian Tire, Future Shop and the Brick spots? Upside: welcome back to Detroit airwaves, Chris Cuthbert!
• Pure Bettman: Celine Dion might own an NHL franchise before the founder of Blackberry, who's had a five year head start.
  
• Welcome to the playoffs, Blue Jackets. Good to see that you got the memo that you had to lose the highlighter-yellow insect(?!) Civil War veteran mascot before you would be let into the playoffs.
• The only thing good about Columbus: being the closest outpost for Oprah's fave ice cream.
• Playoff beards are great. I tried to grow grew one during law school finals with the other guys. So, I do like the Wing's annual playoff theme, "The Beard is Back." I just hope no one is twisted or immature enough to mention that "beard," not unlike "teabagging," does have alternate pop culture meaning. Somewhere, this man is hoping to score tickets to a Wings-Rangers final.
  

I was too busy St. Patrick's Day to post this joke, but it won't work next year (I hope)

Apparently, at the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade, when a St. Patrick character walked down the street, instead of snakes slithering into the Hudson River, taking their place were bonused AIG executives.

W's going to need a lot of computers, since he keeps jamming crayons into the drive doors

Did the news that W got a book deal prompt Crayola stock to spike? Because I'm thinking they're going to need an awful lot of crayons to publish that thing.

Or, at least, fill it in post-sale.

NHL Realignment: Scouts v. Blues Would Be Just As Good as Royals v. the Cards (An OT Post)

One of my favorite blogs, Uni Watch, shared a neat link about the past (and future) of the NHL in Kansas City, where I have a bunch of hockey-lovin' and playin' relatives. (This Saturday, go Chip!)

The Kansas City Scouts joined the league with the Capitals, but then ended up moving to become the Colorado Rockies (bringing the mountain west Don Cherry and "Rock and Roll, Part 2"), and then turning into the New Jersey Devils. It has a nice new arena waiting for a major league tenant, and it continues to be used as leverage for any NHL or NBA team angling for new digs, just like Tampa Bay's domed stadium was for more almost two decades prior to getting the Rays via expansion.

Which is all a roundabout way to saying that the NHL needs to get smart to better compete for the shrinking North American entertainment dollar. To that end, number one is re-alignment, which I've goofed around with for a long time before this article took it on.

I don't do fantasy sports, so, y'know, give me a break.

Travel expenses must be reduced, rivalries intensified, and league-wide exposure increased. So, I propose: go to four divisions (which I have optimized for regional rivalries, though Buffalo tortures me), play each team not in your division home and home, and play the rest of your games against your division.

In the playoffs, you have to play out of your division and, just to throw in a few extra playoff gates, have seeds 4 and 5 do a home-and-home total goal playoff, like soccer. And, just for fun, forget the conferences and rotate the divisions in the last two rounds, like the NCAA basketball tournament. Ever since the league had the Stanley Cup Playoff logo with "west" on the right and "east" on the left, I've sensed that NHL's conferences were, perhaps, false distinctions.

My proposed divisions:

> New York Rangers, New York Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Columbus, Boston

> Minnesota, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto

> Washington, Tampa Bay, Florida, Carolina, Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville

> Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Colorado and Phoenix

The odds of this happening? Slim to none.

The ability to post this because I have this little soapbox? Total and absolute.

Enjoy and discuss.

Craftsmanship Comes In All Sorts of Different Forms

Fellow East Side native and old friend Scott Campbell was a Detroit punk pioneer as one of the founders of The Sillies, and during his solo work later wrote the wonderfully irresistable, "I'm Saving Myself for Angela Cartwright." Scott is now making custom guitars, and sent me a video of one of his creations. For someone who can't play an instrument, both playing and making a guitar, or any instrument, are miracles to me.

Check it out:

Non Sequitur Idiom of the Day: Mortgage "Cram Down" Edition

From NYT: "Carrots and sticks."

