November 14, 2022 • 49 mins
EPISODE 75: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well THAT was fun! Enjoy retaining the Senate and the fascists turning on Trump and then FORGET IT AND GET BACK TO WORK (2:32) Ever seen the movie "Carrie"? There is a lesson for us in it. When you think you have ended Carrie's reign of horror, make sure you burn the grave, salt the earth, and encase everything in concrete before she can reach up from hell to grab you. They are not defeated, they are developing a new Supreme Court scheme as we speak (4:26) Be aggressive - like Pelosi and Schumer planning to raise the debt limit during the Lame Duck session (5:44) And consider the more outlandish ideas: nominating Liz Cheney to be Speaker or offering cabinet or ambassador slots to uninfected GOP Congressmen (7:20) Because the fascists will now cut to the chase: supporters of a different Kari are calling for a military takeover of the government so they can get a new vote in Arizona (8:47) Now is the time to strike because they are burning down their own house: attacking Trump, McConnell, McCarthy and Ronna Romney while Trump cultists like Ann Coulter and Glenn Youngkin's Lieutenant Governor and even the DILBERT GUY bail on Trump (10:43) But now the next threat comes into focus: The Federalist Society is so hellbent to enact "Independent State Legislature Theory" that it has purged its own co-founder because he doesn't believe in it. Supreme Court Barbie - Amy Coney Barrett - and the other fascists do, as you'll hear. And to stop them, we'll need to designate The Federalist Society as a terrorist organization.
B-Block (18:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Maslow in Pennsylvania (19:02) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Coincidence? Trump wanted to "get the IRS on" Comey and McCabe. And each was then hit with a rare invasive audit. (21:07) IN SPORTS: No experience? No problem! Jeff Saturday wins in NFL coaching debut (23:39) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A New Jersey Republican official calls the cops on a 9-year old African-American girl who "scared him." He competes with Sarah "They think we're stupid" Palin and Donald "They stole the ELECTRON from Blake Masters" Trump for the dishonors.
C-Block (29:36) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I really did fall off a cliff (well, a pretty tall rock outcropping) filming a TV Commercial for Boston Market. But that's only part of the story. The ads paid so much I was willing to quit ESPN to do them instead, and the ads were so perversely effective that the company went bankrupt!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
Well that was fun. Retaining the Senate majority and all
(00:28):
the election deniers drowning at the ballot box, and the
GOP lead in the House at minimum so reduced it
guarantees murderous infighting and Pelosi talking about raising the debt
limit in the Lame Duck, and the fascists turning on
McConnell and the fascists turning on McCarthy, and the fascists
turning on Ronna Romney and the fascists turning on Trump,
and I mean everybody from mob Brooks to Fox News
(00:51):
to the Dilbert guy turning on Trump. And this was
a great weekend, and bookmark the memory of it in
your mind, have a few less nightmares as a result,
and then for get it. Back to work and back
to this mindset. Have you ever seen the movie carry
(01:12):
Sissy spacek High school billying victim humiliated at the prom,
turns out to have telekinetic power. It's a Stephen King story.
Destroys the school, Jim kills everybody, destroys her own home,
she dies, Her only friend goes to the house to
lay flowers in her memory. And suddenly out of the rubble,
Carry's arms springs out and grabs her friend to pull
(01:32):
her to hell. There is a lesson for us in
the movie Carry. When you think you have ended Carrie's
reign of horror, when you have Carry vanquished and dead
and buried, make sure you then burn the grave, put
out the fire, burn it again, salt the earth in case,
everything that's left in concrete for a mile square, and
(01:55):
skip the flowers. The fascists are not defeated. They have
another plan. It's about getting the Supreme Court to set
state legislatures on a path where they can overrule elections
they don't like. And we have just found out how
serious the Supreme Court is about this. I'll walk you
(02:16):
through that in a moment. Trump has not vanished. He
is not going to moderate. He's not gonna learn anything
from this except what every other Republican has learned for
twenty five years. If your venom did not work, that's
because you were not venomous enough. The election deniers have
not run out of denial. They're just going to stitch
together all the religious deniers and all the violent deniers,
(02:40):
and all the military overthrown deniers and put it all out,
there is one unit. The fascists have not run out
of evil. They have not run out of schemes, They
have not even run out of carries. Who in the
hell is the Republican candidate for the governor of Arizona?
What's her name again? Carry? Huh huh? Okay, enough seri. Viously,
(03:05):
the best news of this weekend was Speaker Pelosi and
the debt ceiling. Without even being asked, she went on
CNN and said the lame duck was the right time
to raise it, to take the nuclear weapon out of
the Republicans hands. Then she went on ABC and said
that winning the Senate created a window to do it.
So a Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Scalise or Speaker Trailer
(03:25):
Park Green cannot threaten to crash the world economy by
not raising the debt limit and holding the debt limit
hostage in exchange for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
And then Chuck Schumer had a news conferencing they would
map out the route to do this in the Senate
this week. And this is exactly the kind of aggressiveness
that is absolutely necessary right now. When Carrie's dead Arms
(03:49):
shoots out of the rebel, do not wait. Head it
with your shovel. There are more things to do, some
of them feasible, some of the symbolics, some of them crazy.
But we should do all of them instead of breathing
a sigh of relief like they and we all did
at the end of and you saw what that got us.
(04:10):
Somebody suggested that if the Dems do indeed not retain
the House, finding the half dozen still uninfected Republicans in
the House, lining up the huge Democratic minority behind this scheme,
and then nominating Liz Cheney to be the new speaker,
and and no, you don't have to be a serving
member of Congress to be elected speaker, and know her
(04:32):
non insurrection positions are nearly as bad as her father's.
I know that. And no, it probably won't work. And
know even if it did work, the Republicans would then
spend every waking moment trying to undo it. And that's
why you try it. The mistake of one was exhaling
this time less oh, democracy prevailed, and the American system
(04:55):
worked a men and more flying shovels and burning kerosene
on Carrie White's rubble. There was another idea find those
half a dozen uninfected Republicans in the House and have
the President called them up and say, hey, would you
like to join the cabinet? Or have you ever thought
of becoming an ambassador? And you take the ones from
(05:17):
the states where the governor does not get to pick
a successor and it doesn't have to be from the
same party, and you force special elections they're like, oh,
I don't know New York, and make the GOP constantly
defend its razor thin majority in the House. Because I'd
rather see these snakes campaigning than actually legislate. In the
midst of paranoia and pandemic and inflation. The damn fools
(05:39):
have somehow still managed to lose three national elections in
five calendar years. I want to see them campaigning rather
than legislating. Be aggressive, because this is where the Republicans
are now. This is the audio from a video Ron
Philipkowski tweeted from the Carry Lake Supporters. Here's that name again,
(06:02):
them Carry Lake Supporters marching around the Maricopa County Ballot
Counting Center, carrying crosses and demanding the military overthrow of
the government of the United States on Earth as it
is in heaven. Give us a stay. We the people
(06:26):
are requesting military step in and redo our elections was
fake and false. It's full of our government is full
of corrupt people. We the seventy one people that you
can see here around the center. Be aggressive because even
those lunatics supporting that lunatic are looking inwards right now
(06:46):
and wondering who to blame. And they are so used
to Democrats and liberals starting to sing Kumbaya and listening
to the sirens call of unity and bipartisanship to which
we always listen, that they do not believe the Democratic
Party response to the red trickle will be shovels and kerosene. Thus,
it is also imperative to encourage Trump and dissentists to
(07:09):
fight it out for the nomination, and imperative to do
everything we can to get Trump to run as a
third party or independent, because the best way to destroy
the fascist movement in this country is to get it
to destroy itself. Destroying things is the only thing it's
good at, and the kids are doing a great job.
