Cranksgiving Los Angeles 2017

Charity scavenger bike ride for Para Los Ninos....ride starts at Echo Park with all riders dumping shoes into a bag and then finding them; next grap list of stores all over central LA and items you need to get; next get on bike and get items - with receipts and times stamps; get back to 3rd and Loma fast after you hit 10 stores - see if you're the first.  I always win the senior division - only entrant. 

Open Letter to Charlie Rose: Hang in there Fella !

I didn’t understand when you  moved to a morning news show on CBS.  Why you started doing all these specials, and travel assignments and now, now, you started a ‘week in review’ show – with predictions no less.  Silly.  You’re like 10 years older than I am – and you had a heart, medical something; I mean, Charlie….WTF.  What are you thinking?

And then I heard you interview a fellow reporter, who’s a millennial, and I realized why you need to stick around.  I mean the guy was trying to track the Russian investigation and the politics of it all and he regurgitated some press coverage from MSNBC and said nothing about the week’s huge story; the acrimony that’s happening on Capital Hill around the issue.  No nose for the news…tone death; clueless.  Your questions were the only thing that saved his ass.

If that’s the caliber of your replacements; hang in there Charlie!  We especially need you right now.  I mean guys like Huntley and Brinkley are the past (and Uncle Walter ate his last tuna fish sandwich), so we need you Charlie.  At least you remember who Liz Smith was and know who’s the last ambassador to South Korea and why the Justice Department should never be political.   And once more; you still care about these things.    People are fast forgetting how to do that; or why you should.

You are daily fighting the aging process to do all that you do,  and now I understand why.  You gotta keep up ‘cause you’re needed. We need you Charlie to be a journalist. A beacon of truth, justice and even handedness.  We need you to train new ones.   To set some kind of standards (or at least pretend to).  We need you to work just as along as you can; or until Walt Whitman’s words ring out:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

Forget, the rest of that poem, Charlie.  Its strictly not a good tweet.  (No one’ll knows the dif anyway.)