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What You Didn’t Know About… Jerry Springer!

Just about everyone in the English-speaking world has heard of talk show host Jerry Springer. But there’s a lot about Mr. Springer that you might not know:

He was born in a Tube station! Jerry’s parents were German Jews that fled to London to escape the Nazi regime. During WWII, many London Underground stations were used as bomb shelters for civilians. Jerry’s parents were no exception, and it therefore wasn’t all that remarkable that Jerry Springer was born in an east London Tube station on February 13, 1944.

He once paid a hooker with a check! After being an aide for Robert Kennedy and unsuccessfully running for Congress, Jerry was elected to the Cincinnati city council in 1971. He had to resign in 1974 after police raided a massage parlor in Fort Wright, Kentucky and found a check Springer had written for “services rendered”. He admitted the faux pas, and was re-elected in 1975.

He was routinely mentioned on a 1970s TV sitcom! Jerry became mayor of Cincinnati in 1977. “Mayor Springer” was mentioned in several episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati, but never actually appeared on the show.

His show mirrored Morton Downey Jr.’s show! In 1982, Springer left politics and was hired as a political reporter for Cincinnati’s WLWT-TV, an NBC affiliate. This led to his own talk show, The Jerry Springer Show, which debuted on September 20th, 1991. Much like Morton Downey’s Jr.’s show in the 1980s, Jerry’s first TV show was mostly about serious topics like gun control, homelessness and abortion; the show’s guests included Oliver North and Jessie Jackson. Also like Morton Downey Jr.’s show, as time passed the show’s ratings started to fall, and more and more “outrageous” subjects were brought on.

There’s an opera based on his show! In August of 2001, Jerry Springer: The Opera debuted at the Battersea Arts Centre in the UK. The show was an instant success and was frequently moved to larger and larger venues, eventually settling at the Cambridge Theatre in London’s West End. The libretto of the opera is a bit complex to get into here, but it suffices to say that it contains a lot of foul language and content that would offend churchgoers. It’s so offensive, in fact, that the BBC received over 47,000 complaints when it aired a version of the show in 2005 – the most complaints about any show in British history!

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What You Didn’t Know About… “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck”

“I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech” is the official fight song of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech for short). You probably knew that already, but you might not know that:

  • Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sang the song together during a summit in Moscow in 1958. The mood was quite tense, so Nixon suggested doing something to lighten the mood. For some reason, they chose to sing a song together. “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck” was picked because Khrushchev had heard it on an Ed Sullivan sing-a-long during a previous trip to the United States, and Nixon knew no Russian songs.
  • “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck” has been featured in movies: Gregory Peck sang it while strumming a ukulele in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, John Wayne whistled it in The High and the Mighty and Tim Holt’s character sings a few bars of it in His Kind of Woman.
  • “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck” was the first school song played in space.
  • Because of the song’s many references to drinking, a student group backed by MADD often petitions the student government to change the song to something more sober. These petitions are heavily defeated each time they are proposed.

ADDITIONAL TRIVIA: There are only five FBS schools that do not have the word “University” in their official name. Georgia Tech is one, as is ACC rival Boston College. The others are the service academies: the United States Military Academy (Army), the United States Naval Academy (Navy) and the United States Air Force Academy (Air Force).

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What You Didn’t Know About… “Match Game”

Match Game was one of the most popular game shows of the 1970s. It originally aired on NBC in a different format, but was resurrected for CBS in 1973 into the format we all know and love.

Ratings for the show weren’t that good initially, so CBS sent the show a “cancellation notice”. Back then, networks didn’t yank shows off the air like they do today, and Match Game had several episodes remaining before it was due to leave the air. So the writers decided to have fun with it: they took the show’s hitherto pedestrian “fill in the blank” questions and crammed them with lots of innuendo and double entendres. The new “spicy” version of the show became an instant hit and ran for several years.

Many folks noticed the distinctive microphone that host Gene Rayburn used on the show; few know that Rayburn designed and patented the microphone himself. It was built especially for him by Sony and was given model number ECM-51.

In his earlier days, Rayburn was a radio DJ on a show called Rayburn and Fitch. Rayburn once knitted a pair of socks as a publicity stunt for the show, and as a result he became interested in working with needles, especially needlepoint. He was frequently spotted in airports and restaurants and on airplanes doing needlepoint to pass the time. Match Game creator Mark Goodson even surprised Rayburn onstage during the taping of an episode to give him a needlepoint bag as a token gift for making Match Game the #1 daytime television show.

A 1974 incident where Rayburn told contestant Karen Lesko that she had “pretty nipples” has gone down in history as one of the worst bloopers in game show history (or best bloopers, depending on your point-of-view). Rayburn meant to say that she had “pretty dimples”.

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RANT: Movie Reviewers

This rant is about movie reviewers. Don’t get me wrong – I like them as a whole and value their opinions. But on a person-by-person basis. I hate each and every single one of them. Why?

Well, the first reason I hate them is because many of them seem to have “movie envy”. Many reviewers seem to be bitter film school failures. For some reason or the other, us “plebs” just didn’t “get” their “vision” and instead of being the next Steven Spielberg, these poor schlubs are writing reviews for the Des Moines Register. You can see them same bitterness with music reviewers, too. Many must have had dreams of being the biggest rock star on the planet, only to fail miserably and be stuck writing for some rag. So that’s something that’s not unique to movie reviewers.

