Archive for category Bardo
Video of the Month
May 19
On Tuesday, a 17-year-old Phillies fan jumped onto the field at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and evaded police before succumbing to the taser gun of a policeman in pursuit.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this video is worth a few thousand volts:
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and in this case, the taser was appropriate. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, and we have seen enough catastrophes from fans entering the field of play. If someone jumped from the gallery of the Capitol onto the House floor, I would expect no less discipline.
Those attuned to the sports world, or the city of Philadelphia, know that Philadelphians are often scrutinized for their “mischievous” behavior at sporting events. Philly fans represent blue-collar hard workers who have infamously booed Santa Claus, turned stadiums into forums for riotous behavior and even purposefully vomited on children of opposing fanbases.
History notwithstanding, when I read about and watched the Phillies fan get tased yesterday morning, I was quick to believe this was a singular moronic act by an single moron (especially as details surfaced that he called his dad for permission). I saw it as an incident and not a systemic problem.
Then, last night, another Phillies fan jumped onto the same outfield grass.
Fool me once, tase on you, but fool me twice?
Tase on me.
How are we supposed to look upon a city where someone is willing to jeopardize themselves for 20 seconds in the spotlight THE NIGHT AFTER SOMEONE WAS TASED FOR THE SAME OFFENSE?
Surely these acts of jackassery don’t represent every Philadelphian, but a pattern has developed in the City of Brotherly Love (to Hate) that hasn’t manifested itself in other metropolitan cities. Is this really the place where the framework for our nation was drafted through compromise and diplomacy?
Almost two hundred and twenty five years later, the same city is mired in copycat defiant trespassing and disorderly conduct at baseball games. Where do we go from here?
How about the European approach? Teams with unruly and unmanageable fans play home games in empty stadiums. Or maybe we can prohibit alcohol sales until fans prove they can behave for three hours.
Unless the penalties get serious, don’t expect the idiots to stop ruining the game for everyone else.
Bardo Gets LOST
Mar 24
There is so much to say about last night’s Richard Alpert centric episode of LOST, that I’m sort of overwhelmed in trying to figure out how to get to everything. There was all the Ricardo in the Canary Islands stuff, the Ricardo in transit stuff, the Ricardo stuck in chains mid-jungle stuff, Richard with Man in Black stuff, Richardwith Jacob stuff, and the Richard with Hurley stuff. Oh boy.
Instead of a Cliff-Notes run on last night’s Ab Aeterno, here are the things that stood out to me, easily numbered for convenient follow up comments.
1.) Overall I enjoyed the episode. I found it more compelling than the Sawyer angle the week before. Sure, I care way more about Sawyer, but I was appreciative of the writers for weaving in more “island mystery” into Richard’s backstory. And speaking of backstory, interesting that this was the first flashback of the year. I wonder if that had any significance since we’ve been getting a steady dose of sideflashes this season.
2.) Did anyone else love the sequence where Ricardo rides the horse to the doctor and cannot afford the time for a doctor to ride half a day back to Isabella nor afford the money for the cure? To me it was a time-appropriate allegory for the national healthcare debate.
3.) Really? Reaaallly? A old wooden ship (diversity?!?!) smashing through a giant stone statue and the stone statue is the one worse for wear? Reeeeeaaaaallllllllllyyyyyyyy? You’re better than that LOST.
4.) Richard’s conversations with the Man In Black and Jacob were the high point of the episode for me. There were some awesome nuggets in these conversations, which may have been the closest to spoon feeding as the LOST producers have ever given us:
- We now can fully comprehend the reason of the island, to keep hell from breaking loose over the rest of the world.
- We understand Richard’s role with Jacob, as a go between from him to the people Jacob doesn’t want to meddle with. This seems like a cop out for Jacob who says he wants to show MIB that people are naturally good but then has to meddle to show he is right…
- And if this is Jacob’s mission statement, then why would he have Richard tell Ben to gas the entire Dharma project?
- Jacob’s promises seem to take shape right away (Alpert’s eternal life) whereas MIB’s promises are made for the future and have dependant clauses (Alpert’s wife comes back, Sawyer off the island, Sayid gets Nadia)
5.) This is my biggest take away from the episode. MIB tells Richard that in order to kill Jacob, Richard cant let Jacob speak a word to him. Of course Jacob does and the rest is history. Parallel this to the conversation Dogen had with Sayid about killing Flocke. Joe Biden alert, “This is a big fucking deal.” This is clearly the rule Jacob and MIB have about being killed and is interesting for a few reasons:
- Why wouldn’t Jacob and MIB just go around the island speaking to everyone very quickly speak to everyone to ensure they couldn’t be killed? Maybe this is like the thing where a Bond bad-guy never takes the easy kill on 007 when they have the chance.