While at least Stefanik endorsed Trump over the weekend, fellow
(07:33):
disloyal scoundrel Jim Banks was going to endorse Trump, and
instead he both postponed any endorsement and defended Trump. The
Lieutenant governor of Virginia, a Republican, called Trump a liability
to the mission, and on the sidelines half the cheerleaders
walked out, and Culture who wrote a book called in
(07:53):
Trump We Trust. Quote to Trump, you had your chance
with a Republican House and Senate. You had a domestic
policy to your son in law, and Gary Cohne, you
haded foreign policy to your son in law and a
country that gave your son in law two billion. Shut
the blank up forever. The Cornell education appears not to
have been utterly wasted on and culter. After all, when
(08:15):
Trump said maybe the name Glenn Uncan, who was Chinese,
Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy and thus the lead intellect
among the fascists, said I'm out, and a guy at
the National Review said this is delusional, mental breakdown stuff,
and a Fox News guy said it was unhinged, and
Red State freaking Red State wrote Trump legitimately appears to
(08:36):
have had a mental break over the last week. News
Max had Peter King on to trash Trump, Moe Brooks
bailed out on Trump. The New York Post bailed out
on Trump. I think that's four times since last Tuesday,
Candice Owen's bailed out. They have taken that with which
Adam Frisch described Lauren Bobert anger tainment and turned the
(08:58):
angertainment on themselves. Are they sincere? Have the scales fallen
from their eye? Is about Trump? Or did Trump's latest check?
Just not clear? I don't care. It doesn't matter. They're
burning down their own house. Let's go send more Kerassene
(09:20):
and bring the shovels because this is now the problem,
and I'm not certain how to stop this, because this
is the next thing the fascists are trying. The Federalist
Society has, as you know, corrupted the Supreme Court, which
is now the Supreme Republican Religious Court. You may rightly
suggest that it's insistence that the justices it owns throw
(09:45):
out Roe v. Wade was what cost the Republicans everything
they should have gotten in the midterms. Happily though, for
the Federalist Society and has a backup plan eliminate midterms
and other elections. This is, if you have not heard
of it, the independent state legislature theory, which the Court
will hear in a case called Moore v. Harper on
fittingly December seven. In short, the Supreme Court could rule
(10:11):
within the month that state courts are not allowed to
review any federal election related laws passed by state legislatures.
The Supreme Court could allow state legislatures to ignore their
own state constitutions. The legislatures could redistrict congressional seats right,
new voting rules or other laws more than likely overrules
(10:33):
state election outcomes, and you could not sue the legislature
in state court. It's obviously the exact opposite of what
the founders intended and what every defender of representative government
since has sworn to uphold. Well, so what this is
the Federalist Society? What does the Constitution have to do
with it? This is so serious, and the Federalist Society
(10:56):
is so serious about it that its board of Directors
has voted to tell a man named Stephen Calabreze that
he can't describe himself this way any more, or because
he disagrees with the independent state legislature theory and says,
no state Supreme courts are you know, supreme Who is
Stephen Calibracy? How does he describe himself? He is the
(11:19):
co founder of the Federalist Society, and he is still
co chairman of the Federalist Society. And the Federalist Society
is so committed to this that they've just purged him
for disagreeing with their crazy fascist dream of eliminating elections
at the state level when they don't like them. That
is how serious about this soft coup they are. You
(11:43):
already know they are serious enough that they encourage judges
and Supreme Court justices to be openly political, in violation
of every premise of our judicial system. Samuel Alito might
as well have campaigned for Trump. And last Thursday night,
the Federalist Society had its forty anniversary gala in Washington,
and overtly political event, and Aldo spoke and was cheered,
(12:05):
and where steel Neil Gorsich was there, and Brett Kavanaugh
was there waiting tables, I assume, and so is Amy
Coney Barrett, the Jesus freak with the legal skills of
a high school student who might take pre law when
she gets to community college. She got up and spoke
and immediately mocked free speech. Supreme Court Barbie is so
(12:45):
glad about noise not being made by protesters outside her house.
And no, here's a shock. She did not go on
to decry actual violence against America's democratically elected leaders, just
about things that inconvenience to her while she was trying
to overthrow the constitution. And like, part of this that's
missing is that her name is Amy and not carry.
(13:06):
So enjoy the weekend past and the Senate and however
the House finally turns out and the Trump to santist
punch and Judy Show and fascist entertainment being turned inward,
and start worrying more about what the Supreme Court will
next due to democracy and what we can do to
get the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to designate
(13:30):
the Federalist Society as a terrorist organization. Still ahead, Elmo
Muskrat goes one step too far. It's all well and
(13:52):
good to snark on a politician, but maybe not when
that politician is on the Senate subcommittees on Communication, Media
and Broadband and Consumer Protection and Space and Science. Sarah
Pale in his back and dumber than ever. She tweets,
they think we're stupid, and a mighty roar goes up
from the crowd, and Trump claims they've stolen the electron
(14:16):
from Blake Masters, Is he positive? And other physics jokes
coming up in Worse and the day I fell off
a cliff filming a television commercial and then the television
commercial caused the company I made the television commercial four
to lose nine hundred million dollars and going to bankruptcy.
Things I promised not to tell all about his next
(14:38):
this Discountdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman still ahead
on Countdown. She was trying to help the environment, but
she was black at Her neighbor was a Republican, so
(14:58):
he called the cops on her because he was scared
of her. By the way, she is nine years old.
Worst Persons coming up first. In each edition of Countdown,
we feature a dog in need you can help. Every
dog has its day. This is a really small scale project.
Maslow is a handsome brindle pibble terrier mix in Why
(15:19):
I'm Missing Pennsylvania, who is fourteen years old. His human
gave him to another guy. That guy decided Maslow didn't
really need to be fed, so emaciated and betrayed. The
second human dumped Maslow in a high kill shelter, where
Outcast Rescue pulled him They've got a foster for him.
He's getting food and getting healthier, but they need about
(15:40):
six dollars to cover the expenses, probably for the rest
of his life. Owned by the way, it's senior dog month.
Maslow is my pinned tweet at Tom Jumbo Grumbo and
connected on my keith old room and account. If you
can donate, please respond to the tweet and retweet it.
If you can, I thank you and Maslow thanks you.
(16:11):
Pot Scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions, dateline. New York Trump's second chief of Staff,
General John Kelly tells The New York Times Trump told
him he wanted to sick the I R S on
James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the FBI on Oh golly,
what a coincidence. James Koby and Andrew McCabe both later
wound up being hit with a rare and highly intrusive
(16:34):
audit by the I R. S. Kelly said, Trump said, quote,
we ought to investigate and get the I R S
on Comey and McCabe. Trump spokes robot Liz Harrington denies
it and called Kelly a quote psycho, which is quite
a statement. If you've ever seen Liz Harrington dateline Boston.
(16:54):
Elon Musk may have bitten off more than he can
chew this time. No, not about Twitter. We know that
this is about Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. A Washington
Post columnist with Markue's permission, impersonated Marky and got a
blue check mark for a Twitter account. Marky complained about this,
Musk replied, perhaps it was because Marky's real account quote
(17:17):
sounds like a parody. Markie replied. One of your companies
is under a Federal Trade Commission consent decree. Auto safety
watchdog NITZA is investigating another for killing people, and you're
spending your time picking fights online. Fix your company or Congress,
Will Musk replied with a meme. As I mentioned, Marky
(17:39):
is on the Senate subcommittees on Communication, Media and Broadband,
and Consumer Protection and Space and Science. Enjoy the purp walk, Elmo.
