Tod Goldberg

Letters To Parade: This Is What Is Commonly Called A Fucktardathon

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the people who write letters to Parade magazine are delusional fucktards with no grasp on reality. I think I've established that over these many years, to the point that I don't even bother to address this issue much anymore, because I can only be crushed by Sisyphus's rock so many times. In fact most Sundays when I read the collected works of the great lobotomized masses -- and by "lobotomized" I mean "people so covered in the orange refuse of their Cheetos that they can't even tell that they've inadvertently become hoarders and, in fact, don't notice the film crew from Hoarders in their living room filming their stacks of bags filled with fecal matter, the floor carpeted in mummified cats and the strange family members who keep screaming 'You're tearing this family apart!'" -- I simply set Parade back on top of the rest of the paper and methodically pull out each and every pubic hair I have before I ritually begin paper cutting myself. It's just easier on my psyche.

But today I found myself face to face with a few of the dumbest fucking people on the planet posing questions in Walter Scott's Personality Parade and, well, here we are, boats against the current, paper cuts on my denuded body, and all that. First, there was the question posed by a fucktard named Ed Morgan of Newark, NJ who wondered:

How does Steve Harvey like hosting Family Feud?

What a great question, Ed. I'm going to give you three options regarding Steve Harvey's feelings about hosting Family Feud:

1. Holy fuck. I'm now the black Louie Anderson. How the fuck did that happen? Didn't one of the former hosts of Family Feud fucking kill himself? Wasn't one of the hosts that other guy from Home Improvement? Jesus fucking Christ. My fucking career is over. I will fucking kill you, Ed Morgan! Why have you made me face this? I will fucking kill you!

2. Motherfucker, I got bills!

3. I love it! It's the high point of my comedic career!

I won't even bother to list his actual response because it's essentially #3, but that he says the show contains "some of the funniest moments of my career" will let you know that he really believes #1 and #2. 

Next, a fucktard named S. Lee of Miami, Fl asks:

Why is actress Sara Gilbert doing a talk show?

What a great question, S. I'm going to give you three options regarding Sara Gilbert's feelings about hosting the talk show The Talk:

1. Holy fuck. I'm now the whiter Rikki Lake. How the fuck did that happen? Didn't one of the former hosts of The Talk try to fucking kill Ozzie Osbourne once? Wasn't one of the hosts that other person on The King of Queens? Jesus fucking Christ. My fucking career is over. I will fucking kill you, S. Lee! Why have you made me face this? I will fucking kill you!

2. Motherfucker, I got bills!

3. I love it! It's the high point of my comedic career!

I won't even bother to list Sara's actual response because it's essentially #3, but that she says the words "I joined a mom group..." in her response leads me to believe that her actual feelings are #4: I had to get away from the shrill fucking harpies unless someone was gonna write me a check.

Then, a fucktard named Cameron Mitchell of Portland, OR asked what might be the greatest question ever, because it's the one time Parade could have actually called me and asked me to help them respond to one of the fucktards who apparently are incapable of thinking on their own and thus mail in fucking letters to Walter Scott:

Do mystery novelists watch mystery shows on television?

You have to wonder how banal Cameron's life must be to ponder this question to such depth that, at some point, he (or she, I suppose) decided that the only way to find out would be to send a letter to Parade magazine. I mean, you know, Cameron could have just emailed me like the litany of fucktards do each week with equally bizarre questions (a few weeks ago I got an email from someone asking me why there aren't pictures in the Burn Notice books to make it "more like watching the TV show"). Alas, they didn't call me -- though if they had, I would have told the truth: No, all mystery novelists watch HGTV. We love House Hunters! -- instead they went to Sara Paretsky who said, "Why the fuck are you calling me? Isn't Harlan Coben on fucking staff now? Ask him, assholes." Okay, she didn't say that. She said yes, she watches NCIS. (Though it is odd: I think Harlan is on staff. He writes the back essay as often as Mitch "The Five People In Heaven Who Aren't Sick Of My Fucking Books" Albom).

But finally, finally, the very nut of fucktardery in this week's Personality Parade comes from someone who must read Parade magazine in the very same newspaper I do, which sort of frightens me. Because a fuckard named Elizabeth Chambers, hailing from Los Angeles, CA, and presumably reading Parade in the LA Times, as I do, has a question that made me realize that the reason people end up voting for complete fucktards like Sarah Palin is that they don't realize politicians aren't fictional characters. You see, Elizabeth is very curious about that nice young President we have...on THE EVENT:

Blair Underwood is great as President Elias Martinez on NBC's The Event. Does he have any political experience in real life? 

Jesus fucking Christ on a bed of wild rice, Elizabeth. Do you really think you somehow missed out on the two terms Blair Underwood spent as a United States Senator? Or what about when he was a Congressman? Or those years when he was Attorney General? Personally, I'll never forget what it was like meeting Blair Underwood when he was just a state Senator --this was during his downtime after his seven year stint on LA Law ended and before he landed his next role four minutes later. I knew then that one day he would eventually either be President or at least play the President in something. He just had that gravity, you know? But then when he was on The New Adventures of Old Christine a few years ago, I was like, whoa, he's just a school teacher in this! Well, he was a school teacher on the show, and, of course, was the Dept. Secretary of Defense, too, but, anyway, I just felt like he was selling himself short. 

