Sigh

Snow falls on Boston.

By the way, who knew that the giant green statue in front of the Pru was called “Quest Eternal?” We always thought it was just called Man Reaching for his Pants.

another By The Way, from that same photo gallery: this photo reminded us of our friend Graham. Not sure why, it just did.

(Note: the links to the above links may not work correctly if boston.com updates its photo gallery. If so, all of the above references will make no sense. So no calls or letters please.)

More Oscar odds and ends

• Going to the movies in LA is a different experience. At the theater we go to, the crowd is what you'd expect to find at an art gallery. Lots of cordoroy and folks in square-rimmed glasses. It’s also the type of place where portraits of Cindy Sheehan hang in the theater’s lobby, and any reference to George Bush elicits boos from the audience (as happened at a recent screening of Breach). However, in our eyes the theater forfeited most of its movie snob credentials when it reserved its special cinerama-capable Dome screen for successive screenings of Norbit and Ghost rider.
  

• Menino’s former press secretary comments on the Departed's Oscar win. Of course he bemoans the fact that that the mayor wasn't acknowledged in Scorsese's speech. If you’ve followed Boston politics at all, this should come as absolutely no surprise. (Truth be told, we think it’s a nice post. He links his former boss to an Oscar winner- something nobody else is in a hurry to do. That’s loyalty.)

• This exchange is a nice little summary of everything we’ve been told to expect here in Hollywood:

"Backstage, Ms. Lansing said she had not known that Mr. Cruise was going to give her the award. “I saw him at an Oscar party a few days before, and he was sort of cold to me,” she said. Onstage, she said, he had whispered in her ear: “This is an honor. I really wanted to do this, you know how much I love you.” From the New York Times.

(For what it's worth, our experience here so far has been nothing but great. We're surrounded by some very generous people, all of whom have lived up to their word. )

• An iPhone ad appeared during the Oscars broadcast. We just watched it, and are not at all surprised to see that the iPhone ad featured every kind of phone except for the iPhone itself. Hmmm… still no actual working phone yet?

Oscar Night in Hollywoodland

We’re staying not too far from where the Oscars were held last night. Hollywood on Oscar night reminded us a little of Boston during the DNC, but without the protestors. Instead of cars full of cops in riot gear racing down the street, we saw cars full of valets racing down the street to the next party. We tried to stay away from the main area around the Chinese theater, but no matter how far away, your were liable to turn a corner and bump into an Oscar party. Sure sign that you were driving by one: Traffic cones in the street in front of the place, and at least 10 valets and many more uniformed cops and bouncers hanging out in front.

So how did we spend Oscar night? We went to the movies. A great time to go- all the hard core movie goers were at home, glued to their TVs. The place was empty. The movie we saw was Letters from Iwo Jima. We liked it. Some thoughts on the movie:

• Depressing, given the subject matter, but very well made. It was graphic without being exploitive.

• Death by hand grenade is not a pleasant thing to experienceDid a great job of showing us the Japanese point of view, of being invaded by legions of faceless American soldiers.
  

• One lesson we took away from the film: When a commander actually has to tell his troops to stop committing ritual suicide in the middle of an engagement, maybe things aren’t going your way.

• Oscar worthy? Who are we to say? But if its eligible for Best Picture, then we think some of the actors should have gotten a nomination. As hard as it is to be an actor, imagine having to memorize all your lines in Japanese.

• One little detail we really appreciated was that Eastwood cast very distinctive looking actors in each of the signature roles. Our biggest war movie pet peeve is when directors present soldiers who all look and sound alike and make it impossible to sort out who the characters are. This was the biggest problem with Band of Brothers and the Thin Red Line- once you put the helmets on, most of the rank and file soldiers all looked alike. (Quick- tell us one of the names of the soldiers from either movie. Bet you can’t. Aliens and Saving Private Ryan are two examples of movies that did it the right way- the characters all looked, acted, and sounded very different from one another. Same thing with Iwo Jima: the main character is a skinny frail actor with a boyish face; his best buddy is tall and thick. The old-school admiral is thin and grey haired; the charismatic colonel who arrives just before the battle always wears a white shirt and riding boots, etc. A small detail, but once the fighting starts, this type of stuff really helps you keep all the characters straight.