(18:05):
This is Sports Center. Wait check that not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith in sports. If you're wondering if
coaching experience is really necessary in the pro sports that
we love so very much, they laughed when ESPN's Jeff
(18:25):
Saturday was named to coach his old team, the Indianapolis
Colts Saturday, who as a player was a center that
never previously coached at anything more sophisticated than a prep school.
The Colts built a ten zip lead over the Raiders
in Saturday's first game yesterday, they blew the lead, they
trailed twenty to nineteen in the fourth quarter, and then
rallied to win on a Matt Ryan touchdown pass. Final
(18:49):
Indianapolis Jeff Saturday is undefeated as a National Football League coach,
which reminds me of June seven, the Texas Rangers baseball
team fired manager Frank Lucasey and named as his successor
Eddie Stank, He who had not had a thing to
do with professional baseball since the Chicago White Sox had
fired him as manager nine years earlier. His Texas Rangers
(19:13):
promptly scored nine runs in the seventh and eighth innings
to get him attend to eight win against the Twins
in Minnesota, and immediately after that game, Eddie Stanky quit
as manager to Texas Rangers with his one and oh
record and went back to coach college ball. Thank you,
(19:36):
Nancy House. And speaking of Texas, remember the guy arrested
for throwing a can of white claw at Senator Ted
Cruz during the Houston Astros World Series Victy parade. Well,
the attorney victory was probably the word I wanted there.
The attorney for suspect, Joey Arsiko No says they've got
it all wrong, like I got the pronunciational wrong. He
(19:57):
was just throwing a can of white claw to Ted Cruz. So,
in the great tradition of athletes doing this ring World
Series or other championship parades, Ted Cruz would chug the beverage. Now,
obviously this is not going to hold up in court
because have you ever seen Ted Cruise. There's no way
you'd ever mistake Ted Cruz for an athlete. Still ahead,
(20:24):
So I fell off this cliff shooting a TV commercial,
and I still wound up faring better than the company
that paid me to make the TV commercial. Full details
ahead and things I promised not to tell. First, the
daily round up of the miscreants, morons and done in
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons, and the
(20:46):
bronze Oh Sarah Pale and his back. She tweeted that
there's no way John Fetterman or Katie Hobbs could have
won their elections because they have fewer Twitter followers than
do mement Os and carry Lake with It was a
video in which Sarah asked the musical question they think
(21:08):
we're stupid, and we think you're stupid. We established this
in two thousand eight. What's your question? Caller? Wait, there
is more. Palin also appeared at a hockey autograph show
in Toronto on Saturday with her new boyfriend, the equally
intelligence challenged X New York ranger Ron Do Gay. Autograph
(21:30):
pictures were fifty dollars. To be fair, paying fans fifty
dollars to take a picture with Do Gay and Palin.
That's actually a pretty reasonable offer on their part. The
Bronze Trump one of something like one posts by him
on truth Social on the weekend of Veterans Day, and
none of them on Friday even mentioned Veterans Day. One
(21:51):
of them, though, read quotes sorry I'm laughing and you
haven't even heard it yet quote they stole the electron
from Blake Masters do election over again. They stole the
John elect John Well. We need to keep an eye
on this. Is he positive? Trump is all charged up
(22:17):
about it? Whoever did this will face charges, but happily
it's just a phase. Is this electrifying news? I stole
all those jokes from my Twitter applies. But our winner,
Gordon Losh of Caldwell, New Jersey. I hope I'm pronouncing
that correctly. But if I'm not, screw him. If you
(22:40):
hadn't heard about this, much of the East Coast had
an infestation of spottern lantern flies this summer and fall.
Spotted lantern flies are spectacular but also spectacularly damaging to
the local ecosystem, so much so that authorities throughout the
Northeast actually told residents, if you see a spotted lantern
(23:01):
fly and you can't miss them, they look like spotted lanterns.
If you see one, kill it, I mean seriously, nothing
about trapp it it, or will take it to a
farm up state. Kill the things, squish it. So on
October nine, year old Bobby Wilson of Caldwell, New Jersey,
(23:22):
went out to spray a tree that had been planted
by her grandmother and had become infested with spotted lantern flies,
which is when the Wilson's neighbor across the street, Gordon Losh,
called the police. Quoting from the tape of his call.
There's a little black woman walking spraying stuff on the
(23:44):
sidewalks and trees. I don't know what the hell she
is doing. Scares me, though, Lash added he thought she
was wearing a hoodie. Turned out she was not a
little black woman. She's nine and she's been this idiot's
neighbor for eight years. The mayor of Caldwell, New Jersey,
(24:06):
has apologized to Bobby Wilson and her family. All her
mother wanted in response to this was to talk to
Losh about how dangerous his phone call was, even after
the fact, especially since the emergency operator actually sent cops
to the street to talk to the quote little black woman,
Little Bobby is now afraid of the police. Gordon Lash
(24:27):
refused to meet with the Wilson's refused to discuss this,
and his attorney said the claim that Bobby Wilson is
now afraid of the cops was absurd, quoting the attorney,
it makes real problems not be taken seriously. The attorney
also said Losh wasn't wearing his glasses. Punchline. Gordon Lass
used to be a town councilman in Calledwell, New Jersey,
(24:49):
and he is guesses co chair of the calledwell Republican
Party Gordon. I couldn't be bothered to put on my glasses,
so I risked these cops shooting a nine year old
girls might have been my neighbor for eight years. Losh
two days, worst person in the world, to the number
(25:21):
one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me
and things I promised not to tell. And it was
this time of year when my agent called me at ESPN.
There's an ad agency in Santa Monica. They just called me,
would you like to do two commercials for Boston Market?
I answered, with profound indifference, Okay, would you like to
do two commercials for Boston Market for two fifty dollars.
(25:46):
I believe my next words were, well, I can't do
them today, but sure. They faxed me. The scripts are
actually pretty funny, very well done. I think you'll like them.
I believe my next next words were, if I don't
have to kill anybody in them, call them back and
say yes and get the money. Since the idea of
what these ads would run on sports telecasts, most of
(26:06):
them on ESPN, my yes got back to management at
ESPN pretty quickly. You can't do these, one of the
executives explained dismissively. We don't let anybody do commercials, I laughed.
Every one of us has done the uh, this is
Sports Center commercials. Some of us have written that this
is Sports Center commercials. You don't even give us days
(26:27):
off for making them, let alone give us money. This
is money I don't have to ask you for. The
executive shook his head. Those aren't commercials. Those are promotional announcements.
They're in your contract. Nobody here does commercials, I said.
Chris Berman has done a beer commercial in three out
of the last five Super Bowls. My commercial is just
(26:48):
for food. Well, he's Berman, I pointed out. I went
to high school with him, and I was the star
of their most popular program, a little thing called Sports Center.
