Shocking news from the Miami Herald Fitness Challenge: We've lost a contestant. Well, about a third of a contestant, anyway -- the scales at the final weigh-in show that Andrew Richardson, Lisett Araujo and I lost a total of 56 pounds during our three months of dieting and workouts.
Andrew Richardson was the biggest loser, dropping 27 pounds, from 253 to 226. Lisett lost 10, from 166 to 156. And I lost 19, from 220 to 201. We're all still a long way from our ideal weights. But I don't think anybody who saw us clustered around the scales at the South Beach branch of Equinox last week would have guessed that. We were all exuberant that our 12-week death march of treadmills and diet cheese had paid off with some big numbers. Read my full -- and final -- story on the Fitness Challenge in Tuesday's Miami Herald.
Or, better yet, the hell with the story -- just vote for me! In fact, do it several times -- unlike, say, Chicago, it's not even technically against the rules!
Like most bureaucrats, Robert Groves, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, has cultivated a poker face that works pretty well when he's fending off irksome questions from congressmen about why he spent $2.5 million on a TV ad during the Super Bowl or $3 million training employees who were fired before they worked a single day.
But through careful observation of Groves' body language, it's possible for trained observers to interpret his words. When he scratches his right ear, for instance, he's telling the truth. When he cups his chin in his hand or rests a finger on his left cheek, he's telling the truth.
And when he waves a census form in his hand and says, `Your answers are confidential, the Census Bureau cannot give out information that identifies you or your household,'' he's lying.
Maybe ``lying'' is too harsh a characterization. Maybe we should regard his promise of confidentiality as simply a Reader's Digest version of the full truth, which would be: ``The Census Bureau won't give out information that identifies you or your household unless some other branch of the government wants it so they can burn your home, lock you up in an internment camp, or put you under warrantless surveillance as part of a racial-profiling exercise.'' Read my full op-ed piece in Tuesday's Miami Herald.
Their advertising sales may be down nearly $100 million, but Spanish-language broadcasters say that ringing sound you hear from their industry isn't an alarm bell. It's a wake-up call -- and a lot of companies have already answered.
``This time next year, if you're not in Hispanic media, you're going to want badly to get in,'' says Don Browne, president of Telemundo. ``And those who are already in it are going to feel pretty damn good about it.''
Once a cozy little Monopoly board with all the hotels stacked on two properties, Univisión and Telemundo, Spanish-language television has turned into a rambunctious free-for-all with new competitors getting into the game all the time.
The siren song that beckons them: explosive population growth among U.S. Hispanics that has already outstripped every demographic projection of the past decade and is expected to show an even more breathless pace when results of the 2010 census are in.
Some industry figures think tangible proof could come as soon as June, when the World Cup soccer tournament begins in South Africa. ``All the matches are going to be televised in the United States in the afternoon and early evening,'' says Jose Cancela, owner of the Hispanic USA marketing firm. ``I think the ratings are going to be through the roof.'' Read the rest of my story on Spanish-language TV in Monday's Miami Herald.
Breaking Bad (10 p.m. Sunday, AMC) -- Bryan Cranston already has two Emmys for his role as a high- school chemistry teacher with cancer who moonlights as a meth merchant to pay for the treatment. And he's under more pressure than ever as the third season kicks off, with both the cops and his wife closing in on his secret.
Nurse Jackie (10 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- Edie Falco returns for a second season as a hard-bitten nurse at an inner-city hospital who subsists on a diet of illicit sex and stolen Oxycontin.
Fly Girls (9 p.m. Wednesday, The CW) -- Reality series about Virgin America flight attendants, who are full of astute travel tips. Such as: ``While on the plane, always wear your shoes in the restroom!'' Unlike, you know, airport restrooms.
Paranormal Court (10 p.m. Saturday, TLC) -- Like Judge Judy, except the legally warring parties have agreed to let their disputes be settled by a medium who relays verdicts handed down by ghosts on the other side. TLC is airing this as a public service to lay rest to the rumors that America is about to suffer a crippling shortage of idiots.
Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at http://www.tivo.com.
It was 56 years ago that Hedda Hopper proclaimed to a jubilant generation of little Baby Boomers, "Take off those black armbands, kids, and put on your coonskin caps, for Davy Crockett will hit the trail again." And now it's time to put them back on again. Fess Parker, whose portrayal of the sharpshooting frontiersman Crockett on Walt Disney's show was television's first monster hit, died Thursday at age 85.
Except for Elvis Presley, nobody left a bigger footprint on popular culture than Parker as Crockett. His original three-episode arc on the ABC kiddie anthology Disneyland -- Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter, Davy Crockett Goes To Congress and Davy Crockett At The Alamo -- blew the lid off TV ratings when they aired in a nine-week span between December 1954 and February 1955.
They were edited together into a hit movie (Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier), spawned four hit versions of the show's theme song (one sung by Parker himself), and triggered a monsoon of merchandising that became a blueprint for every generation of marketers since. Everything from coonskin caps like the one Parker wore in the shows to bubblegum card to sets of plastic toy soldiers -- the latter thrown together so quickly that they featured Crockett and his men fighting Indians at the Alamo rather than the Mexican army -- racked up breathtaking sales. There were Crockett pencil sharpeners, pajamas, every underwear.
