Jamey Tucker’s BlogSquat

I’ll spend the next couple of hours trying to forget what I’ve just seen.
“United 93″ was on HBO HD a couple of weeks ago. I DVRd and watched it tonight.

Two words: Gut wrenching.

Like most people who were glued to the tv set that morning of September 11th, 2001, I’ve somehow managed to put a lot of that behind me. Sure, the horros of that morning reappear every year on that date, but mostly…I’ve moved on.

But this movie brought it all back. Just as clear as it was that day and the days immediately following it. I thought of what it must have been like for the people on those planes. Surely, even as passengers and flight attendants were benig stabbed and killed, the plane would eventually land safely. Nobody, not even the hijackers wanted to die. Do they?

Few people knew much about Islam then. Few outside that faith had heard that followers were willing to die for the cause. Not just willing, but blessed to give their lives for Allah.

Watching the actors portraying the passengers phoning their loved ones once they knew what was planned was the toughest for me. They were doomed and in their last moments called spouses, parents and children to say goodbye. “Give the phone to your brother now” some said.

I sobbed watching this movie like I did as a 5th grader watching “Brian’s Song”. I never want to see this movie again. But one of these days, I’ll probably need to. You might too.

First the good news. “WKRP in Cincinnati” comes to DVD Tuesday. The bad news: the music in the show doesn’t make it.

Because of music license fees, the original tunes from the show have been replaced by generic songs. These are most likely the tunes we heard when the show aired on Nick at Night several years ago.

Pretty disappointing but I’ll probably be one of the first in line at Circuit City to pick up the 3 disc set that includes all 22 episodes from Season one. That’s the season that includes the turkey episode and the one where Venus and Johnny participate in an on-air drinking contest, I mean, public service announcement.

Now if they’d only release the Wonder Years on DVD. Speaking of which, the episodes now airing on Ion do have the original music soundtrack. I’ve got about a dozen recorded on my DVR and need to hook up a VCR to save them forever.

Congress is making internet radio nearly impossible to survive. I’ve mentioned here before that I love listening to Pandora.com, one of many internet music services that is endangered by recent action by the government to significantly raise the fees these stations are charged to play music over the web.

I have no problem with artists getting their fair share of the pie, but I think they may be overlooking how internet radio is helping them. I’ve purchased entire cds from artists I would have never discovered were it not for Pandora. It allows me to set up my own stations based on the artists I like. I have a Bruce Springsteen station, a Van Morrison station, a Johnny Cash station and a Bob Wills station. Pandora plays some of their music but also plays songs from artists who are similar.

Needless to say, these other artists are never heard on the over-the-air radio stations that seem to play the same 12 song rotation.

So help save internet radio. Go here and sign the petition, contact your local congressman. And artists, internet radio is good for you. I wish you and your record labels could see that.

Today’s Shoptalk had a link to a Memphis Flyer article about the WPTY traffic reporter auditions I posted about yesterday. Seems they ARE going to have a panel of judges, and they ARE going to put some of the best auditions online (and I suppose on air) for viewers to vote for their best.

I like it.

Great news, at least for me. The Wonder Years is back on television. I caught the last 30 seconds of an episode on a network called ion.

Pardon me for a moment while I silently scream for joy. TWY is in my top-3 tv shows of all time (“M*A*S*H”, “WKRP in Cincinnati” being the other two). Even though the show is set in 1968 and later, and I grew up in the 1970s, this show was practically a look at my own tender years.
The perfect cast (Winnie, Paul, Wayne (the bratty brother), Karen, mom and dad, the science teacher, the french teacher all seemed like real people and not actors. The situations were real (broken hearts, first kiss, fights with your best friend, death). The script writing was exceptional and the soundtrack (Four Tops, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Turtles, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young) set the tone and mood as well as any other tv show in history.

More like a documentary of the 1960s and ’70s, this show perfectly painted a picture of kids in elementary and middle school of the time.

I kept VHS copies of the show for a long time but threw them away during one of my moves, figuring one day I’d just buy the DVD set. As I’ve written here before, the thing that has kept Wonder Years off the air in syndication and out of DVD boxed sets has been the music copyright thing. ABC apparently didn’t get releases to use the music from the late 60s, and early 70’s except for when the show aired on the network. Nickelodeon picked up the show about 10 years ago but I don’t remember whether the original songs were part of the reruns or not.