TV guy had just named us one of the top
ten shows on TV shows not sports shows us in
Seinfeld say, well, now I got a little angry, which
never happened to me at ESPN, and I went to
(27:10):
my ace in the whole. Uh, my contract expires in
like ten months, and you know I intend to leave,
and during those ten months, you're gonna pay me about
two hundred and sixty dollars. So Boston Market is gonna
pay me two hundred and fifty tho dollars for two
days work instead of ten months work. Plus they're gonna
take me out first class to l A for a
(27:31):
couple of days, and they're probably gonna do some radio
spots and I'll make another twenty five grand. So you're
giving me a choice, make say, chord seventy dollars in
like five days for them, or make two hundred and
sixty dollars here between now and next September when I'm
planning and leaving. Anyway, if you make me choose between
(27:52):
those two, which do you expect me to choose? The
executive coughed we'll get back to an hour later. He
got back to me by phone. Okay, we see your point,
but there's still two problems. We can't just let everybody
do commercials. I said, well, you know, why don't you
just let anybody who went to the high school that
Berman and I went to do commercials. He did not
(28:12):
laugh at that. Well, how about only your regular weekday
sports center anchors get to do commercials? There was a
grunt and a maybe. Then we got to the gist
of the real problem. Here's the real problem. People on
your show. They'll be resentful. And I said, why will
they be resentful? Because the production assistants are expecting that
(28:34):
they're going to get their own commercials too. And I said,
how about this, the day I'm out there actually shooting
the commercial, I will get Boston Market to like cater
dinner for the show staff, even if I have to
pay for it myself. There was a long silence. Would
management be included in that? And can we get all
(28:55):
the side dishes too? I swear to God. So off
I flew at the beginning of December, during a winter
that had gone frigid in October in Bristol, Connecticut, and
the next thing I knew, I was on the beach
in Malibu at Leo Carrio State Park. The crew is
complaining because it is raining lightly and only about fifty
(29:17):
five degrees. To me, fresh from the hinter lands and
having not been back to l A since I had
moved out in It's like I'm in Tahiti. And my
agent was right. The scripts were funny and original. They
were a send up of the old Calvin Klein obsession
perfume commercials. There are two extremely thin models and they
(29:37):
are filmed writhing in frustration on the beach on the
big Rock outcroppings at Leo Corio State Park. She is
supposed to say, emptiness, How can I fill this empty
void of emptiness? They are in black and white, but
I emerge from behind a rock or wherever I'm in color.
(29:58):
They are in black and white, and I say, when
they say, don't know what to do by this emptiness,
I say eat something. I then sell the sandwich. Then
it cuts to a shot of me walking them down
the beach with my arm over each of their shoulders,
telling them eating is a good thing, and who's wearing cologne?
Or who likes sports or other stupid things like that.
(30:21):
For a quarter of a million dollars, Well, we start
this at eight am, and the producer and the director
John say to me and the two models and the crew, look,
this rain is just going to get heavier as the
day goes on. So what we want to do is
not take a break for lunch. We'll just shoot until
like two pm, and then you can have lunch. You
can take your lunch with you, and you'll all get
paid for a full day. And everybody agrees. The actress agrees,
(30:44):
and she swears as she agrees. The actress is named Una.
Una is from Chicago, and it will soon prove Una
swears more than a longshoreman. This blanking called can blank
my blanking blank to be fair. Una and the guy
are dressed in Calvin Klein rags, and they are there
(31:05):
and they are from there, and they are freezing while
I am wearing a production company brand new suit and shoes,
and to me it feels like it's Tahiti. We take
a couple of hours where we do all the shots
where I emerge from behind the rocks or go around
the rocks, or over the rocks, or look over the rocks,
and the director finally says, okay, we've got five good options.
(31:26):
Let's set up for the walk down the beach with
your arms around each other's shoulders. By now it's noon
or twelve thirty. And as they move the cameras and
the rain starts to move from a mist to like
a light rain. Two prop guys bring out rakes, and
I'm sitting with the crew and I've been asking them
questions all morning in between takes about how this is
(31:48):
all being arranged and made and lit. And I say, Rakes,
what do you need Rakes for on a commercial and
they say you'll see. And then each time me and
Una and the guy walked down the beach and the
director says, cut, we go back to the starting point.
Now outcome to stage hands with rakes and they rake
the sand on the beach smooth, and I say, oh, footprints.
(32:14):
So each time I walk down this damp beach with
the range just a little harder than it was the
take before, in my brand new dress shoes, what I'm
basically doing is polishing the souls of these brand new
shoes on damp sand. I mean, by the time the director,
John says, we are done, these souls of these shoes
so shiny, I could go ice skating in these shoes.
(32:36):
And John comes over and he says, listen, we got
another half an hour. Can we go back and try
a new way for you to appear on the rocks?
I mean, can you Can you climb rocks at all?
And I say, yeah, actually, I'm surprisingly good at it.
You wouldn't think so, but I can climb rocks. And
he points to one rock out cropping on the beach.
Maybe it's high, and he says, try to climb up
(32:58):
that and go as high as you can. If there's
nothing that will support you, we'll forget it. And I try,
and sure enough, I get up near the top and
there is a perfect little shelf in the rock that
I can comfortably stand on. And the director points the
camera up and he says, oh, damn, the angle is
too tough. I can't swing the camera down fast enough
for when you say eat something so I can refocus
(33:19):
on the models. It won't work. Is there anything lower
on the rock where you could stand? Can you come
down at all? And I said, I think so. I
think I can come down a little bit. Well, little
did I know. Sure enough, maybe nine ten ft from
the beach. Up in the sky, there is another little
(33:39):
foothold on this rock outcropping. It is not big enough
for me to put both my feet on it. But
I say, if you don't mind me holding onto the
rock as I say eat something, I can do it
from here. And the director says, okay, let's try it.
And I climbed down the rock and he's moving the
camera and I put my left foot on this flat
part which is nine or ten feet up from the beach,
(34:01):
and for a couple of seconds everything is fine. I'm good.
And that's when I feel that my left shoe, my
brand new left shoe, straight from the floor, shyme catalog,
bright and shiny, and now having been polished by four
hours of walking up and down on a wet beach,
complete with two guys there to rake the beach and
(34:23):
make sure it is as shiny as it possibly can be.
My left shoe, slipperier than a diamond, is now moving
of its own accord. I'm holding, I'm doing a good
rock climbing job, but the shoe, the shoe is not holding. Hey,
I say, with some alarm, I'm about to fall off.
(34:48):
I hit the sand no more than five seconds later.
So that's about a sixteen ft drop from my head
to the beach. And for weeks, for years still to
this day, it has amazed me more than anything else
that happened. It has amazed me how much went through
my mind before I crashed. In fact, before I actually fell,
(35:10):
I know, I did a quick height calculation fifteen sixteen feet.
I recognized that the outcropping was so vertical that I
was unlikely to hit any of the rock on the
way down. But just the same I remembered that the
rocks continued under the sand sea. I took two years
of geology, and this was going to be a hard landing.
(35:32):
More amazingly than all that. Though I had taken judo
as a kid, I hated every minute of judo nineteen
sixty six, So twenty six and twenty seven years before
we shot this commercial, I was in the studio, the
Judo studio in White Plains, New York, the day of
(35:54):
the nineteen sixty five Northeast blackout, and the only happy
memory of the entire judo experience I had was when
our instructor, Bob Durocher locked us in the dojo that
had been converted from a store that had a front
door that was set in several feet from the streets
so they could put display cases up. And now it's
(36:14):
pitch black. So he went out and got his Volkswagen
Karmen Dia, drove it up over the sidewalk into that
set in entryway of this converted storefront. He put his
high beams on. He flooded the dojo with enough light
that weak kids could change out of our judo stuff
and back into our regular clothes and wait for our
parents to come get us. He did a great job.
(36:37):
I didn't like the judo so much, but his blackout
operations practice was superb. So now, with all of this
having gone through my head in a second, I began
to fall, and everything else from that year of once
a week judo classes comes back to me. Relax. As
you drop, the more of your body that hits, the
less you'll get hurt. Hands protect. The head dropped like
(37:00):
a sack of sand. I did not hit the sand,
her say, I kind of splattered on my left side
swoop as I rolled over onto my back and took
a breath and sat up. Of all people, Una was
the first to race over to me. You want some
blank and tea? I said, uh no, no thanks, Let
(37:21):
me let me see if I'm dead. The grips tried
to help me to my feet, but I felt some
very sharp pain that which suggested we should slow down.
