It was 40 years ago today that I awoke, like millions of Americans in the eastern half of the United States, to learn New York Sen. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated following his victory in the California presidential primary.
Hard though it maybe for so many younger readers to grasp, in those days there was no 24-hour news cycle, no unending cable news networks, no Internet.
On the evening of June 5, 1968, all the early exit polling had indicated RFK would emerge the winner of the California primary, effectively nudging Sen. Eugene McCarthy out of the primary fight.
And so we went to bed, only to awaken on the morning of June 6 to learn Kennedy had been mortally wounded by a lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.
I cannot begin to explain the depth of sadness, which swept over the nation. Bobby had been more than an heir apparent to the legacy of his murdered brother John F. Kennedy. It truly was, to this then 18-year-old young man, a loss of that intangible sense of all that this country could and ought to be.
Make no mistake, despite the mop of unruly hair, the angelic sereneness of Bobby’s demeanor, he was by all accounts a skilled and ruthless politician, as adept at the throwing of sharp elbows as any pol who ever kissed a baby.
It is not too far of a stretch to suggest that had Kennedy lived, he would have won the nomination and the presidency.
Can you remotely fathom how the dour, ever-sweating Richard Nixon would have held up on a debate stage opposite the young, charismatic, articulate, poet of the hustings? It wouldn’t have been pretty. It would certainly have been decisive.
Alas the Robert Kennedy presidency is a history chapter forever lost.
This much we can reasonably assume, though.
Chances are the riots in the streets during the 1968 Democratic Convention would never have taken place, since an anti-war candidate was poised to win the nomination.
And thus, a President Robert F. Kennedy would have moved quickly to end the debacle of the Vietnam War, which was tearing the country apart.
And the office of the presidency, now occupied by the brother of a martyred, beloved president, would never have been subjected to the debasement of Richard Nixon’s Watergate.
Who knows how two terms of a Kennedy Administration would have influenced the careers of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, George W.W. Bush? We’ll never know.
If you are ever in Washington you should include a visit to the Arlington National Cemetery.
Among the graves of thousands of fallen soldiers and dignitaries, you’ll also find the final resting place of John F. Kennedy, where the assassinated president is joined by his wife Jacqueline and son Patrick Bouvier, who died shortly after he was born and an unnamed stillborn daughter.
An eternal flame marks the location.
A few feet away however, you’ll see a simple white cross. This is Bobby’s plot, just as powerful in its simple elegance as his older brother’s grave site.
Linked forever in death, you can’t help but stand there and wonder - what might have been, what might have been?
Among the many accolade’s taking note of the passing of actor/director Mel Ferrer, while they all mention his marriage to Audry Hepburn, none pay due homage to his appearance in what is unarguably, indisputably, without a doubt one of the worst movies ever made - “The Norseman,” which was shot right here in Tampa back in 1978.
Irony abounds! Almost all of the obituaries detailing Ferrer’s passing at 90 earlier this week repeatedly cite the late actor’s long standing distaste for - acting.
“I curl up and freeze when I have to act,” Ferrer once told an interviewer. And if anything would have induced the mother of all fetal positions, it most certainly would have been finding oneself cast in “The Norseman,” a Charles B. Pierce production, who was to directing what the Myanmar government is to emergency management.
“The Norseman” starred Lee Majors, then at the height of his “Six Million Dollar Man” fame, as Thorvald, a Viking warrior. The movie also featured, in addition to Mel Ferrer’s Viking King Eurich such screen luminaries, Cornel Wilde and Jack Elam, whom this scribbler had the privilege to share several cocktails with during filming.
Aside from the lousy script, the cheesy set design and Majors’ turgid performance, “The Norseman” managed to find even more ways to to become of the worst movies ever made in the history of the medium.
In several beach scenes, one can spot tire tracks in the sand, jet vapor trails in the sky, even an oil tanker sailing off the Gulf of Mexico coast.
As well in one shipboard sequence a Viking sailor can be seen wearing a - watch.
Despite his public dismissiveness toward acting Ferrer remained very much in demand in front of the camera well into his senior years.
There was no rational reason for to accept a role in what was obviously going to be such a cinematic disaster - unless, of course, perhaps an alimony payment was over due.