- Lets figure out who Jacob and MIB have spoken to thus far:
i) Jacob- Hurley, Richard, Ilana, Ben (we’ll get back to this in a second)
ii) MIB- Richard, Sayid, Claire, Kate, Sawyer, Ben - Under this theory, Jack can still be the one to be the hero to kill Flocke at the end of the year. And though Sawyer cant kill Flocke, watch out for him lending a helping hand and using what he’s learned from spending time with him.
- About that whole Jacob talking to Ben thing… Follow closely because I am about to posit that the show hasn’t been totally honest with us. Jacob spoke to Ben before Ben killed him in last season’s finale. Don’t believe me? Well check it out
If the rule is “don’t let him say a word to you,” than perhaps Ben hasn’t killed Jacob. Think about it and let me know how you see it.
Bardo Gets L O S T
Mar 3
Editor’s Note: I have been way too busy recently to blog. Sorry. If you’re really bored playing online Mini Putt. My new low is 21.
Seems like a fairly mixed bag of reviews for LOST’s sixth hour of the season, “Sundown.” The main criticism lodged is that nothing happened, a distant cousin of “we got no answers.” In terms of satisfaction with the episode, to each their own, but I would argue that this season has benefited from the trimming of the fat, where previous year’s have struggled.
Every episode has pushed the underlying story, which has basically been set up as a showdown between good and evil. Whether we have witnessed five seasons of set up for one inevitable battle between Jacob and Man In Black/Smoke Monster/Evil Incarnate/Fake Locke, is not entirely clear, but as Jacob said in the season five finale, “It only ends once. Everything else that happens is just progress.”
So let’s jump into this progress. The biggest development from “Sundown” was the clearer picture developed of the good vs. evil battle lines. Whereas before the episode there was still small debate (not in my mind but in some people’s) whether Team Flocke could have actually been on the good side, “Sundown” seems to have smashed the door shut on that conversation. Furthermore, we can officially welcome to Dark Sayid to Flocke’s flock, along with Crazy Claire and most of the temple’s less-than loyal subjects.
(Quick Nerdy Tangent- This is shaping up a lot like the Harry Potter conclusion where members of the wizarding community had to align themselves as Voldemort’s Death Eaters or on Harry Potter’s and Dumbledore’s side of good. And if I just ruined it for you, you are clearly the slowest reading nerd on the face of the Earth.)
(Quick question- how come Cindy apparently gets answers about Jacob and the island while our heroes struggle with what is what? She seemed pretty knowledgeable while fleeing the temple.)
For the good guys, or Team Jacob, it seems pretty clear that Jack and Hurley are the captains, while Elana, Sun, Miles, Lapidus will be joining them. Eliminating Rose and Bernard as irrelevant, we are left with Sawyer, Kate, and Ben as free agents in the island showdown (I have no idea and don’t want to even try to guess what happens with Jin, who is apparently alone in Claire’s fortress of crazy).
This leads me to two main thoughts coming out of “Sundown”:
1) Kate and Sawyer’s role in the battle. I’ve read a few places that they are with Team Bad, drawing from Sawyer’s role in “The Substitute” and Kate’s position at the end of “Sundown.” I would argue however that out of every character on LOST, Sawyer and Kate have always acted on their own volitions, which were always based on their beliefs. Unlike everyone else, they don’t cave for others or pussyfoot around other’s agnedas, but instead do what they want and disregard other’s instructions. Both have interminable wills and I don’t believe either could be “easily” convinced to join one side if they weren’t wholeheartedly invested.
Also, as a personal belief, I don’t see Lindelof and Cuse allowing Sawyer to end the show as a bad guy. Over and over, he has been trampled, used, heartbroken, while eroding from “that douche who stole the plane’s liquor” into “that hero that jumped out of the helicopter if Kate would check on his daughter.” Call me stubborn but out of everyone on the island, I don’t think they would let him contribute to the evil side in the end.