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RANT: “The Da Vinci Code”

Allow me to preface this rant with a clarification: I have no problem with The Da Vinci Code as a work of fiction. My problem stems from the fact that so many people apparently think it’s based on fact, either because they’re stupid or because Dan Brown wrote a convincing book. Either way, it is the source of my rage.

As you know, the movie based on the wildly popular book The Da Vinci Code hit theatres last Friday. That’s fine. Enjoy the film! Hell, I’d even go see it myself, but the missus has no interest in seeing it and lately I just haven’t been in the mood to go to the movies by myself. Anyway, there apparently are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people out there that seem to think Dan Brown’s work is real… as in “based on fact”. If you’re one of those people, this rant is for you:

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RANT: California

I really freakin’ hate California.

The other day Miss Lisa was watching Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello. There’s a running argument between Lisa and myself over whether Michael Chiarello is gay (my position) or whether he’s just “from California” (Lisa’s position). But for some reason, I just kept getting more and more angry as I watched his show last Sunday. Why does California have to ruin everything? Why would someone in California take something as magnificent and glorious as the New York pizza and think “Hmmmmm.. what this needs is goat cheese, Thai-flavored chicken and organic Crimini mushrooms!” Blech! And why would they take something as unhealthy for you (yet delicious) as French fries and coat them with “a fine, light extra virgin olive oil” and bake them? Dude, newsflash: French fries are supposed to be bad for you. The rest of us still rue the day that McDonalds stopped cooking their fries in beef tallow… ‘cos that’s what made them so damn tasty!

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RANT: Lost Stuff

You know what really pisses me off? Two things this week:

For starters, don’t you hate when one simple organizing task blows up into a 14-hour cleaning marathon? You see, Lisa once kept her CDs in a nice wire rack in a corner of the living room. One Christmas, she decided that she’d rather keep her discs in DJ cases instead, so I got her a nice case from Sam Ash. And so – the wire rack just kind of sat there for a while looking for a home. Now me, I’ve kept my CDs in some stolen Dr Pepper flats, the heavy plastic kind that the 20oz. drinks used to come in. And while the flats are functional and cheap (free, even!)… they’re just not that pretty to look at. So I decided to move the now-unused wire rack to my room and put my CDs in there. The only problem with that is that I have far too many CDs for the rack. “No problem”, I’m thinkin’, “just put your 100 favorite ones in the rack and stash the rest in the closet”. Which is a great plan, only my closet is the greatest example of entropy there is. There was junk crammed all over the place. Hell, I once sent a team of Swiss hikers into my closet to find something, and I never heard from them again. So – just to make my room look a little nicer, I pulled the 14,591,278 items I had on the closet’s floor out and trashed half of it and reorganized the rest. It needed to be done, sure… but what a pain in the ass! What should have been a nice little gesture took me all day and part of the night.

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RANT: NFL Officiating

Is it just me, or did the NFL games this past weekend showcase the worst officiating in the history of the league?

As you probably know, I am a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. As such, I was over the moon when Troy Polamalu picked off a Peyton Manning pass with 5:26 left in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game. The game was all but over – the Steelers were going to the AFC Championship! But then the Colts challenged the interception ruling. Hell, I can’t say that I blame them – were I Tony Dungy, I’d have done the same thing. Referee Pete Morelli trotted over to the replay booth and watched the replays for what seemed like a half-hour before coming back out onto the field and stunning everyone in the RCA Dome, the television audience and even the space aliens that will some day pick up the broadcast on their home planet. The call was reversed: incomplete pass.

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RANT: Old People Writing Checks

Here’s this week’s rant: who the hell still writes checks?

I own a Windows Smartphone – a Samsung i600 phone – and enjoy using it as a portable media player thanks to The Core Pocket Media Player. I have a 512MB SD card, and usually have several albums as well as a few podcasts on the card. The problem is, the phone doesn’t have a very powerful speaker (compared to a car stereo) and I usually have to listen through headphones. Wouldn’t it be more fun to listen via the AUX input of my car stereo or the cassette adapter of Lisa’s stereo?

And so – earlier this week I went to Radio Shack to buy an adapter that would allow me to connect a 3.5mm input to the standard 2.5mm output on my phone. It’s a simple piece of plastic and wires that I would normally buy online if I weren’t so hesitant to pay $6.99 in shipping for a $1.99 part.

And so – I walked into the empty store, and within five seconds I made a grievous mistake: the saleslady asked me if I needed any help, and like an idiot I told her I’d be fine on my own. Of course, I had no idea where the specific adapter was located, so whilst I was searching the store’s cramped racks, an elderly gentleman walked in. The poor guy was as old as the hills and has some sort of ailment that rendered his thick Southern accent almost unintelligible. If you wish, imagine Boomhauer from King of the Hill with a nasty case of emphysema.

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RANT: People Who Call Outlook Express “Outlook”

This week’s rant – or, more accurately, “this month’s rant” or even “this quarter’s rant” – is an old one to IT support folks. Part of it is Microsoft’s fault and part of it is your fault. But whatever the case may be, it’s worthy of a rant, even if it’s an old complaint.

Microsoft makes two programs for getting email. One is Microsoft Outlook. The other is Microsoft Outlook Express. Outlook was created by the Office team; Outlook Express was created by the Internet Explorer team. Outlook is part of Office and costs money; Outlook Express is included with Windows and doesn’t cost extra. Outlook has many features that businesses like, such as task lists, calendars and sticky notes; Outlook Express is mostly for home users that just need to get email. Outlook can connect to Microsoft Exchange servers; Outlook Express cannot.

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