George’s slightly off-center view of the world
People who interest me
E.J. Jackson, founder and president of Jackson Limousine Service in Los Angeles, died last week of a heart attack. He was sixty-six years old. His thirty-plus-year project of providing Thanksgiving turkey dinner to those who really need it will continue.
If you did not stay up late election night, you probably haven’t seen this. The talking heads were preening in the spotlight, making light-hearted banter about the pundits, including themselves, and how wrong they were. Oh well. Then Foreign correspondent Richard Engel came on and spoiled their party.
Unfortunately, this clip doesn’t include their reaction to Engel’s downer.
Domino’s Pizza impresario, Tom Monaghan had his “Aha” moment, so the story goes, after digesting the results from his surveys of pizza customers. He learned that for many, having the product brought to them was more important than whether the product was any good. And so began the thirty minutes or it’s free Domino’s delivery promise. Enough people were killed or maimed by Domino’s delivery drivers trying to beat the deadline, that the company no longer makes that guarantee.
Lady GaGa is making news with her latest album, just released. Oops, I mean “dropped.” Some of the new songs were recorded on analog equipment, on tape, as it was done way back when, before the 1s and 0s of digital recording took over in the nineteen-nineties. Digital recording has the advantage that a song can be pieced together from numerous takes, a few seconds from here, a section from there. The off-key parts, whether vocal or instrumental, can be corrected with a bit of digital wizardry called Auto-Tune.
“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.” – Bob Newhart
“Queen Bey and the Dixie Chicks, I thought that was just power, just raw power. I just love that it was feminine raw power.” – Garth Brooks.
We were okay with Charley Pride and now Darius Rucker, but this? Here’s what outraged country music fans at the recent Country Music Awards. Read about it here.
My personal favorite country music outrage: Del McCoury does Richard Thompson.
Aroldis Chapman, closer for the World Series champion 
Chicago Cubs throws the fastest pitches ever recorded: 105 miles-per-hour. He also is the first player to be penalized under Major League Baseball’s domestic violence rules. Not to worry, though, his accuser, Cristina Chapman, mother of one of his children, was the special guest of the Cubs at Wednesday’s game.
The allegations had caused the Dodgers to void a trade deal with the Reds for him. They made a deal with the Yankees, who subsequently traded him to the Cubs.
And the $1 million in lost salary for his thirty-game suspension? Chapman’s share of the playoff pool will be close to half that.