Oscar Night in Boston

We were asked to help write a short video that would be played at the Ellie Fund’s annual Oscar Night Celebration on Sunday. It was a 3 minute skit that will be shown during the event, starring Ernie Boch Jr. and local political people and celebrities. We submitted a take-off on The Departed, that featured Governor Deval Patrick slamming Ernie Boch's broken wrist onto the mahogany table in the Governors Council Room.

They didn't accept it, but they used some of our lines so we are still one of the credited writers, so far as we know. If the final version ever makes it online we'll let you know.

Catching Up

Some items and things of note from the past few weeks that we’re still catching up on …

Best wishes and a speedy recovery to a friend of this site, Kelley McCormick and his wife Kim. Kelley just donated a kidney to his wife. Most guys are content with giving their wife flowers, but Kelley was always one of those guys who goes the extra mile. Read about it here.

Last night was one of the best moments in all of sports: Goalie fight!


Ottawa vs buffalo, a late hit led to a brawl, and the star of the evening was the Ottawa goalie, Ray Emery.

Here's a video of the whole melee. Before it was over, he and Buffalo’s top fighter went at it, and Emery held his own. He was even laughing during the fight. How often is it that a team’s best fighter is their goalie? Great stuff.

“But wait” you say. “I thought that it was protocol for the 2 goalies to find each other during a brawl.” That is correct. Seems that Emery did find Martin Biron, the Buffalo goalie- - and quickly dispatched him, before heading back into the pile. Where he met Peters. Emery, by the way, is a huge boxing fan, and once wore a mask with an image of Mike Tyson painted on it.

Outstanding. Still not the best goalie fight we’ve ever seen –that title’s shared by the 1997 fight between Mike Vernon and Patrick Roy and the fight between Roy and Chris Osgood in ‘98.

Need more? Sports Illustrated has a GREAT gallery of the best goalie fights, with photos and videos.

Dispatch from Hollywoodland

A photo taken inside the Amoeba music store on Sunset, one of the best music stores we’ve ever seen. Via Flickr.com


Now we know why there are so many cool record stores in LA. It’s because the radio stations here suck. LA radio is simply awful. We are at a loss to understand how they program their song selection. It is not unusual for a Coldplay song to be followed by by a Sinatra song, then followed by New Edition. On the same station. Among the songs we’ve heard so far:

• I Wanna Sex You up, Color me Bad.

• Hello, Lionel Richie

• Every Little Step I Take, New Edition.

And these are all on mainstream, popular music stations, not those Mike FM or 80’s stations.

Usually, when driving thru a new city, it takes about 15 minutes to find 1 or 2 radio stations that will carry you through your journey. It’s been 20 days, and we still haven’t found a go-to FM station. Instead, we're using all 6 presets on our car radio, and it’s not unheard of for us to cycle through all of them 11 times before finding a song that is acceptable. Is there an LA equivalent of BCN or FNX? Nope. It's more like a collection of all those college radio stations we hated back in the day, where the DJ’s would play anything that strikes them as cool or ironic.

The sports radio isn’t that much better either. You don’t know what Hell is until you've been forced to listen to two hours of Padres baseball talk.

Dispatch from Hollywoodland

Day 19 in Los Angeles, and we still haven’t been carjacked…

As most of you may recall, we temporarily relocated our world headquarters to Los Angeles, CA. We arrived here February 2, and we’ve been settling in ever since. (took us a while to get connected back to the Internet. Seems that when you live in the future, no one gives you a computer when you arrive at work. You’re expected to arrive with your own laptop, much like members of previous generations were expected to bring their own pens and paper to work. Who knew?)

Unfortunately, we can't tell you what we're doing here. Upon our arrival we were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, promising that we would not divulge much of what we see or hear while at our new gig (who knew we’d go all the way to LA, only to end up working for the Deval Patrick Transition Team).

