"She did a movie called 'Revenge of the Pervs' / there were screams and jeans and curves and nerves"

1. This morning I had really long fingernails so I decided that I needed to cut them before I found myself anywhere important. So I brought a pair of clippers with me with the intention of using them at some point during work, in the bathroom. On the subway platform though at Dekalb I saw a guy standing over the tracks, and he was cutting his nails. It would have been pretty good if I'd come up right alongside him and started doing the same thing. Would he have said something?

2. I did an item for NYO last night that went up around six this morning re Bob Barker's memoirs, which he's writing now that he's been off The Price is Right for a year. When I woke up this morning at 8:30 or whatever, there were already two comments. The first one:

Bob Barker is immensely talented and charismatic. Hosting a game show is not as easy as it looks and there's only a select few who master the craft year-after-year. Decades is extremely rare. Bill Cullen was in a league by himself and so is Bob Barker. Wink Martindale is down the list a bit. Way down!

From what I've read, Bob Barker has a dark side. A very dark side. I used to watch The Price Is Right years ago, and there were hints of this dark side with the contestants in the form of putdowns and ridicule. It was all in the name of fun, but nonetheless it was putdowns.

A number of former employees of the show have filed lawsuits and I think most of them, if not all of them, are women. I'm only familar with two women: Parkinson and Hallstrom. One lawsuit was of a sexual nature and the other lawsuit was due to a firing. Several months ago. I read another lawsuit has been filed which has racial overtones. There was a fairly recent mass firing on one day, and Barker's explanation for this mass firing was economics.

I hope Bob Barker will address these issues in the book, and I'm sure his version of what happened will be quite different. I'm of the opinion Bob Barker has a dark side, because there's been too many lawsuits. As I said previously, you saw little hints of this dark side on the show. If the contestant didn't do the right thing, he was impatient. Something along the lines: "You're not yelling loud enough. Louder. I mean louder. What's wrong with you. Do you want this car. You can putt better than that. Audience, let's here a boo. Spin the wheel, NOW. NOW. That's not how you spin it."

I'd post the second one but the guy just responds pretty much and it's not terribly compelling. They go on for six more posts, but man, can you imagine writing that first thing? Thinking those thoughts/ideas about Bob Barker? "There were hints of this dark side with the contestants in the form of putdowns and ridicule. It was all in the name of fun, but nonetheless it was putdowns." This is a crazy thing to think.

3. Problem in "Certain Songs" by Hold Steady, which is that Craig Finn identifies a bunch of jukebox selections during the climactic bridge or whatever, but he only gives the coordinates of the disk, not the song. You need both to make a selection on a jukebox; if you punch in just the first letter and number you will not get any result. The lyrics go: "B-1 is for the good girls / it's, 'Only the Good Die Young.' / C-9 is for the makin' eyes, it's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light.' / D-4 is for the lovers / B-12 is for the speeders / and the hard drugs are for the bartenders and the kitchen workers and the bartender's friends." In other words these are songs he's listing. But there's no way it's true that you could press "B-1" and hear that song. You'd have to provide the jukebox with more information. It's a fucking lie is what it is.

4. Standing on the elevator the other day at work, waiting for it to leave the lobby which it always takes a few seconds too many to do. While it sits there, on the first floor, a woman comes aboard and asks me, "Going up?" Yes obviously going up.