The problem was, though, even if I needed an ambulance,
there was no way to get one down to where
we were shooting. As that rock outcropping that I had
just fallen from suggested, I like to call it a
(37:42):
cliff every now and again. Leo Courio State Park had
a real cliff in it, and a flight of stairs.
I mean a hundred steps, two hundred steps up to
the Pacific Coast Highway and a park. Sure enough, I
was able to stand, but I couldn't move easily. Everything hurt.
So the two biggest members of the crew let me
drape my arms over their shoulders, exactly the way I
(38:04):
had draped my arms over their shoulders of the models
during the beach shot. I stopped for a second. Hey, Oona,
are you sure you don't want to Frankin carry me
up the stairs? She said, with genuine sincerity. Now that's
blank and funny. Seemed to me like it took about
(38:26):
a month to get up those stairs. I assumed there
would be an ambulance waiting by this point. Instead there
was a park ranger. This is a state park. I
have to see you first, then I have to call
the fire department. I said, well, this pain on my
side here, this feels like fire, but I don't think
it's actually fire. He called the fire department. They showed up,
They assessed me, They called the ambulance. At some point,
(38:49):
probably when I was being half dragged up the steps,
something happened on the impact side. If I now tried
to lower my left arm from way above my head.
I got severe shooting, burning pain from my left armpit
to about my left knee. Cleverly, I figured out not
(39:10):
to do that. Keep your left arm above your head
and it won't hurt. I use the restroom in the
ranger station. There was no blood, so no kidney damage.
I'm okay. It does, however, hurt, and something could be broken.
Now I go back outside, my arm above my head
like I'm signaling for a cab on the streets of
(39:32):
New York City. And the ambulance shows up and the
A m t S tell me to get on their gurney,
and I said, I can't. I can't lower my arm
unless I want excruciating pain. I can't move my arm.
I have to stay in this position, looking like like
a Flamenco dancer. But I said, listen, can you lock
(39:53):
the wheels on this gurney? And they said, sure, we can,
of course we can. And I said, don't just lock
the wheels and I'll just back up onto the end
of it and I'll fall backwards. And it worked, and
so with my left arm still extended over my head,
they loaded me into the ambulance. Apparently, when I fell
from that rock or cliff, as I call it. It
(40:14):
looked like I had been shot. Fifty sixty people on
a commercial crew. The shooting day is over. They have
missed lunch. There is a very nice catered lunch sitting there.
And they told me later that everybody was so disturbed
by what happened to me that only three people even
took something to go and know. The director was not
(40:35):
filming as I fell, sadly, so we hid every pothole
on Pacific Coast Highway on the trip from the beach
to the hospital. Oh. I called my agent from my
cell phone. She laughed. I called ESPN actually to check
on the catered dinner. Oh what's new. Oh, I fell
off a cliff shooting the commercial, they laughed. And I'm
(40:56):
lying there in the emergency room waiting for X rays
when my cell phone rings again and I reached into
my left pocket and I had the phone halfway to
my ear when I realized, my left side does not
hurt anymore at all. It does not hurt at all. Well,
that was a quick recovery. I sat up. My left
side felt fine, In fact, it felt great, and a
(41:19):
nurse came over and suggested I should lie back down again.
I said, why. Somehow I got better on the trip
from all the potholes and just lying here. In fact,
I feel great. Did you guys remove my left leg
while I wasn't looking? Did you replace it with the
left leg that I had when I was twelve? Because
I could hop back to Connecticut on my left leg.
Right now, just cancel the flight, she laughed. She said, no.
(41:41):
What I was feeling would be the morphine they gave
me so they could twist me around and take the
X rays they needed. And I said, please, never ever
give me any more of that ever again. Thank you.
My Judo flashback, as it turned out, had done the job.
I had broken nothing. The e R doctor complimented me
on my fall, and he said I probably had six
(42:03):
or eight different sprains on my left side. It would hurt,
but it would keep getting better and I'd be able
to make my flight home the day after next. He
was completely right, although I now I found twenty five
years later that it's beginning to hurt, like I just
fell off the cliff. Anyway, I went back to the hotel.
I ate well, I slept well, I managed to walk
(42:23):
around with the help of a cane and I went
back for day two of the commercial shoot. This one
is in a mansion in Pasadena, a room teeming full
of UNA's lying on the floor. They're photographed through chandeliers.
They're lazy, rich kids who also need to be told
to eat something. I arrived and walked into applause from
the crew and I delivered a well rehearsed line. And
(42:46):
now from my next trick, which is when the director
John came over and apologized, and he said he thought
this entry into shot for me would be way easier.
What I had to do is lie on the floor,
then sit up and deliver the line eat something. If
you can sit up, he said that if you can't,
we can do something else. Can you sit up? And
(43:08):
I thought about it, and I rubbed my lower back
and I said, based on the day so far, yeah,
I could, but probably only six or seven times. And
and I said, while I can sit up, it's clear
to me one of those bad sprains was in the
muscles somewhere my lower back. And if I try to
lay back down, I lose control. I just crashed back
(43:29):
to the floor. That actually happened getting out of bed
this morning. So after each take the same. Two guys
who had walked me up the stairs after I fell
at the beach gently held my arms and shoulders and
lowered me back two lying on the floor. We got
what we needed. I went back to the hotel. I
(43:49):
had dinner with some friends. The next day. I was
a little sore, but perfectly fine to get back on
the plane east, and sure enough, only time ever I
had a west to east tail wind. The flight from
l a X to Newark took three hours and forty
eight minutes. We traversed the country like at art shot
from a gun or an alderman falling from a rock
out cropping. Oh, by the way, the commercial was an
(44:13):
immediate success, unlike any that Boston Market had ever done before.
In those days, they were packed each night for dinner
at every location, selling half chickens and full meals with
potatoes and salads, and they were getting an average of
twelve dollars out of every customer. The rest of the
day the place was empty. The idea behind my commercials.
(44:36):
They were designed bringing a lunch crowd a sandwich in
an soda and a bag of chips for four dollars.
Soon they were swamped at lunchtime. Boston Market ordered three
more commercials. These two be shot in a studio in
New York. They offered me fifty grand a day. An
entire new career Vista was opening in front of me.
I was, for a week or two in early the
(45:00):
most successful male commercial actor in the country. We shot
those three spots. I interrupted a grunge concert to shout
eat something at the band, and then I got carried
off by the crowd in a mosh pit. And I
interrupted a Romeo soap opera surgeon coming on to his
nurse by rising from the operating table to shout eat something.
(45:22):
And then we did something with ball players at the
stadium on Randall's Island. And I remember nothing of that because,
unlike the first two, they never edited the film. Because
that's when it happened. They're equivalent of falling off the cliff.
I will confess it had not occurred to me. Then again,
I did not own Boston Market. I did not work
(45:44):
for their marketing department. I did not run the ad
agency they employed. But none of them anticipated it either.
After the first few weeks of giddy glee about the
lunch crowds I had brought them somebody noticed something unfortunate
and unexpected. Basically, for every four dollar lunch they were
now selling, they were selling one few twelve dollar dinner.
(46:07):
They had not gained any new customers. They had just
managed to get their customers to each spend eight dollars less.
These very well made, very memorable commercials worked very very well.