In fact, we’re not sure we should even tell you the name of the thing we’re working on. Instead, here are some of the rumored reasons we’ve heard to explain our trip out to LA:

• We’re in LA searching for Suge Knight, so that we can get him to produce our new Folk Rap album.
  
  
• We joined a Magazine Crew, and are traveling the country selling subscriptions to Men’s Vogue and Lucky Magazine door to door.
  
  
• As part of a new law requiring every Reality Show to have at least 1 jackass contestant from Boston, we’ve been drafted and sent to LA to participate in the ‘07 round of auditions.
  
  
• It’s our annual pilgrimage to the Scientology World Headquarters.
  
  
• We’re researching the sequel to Ten Days in December, and are searching for the CEO of the Keebler Elves. (We need to act soon; a lot of folks are starting to jump on this revisionist Santa Claus bandwagon)
  
  
• A wise man once said, if you want to pursue your dream, you need to go where they do the thing you want to do. And is there anyplace with more carnies than CA?
  
  
• We had to vacate our Back Bay HQ get so they could begin construction on the new Apple Store. (we were initially bitter about leaving the area just as they finally got one of these stores, but not anymore. Here in LA, an Apple Store is as easy to find as one of those Things Remembered Stores back in MA)
  
  
• Let’s just say it's time someone brought this whole Rosie O’Donnell business to a swift and violent conclusion, once and for all.
  

So far, all is going well, although we do regret taking the Fung Wah bus out here from Boston. Trust us, next time you see a cross country bus ride advertised for only $45, remind yourself that some things are too good to be true.

Some of the highlights so far:

• Our 1st day in LA , we sit down for breakfast. Sitting behind us: Soleil Moon Frye. Yes, THE Punky Brewster. (emboldened by this 1980's celebrity sighting, we spent the rest of the weekend hoping to bump into the girl from Small Wonder, but to no avail)

• At dinner this past Saturday nite, we may or may not have sat next to Scarlett Johansson. This will devastate the littlest member of the Ten, who has a monster crush on her and anyone who just looks like her)
  
  
• But we definitely did sit next to one of the girls from Mean Girls at that same dinner.
  
  
• At breakfast Sunday morning, we were among Gina Gershon, Joanne Whaley, and the Cheerleader from Heroes.
  
  
• Driving into Fred Segal's this weekend, we had to stop the car to so that the bald kid who plays Lex Luthor could pass.
  
  
• We also had dinner with an editor from the Cartoon Network. His current gig is editing Ben 10, one of their Saturday morning cartoons. Fun guy. Like us, he was hoping to score tickets to the George Lucas session of the ongoing Museum of TV and Radio Paley Festival. “But I wasn’t going there to kiss his ass” he told us. “I was going to yell at him for the way he fucked up the last 3 movies.” But enuff with the celebrities. Want some more highlights? Keep reading:
  
  
• Getting kicked in the leg by an Australian at LAX .
  
  
• Discovering that it takes 45 minutes to drive down the block to pick up a newspaper.
  
  
• A Wookie was arrested outside the Chinese Theater on Hollwod Boulevard

Meanwhile, back home, we’ve heard it was snowing or something?



(Top Photo via Flickr)

“If you can think of a better way to get ice, I'd like to hear it.”

A sign that the Iraqi occupation is not being run as well as it can be comes from this month’s Vanity Fair, as Richard Perle tells a “story he heard from an Iraqi cabinet minister ….

“..about a friend who was asked to lease a warehouse in Baghdad to a contractor for the Americans in the Green Zone. It turned out they were looking for someplace to store ice for their drinks. But, the man asked, wouldn't storing ice in Iraq's hot climate be expensive? Weren't the Americans making ice as and when they needed it? Thus he learned the extraordinary truth: that the ice was trucked in from Kuwait, 300 miles away, in regular convoys. The convoys, says Perle, "came under fire all the time. So we were sending American forces in harm's way, with full combat capability to support them, helicopters overhead, to move goddamn ice from Kuwait to Baghdad." Via The December Vanity Fair.

Here at Ten AM World HQ, we used to laugh about that very same scenario.