For fuck's sake. I mean it. People this stupid shouldn't be allowed to watch television. It's clearly not good for them and thus it's not good for America and, thus, it's bad for the Jews.

(And for the curious, Blair was student body president of his high school. For the sake of comparison, I was a senator in college, which I think confirms that I could totally play a senator on a sci-fi show that closely mimics Lost. Time for me to call my agents to let them know I'm diversifying...)

 

Banned Books Week: The Belated Edition

Banned Books Week actually ended on Oct. 3rd, but I just read this rather remarkable (and not in a good way) account of Risha Mullins Salem Witch Trial-like experience and had to share it here. I encourage you each to go and read the entire post here. [Update: Hmmm, it's disappeared from her site, but here it is elsewhere.] Here's just a snippet:

Remembering when the Moo Moo Book Club kids taped posters of their favorite books all over the school—totally taking ownership of their books by taping “recommended by” plaques beneath each poster—and how after that, non-club kids would stop by my room and ask to borrow a book. Remembering Teen Read Week of 2008 when the 130 book club kids marched through the school, boom box blaring, tossing bookmarks through the Ag. department, the Science and Math wing, the Freshman hall, and the Board of Education building, dancing, chanting “Moo Moo Book Club,” proudly sporting their recommended book posters on strings around their necks. Remembering the way it felt to post the newspaper articles about the club on my walls: the one about taking my club to Virginia Tech, where Nikki Giovanni gave the book club a private writing workshop after reading her book Blues for all the Changes; the one article in the state newspaper that discussed my having gotten the prestigious grant; and the one about the club’s “Jewish Culture Project,” where club members signed up to take Hebrew classes, decorate doors in facets of Jewish Culture, and attend service at a local synagogue, and then when Jewish, Holocaust-surviving author of Bondi's Brother, Irving Roth, flew to our school for a book talk and assembly. And then, remembering the way I beamed when the Literacy Committee chair asked me to take her place because I had changed the notion of literacy at Montgomery County High. 

Remembering the email that stopped it all. Two years ago this week. A parent whose child had chosen to read Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles, and how that parent sent an email to the superintendent, the board members, the principals, and me saying that I taught “soft pornography.”

Stephen Cannell

Stephen Cannell died last night and though I didn't know him well, I knew him for a long time. I, of course, watched his shows as a kid (I loved the Rockford Files more than anything and when I write Burn Notice, in my mind I'm writing Jim Rockford, but I also loved Stingray and Wiseguy) and then later my brother Lee worked on several shows with him, so I met him personally when I was a teenager and it was like meeting god. He had absolutely no reason to remember me over the years when I'd run into him at things Lee was doing, but he always did. Then, when I became a writer, too, I ended up doing quite a few things with him -- we were constantly paired together on panels and I interviewed him on stages three or four times -- but because the Southern California writing community is actually fairly tight-knit, I probably saw him four or five times a year at various functions where we had nothing to do with each other. And every time, he would take time to sit down and talk to me about what I was doing, ask me about my dyslexia (he had a profound case of it, as I do), and if my brother wasn't about, he'd always share some new story about working with Lee on some other project or another. He was a terribly sweet man and every time I talked to him, I had to keep it together on the outside because on the inside I was ten years old, sitting on the floor of our family room in Walnut Creek, watching Rockford. One other brief anecdote before I tell the story I actually sat down to tell about Stephen Cannell: Every time I did a panel with him -- and I must have done a dozen panels with him in the last five years alone -- afterward he bought copies of every single other person's book on the panel. This might seem like an insignificant thing in the larger scheme of life, but to see the looks on people's faces when he walked up with their books afterward to get them signed confirmed for me the same thing I felt time and time again: he was just a class act.

But this is what I meant to tell you. It's just a small story about two moments in two people's very short lives.  A few years ago, I think 2005, Stephen optioned my friend Barbara Seranella's Munch Mancini books and I don't remember whether or not he ended up setting it up somewhere or not, but it was a good deal and Barbara was exceptionally excited because cool and interesting things kept occurring (I think at one point he had it set up at NBC, now that I think about it) and having Stephen Cannell working on getting your book turned into a TV series is the kind of thing crime writers say little prayers for each night. The other side of things was that she was also dying at the time all of this pitching about town was happening -- she'd already had a liver transplant -- and it was clear things weren't working out. Her personal life was also a bit of a shambles, too. One day, however, I ran into her at Target (she lived down the street from me) and she looked absolutely awful. She was tooling around in one of those mechanized scooters and she was so jaundiced that it was hard to look at her but she was absolutely out of her mind with delight. This was in the late summer or early autumn of 2006. 

"You're not going to believe what I did this week," she said. 

I told her I had no idea.

"Steve Cannell sent a car out here to pick me up and drive me out to his yacht and we sat out there all day talking about my series. Can you believe that?"

Barbara had known Steve for a long time, too, but she was giddy like she'd just met him. 

"Do you think the show is going to happen?" I asked.

"Oh, probably not, but who knows?" she said. "But who cares. Steve Cannell sent a car out to pick me up and drive me to his yacht!"

Barbara died a few months later, in January of 2007, and the next weekend Stephen and I were on a panel together at the Cerritos Library with a bunch of other writers. We were seated next to each other and our conversation naturally turned to Barbara and I told him about how excited she'd been to make that trip. And he said, "I really wanted to make that show happen for her. I wanted her to know it was going to happen." 

Update: I encourage you all to go read my brother Lee's post about Steve.