2) I don’t still don’t really get how Charles Widmore factors into the equation. Widmore was on the island and his ties to Elana seem to be overwhelming clues that he is on Team Jacob. However we’ve been conditioned to understand that Widmore and Ben are mortal (literally) enemies. Widmore was also responsible for sending the freighter that killed Dharma-ers and LOST-ies alike. If Widmore is Team Jacob, does that make Ben Team Flocke? Clearly Ben wasn’t killed in last night’s temple purge (under no circumstances would the producers let him die off screen), so where is he? Are we to believe as we see Vietnam-like body piles, that he survived the Smoke? Does he now also have a darkness growing in him?
I can easily see the season playing out like a chess match between Jacob and Flocke, recruiting and harnessing powers, as more and more of the island’s mystery is revealed. It’s odd though, that I don’t really care whether good will triumph over evil, as much as I do about what happens to the specific characters. Also clearly I don’t care much about side-flashes (Don’t confuse that with my unwavering support of side-boob!) at this point in the season.
One Wild Prediction: Best moment of the season will be Jack’s reworked “Live Together, Die Alone Speech” to draw the services of Sawyer to Team Jacob before the final showdown. You will be emotional.
Bardo on Tiger
Feb 20
The last time we all dropped everything and gathered around the boob tube to watch the fate of a disgraced athlete, Judge Ito told us OJ Simpson was innocent. Today, there was similar disappoint as Tiger Woods read an apologetic statement and offer us little else. Tiger had the opportunity to show the world he was truly sorry and on the road to becoming a new, better man. Spoiler alert, he didn’t.
Friday Morning Tiger was equally robotic and automatic like the Sunday Afternoon Tiger we used to know on the links. Tiger read aloud for 13 minutes, like some horrific bedtime story full of monotone reflections, nonspecific statements, and a complete disregard for character development. He hardly exhibited emotion, though, to be fair, a 72nd-green fist pump would have been pretty uncivilized
In fact the only part of the monologue (and that’s what it was) that wasn’t worthless to me, was Tiger admitting his feelings of entitlement. But that’s where it started to get personal and also where it ended, as Tiger quickly went back to his Mad Libs apology set, plugging in a religious affiliation as well as an adjective, a verb ending in -ing, and a body part (plural).
Let’s get real. This wasn’t an apology. This was a prepared statement, an apologetic essay. It was practiced and manicured and precise, like every aspect of Tiger’s golf game. It was everything we should have expected from Tiger, a guy who can’t be made to look anything but in control and never leaves his comfort zone. The biggest F-U from Tiger, no questions, meaning we can add the three (THREE?!?!) media members in attendance to the list of people Tiger has stiffed.
Having every detail prearranged showed his continuously mismanaged priorities; that his image comes before everything else, including his family and the apology. If his image wasn’t most important why wouldn’t he have spoken from the heart? Why did he need “I am truly sorry” written down? Had Tiger strayed from the script and spoken off the cuff, he may have stuttered or stammered or appeared vulnerable. He would have thrown himself in front of the apology bus instead of jumping out of its path and pretending to be hit.
I don’t care that he put himself out there and admitted his wrongs because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you have sex with tens of women outside your marriage Its called manning up and Tiger showed today, he is no more of a man than he was three months ago.
Bardo Bleeds Green
Feb 12
The NBA, where rumors happen! It feels like the high school hallways, come trade deadline week. Who’s with who behind closed doors? Is that 3 way deal really going down? Today, a rumor circulating the interwebs suggested that the Celtics might take part in a blockbuster with the Wizards. We would send Ray Allen, Brian Scalabrine, and JR Giddens to DC for Antwan Jamison and Caron Butler (and for the record, Danny Ainge shot down these rumors pretty quickly)
Undoubtedly, the trade would shake things up all over the league. A less myopic blog would talk about those ramifications, who then would need to step up and make a deal, and how this would affect the Eastern Conference. Not here.
To me, one of the interesting things about this trade was the idea of getting rid of JR Giddens, the “who’s that?” of the deal. Giddens was the Celtics 2008 first round draft pick from New Mexico. If you still don’t know the name, it’s probably because he’s played a whole 107 minutes in his year and a half. Desmond wouldn’t even have had to push the button twice in Gidden’s entire career on the floor.
Trading Giddens, shouldn’t be a big shock, because that’s been the Celtics MO for almost 10 years. A report card of the Celtics’ drafts in the aughts, would contain mostly N/As. A quick breakdown:
2001- Celtics draft Joe Johnson, Kedrick Perkins, and Joe Forte in the first round. 2 are out of the league within a couple years and Joe Johnson became an annual All-Star for a team that owns the Celtics right now. We traded him after half of a season.
