A few minutes with Jakey Rooney

Ferndale, Mich. -- Have you ever wondered why people bother to go to the ballpark and don't bother to watch the ballgame? I have.

I did yesterday while taking in a Tigers game at Comerica Park.

Cheers. Chuckles. Cacophony. Chaos.

An entire row of tween girls left in the second inning and didn't return until the eighth. That was the good part, come to think about it.

A man who was old enough to know better audibly kept trying to decide whether to ride the carousel or the Ferris wheel. Guess he called an audible when he got there.

A few rows in front of us, a group kept gabbing about somebody's birthday, singing and standing while blocking my view of home plate.

"Seriously?" I said. "I have a birthday every year."

It is a free country, in theory, but why would one pay good money to NOT watch the game? (Jets fans need not answer.)

Maybe I am not the best barometer. I keep score. Rap music is repugnant. The only wave I want to see is from the Fox Sports Detroit girls.

I had just about had enough, loudly lamenting the HDTV receiver and my recliner, when Alex Aliva went deep with what proved to be the game winner.

"You know," I said, looking down on the green field of glory, "I carry on and complain, and yet I love this damned ol' game."

It's so good, in fact, that I wished these folks had watched.

A few minutes with Jakie Rooney...

OK, here's my Andy Rooney rant for today.

Don'tcha just hate it when you are right in the middle of a conversation and somebody says, "Hang on...I'm getting a beep," and then treats you to dead air for five minutes? Unless somebody is dying, forget it. Gossip later. We are talking here.

I'm getting fed up with those ubiquitous cell phones anyway. Oh, they serve a purpose. But, I swear, some people use them to the point they might as well be another appendage. We somehow managed to survive for thousands of years without them, anyway.

I don't want to try to talk to you during dinner while you are blabbing away on your phone. I don't think it's humane to keep chatting while a sales clerk or drive-thru attendant is taking your order. Hang up. Show some respect. They aren't your servants. They are people.

And, while I tweet and text myself, I shudder at the thought of what this is doing to the English language, which is already an endangered species. I'm sorry, but "C U L8ER" is not a sentence. It barely belongs on a license plate.

If you are at a party and your cellphone rings, let it go. If you are sitting alone at a restaurant using your cellphone, don't ruin my meal by talking so loudly I can hear every syllable of your argument with your significant other or the fact that you need to pick up a loaf of bread on your way home.

I couldn't care less. Let me eat in peace.

If we are in the theater watching a movie, turn the damn phone off. I want to see the celluloid. I don't want to hear you. I don't want to see the light flash when you tweet vapid verbiage. And if you have the temerity to let your cellphone ring during a live play, you should be swiftly executed.

And if you are driving? Don't even think about it. I don't want to become roadkill because of your fear of silence.

One of these days, we are going to forget how to carry on an honest-to-God eye-to-eye conversation with one another. Some of us are already there.

Put the cell phone away. Just. Put. It. Away.

C U L8ER.

Why I hate the 21st century

OK, so my friend Ross Southerland sent me this clip earlier today:

Had no clue who "Ali-G" is, didn't much want to know, but LOVED Andy Rooney's reaction. I could tell Andy was mad.

"If this was this fool's attempt at satire, he picked the wrong scribe with which to screw," I said to myself.

Then I looked at the other videos on YouTube.

And it all clicked -- who the guy was, why Rooney didn't suffer his foolishness, and why I hated the clown from my first look. I think my friend The Giant Rat of Knoxville will also love Rooney's response and some of his one-liners.

Oh, and just for fun, here is my infamous review of Cohen's film "Borat," written in March 2007.

'Throw Borat down the well'

I am nonplussed at the thought of writing a review about "Borat." I guess the thing to do is to get some choice words out of the way.

Vile, sophomoric, lewd, disgusting, soporific, pathetic, lowbrow, worthless and unbelievable. Whew. That feels better.

I mildly laughed at the film a couple of times early on. A friend belly-laughed at scenes that were anything but funny. I knew we were in for a long night when Borat and tag-a-long buddy Azamat stopped at a bed and breakfast ran by two sweet Jewish folks. Later, when Azamat began overtly admiring a "Baywatch" book (I'm cleaning up the scene), I walked out of the room.

"Waterworld" and "Joe Vs. The Volcano" can rest easy. This is the worst movie I have ever seen.

The gag is that Sacha Baron Cohen, who is Jewish, is attempting to show that racism, and anti-Semites, are still prevalent in America, particularly --- wait for it --- down South. I'm refraining from calling this train wreck satire because satire is an artistic term and "Borat" is nowhere near worth calling art.

Thirty-five years ago, Norman Lear's "All in the Family" accomplished what this film can't by using sophistication, wit and good writing. Imagine that.

This worthless pile of celluloid is intended to shock. If you like unspeakably bad jokes, humor that wouldn't do in a frat house, full-frontal male nudity and content that should make anyone with a brain blush, by all means this film is for you. I sincerely hope I never hear of Cohen again.