But there he was nonetheless, Hepburn’s former husband, a man who had appeared in “Scaramouche.” “Lili,” “War and Peace” and produced “Wait Until Dark,” talking stage directions from Charles B. Pierce, to whom a camera was a weapon of mass embarrassment.
From time to time “The Norseman” shows up late at night on cable television. If you are a glutton for punishment, or perhaps regard yourself as something of an aficionado of the truly horrible, bad, very bad movie - this is your cup of tea.
And try not to think too badly of Ferrer, Wilde and Elam. Obviously they made this movie hoping no one would notice and judging from the box office receipts, they weren’t too far off the mark.
This is what happens when a gutless corporation runs head long into a feckless, dim-wit with a syndication deal.
What should we call this insanity? Fast food McCarthyism?
A few days ago an American corporation, Dunkin’ Donuts pulled an advertising campaign featuring food goddess, Rachel Ray, simply because columnist Michelle Malkin is a complete, unmitigated dope.
Malkin, who has to be dumber than a sack of doughnut holes, got her John Birch Society card all in a wad, merely because of an advertising campaign , featuring Ray holding a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
And the problem here was?
In the ad, Ray is wearing a simple black and white silk scarf around her neck. That’s it. That’s the problem, at least according to the Bill O’Reilly in sensible pumps.
In her column Malkin railed against the Dunkin ‘Donuts ad for allowing Ray to pose “... in what appeared to be a black-and-white keffiyeh.”
The keffiyeh is a traditional Middle Eastern head-wear worn through the regions by tens of millions of people, including, yes, even evil-doing terrorists.
Alas, the problem for Malkin was that Ray was not wearing a keffiyeh in the ad, a point even conceded by Glenn Beck in a hoop skirt, when she wrote “...appeared” to be a black and white keffiyeh, which would be sorta like writing Michell Malkin “appeared” to not even know she was alive.
Unfortunately, all the phony posturing and outrage by Malkin eventfully prompted the company to actually pull the ad to “avoid the possibility of misperception.”
That’s too bad.
It would have been nice to see the company issue a press release that said something like this:
“Michelle Malkiin has to be dumber than a sack of bearclaws.
“Does this imbecile really believe we would sit around a conference table at our corporate headquarters and run an ad that would offend our customers?
“Does this crime against journalism believe someone in our offices said: ‘Hey, I have a great idea! Let’s have Rachel wearing terrorist garb in the ad!’ and that we all said “Bully! What a fabulous notion!”?
“But you know what? It’s really not worth putting up with all this right-wing blather, so we killed the ad. And no, we are not planning another campaign featuring Rachel burning the American flag.”
And that probably also explains why I would be a miserable failure as a marketing strategist.
In attacking the memoir critical of George W. Bush’s regime, former press secretary Scott McClellan has been described by the White House as your classic “former disgruntled employee.”
Well, yeah, do ya think?
After all, if you had been lied to and played for a chump by your bosses, sent out to spread disinformation to the national press corps, don’t you suppose you’d be a pinch “disgruntled,” too?
There is a temptation to regard McClellan’s's revelations that the Iraq War was a conflict born of hubris, a “strategic blunder,” advanced by an incurious president given to “self-deception” as a kind of vindication for the millions of Americans who opposed this insane foreign policy delusion from the very beginning.
But then again, those of us who have opposed this war already knew - obviously well ahead of Scott McClellan’s epiphany - of this debacle in-the-making.
To be sure any additional vindication is a nice thing. So really, what else is there to say, except: “Welcome, welcome, welcome Scott, Come on in to the pool of truth. The water is just fine.”
In another life long ago and far away, I plied my trade as a film critic.
I used to joke I spent more time in darkened rooms than most hookers, such is the life of those of us addicted to the - movies.
Here’s one way, at least for me, to determine just how severe one’s love affair with the flicks burns.
I am almost 59 years old. I have been going to the movies for more than a half a century and yet, when the lights dim and the curtain pulls back I still feel that excitement that (hopefully) something exciting, or special is about to happen on the big screen. Even worse, I like getting to the theater early to see the previews.
You’re probably right. I’m hopeless.
And so it was with that anxious anticipation that the Bombshell of the Balkans and I took in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” over the Memorial Day weekend.
If I was still formally in the film critic racket I probably would have given the movie somewhere between two-and-half and three stars.
Is it a great movie? No. Will the fourth installment of this action-adventure franchise represent an historic moment in the evolution of cinema? Hardly.