2003- Celtics draft Dahntay Jones from Duke and trade him before ever playing a single game. Jones is now a solid rotation guy for the Pacers, who signed him after a great year with the Nuggets.
2005- Celtics draft Gerald Green and Ryan Gomes. Green can jump out of the gym, which we know, only because we saw him in the yearly Dunk Contest. Gomes, gets slightly more time than Green, before both are traded with Al Jefferson.
2006- Celtics draft Randy Foye and immediately trade him for Theo Ratliff, a proven, veteran non-factor, and Sebastian Telfair, a young, upstart non-factor. Foye turns into a double digit scorer and solid role player.
2007- Celtics draft and trade Jeff Green for Ray Allen, which worked out for everyone (a title for us, and Green is great for the Thunder). Celtics also draft Gabe Pruitt who rides pine for a little over a year before the Celtics let him go.
2008- Celtics draft the aforementioned JR Giddens. Oh and we also picked some guy from Turkey who is still playing there.
2009- Celtics draft Lester Hudson who is released after 16 games and 22 points. He has already been picked up by the Grizzlies and is playing more and scoring more in Memphis.
Of course there are the exceptions to the trend. Rajon Rondo impacted the Celtics right away with his uptempo pace and Al Jefferson was Paul Pierce’s only reliable asset until he was traded away. And that’s my point; these two guys were and are a couple of the best players in the league. Jefferson’s departure was necessary in getting the 07 title, but I find it less than coincidental that the guys who got early and often run with the C’s were the biggest contributors to the team (Other players not mentioned: Delonte West, now a starter in Cleveland and Tony Allen, the annual Mr. Inconsistent for the Celts).
I don’t mind if we say goodbye to JR Giddens within the next seven days (the deadline is the 18th), but in the future, I wish the guys we draft, actually make it on the Boston parquet a little more often before we send them to be productive for our opponents.
The Celtics’ Situation
Feb 1
The Celtics have problems. You know that, I know that, Doc Rivers might know that. What is debatable though, are levels of concern we should have after three straight, devastating losses, to three of the best teams in the NBA last week. I was wavering between “its alright, everyone goes through slumps” mode and “Code Red, Dan Shaughnessy, Sell Sell Sell” mode. I was trying to come up with a solution for the team, to figure out where things were going wrong, when I realized what the 2010 Celtics season has become.
We are The Situation. The parallels are uncanny. First is the whole closing thing. In Orlando and against the Lakers, it was the case of an inevitable collapse. You could see from midway through the fourth that no lead would be big enough to hold onto. Like Situation, the Celtics make us think we’re going home winners, only to fold in the waning seconds. The results are always the same, though the details slightly different; an airballed three pointer, a blown defensive coverage, or the mishandling of a grenade without the wingman personnel.
The C’s and the Sitch also share an age problem. Both are older than their peers and older than they should be for what their goals are, which leads to almost a pitiable image.
Meanwhile the Celtics and the Situation both need a helping hand; neither is going all the way without an assist. Mike’s help comes from Vinny or Pauly D wingmanning the hell out of the fat cows who come back to the Jersey House. Without them, the Situation’s night is going to end lonely and unfulfilled. Similarly the Celtics are going to need help from someone else, in the form of a trade. Without a useful big man to spell KG’s knees or another guard to backup Rondo, the Celtics season is doomed. Neither is going all the way
Also like the Situation, the Celtics have to prey on twos, threes, and fours instead of bagging any tens. Against the Lakers, Magic, Cavs, and Hawks, the Celtics are 2-7. We have had no problem swooping up the wins against the Nets, Wizards, Knicks, and Twolves (6-0). The Situation says “You have to walk through the weeds to get to the flowers,” but in the NBA, if you can’t beat the run with the big boys, see you next year.
(I.E. We didn’t write this)
This weekend, I read Dustin “Screech” Diamond’s entire autobiography, “Behind the Bell”. And I might be the only person who’s ever done that.
Literally, the only person. I’m fairly sure no editor actually read it cover-to-cover; on page four we get the sentence “Fuck fame. Allow me to tear down your allusions”… and that sets off a book just riddled with spelling errors, punctuation errors, repeated references to craft services as Kraft services and weird line breaks. On two separate occasions, entire paragraphs are actually repeated.