And the problem with that was each time they did work,
it costs Boston Market eight dollars. By the end of
(46:29):
Boston Market was something like nine hundred million dollars in debt,
it had filed for bankruptcy and had been taken over
by McDonald's. On the other hand, I got my money,
and in the twenty five years plus since, Boston Market
has not once used a celebrity endorser to try to
sell their food. Oh and there was one other positive outcome.
(46:52):
I'm actually very proud of this. The ad agency got
the award in question. I did not, so I don't
know which group gave it to us, but that eat
Something campaign actually one in a award because somehow my
shouting eats something at Una and the other way thin models.
Somehow that cuts through to at least some victims of
(47:15):
eating disorders. The Boston Markets. Eat Something ad campaign for
which I fell off a cliff. Okay, a rock outcropping
for which I fell off a rock outcropping got an
award from a national Bolima association. I've done all the
(47:46):
damage I can do here, most of it to my
left side. Thank you for listening. Follow this podcast if
you can tell a friend, tell a passer by. We're
number one among news and political podcasts not produced by
any network. Here are our credits. Most of the music,
including our theme from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and
performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Chanelle. They are
the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John
(48:10):
Philip Chanelle. Guitars based on drums by Brian Ray, produced
by t Ko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged
and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is
the Olverman theme from ESPN two, and it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments
from Nancy Faust the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
(48:30):
announcer today was Richard Lewis, who I had dinner with
on the trip that I took to film that bloody
Boston Market commercial and everything else is pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this, the six hundred day since
Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government
of the United States. Arrest him now while we still
can a new episode tomorrow. Till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
(48:53):
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
Keith Alderman is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
Well that was fun. Retaining the Senate majority and all
(00:28):
the election deniers drowning at the ballot box, and the
GOP lead in the House at minimum so reduced it
guarantees murderous infighting and Pelosi talking about raising the debt
limit in the Lame Duck, and the fascists turning on
McConnell and the fascists turning on McCarthy, and the fascists
turning on Ronna Romney and the fascists turning on Trump,
and I mean everybody from mob Brooks to Fox News
(00:51):
to the Dilbert guy turning on Trump. And this was
a great weekend, and bookmark the memory of it in
your mind, have a few less nightmares as a result,
and then for get it. Back to work and back
to this mindset. Have you ever seen the movie carry
(01:12):
Sissy spacek High school billying victim humiliated at the prom,
turns out to have telekinetic power. It's a Stephen King story.
Destroys the school, Jim kills everybody, destroys her own home,
she dies, Her only friend goes to the house to
lay flowers in her memory. And suddenly out of the rubble,
Carry's arms springs out and grabs her friend to pull
(01:32):
her to hell. There is a lesson for us in
the movie Carry. When you think you have ended Carrie's
reign of horror, when you have Carry vanquished and dead
and buried, make sure you then burn the grave, put
out the fire, burn it again, salt the earth in case,
everything that's left in concrete for a mile square, and
(01:55):
skip the flowers. The fascists are not defeated. They have
another plan. It's about getting the Supreme Court to set
state legislatures on a path where they can overrule elections
they don't like. And we have just found out how
serious the Supreme Court is about this. I'll walk you
(02:16):
through that in a moment. Trump has not vanished. He
is not going to moderate. He's not gonna learn anything
from this except what every other Republican has learned for
twenty five years. If your venom did not work, that's
because you were not venomous enough. The election deniers have
not run out of denial. They're just going to stitch
together all the religious deniers and all the violent deniers,
(02:40):
and all the military overthrown deniers and put it all out,
there is one unit. The fascists have not run out
of evil. They have not run out of schemes, They
have not even run out of carries. Who in the
hell is the Republican candidate for the governor of Arizona?
What's her name again? Carry? Huh huh? Okay, enough seri. Viously,
(03:05):
the best news of this weekend was Speaker Pelosi and
the debt ceiling. Without even being asked, she went on
CNN and said the lame duck was the right time
to raise it, to take the nuclear weapon out of
the Republicans hands. Then she went on ABC and said
that winning the Senate created a window to do it.
So a Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Scalise or Speaker Trailer
(03:25):
Park Green cannot threaten to crash the world economy by
not raising the debt limit and holding the debt limit
hostage in exchange for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
And then Chuck Schumer had a news conferencing they would
map out the route to do this in the Senate
this week. And this is exactly the kind of aggressiveness
that is absolutely necessary right now. When Carrie's dead Arms
(03:49):
shoots out of the rebel, do not wait. Head it
with your shovel. There are more things to do, some
of them feasible, some of the symbolics, some of them crazy.
But we should do all of them instead of breathing
a sigh of relief like they and we all did
at the end of and you saw what that got us.
(04:10):
Somebody suggested that if the Dems do indeed not retain
the House, finding the half dozen still uninfected Republicans in
the House, lining up the huge Democratic minority behind this scheme,
and then nominating Liz Cheney to be the new speaker,
and and no, you don't have to be a serving
member of Congress to be elected speaker, and know her
(04:32):
non insurrection positions are nearly as bad as her father's.
I know that. And no, it probably won't work. And
know even if it did work, the Republicans would then
spend every waking moment trying to undo it. And that's
why you try it. The mistake of one was exhaling
this time less oh, democracy prevailed, and the American system
(04:55):
worked a men and more flying shovels and burning kerosene
on Carrie White's rubble. There was another idea find those
half a dozen uninfected Republicans in the House and have
the President called them up and say, hey, would you
like to join the cabinet? Or have you ever thought
of becoming an ambassador? And you take the ones from
(05:17):
the states where the governor does not get to pick
a successor and it doesn't have to be from the
same party, and you force special elections they're like, oh,
I don't know New York, and make the GOP constantly
defend its razor thin majority in the House. Because I'd
rather see these snakes campaigning than actually legislate. In the
midst of paranoia and pandemic and inflation. The damn fools
(05:39):
have somehow still managed to lose three national elections in
five calendar years. I want to see them campaigning rather
than legislating. Be aggressive, because this is where the Republicans
are now. This is the audio from a video Ron
Philipkowski tweeted from the Carry Lake Supporters. Here's that name again,
(06:02):
them Carry Lake Supporters marching around the Maricopa County Ballot
Counting Center, carrying crosses and demanding the military overthrow of
the government of the United States on Earth as it
is in heaven. Give us a stay. We the people
(06:26):
are requesting military step in and redo our elections was
fake and false. It's full of our government is full
of corrupt people. We the seventy one people that you
can see here around the center. Be aggressive because even
those lunatics supporting that lunatic are looking inwards right now
(06:46):
and wondering who to blame. And they are so used
to Democrats and liberals starting to sing Kumbaya and listening
to the sirens call of unity and bipartisanship to which
we always listen, that they do not believe the Democratic
Party response to the red trickle will be shovels and kerosene. Thus,
it is also imperative to encourage Trump and dissentists to
(07:09):
fight it out for the nomination, and imperative to do
everything we can to get Trump to run as a
third party or independent, because the best way to destroy
the fascist movement in this country is to get it
to destroy itself. Destroying things is the only thing it's
good at, and the kids are doing a great job.