Still, if you are a lover of the movies “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was a delight to sit through and enjoy for the simplest of pleasures.
By any measure Harrison Ford has enjoyed one of the great careers as a Hollywood leading man.
Where to begin? “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Blade Runner,” “Witness,” “Mosquito Coast,” “Presumed Innocent,” “Working Girl,” “The Fugitive,” “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger” and,of course “Air Force One.”
And if you’ve never seen “Frantic,” you are missing one of Ford’s best little treasures on screen.
It’s been a wonderful run for hugely successful box office hits for Ford, a resume the envy of virtually any actor.
However since “Air Force One” in 1997, Ford had fallen on some hard times, with a string of either dreadful movies and/or box office disasters - “Six Days Seven Nights’ (oh dear), “Random Hearts” (ugh). “K-19: The Widowmaker” (Run away! Run Away!), “What Lies Beneath” (Harrison Ford as a bad guy? Please!) and the simply horrible “Firewall,” an attempt to set “Air Force One” in a bank. It wasn’t pretty.
So despite whatever the shortcomings associated with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” it was still good to see one of the screen’s most popular figures once more score with a hit.
It is not an easy feat for 60-ish actors to pull off the action-adventure genre.
Clint Eastwood was still chasing bad guys at 63 in “In The Line Of Fire.” Sean Connery played several action roles well into his 60s, too before realizing he just looked silly at 69 romancing Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Entrapment.”
John Wayne, naturally, stayed in the saddle all the way to the end with “The Shootist” at 70. And Henry Fonda, at 63, seemed to revel in portraying one of the most brutal heavies in screen history in “Once Upon A Time In The West.”
Harrison Ford shot “Indy 4” at 64. He looks terrific and performed many of own stunts. Not bad.
But enough is enough.
To be sure, Ford still has a long career as a character actor ahead of him if he chooses to follow the example of Clint Eastwood, who has allowed his screen career to age with dignity.
Still, for a few hours the other day, it was grand fun to turn the clock back just a bit.
But only for a bit.
Kim Bailey is the owner of Bailey’s great restaurant on Rome Ave. in Hyde Park. He was also one of the judges in my chili contest back in March.
Apparently he has recovered and not only that, says he will be serving the championship recipe Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, which are the only nights the restaurant is open to the public. He is making his version of the one won by the Krewe of Zingaro.
To that end Bailey says 100 percent of all chili sales will go to the Krewe of Zingaro’s fund for the St, Joseph’s Children Cancer Group. I’m getting my spoon and heading over.
It’s Sunday, the humidity is down, heat is up and the Scratch My Back benefit concert is about the best place to be this afternoon, starting around 5 p.m. and going on until the last band is tossed out.
The venue is the legendary SkipperDome out behind Skippers Smokehouse where the Quivering Rhythm Hounds will open the concert, followed by Sharon (of WFLA AM fame) and the Boys and then the great Johnny G. Lyon band.
It’s all for the Humane Society of Tampa Bay and also as a reminder not to lock your pets in enclosed cars or anything else, especially this summer.
I’ll be giving away raffle prizes along with Party Marti Ryan all night. Get your shades, flip-flops and straw hat (even after dark you will be so cool) and come on out.
I think of any good number of reasons to hole up near the closest air conditioner this weekend. Memorial Day around here is more or les the official start of summer but the sticky mugginess we all know and love settled in about a week ago.
I’m bracing myself for Sunday’s"Scratch My Back’’ benefit for the Humane Society at Skipper’s Smokehouse. It starts later in the afternoon, or whenever it is Pinetop Peterson and his Quivering Rhythm Hounds get their act together and get cranked up on the stage of the mighty Skipperdome. Pinetop is the guy who has been organizing this event for more than a decade, as a remembrance of his beautiful black lab Molly who died after being left in a hot car by someone else .
This year the Hounds will again be on stage, along with Sharon and the Boys (Sharon being Sharon Taylor of WFLA radio fame)i and then the great Johnny G. Lyon band.
I get to be on stage during the breaks, giving away prizes and raffle tickets with co-emcee Marti (Party) Ryan with everything going to the Humane Society.
If you’ve never been to the Skipperdome, well, wear shorts, flip flops, some cool shades and maybe a hat. Even after dark you will look like you belong.
This was probably inevitable. Sad, but inevitable.