At their best, movies have the power to raise us up, to comment on the human condition and make us better people. Less lofty films at least can entertain and offer 90 minutes of mindless humor.

"Borat" is none of this. It is an amazingly unfunny, poorly done, offensive, worthless piece of garbage. And all those other adjectives I used at the beginning of this piece.

That's it. I'm done. Can't believe I wasted this much of my life.

....

To which friend and colleague Carol Springer responded: "So, Jake, how do you really feel?"

'Just look for the truth'

OK, I'll admit it.

I loved Mike Wallace.

Well, let me back up. I had a love/hate relationship with the guy. Sometimes his "60 Minutes" segments made me stand up and cheer. Sometimes they'd make me mad. But, that was the point.

As Scott Pelley said last night on the CBS Evening News, Mike Wallace had a saying:

"Our job isn't hard. Just look for the truth."

Those words are more important than ever in this social media cyclone, in which even the relatively-new 24-hour news cycle has been reduced to a seven-minute one.

You no doubt know I'm a old soul. I've watched or recorded "60 Minutes" since I was a boy. Andy Rooney was my favorite. Harry Reasoner was the one I wanted to be like. Ed Bradley was the dude that dug great tunes. I had a crush on Lesley Stahl since her White House days. Morley Safer was the courtly one. Dan Rather was Dan Rather.

But the guy whose voice and manner and mere presence quickened my pulse was Mike Wallace. I admired his guts. I'd always laugh whenever he'd nail some crook. I loved to watch the powerful and the dictatorial and the arrogant asses dither and squirm. Pelley and Steve Kroft and the current crew (Safer and Stahl are still around and, for the record, I still love Stahl and now have a crush on Lara Logan) are doing a great job keeping Don Hewitt's baby and Mike Wallace's MO alive.

Wallace had been to the top of the mountain and to the depth of the valley. Gen. William Westmoreland sued him in a famous incident in 1982. Wallace later admitted the incident, plus the death of a son, touched off a series of depressive episodes. He admitted to Safer in a late interview he once tried to kill himself. I felt for him because I, too, have been nipped at the heels before by the Black Dog.

Favorite stories? Oh, the time he scooped Seymour Hersh on Hersh's own story -- while on an airplane! And the time he threw up the word "lunatic" to the Ayatollah.

Don't miss this excellent New York magazine piece by Matt Zoller Seitz.

Of the CBS clips of classic interviews, please watch Wallace's heart-wrenching story on the Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, who blamed himself for JFK's assassination. You can find it among these classic clips. Heck, watch 'em all.

As such things eerily go sometimes, I watched a Wallace-hosted 1992 CBS documentary on Watergate about 24 hours before I heard of his passing. I remember thinking how much I missed that voice, that turned-up eyebrow, that look, on "60 Minutes."

He had his faults and he wasn't a saint, but at least by one viewer who appreciated a guy going for the jugular and giving his all into his 90s, Mike Wallace will be missed.

One last story: Pelley said last night CBS threw Wallace a big party the Friday night of the week he "retired." Gave him a cake and everything.

Guess who was back at work, sitting at his desk, the following Monday?

You can't help but admire that.

"60 Minutes" will air a special tribute to Mike Wallace at 7 p.m. (Eastern) Sunday, April 15.

No. 1 Giants fan would've loved Sunday

Sunday night after the Super Bowl, the thought popped into my head that the late CBS News commentator and my favorite curmudgeon, Andy Rooney, said during one of his last interviews he kept New York Giants tickets in a secret drawer inside his office desk.

Mr. Rooney would have loved the outcome of Sunday night's game.

Sure enough, the folks at "60 Minutes" uncovered this classic segment from 1987. They call it Andy Rooney's Fantasy Football. Morley Safer dubbed him "Wrong Way Rooney."

Enjoy!

My favorite curmudgeon

Sunday nights will never be the same.

Andy Rooney, America's favorite curmudgeon, whose commentaries provided the perfect period for the final moments of "60 Minutes," died Friday night. He was 92.

Barely retired a month (although he said, and I concur, that a writer never retires), Rooney passed away from complications following surgery. He will be missed.

Rooney got his start during World War II, as a reporter for the daily Stars and Stripes newspaper. He said later that being in the war, first as a reluctant soldier, altered his thinking about its necessity. "I saw the Germans," he said, "and I changed my mind."

He came to fame in the final installment on "60 Minutes," complaining about everything from women's hats to flights of stairs. ("They don't take flight.")

But he could also be serious, offering a touching tribute to D-Day, raging against the senseless 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City ("I could kill the bastards!"), mocking the lyrics to Michael Jackson's "Bad."

He said, though, that of all the things about which he could complain, he could never grumble about his life. It was filled with a loving wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Not to mention a career to remember, punctuated by those perfect periods at the end of "60 Minutes" on Sunday nights.