Lots of folks probably don’t realize this but The Wonder Years was actually based on or at least inspired by the movie “A Christmas Story”.

Now, I’ve got a pile of blank VHS tapes to capture these priceless episodes while I can. My weeknights just got very entertaining.

That won’t be an American Idol audition line in Memphis in a couple of weeks, but standing in it might get you a shot at a regular tv gig.

WPTY is holding open auditions for the job of traffic reporter April 28th at Parmasters Golf Training Center. link here

According to the ad on the website, interested candidates will audition in front of a camera. The winner, or the best auditioner will get a part-time morning traffic reporter gig. High school diploma is required, some college is preferred.

Now before you go off joking about PTY’s method of finding a traffic reporter, don’t be too nasty.
It’s a part-time gig so they’re not going to put out a national search for the right candidate. So why not hold an open audition? Absolutely nothing. In fact, I really like it.

What’s the most important thing here? Simply put: finding someone who can relay information from the police and sheriff’s department on work zones and traffic accidents. Someone who’s engaging enough to capture the viewer’s attention. Someone who can be entertaining and credible. Someone who is pleasant enough to look at and listen to, who can still communicate what’s happening on the “highways and byways”, (tip: don’t use that phrase too often in your audition).

While I wouldn’t welcome this type of audition for a reporter job, or an anchor or weather person, it’s a perfect way to find a traffic reporter. Not to belittle the traffic person job but it doesn’t or shouldn’t require a Harvard education, or even a J-school education. It takes skill sure.

NBC-13 in Birmingham hired Brooke Smith a few years ago and she came straight to Red Mountain from being a contestant on “The Bachelor”. She’s done pretty well.

But to make things more interesting, maybe WPTY should bring in a panel of judges to critique the auditions as they happen. Set up a couple of cameras and bring in a host and you’ve got a sweeps series that most of Memphis would be talking about throughout the month of May.

Saturdays have always been a bit strange for me. For most of my childhood, Saturdays were spent at my grandparents salvage store. Tucker Salvage was the hotbed of activity in rural north St. Clair County Alabama. Railroad salvage meant boxcars of a little bit of everything. My grandparents sold produce, tobacco, dog food, hand-cut meats, canned goods, motor oil, reams of fabric, Hee Haw overalls, records, tires, popcorn, meal, furniture and coca-cola in 6 1/2 ounce bottles.

Every Friday night and every Saturday morning from the time I first recorded memories until I was in about the 9th grade, my mom and dad would load up the Dodge with my sister and I, and we’d spend every minute at “THE STORE”. I didn’t play with the neighborhood kids on Saturdays. Didn’t go shopping on Saturdays. Didn’t do anything away from the store.

Mom ran the cash register, the meat cutting department, cut fabric and poured loose dog food and laundry detergent into brown paper sacks. Dad did a little bit of everything. He loaded and unloaded trucks. Answered questions from customers and help them find 30w motor oil and transmission fluid. In the early days he pumped gas and probably helped get the live minnows into buckets for fishing.

My sister and I tried to stay out of the way. Sometimes I’d grab my b-b gun and shoot at the gopher rats in “the green building”. Sometimes we’d rummage through the boxes, looking for a toy or a football. I remember not having a real football to play with so my buddy Grover, who’s mom also worked weekends at the store, and I wrapping a tin can filled with pebbles with newspaper and duct tape so we’d have a “football” to play with.

Once the store closed, I didn’t know what to do on Saturdays. It was new territory for a 15 year old kid. The rest of my friends had long found ways to spend the weekends but not me.

And so I think for that reason, Saturdays have always been sort of an undefined point of time for me. Even today.

The past two Saturdays we’ve had some things to do, but not nearly enough to fill up the entire day. So tonight, Cameron and the kids were sound asleep by 8:30. Nothing’s on tv to watch, so I’ve been sitting with my laptop and with Baseball Tonight on ESPN. A search of iTunes found a podcast of one of my favorite “undiscovered” bands, The Zac Brown Band. I heard them first a few years ago on The Rick and Bubba Show and mail-ordered their first CD. The podcast I’ve been listening to the past couple of hours is a live performance of them demo-ing some of the new songs from an upcoming cd.