Kwame Kilpatrick, Public Enemy Has Some Lyrics For You

I was not surprised when Kwame Kilpatrick:

• First ran for Mayor of Detroit, because was going to be term-limited, and in an odd year, his mother's campaign structure had nothing else to do;
• Was first elected, because America's First Hip-Hop Mayor was too irresistible for the voters to pass up;
• Was re-elected in 2005, because he was running a different race -- yes, that has multiple meanings -- than Freeman Hendrix;
• Was finally caught, because he'd believed his own hype;
• Initially denied everything, because he still believed his own hype;
• Still considered himself a victim, because narcissists do that;
• Complained about his jail time, because of all the above;
• And, finally, scored a sweet gig, regardless of his boss' supposed short leash (which all 2009 wage slaves have) because money and politics make the world go 'round.

As I like to say, know that we know what the players in that hiring are, it's just that the price as finally been set.

The one thing I was surprised by: how did he do all that texting with those big, beefy ex-lineman fingers.

Remarkable. All of it.

Brett Favre Got Paid a Lot to Buy That Last Clue

So, Brett Favre finally hangs 'em up? I doubt anyone would buy another emotional press conference with crocodile tears.

While he was talented and charismatic, his one Super Bowl somehow doesn't match up with his idolatry to some.

Which I noted a long time ago. In blog years, at least.

^= "When I said I'd play one more year for the green, I meant the money."

I Would Have Quiero-ed This Case on Contingency

Remember the campaign with the chihuahua jonesing for Taco Bell? A Grand Rapids agency thought their idea got ripped off and won their trial in Michigan a few years ago. Taco Bell then sued their agency in California, and it ended up on appeal there, and on Monday, Taco Bell lost, yet again.

What was a $30 million verdict, with $12 million in interest, continues to tick-tick-tick up with new interest, the final tab running ever higher. TB should bring back the 99 cent double decker taco, sell a few dozen million and settle this thing.

This Just In: Gary Bettman Continues to Suck

If you aren't lucky enough to catch Hockey Night In Canada every Saturday night, then you clearly didn't catch their coverage of last night's NHL All-Star Game in Montreal, marking le 100e anniversaire de Les Habitants . Even without any Red Wings playing (and getting suspended for it), the game itself is such a joke that I forgot to watch it, instead catching the SAG awards in the background while working. It's just that I know what a horrible hockey game it will be, and it was: an 11-11 tie ending with the league's bastardized overtime and shootout.

Thanks to the miracle of archived video on The Internets, however, we're still able to see HNIC's Ron MacLean's annual attempt to get a straight answer out of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, which I can't figure out how to embed here, but which you can check out here. I swear, Ron must want to take a shower after talking to Bettman, especially when he gets so smarmy about a billionaire wanting to blow a quarter-billion dollars invest in an NHL franchise so he can move it to the underserved market he happens to live in.

Remember, this is the commissioner who hasn't committed to another Winter Classic, but has investigated putting it in Vegas or the Rose Bowl. Yes, the visuals of breath mist and falling snowflakes, re-connecting the game to its roots, will work so well out west.

Oy.

"Rashomon" Has Nothing to Do With Trying to Sack a Quarterback (An OT post)

A centuries-old saying is that "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." Except, apparently, when Monday-morning quarterbacking the demise of a much-loved Detroit radio station. So, in very Rashomon-like fashion, various players, current and former, have taken to dissecting the rise and fall of The Fan -- Detroit's first all-sports station, WDFN-AM -- in the midst of Obama's inaugural speech last Tuesday.

=> Former PD Gregg Henson, now out of the radio business but still aware of what the deal is, has long charted the station's up and downs here;

=> Nice guy former morning drive host Jamie Samuelsen weighs in here;

=> His former partner, Greg Brady, writes a great post -- definitely not in the "60 Second Blog" ethos -- here;

=> Now former-PD Rona Danzinger provides her witnessing of the carnage, and rebuts Brady, here;

Another axiom is that you should always follow the money. The loss of The Fan stemmed directly from Clear Channel's being sold, a deal that it was conceived during a bull market, and then ended up closing during the beginnings of the credit squeeze. You can chart the ever-increasing acrimony in what finally evolved into a shotgun wedding:

=> In November 2006, corporate owner Clear Channel agreed to sell to Mitt Romney's old place here and here; some of CC's past shenanigans, like gluttonous over-consolidation and the rusulting possible anti-trust violations, are mentioned in the second link:

=> Then, after all the governmental vetting, credit started to tighten about a year ago, causing one of the buyers to not have much to say in investors, resulting in apologists going into the "all is well" mode.