While at least Stefanik endorsed Trump over the weekend, fellow
(07:33):
disloyal scoundrel Jim Banks was going to endorse Trump, and
instead he both postponed any endorsement and defended Trump. The
Lieutenant governor of Virginia, a Republican, called Trump a liability
to the mission, and on the sidelines half the cheerleaders
walked out, and Culture who wrote a book called in
(07:53):
Trump We Trust. Quote to Trump, you had your chance
with a Republican House and Senate. You had a domestic
policy to your son in law, and Gary Cohne, you
haded foreign policy to your son in law and a
country that gave your son in law two billion. Shut
the blank up forever. The Cornell education appears not to
have been utterly wasted on and culter. After all, when
(08:15):
Trump said maybe the name Glenn Uncan, who was Chinese,
Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy and thus the lead intellect
among the fascists, said I'm out, and a guy at
the National Review said this is delusional, mental breakdown stuff,
and a Fox News guy said it was unhinged, and
Red State freaking Red State wrote Trump legitimately appears to
(08:36):
have had a mental break over the last week. News
Max had Peter King on to trash Trump, Moe Brooks
bailed out on Trump. The New York Post bailed out
on Trump. I think that's four times since last Tuesday,
Candice Owen's bailed out. They have taken that with which
Adam Frisch described Lauren Bobert anger tainment and turned the
(08:58):
angertainment on themselves. Are they sincere? Have the scales fallen
from their eye? Is about Trump? Or did Trump's latest check?
Just not clear? I don't care. It doesn't matter. They're
burning down their own house. Let's go send more Kerassene
(09:20):
and bring the shovels because this is now the problem,
and I'm not certain how to stop this, because this
is the next thing the fascists are trying. The Federalist
Society has, as you know, corrupted the Supreme Court, which
is now the Supreme Republican Religious Court. You may rightly
suggest that it's insistence that the justices it owns throw
(09:45):
out Roe v. Wade was what cost the Republicans everything
they should have gotten in the midterms. Happily though, for
the Federalist Society and has a backup plan eliminate midterms
and other elections. This is, if you have not heard
of it, the independent state legislature theory, which the Court
will hear in a case called Moore v. Harper on
fittingly December seven. In short, the Supreme Court could rule
(10:11):
within the month that state courts are not allowed to
review any federal election related laws passed by state legislatures.
The Supreme Court could allow state legislatures to ignore their
own state constitutions. The legislatures could redistrict congressional seats right,
new voting rules or other laws more than likely overrules
(10:33):
state election outcomes, and you could not sue the legislature
in state court. It's obviously the exact opposite of what
the founders intended and what every defender of representative government
since has sworn to uphold. Well, so what this is
the Federalist Society? What does the Constitution have to do
with it? This is so serious, and the Federalist Society
(10:56):
is so serious about it that its board of Directors
has voted to tell a man named Stephen Calabreze that
he can't describe himself this way any more, or because
he disagrees with the independent state legislature theory and says,
no state Supreme courts are you know, supreme Who is
Stephen Calibracy? How does he describe himself? He is the
(11:19):
co founder of the Federalist Society, and he is still
co chairman of the Federalist Society. And the Federalist Society
is so committed to this that they've just purged him
for disagreeing with their crazy fascist dream of eliminating elections
at the state level when they don't like them. That
is how serious about this soft coup they are. You
(11:43):
already know they are serious enough that they encourage judges
and Supreme Court justices to be openly political, in violation
of every premise of our judicial system. Samuel Alito might
as well have campaigned for Trump. And last Thursday night,
the Federalist Society had its forty anniversary gala in Washington,
and overtly political event, and Aldo spoke and was cheered,
(12:05):
and where steel Neil Gorsich was there, and Brett Kavanaugh
was there waiting tables, I assume, and so is Amy
Coney Barrett, the Jesus freak with the legal skills of
a high school student who might take pre law when
she gets to community college. She got up and spoke
and immediately mocked free speech. Supreme Court Barbie is so
(12:45):
glad about noise not being made by protesters outside her house.
And no, here's a shock. She did not go on
to decry actual violence against America's democratically elected leaders, just
about things that inconvenience to her while she was trying
to overthrow the constitution. And like, part of this that's
missing is that her name is Amy and not carry.
(13:06):
So enjoy the weekend past and the Senate and however
the House finally turns out and the Trump to santist
punch and Judy Show and fascist entertainment being turned inward,
and start worrying more about what the Supreme Court will
next due to democracy and what we can do to
get the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to designate
(13:30):
the Federalist Society as a terrorist organization. Still ahead, Elmo
Muskrat goes one step too far. It's all well and
(13:52):
good to snark on a politician, but maybe not when
that politician is on the Senate subcommittees on Communication, Media
and Broadband and Consumer Protection and Space and Science. Sarah
Pale in his back and dumber than ever. She tweets,
they think we're stupid, and a mighty roar goes up
from the crowd, and Trump claims they've stolen the electron
(14:16):
from Blake Masters, Is he positive? And other physics jokes
coming up in Worse and the day I fell off
a cliff filming a television commercial and then the television
commercial caused the company I made the television commercial four
to lose nine hundred million dollars and going to bankruptcy.
Things I promised not to tell all about his next
(14:38):
this Discountdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman still ahead
on Countdown. She was trying to help the environment, but
she was black at Her neighbor was a Republican, so
(14:58):
he called the cops on her because he was scared
of her. By the way, she is nine years old.
Worst Persons coming up first. In each edition of Countdown,
we feature a dog in need you can help. Every
dog has its day. This is a really small scale project.
Maslow is a handsome brindle pibble terrier mix in Why
(15:19):
I'm Missing Pennsylvania, who is fourteen years old. His human
gave him to another guy. That guy decided Maslow didn't
really need to be fed, so emaciated and betrayed. The
second human dumped Maslow in a high kill shelter, where
Outcast Rescue pulled him They've got a foster for him.
He's getting food and getting healthier, but they need about
(15:40):
six dollars to cover the expenses, probably for the rest
of his life. Owned by the way, it's senior dog month.
Maslow is my pinned tweet at Tom Jumbo Grumbo and
connected on my keith old room and account. If you
can donate, please respond to the tweet and retweet it.
If you can, I thank you and Maslow thanks you.
(16:11):
Pot Scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions, dateline. New York Trump's second chief of Staff,
General John Kelly tells The New York Times Trump told
him he wanted to sick the I R S on
James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the FBI on Oh golly,
what a coincidence. James Koby and Andrew McCabe both later
wound up being hit with a rare and highly intrusive
(16:34):
audit by the I R. S. Kelly said, Trump said, quote,
we ought to investigate and get the I R S
on Comey and McCabe. Trump spokes robot Liz Harrington denies
it and called Kelly a quote psycho, which is quite
a statement. If you've ever seen Liz Harrington dateline Boston.
(16:54):
Elon Musk may have bitten off more than he can
chew this time. No, not about Twitter. We know that
this is about Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. A Washington
Post columnist with Markue's permission, impersonated Marky and got a
blue check mark for a Twitter account. Marky complained about this,
Musk replied, perhaps it was because Marky's real account quote
(17:17):
sounds like a parody. Markie replied. One of your companies
is under a Federal Trade Commission consent decree. Auto safety
watchdog NITZA is investigating another for killing people, and you're
spending your time picking fights online. Fix your company or Congress,
Will Musk replied with a meme. As I mentioned, Marky
(17:39):
is on the Senate subcommittees on Communication, Media and Broadband,
and Consumer Protection and Space and Science. Enjoy the purp walk, Elmo.
(18:05):
This is Sports Center. Wait check that not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith in sports. If you're wondering if
coaching experience is really necessary in the pro sports that
we love so very much, they laughed when ESPN's Jeff
(18:25):
Saturday was named to coach his old team, the Indianapolis
Colts Saturday, who as a player was a center that
never previously coached at anything more sophisticated than a prep school.