Check them out if you have a few minutes of nothing to do. “Chicken Fried” is a fun song, sort of country/rock. But “Whatever It Is” is one of the best songs I’ve heard in quite some time. No link here, but it’s on iTunes.

Now it’s 10:30, about the time we’d just be getting home from The Store.

Funny, but every year during the National Championship basketball game, I think of Gary Dobbs.

For those familiar with the Huntsville television market in the 1980s and 90’s, you’ll remember Gary Dobbs as the sometimes wacky weatherman at WAAY-TV31 in Huntsville. Sometimes Gary wore some pretty loud looking sportcoats that were always accompanied with a bright smile. Some loved Gary’s delivery of the forecast. Some were annoyed.

I think of Gary because of something that happened following a late-night newscast just after a Championship game.

I was anchoring the 10pm news for WHNT, the CBS affiliate. Our news followed the ballgame so once our newscast ended it was well past midnight. Maybe it was 1995 or ‘96. Could have been ‘97. I had finished the newscast and was driving home.

Once I turned off the four-lane Hwy 72 and toward Maysville, I saw it. A car had left the road and was sitting in a ditch, the headlights were still on and a man was struggling to get out of the driver’s side door. i stopped and asked if he was okay.
“yeah…I’m okay”, he said and started slurring some attempt at conversation. It became very clear that the man was drunk off his butt and had swerved too far to the shoulder and wound up in the ditch.

This was before cellphones were common enough for me to own one so I tried to engage the guy in a conversation long enough for someone else, hopefully a cop, would stop.

A couple minutes later another driver stopped to check on things and I walked over to see if he had a cellphone. “Sure do”, he said. I told him to call 9-1-1 as the drunk driver was back in his car, suddenly aware that he might go to jail for DUI. As the second driver called 9-1-1 I walked back over to the drunk and tried to get him back out of his car before he somehow could get it back on the road.

“You’re not going to call the cops are you?”. Me? Noooo. “Cause if you call the cops on me you’re really going to piss me off. I ain’t drunk you know.” No, I told him…we’ll help him get a buddy to come pick him up if he’d just calm down.

To distract him, I started asking him about the basketball game. “Yeah I saw it. How ’bout them Wildcats?!”. We slapped high-fives as I looked over my shoulder for blue-lights. And then he said it: “Hey…I know who you are. You’re on tv.”
“oh, come on…” I said. “Yeah…you’re on tv. What’s your name?”. “Oh, I’m not on tv. You must think I’m somebody else.”

“No…you’re on tv. What’s your name?” he asked.

Knowing that this guy was likely going to sober up in a few hours behind bars, I said the first thing that came to mind. “I’m Gary Dobbs”.

The best thing about the Final Four? It’s the start of the new baseball season. And as I have done for the past 15 or 16 years, I spent nearly 2 hours with some of my old friends, drafting a new team for our fantasy baseball league.

I’ve done pretty well in the past, but every new season is a new chance to be the top or the bottom of the league. So, here’s how I did this year with the $300 cap

• catcher Paul Loduca
• first Conor Jackson
• second Ian Kinsler
• third Garrett Atkins
• short Derek Jeter
• OF Grady Sizemore
• OF Andruw Jones
• OF Brian Giles
• Pitcher Johan Santana
• Pitcher Tim Hudson
• Pitcher Felix Hernandez
• Pitcher Javier Vazquez
• Pitcher Octavio Dotel

Of course this wasn’t the team I planned to draft. I never get that group of players. Other owners nabbed players I was just a pick away from getting. Vladmir Guerrero has been a member of Tuck’s Friars for years, but I missed him by one pick this year. This is the first year I’ve used a first pick on a pitcher, Johan Santana. Some members of last year’s regular season champions (first and second half) didn’t get on my team this year but it wasn’t for a lack of planning or trying. David Wright, Guerrero went somewhere else.

Derek Jeter is back with the Friars along with Javier Vazquez who better have a better year.

Some of these guys won’t last until the All Star break before I kick them to the waiver wire and others will carry me until October.

Tomorrow night is the first game of the year! Oh….I love baseball season.