But you’re not reading this for me to call out Dustin Diamond’s copy editor. Nor was I reading his book to look for such errors. (I just notice them because I’m a precocious-in-a-bad-way son of an English teacher.) No… we all want to know the unbelievable “Saved by the Bell” sex scandals that he witnessed first hand. (Or, as he disclaims in the prologue, some of them are “things [he] heard from reliable sources.)
And I’ve got ‘em for you.
1. Dustin Diamond has a large penis and has used it to have sex with more than 2,000 women, most of whom he picked up at Disneyland.
Diamond’s sales pitch for this book, it seems, is: “As wholesome as ‘Saved by the Bell’ appeared on screen, the exact opposite was happening behind the scenes, and I’m broke and desperate enough to sell everyone out and tell you about it.” But his unspoken mission statement is: “I’m not Screech. I’m 100 percent, in every single way, not Screech. I’m cool, I follow no man, and women find me irresistible.”
Diamond tells of many of his exploits; even starting one chapter about halfway through the book with the sentence, “Is it bragging to say I’ve banged over two thousand chicks in my life?” (And as my fellow journalism brethren will note, yes, that line contains yet another misused word.)
And while it seems he met many of these anonymous “chicks” when they were extras on the show or during the cast’s mall tours and cross-country appearances… he says he actually seduced a large number of them at Disneyland.
“People don’t realize that Disneyland in the early ’90s was the perfect place to meet and hook up with chicks,” he writes. He then goes on to describe the best rides on which to carry this out (”The Haunted Mansion — a totally dark, nine-minute ride.”) And finally, he explains, his method was simple. He and a friend would walk around, wait until two (often international) tourist girls would recognize him as Screech, and take it from there.
The saddest part of all this? As I read that, I said to myself, “Yep. That probably did work.”
2. Mario Lopez raped a girl, and NBC paid her hush money.
Definitely the most damning accusation in the book… but one that Diamond doesn’t hedge (like many of the upcoming points). He flat-out says that Mario Lopez “lured [a girl] back to his pad… and was forced to have sex against her will.”
NBC’s lawyers stepped in to maintain the image of its clean teen stars, though, and paid the girl to be quiet. “And my understanding,” Diamond writes, “is that it wasn’t a boatload of cash, either, somewhere around fifty grand.”
I found a “Variety” article about Lopez being accused of date rape, so there is other corroboration on this. It’s amazing — back in 1993, before the Internet turned the American celebrity gossip press into the British celebrity gossip press, a huge “SBTB” fan like me never heard a word of this. If this date rape accusation had happened 15 years later, within moments of the story coming out a photo of A.C. Slater would’ve been on Perez Hilton, complete with a MS Paint mouth semen.
3. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen cheated on the actor who played Johnny Dakota simultaneously with Mario Lopez and Mark-Paul Gosselaar.
Thiessen comes off pretty poorly in the book. In this instance, Diamond discusses the famous anti-drug “SBTB” episode — the one where a movie star named Johnny Dakota shows up to film an anti-drug PSA but then tries to get the crew to use drugs… and they stand up to him. Apparently, Thiessen was dating Eddie Garcia, the actor who played Johnny Dakota.
But, little did he know, Diamond says, she was having sex with both of the other male leads of “SBTB” under his nose. In fact, he says, for the entire week of that episode, Thiessen was sneaking off, right under his nose, going from one guy’s dressing room to the other’s. Garcia eventually found out and ended things, because, it turns out, he was nothing like his character and was the most “steadfast dude you’d ever want to meet.”
4. During the “No Hope With Dope” episode, the cast members were all smoking weed in their dressing rooms.
Diamond doesn’t reveal that much about the drugs floating around the cast, but does say that “the ‘No Hope With Dope’ episode ended up being a huge hit … I just can’t help but think of all the off-camera drinking and recreational drug use being indulged in by the cast members during that time … I could even smell a certain ’smoke’ wafting from the crack beneath Tiffani’s dressing room.”
Man. I feel more betrayed than Ox when they accused him of being the one smoking the joint in the men’s room.
5. Elizabeth Berkley also did both Mario Lopez and Mark-Paul Gosselaar… but only once Tiffani-Amber Thiessen was done.
Berkley doesn’t get a ton of ink in the book — you almost perceive that Diamond has sympathy for her post-”SBTB” career being almost entirely a spiral of slut/hooker roles spurred by her decision to do “Showgirls”.