=> Finally, after an interminable 19-month due diligence process and lawsuits all around, the deal closed this past May, and a whole bunch of belt-tightening was on the horizon.

Now, everyone I ever met from The Fan ranged from at least cordial to downright awesome, a situation you rarely find at any broadcast outlet. Also, let us not forget that many other off-air people at Clear Channel, including friends, got the ziggy, too.

In the big picture, what Clear Channel has wrought has not been good for the industry beyond a handful of its higher-ups. Closer to home, the various takes range from entertaining to informative, and often both, and contain many of the avoidable mistakes and missed solutions which could've made the whole situation better. We forget, though, that while the soldiers on the front lines do the fighting and dying amidst the fog of war business, it stems from the directives from the generals above, playing their little game of Risk or Monopoly, but with real lives.

In the end, I think some essential truths are born out:

=> Terrestrial radio is an awesome business when you craft a product that reflects where it's broadcasting. Homoginizing stations across markets is ultimately a death wish.

=> It's apparent after the last few months, so it's no news flash, but the private sector will screw over everyone but themselves, if you let them.

=> The FCC should take begin to take a long, hard look at these licensees of the public airwaves, and if they aren't doing anything productive for a local market beyond providing syndicated national programming, those licenses should be in jeopardy, if not pulled.

As someone who adores radio and has had some ideas work in the industry, I have long held out hope that these corporate behemoths would ultimately have to divest the stations for any number of reasons, from anti-trust compliance to wanting the tax write-downs to, perhaps, ultimately suffocating from under their own weight. Then, after prices are re-set to a sane market level, local owners will once again be able to craft unique programming visions which are now being relegated to the wonderful, but limited, Internets.

Bottom line, this is yet another example of the path corporate America is now wrongly pursuing to see better days, what I call "downsizing to greatness."

Because, really, have you ever seen that happen?

And now, let us remember that Elvis Costello had this whole scenario sussed out more than 30 years ago:

Life is the Journey, Not the Destination

Yesterday (January 18) was my birthday, and with the holiday and the inauguration on tap, it's a good time to keep things in perspective. So, let's put the late, great Randy Pausch lecture up here, just so it's easy to get to:

Running the NHL, Gary Bettman is a Blind Squirrel

In the sense of a blind squirrel occasionally finding a nut, that is.

So, despite Bettman (sucks!) being incomprehensibly coy about continuing a twice-successful annual event to number three and beyond, congrats to the league on its successful Winter Classic on New Year's Day, where the Wings downed the 'Hawks at Wrigley. I agree with my friend Hockey Dino that is was a great event: good hockey game, great aestethics, increased TV ratings. There were some pros and cons, like: as great as the unis were (especially the Chicago use of old school off-white), Bob Costas seemed like he was bummed slumming doing hockey outdoors on New Year's Day.

I personally thought the game should've been at Solider Field to get a bigger crowd in, but doing that would've eliminated the perceived North Side / Wrigley cachet, allowed the 'Hawks to keep Red Wings fans out, and, most importantly, would have prevented the NHL and Blackhawks from sufficiently holding up Chicago's season ticket holders.

As much as there are now calls for Michigan Stadium or Beaver Stadium (please, not Sidney Crosby again) to host the event soon, may I suggest that you have to spread this thing around: the next two events should be Rangers / Maple Leafs in New Yankee Stadium, and Bruins / Canadiens at Fenway. (A wild card possibility for next year: the Canucks hosting in the lead-up to their Winter Olympics). This way, there's no better way to go old school, playing outside, than by going with the Original Six.