Monday, March 2, 2009

It's all storm, all the time on NY1 this morning, with the station's poor correspondents sent to various parts of the city to stand outside and freeze half to death all morning for a story with little in the way of new developments beyond the school closings. Kristen Shaughnessy's in some hellhole in Queens, Roger Clark is in Brooklyn and Michael Scotto (who looks about 12 in that knit hat) is on the West side. 

Scotto must be pretty pissed that after a plum assignment in Tokyo, his first assignment upon his return is to cover this crappy story. (Quick aside- I thought his series in Tokyo, on how that city is handling environmental issues, was pretty interesting, and I'm duly impressed with NY1 for sending him over there and not slashing travel budgets in These Economic Times).

There have been a couple of humorous items this morning, including a hilarious story about Staten Island Chuck, the aggressive groundhog who bit a chunk out of Bloomberg's finger on Groundhog Day. Apparently there is talk that this was a political statement on the part of the groundhog, and some silly person has gone to the trouble of making T-shirts depicting Chuck in the iconic Che Guevara pose. 

There was also an amusing item from In The Papers, with PK referencing a Daily News story about dumb things that air travelers have tried to take on board. PK's favorite was the passenger who tried to get on a plane with a gasoline-powered chainsaw. 

Another funny thing I saw was actually a commercial - I can't believe I forgot to write about this in the last post. It's for a wedding venue called Grand Prospect Hall, which, judging by the commercial, looks like the kind of place where you'd have your wedding if you are the daughter of a Russian mobster. 

The bulk of the commercial consists of various images of the extremely garish and tacky rooms at the venue, accompanied by a cheesy string-based composition that gets increasingly urgent until it builds to a crescendo, at which time your television screen explodes into a veritable visual orgy of images and colors so over-the-top tacky they make Liberace look like a study in tasteful nuance. 

Just when you think the tackiness has reached a maximum, the commercial cuts to a shot of the owners, an older couple who are dressed in keeping with the establishment they own. The wife is wearing a spangly red sequined sweater and jacket twinset; in some Eastern European-sounding accent, she declares, "We make your dreams come true!" Well, I guess if your dreams are to get married in a room festooned with neon lights that change colors every so often, then yes, they probably do. 

2 comments:

  1. I love how Canadian Pat is being this morning. He's basically scoffing at the school closings and words like "blizzard." When he's not on screen, his eye rolling is nearly audible. He even gave Roger the old "when I was a kid, we walked uphill both ways to get to school in giant snow drifts" spiel.

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  2. Vat du ju min bay, "Eastern European-sounding?"

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