He does, however, mention that, once Thiessen was done with Lopez and Gosselaar, Berkley decided she wanted to get with both of them too. He says “there was a desperation to [her] ho’ing, like she had a lot of catching up to do.”
I don’t know about that. I think she just might’ve found jeans with two rows of belt loops too irresistible to pass up.
6. Lark Voorhies then did them as sloppy thirds.
From this book, and other things I’ve read, I get the impression that Voorhies is one of the shyest people in the history of mankind. According to Diamond, it took years for “Lisa Turtle to come out of her shell” (and I give him a point for that pun)… and when she finally did, she took her requisite turn on the Lopez/Gosselaar ride.
Basically, Diamond says, you can match up the timing of these relationships with the timing of Zack’s romances on the show. Kelly got the early years… then Jessie had the kiss during the rehearsal of “Snow White and the Seven Dorks” (eight if you count Studly)… and finally, Lisa got her quick run during her fashion show.
Diamond also seems to take legitimate personal umbrage with how that fashion show episode went down — he feels that Zack kissing Lisa, while knowing Screech had always loved her, was the ultimate sign that Zack Morris was a Bad Person. It’s one of the few times that he allows the line to be blurred between himself and Screech. I would’ve thought he’d be more upset that he didn’t get a crack at Thiessen during the famous “Kelly and Screech? Way to go Screech!” episode. Kevin probably cockblocked him.
7. When Lark Voorhies was engaged to Martin Lawrence, he abused her (at a minimum verbally).
This might be the strangest (and most abstract) scandal that Diamond tries to expose. He basically suggests that Martin Lawrence did something to make Voorhies even more reclusive and non-communicative.
He says that he saw Voorhies shortly after her fiance, Martin Lawrence (yes, the famous one) ended things with her, publicly, on the “Arsenio Hall” show. Diamond says “She flinched whenever a man was near her or a man’s voice was suddenly projected toward her. She rocked back and forth mumbling to herself in a very disturbing fashion, as if in her own world. You can draw your own conclusions from that.”
So Glennbeckian!
8. Dustin Diamond had sex with NBC’s VP of children’s programming, Linda Mancuso.
Diamond doesn’t go into too much detail about his other 1,999 sexual partners, but one of the NBC executives who oversaw “SBTB” gets almost an entire chapter.
Mancuso was 18 years older than Diamond but, he says, from the moment they met she treated him like an equal. Eventually, as he got older, that turned into a sexual relationship.
As I read this I kept thinking, “Wow, this is really specific and controversial stuff to be saying about this woman who he seems to really care about — how pissed off is she going to be?” Then I got to the point where he reveals that she died from cancer in 2003. She was 44 at the time of her death.
The skeptic in me quickly thought, “Well, what a convenient story — the only sexual partner whose name he reveals, and the highest-profile sexual partner at that, is dead.” But hey, draw your own conclusions, right?
9. Mark-Paul Gosselaar confessed to the cast that he took steroids before “Saved by the Bell: The College Years”.
Enough with tell-all books revealing steroid use. Those revelations jumped the shark when Jose Canseco declared that he used to inject steroids right into Mark McGwire’s ass. This next decade had better yield an era of tell-alls revealing (1) athletes cheating on wives (spoiler alert: all of them) (2) pop singers who really couldn’t sing and (3) plastic surgery confessions.
10. Ed “Max” Alonzo used to get gay with Neil Patrick Harris while they talked about magic.
This one was probably my favorite. It’s about Ed Alonzo, who played the mostly useless character of Max (owner of The Max) during the early years of “SBTB”. Max would always do magic on the show, which corresponded to Alonzo being a magician in real life.
Well… Neil Patrick Harris has always been a big fan of magic. (Now, as an adult, he’s on the board of LA’s famous Magic Castle… and all the magic that Barney does on “How I Met Your Mother” is inspired by Harris’s real-life skills.)
So, according to Diamond, “[Alonzo] wound up spending a lot of time with Harris. A lot of time. For a while they were inseparable, going away to perform magic together, conjuring their mystical spells of enchantment. It wasn’t until years later that Neil Patrick Harris announced he was gay.”
That’s a clever literary way to draw a syllogism… and I completely bought it. What can I say? I’m also the one who spotted Dumbledore as gay from a mile away and saw homoerotic sexual tension in every interaction Harry and Malfoy had for all seven years at Hogwarts.