As her campaign slowly devolves into its death throes, Hillary Clinton has resorted to blaming sexism on her failure to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
Here’s what Clinton told The Washington Post recently.
“The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, ar at least more accepted, and ... there should be equal rejection of the sexism and racism when it raises its ugly head,” she said, adding, “It does seem as though the press is at least not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing more than misogynists.”
And then Clinton went on to bemoan lewd t-shirts and comments she has experienced on the campaign trail.
To which one can only respond with, and this is a highly technical political science term, balderdash.
A 60-year-old candidate with all the hustings charm of Ma Barker and voice that could crack the mirrors on the Hubble Space Telescope, still has managed to best a huge field of Democratic candidates to come within a eye-lash of capturing her party’s presidential nomination.
So please, if Hillary Clinton were truly the victim of sexism, her campaign wouldn’t have made past the Iowa caucuses.
Along the way, Clinton defeated heavyweights Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, John Edwards and a host of other candidates, as well.
Regardless of your views toward Clinton, considering her Imelda Marcos-like political and personal baggage, she waged an extraodinarily fine campaign, proving herself to be a formidable political force. Good for her.
But all political campaigns produce winners and losers. And instead of accepting the fact she has come up all, too tantalizingly short, Hillary Clinton has now risked her dignity by leaving the the presidential race as an embittered, angry sore loser. It’s unbecoming. It’s embarrassing. It’s, alas, oh so Clintonian.
Hillary Clinton conveniently overlooks she has been elected twice to the United States Senate by overwhelming margins - hardly the victim of sexism there.
And during the course of the Democratic presidential primary season, as she herself has often noted, she is at least tied with or (depending on how you count) even ahead of Barack Obama in the popular vote. Sexism at work here? Really?
She received numerous endorsements from newspapers around the country as well as all manner of special interest groups, who apparantly didn’t care she was a woman.
Are there plenty of prejudices to be found on the stump? You betcha.
Would anyone disagree that Barack Obama has lost votes simply because he’s black? Has John McCain been subjected to ageism? Duh!
Mitt Romney most certainly experienced an anti-Mormon bias. And let’s face, there are still some people out there who are irrationally fearful of a Catholic president.
It is certainly true, as well that Hillary Clinton has indeed been subjected to sexism, but no more or less a bias that any other other high profile candidate has had to endure.
Clinton’s real problem is that she treated the presidential race more as an entitlement rather than an honor to be earned. She made huge miscalculations in campaign strategy and blew enormous amounts of money. And she came up short. Rightfully so.
Men often make the same mistakes. See Giuliani, Rudy.
Presidential political life is a tough, very tough arena. To the victor go the spoils. And eventually, the crybabies go home to Chappaqua - as they should.
This was one of those classic cases of a man born to wear a certain kind of hat. Never was there a greater moment of kismet betweenn lid and head.
Standing in front of the stage where Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was soon to arrive to deliver a rousing stump speech, stood Ronnie Fuld, a tall, thin, elegant black man in a neatly pressed blue-striped shirt and his hat - a dark, ever so very slightly rumpled brown fedora with the brim turned up ever so gently.
To put it simply it was one of the greatest hats I had ever seen. I hat that had that look about it, which said: “The stories I could tell you.” This was a hat of history, a hat of culture, a hat that had been places, done things, seen stuff.
“Oh lord, please,” Fuld laughed when asked about his hat, agreeing he and his hat had been around.
Fuld bought the hat in 1979 while serving in the U.S. Army in Germany. They have been inseparable ever since.
A retired Sergeant First Class, Fuld was playing a bit of hooky from his teaching position at Palm Harbor University High School, where he conducts a course on world history. Three of his sons serve in the military. Two have survived tours of duty in Iraq.
Fuld wanted to attend Obama’s rally for two reasons.
First he was hoping to hear if the candidate would say anything about recruiting former military personnel to become teachers. Alas the issue didn’t come up.
And secondly, Fuld, who while he voted for Obama in the Florida primary, still hasn’t made up his mind between the Illinois senator and John McCain, whose military service and time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam the retired sergeant admires greatly.
Then there was the lapel pin thing. Although he recently started wearing an American flag lapel pin, Obama had been roundly criticized by his opponents for not wearing the adornment. And it bothered Fuld, too.
There was no gentle way to put this to Fuld.