Though Parker's Crockett, like his real-life counterpart, died in a last stand against Mexican soldiers at the Alamo, Disney quickly discovered that the power of television couldn't be contained by mere death. By the end of 1955, Parker had played Crockett again in two prequel episodes (Davy Crockett's Keelboat Race and Davy Crockett And The River Pirates), and the whole craze was revived.
Parker went on to make some other films. He stood off giant ants in Them, the best of the big-bug movies of the 1950s, and was the strong, wise dad in the tear-jerking doggie snuff film Old Yeller. But audiences could never really separate him from Crockett. At first, he was bitter. "For a while I resented Davy Crockett," he later recalled. "I wished that I could have played Hamlet."
But eventually Parker decide to embrace his character's popularity. In 1962, he starred in a TV series called Mr. Smith Goes To Washington that was a kind of modernized (not to mention idealized) version of the real-life Crockett's terms in Congress. And two years later, he accepted the lead in NBC's Daniel Boone, practically indistinguishable from the Crockett role. The series was a huge hit and lasted six seasons. About the only thing missing was Crockett's trademark motto, which Parker adopted for himself: "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
Bad news for Christiane Amanpour fans: She's quitting CNN. Good news: She's taking over as host of ABC's Sunday-morning interview show This Week. The anchor chair at This Week has been empty (figuratively speaking; Jake Tapper has been filling in) since George Stephanopoulos departed for Good Morning America in December. She'll go on the ABC airwaves sometime in August.
Amanpour, the London-born product of an Anglo-Iranian marriage, has reported from most of the world's trouble spots -- particularly those in the Middle East and the Balkans -- since become a CNN correspondent in 1989. The network hired her as assistant on its foreign desk right out of college in 1983. She doesn't have a deep background in U.S. politics, the main course on This Week, but then Stephanopoulos didn't know a lot about cooking segments when he went to Good Morning America, either.
Amanpour had nothing but nice things to say about CNN in announcing her departure. "I leave CNN with the utmost respect, love and admiration for the company and everyone who works here,' she said. "This has been my family and shared endeavor for the past 27 years and I am forever grateful and proud of all that we have accomplished."
Confirming a suspicion I've had going back at least to the days of Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire, modern science has now established what kind of people want to be contestants on reality shows: assassins and torturers. Contestants who thought they were trying out for the pilot of a new French reality show called The Game Of Death (actually, the whole thing was staged by psychologists for a documentary production team) were told they could administer electric shocks to teammates who botched answers. As the studio audience screamed for more, the vast majority of the contestants pushed buttons to deliver up to 460 volts to the errant teammates -- and kept pushing them even when the victims screamed for mercy. The French news agency AFP reports that 80 percent of the contestants kept zapping away until it appeared their teammates were dead.
Actually, the victims were actors who weren't really getting shocked, just pretending they were. But by the time the show premieres on Fox in September, rest assured the switches will be hooked up to real wires.
DirecTV and the Versus sports channel, after a mere six months of scorched-earth warfare, have finally kissed -- well, shaken hans; okay, nodded politely -- and made up. DirecTV subscribers can again see the channel, which went dark in their homes on Sept. 1 when the two couldn't agree on a new contract. Nobody is talking about terms of the settlement, which comes just weeks before the NHL playoffs begin. DirecTV subscribers missed not only most of the hockey season but a substantial number of college football games involving teams from the Pac-10, Big 12, Mountain West and Ivy League conferences.
We've reached End Times with The Miami Herald Fitness Challenge. With just a few days left in our three-month contest to lose weight, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder.Andrew Richards wears a knowing grin -- he's a few pounds ahead of me in weight loss -- and I don't believe for a minute that Lisett Araujo brought that machete to work so that she could cut the grass in front of the building.
So with tensions running high, I decided to consult the world's greatest expert on how to lose weight while not being murdered in your sleep by ruthless competitors. I'm speaking, of course, of Pete Thomas, who lost 185 pounds during the second season of NBC's The Biggest Loser but was nonetheless voted off the show by his perfidious teammates.
"Your competitors do sound treacherous, especially that Lisett," said Pete, who, as an ex-fat guy, has been following the Fitness Challenge with vicarious pleasure. "But I don't think they're anywhere near as bad as ours were on The Biggest Loser. One of the guys -- really -- sent me a box of chocolates." Read my full story on the Fitness Challenge in Tuesday's Herald. And watch the video above to see Andrew, Lisett and me tortured by the Brazilian Buttmaster.
I don't know about you, but every Tuesday as I'm watching yet another and even more incomprehensible episode of Lost, and wondering how in the game of God I've given up six years of my life to this thing, I inevitably say to myself: "Boy, if only that runty, evil little swine Ben Linus were here, he'd explain what the hell this is all about and I could enjoy it again." Well, at last, ABC has answered my prayers. Well, one of them anyway. I'm still waiting for the big-screen TV and the car.