I just see my homosexual friends slowly but surely taking over magic, the way they took over steelwork, snapping, racquetball and Bravo. (And they’ll take over marriage unless you put your foot down. Don’t turn around, there may be a gay guy standing over your shoulder, trying to marry you as we speak. It’s definitely something that’s worth being afraid of and spending millions of dollars to fight against.)
11. Executive producer Peter Engel used to have bisexual threesomes with Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and Mark-Paul Gosselaar in his office.
And why not, right?
According to Diamond, Engel was a former cocaine user and Hollywood party scene guy who saw the light and became a born-again Christian. As the showrunner for “SBTB” he banned swearing on set, and refused to let Bayside High be anything short of a utopia that was as clean as Singapore and pure as Walton’s Mountain. (It’s why there was never an episode that broached the topic of teen sex.)
But… he really tries to guide the reader into believing Engel, Gosselaar and Thiessen used to get-it-on. He never says it directly, but if he’s not implying it, then I surrender my reading comprehension merit badge. Here are a few excerpts, in order, from the section about this.
“I’ve heard lots of Hollywood hearsay in my day, but I can only vouch for what I saw… here is one of the most fucked up things I saw behind the scenes of ‘SBTB’. Draw your own conclusions because I still don’t know what to make of it.
“[Gosselaar] started getting called to [Engel]’s office for long meetings… and closed the door behind him. Which was weird… because typically Peter kept his office door open.
“[Thiessen] also began to be summoned upstairs for long, cloosed-door meetings… then, both [Gosselaar] and [Thiessen] (!) were called together into [Engel]’s inner sanctuary for another mystery marathon behind closed doors.
“[Gosselaar] and I were selected to go on a Paris [publicity] trip together… lo and behond, [Thiessen] pitched a bitch. She went up to [Engel]’s office for another hours-long, closed-door meeting, and when she re-energed it was suddenly her and [Gosselaar] now making the trip.
“[Thiessen] wasn’t even supposed to be around for ‘The College Years’… all of a sudden, [Thiessen]’s locked again in those troubling closed-door meetings in [Engel]’s office and, voila, she’s off to college with the guys. From then on the show’s writing became all about Zack and Kelly.”
So, yeah. At least through Diamond’s eyes, the entire “SBTB” era was pretty much one giant orgy and everyone was invited. (Except Mr. Belding. Dennis Haskins, who Diamond refers to as a close friend, escapes this book with very few mentions and virtually nothing controversial. Either Diamond left him out of the stories, or Rod Belding swooped in and took his spot in all the orgies.)
Now that I’ve cashed out the 11 biggest bombshells in the book, you might be wondering if it’s worth reading. My answer is… sort of. The writing isn’t great (I don’t think Nobel Prize-winning books repeatedly use the word “douchenozzle”). There’s such an aura of a money grab here that it’s hard to buy into Diamond’s credibility — how many half-truths or complete fabrications are included simply to pump up the craziness of the book?
But, over the 300+ pages you will get two things. One: You’ll get a lot of cool behind-the-scenes looks at “SBTB” which, for huge fans like me, were fantastic. And two: You’ll get a really strong look into the mind of a scarred, desperate child star, forever typecast, alienated and altered by his time on such a seemingly juvenile television show.
To me, the book read very sad. Diamond clearly perceived himself as a picked-on outsider during filming and that bitterness still stays with him today. The constant insistence that he’s not Screech (I smoke pot and shoot BB guns, look at how cool I am! I’ve banged 2,000 chicks, look at how much of a player I am!) falls squarely into the zone of him doth protesting too much. And little throwaway lines — like one about him and his widower Dad no longer speaking to each other because his Dad mismanaged and lost most of his earnings — give fleeting honest looks at the unhappy, unfortunate state of a guy my age who I grew up with and admired.
If you’re a big “SBTB” fan… and you’re willing to see it without rose-colored nostalgia glasses… I strongly recommend the book. (In spite of all my criticisms, I read the entire thing in one day and never found myself bored or daydreaming.) If you’re not a big “SBTB” fan, though, or you’d like to keep the cast members pure and innocent, preserved in mylar bags attached to your wall like The Collector… then focus your reading attention on a book with more literary merit.
AKA any book written by anyone other than Dustin Diamond or Stephenie Meyer.