Was he aware if you log onto the official presidential websites of: Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, that none of them -Republican and Democrat alike - are wearing an American flag lapel pin?
Indeed, the only official portrait of an American president wearing the flag pin is the current incumbent, George W. Bosh.
Fuld was mildly stunned. “Really?”
Yep, really.
We went out to a seafood restaurant last night. This one was in Westshore Plaza where they have almost a village of new restaurants. Like the others, I guess you would describe this one as “upscale chain.’’ And it was pretty good. The service was attentive, the fish was fresh and I even had something called a “key lime martini’’ that was like key lime pie with a kick.
Where they lost me was when I said I wanted a dozen oysters. This place has four different kinds of oysters to choose from, except that each order is for four oysters at $7.50 an order. I mean geez, it’s like that pound of coffee you buy in the grocery these days that is less than a pound.
“You mean,’’ I said a little too loudly for my wife to the waiter, “that if I ordered a dozen oysters that would be thirty bucks?’’
The waiter only nodded, certainly wondering what cheap local yahoo he had been stuck with.
I don’t care. This is Florida, and it’s not even resort Florida or one of those Disney jobs and thirty bucks for a dozen oysters is way over any body’s top.
I mean isn’t it enough you risk your health eating raw shell fish without getting a raw deal at the same time?
The most interesting story in Mother Trib today is the discovery of a sunken vessel in the Hillsborough River, somewhere near Lowry Park. A team of archeaologists from the Florida Aquarium made the find and say the ship appears to be etween 80 and a 100 feet long. Records indicate it could be a Confederate blockade runner from the Civil War.
Maybe. I do recall going across the river on Hillsborough Ave. to church with my grandfather. We would always see the wreckage of the originial Gasparilla ship stuck in the muck where it had been beached and later burned.
I suppose it’s not too likely, but if those archaeologists come up with some beads on that blockade runner they might have to re-evaluate their discovery. One can only dream.
So it is no secret things are bad. How bad was the news this week contained in a report of Tampa’s economic ranking with six Southern cities. The semi-annual report was released this week by the Tampa Bay Partnership and it ranked the Tampa Bay area dead last against five other metro areas: Atlanta, Dallas, Jacksonville, Charlotte and Raleigh\Durham.
The numbers are based on a number of indicators including employment, home affordability and housing permit growth.
Not included in the numbers are a lack of political leadership and continued low salaries and a floundering public school system.
Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean is going to be in town Monday. Political reporter Wendy March quotes local party leaders as saying the purpose of the visit is reconciliation. And while he’s here they will hold a $1,000 a plate dinner, which is a pretty steep price for crow.
But the party faithful have no shame. They cheated Florida voters this year, denied them the opportunity of picking a candidate and now here they are asking for money. They’ll get it too because power is more important to party leaders than being fair to voters.
They don’t care that they are more than a little responsible for a field so weak on both sides you almost wish nobody would win.
As subtle hints that he just might be potentially certifiably insane, do you think that maybe, just maybe when Edward Covington was found sobbing face down on the floor surrounded by mutilated cats, a reasonable person might have concluded this chap was operating on a totally foreign plane of reality?
And yet, even though he was indeed charged with animal cruelty in 2005 for the brutalized cats, Edward Covington was still permitted to serve as a corrections officer for the Florida Department of Corrections, until he finally resigned in 2006.
Covington was never prosecuted for the horrific abuse of animals, which does get the mind to pondering what might have happened if the man now accused in the murder and mutilation of his girlfriend Lisa Freiberg and her two children, Zachary, 7, and Samantha, 2, on Mother"s Day had been held legally accountable for the violent mistreatment of animals.
Might Freiberg and her children still be alive?
It is also noteworthy that, in addition to giving a statement to Hillsborough County Sheriff’s investigators in which, he admitted his role in the deaths of Freiberg and her children, Covington has also admitted to killing the family’s German Shepherd.
Who knows? Who knows if Covington had received the obvious psychological help he needed in 2005, perhaps last Sunday’s blood bath in Frieberg’s Lutz mobile home could have been avoided. Alas, we’ll never know.
What we do know though is the mutilation of animals is often the early sign of future, even more deadly mayhem. See, Dahmer, Jeffrey.
Because it appears Covington never received the help he so desperately needed in 2006, you could make a case that from the day she was born that same year, two-year-old victim Samantha Freiberg’s days were numbered.
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