The Colts built a ten zip lead over the Raiders
in Saturday's first game yesterday, they blew the lead, they
trailed twenty to nineteen in the fourth quarter, and then
rallied to win on a Matt Ryan touchdown pass. Final
(18:49):
Indianapolis Jeff Saturday is undefeated as a National Football League coach,
which reminds me of June seven, the Texas Rangers baseball
team fired manager Frank Lucasey and named as his successor
Eddie Stank, He who had not had a thing to
do with professional baseball since the Chicago White Sox had
fired him as manager nine years earlier. His Texas Rangers
(19:13):
promptly scored nine runs in the seventh and eighth innings
to get him attend to eight win against the Twins
in Minnesota, and immediately after that game, Eddie Stanky quit
as manager to Texas Rangers with his one and oh
record and went back to coach college ball. Thank you,
(19:36):
Nancy House. And speaking of Texas, remember the guy arrested
for throwing a can of white claw at Senator Ted
Cruz during the Houston Astros World Series Victy parade. Well,
the attorney victory was probably the word I wanted there.
The attorney for suspect, Joey Arsiko No says they've got
it all wrong, like I got the pronunciational wrong. He
(19:57):
was just throwing a can of white claw to Ted Cruz. So,
in the great tradition of athletes doing this ring World
Series or other championship parades, Ted Cruz would chug the beverage. Now,
obviously this is not going to hold up in court
because have you ever seen Ted Cruise. There's no way
you'd ever mistake Ted Cruz for an athlete. Still ahead,
(20:24):
So I fell off this cliff shooting a TV commercial,
and I still wound up faring better than the company
that paid me to make the TV commercial. Full details
ahead and things I promised not to tell. First, the
daily round up of the miscreants, morons and done in
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons, and the
(20:46):
bronze Oh Sarah Pale and his back. She tweeted that
there's no way John Fetterman or Katie Hobbs could have
won their elections because they have fewer Twitter followers than
do mement Os and carry Lake with It was a
video in which Sarah asked the musical question they think
(21:08):
we're stupid, and we think you're stupid. We established this
in two thousand eight. What's your question? Caller? Wait, there
is more. Palin also appeared at a hockey autograph show
in Toronto on Saturday with her new boyfriend, the equally
intelligence challenged X New York ranger Ron Do Gay. Autograph
(21:30):
pictures were fifty dollars. To be fair, paying fans fifty
dollars to take a picture with Do Gay and Palin.
That's actually a pretty reasonable offer on their part. The
Bronze Trump one of something like one posts by him
on truth Social on the weekend of Veterans Day, and
none of them on Friday even mentioned Veterans Day. One
(21:51):
of them, though, read quotes sorry I'm laughing and you
haven't even heard it yet quote they stole the electron
from Blake Masters do election over again. They stole the
John elect John Well. We need to keep an eye
on this. Is he positive? Trump is all charged up
(22:17):
about it? Whoever did this will face charges, but happily
it's just a phase. Is this electrifying news? I stole
all those jokes from my Twitter applies. But our winner,
Gordon Losh of Caldwell, New Jersey. I hope I'm pronouncing
that correctly. But if I'm not, screw him. If you
(22:40):
hadn't heard about this, much of the East Coast had
an infestation of spottern lantern flies this summer and fall.
Spotted lantern flies are spectacular but also spectacularly damaging to
the local ecosystem, so much so that authorities throughout the
Northeast actually told residents, if you see a spotted lantern
(23:01):
fly and you can't miss them, they look like spotted lanterns.
If you see one, kill it, I mean seriously, nothing
about trapp it it, or will take it to a
farm up state. Kill the things, squish it. So on
October nine, year old Bobby Wilson of Caldwell, New Jersey,
(23:22):
went out to spray a tree that had been planted
by her grandmother and had become infested with spotted lantern flies,
which is when the Wilson's neighbor across the street, Gordon Losh,
called the police. Quoting from the tape of his call.
There's a little black woman walking spraying stuff on the
(23:44):
sidewalks and trees. I don't know what the hell she
is doing. Scares me, though, Lash added he thought she
was wearing a hoodie. Turned out she was not a
little black woman. She's nine and she's been this idiot's
neighbor for eight years. The mayor of Caldwell, New Jersey,
(24:06):
has apologized to Bobby Wilson and her family. All her
mother wanted in response to this was to talk to
Losh about how dangerous his phone call was, even after
the fact, especially since the emergency operator actually sent cops
to the street to talk to the quote little black woman,
Little Bobby is now afraid of the police. Gordon Lash
(24:27):
refused to meet with the Wilson's refused to discuss this,
and his attorney said the claim that Bobby Wilson is
now afraid of the cops was absurd, quoting the attorney,
it makes real problems not be taken seriously. The attorney
also said Losh wasn't wearing his glasses. Punchline. Gordon Lass
used to be a town councilman in Calledwell, New Jersey,
(24:49):
and he is guesses co chair of the calledwell Republican
Party Gordon. I couldn't be bothered to put on my glasses,
so I risked these cops shooting a nine year old
girls might have been my neighbor for eight years. Losh
two days, worst person in the world, to the number
(25:21):
one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me
and things I promised not to tell. And it was
this time of year when my agent called me at ESPN.
There's an ad agency in Santa Monica. They just called me,
would you like to do two commercials for Boston Market?
I answered, with profound indifference, Okay, would you like to
do two commercials for Boston Market for two fifty dollars.
(25:46):
I believe my next words were, well, I can't do
them today, but sure. They faxed me. The scripts are
actually pretty funny, very well done. I think you'll like them.
I believe my next next words were, if I don't
have to kill anybody in them, call them back and
say yes and get the money. Since the idea of
what these ads would run on sports telecasts, most of
(26:06):
them on ESPN, my yes got back to management at
ESPN pretty quickly. You can't do these, one of the
executives explained dismissively. We don't let anybody do commercials, I laughed.
Every one of us has done the uh, this is
Sports Center commercials. Some of us have written that this
is Sports Center commercials. You don't even give us days
(26:27):
off for making them, let alone give us money. This
is money I don't have to ask you for. The
executive shook his head. Those aren't commercials. Those are promotional announcements.
They're in your contract. Nobody here does commercials, I said.
Chris Berman has done a beer commercial in three out
of the last five Super Bowls. My commercial is just
(26:48):
for food. Well, he's Berman, I pointed out. I went
to high school with him, and I was the star
of their most popular program, a little thing called Sports Center.
TV guy had just named us one of the top
ten shows on TV shows not sports shows us in
Seinfeld say, well, now I got a little angry, which
never happened to me at ESPN, and I went to
(27:10):
my ace in the whole. Uh, my contract expires in
like ten months, and you know I intend to leave,
and during those ten months, you're gonna pay me about
two hundred and sixty dollars. So Boston Market is gonna
pay me two hundred and fifty tho dollars for two
days work instead of ten months work. Plus they're gonna
take me out first class to l A for a
(27:31):
couple of days, and they're probably gonna do some radio
spots and I'll make another twenty five grand. So you're
giving me a choice, make say, chord seventy dollars in
like five days for them, or make two hundred and
sixty dollars here between now and next September when I'm
planning and leaving. Anyway, if you make me choose between
(27:52):
those two, which do you expect me to choose? The
executive coughed we'll get back to an hour later. He
got back to me by phone. Okay, we see your point,
but there's still two problems. We can't just let everybody
do commercials. I said, well, you know, why don't you
just let anybody who went to the high school that
Berman and I went to do commercials. He did not
(28:12):
laugh at that. Well, how about only your regular weekday
sports center anchors get to do commercials? There was a
grunt and a maybe. Then we got to the gist
of the real problem. Here's the real problem. People on
your show. They'll be resentful. And I said, why will
they be resentful? Because the production assistants are expecting that
(28:34):
they're going to get their own commercials too. And I said,
how about this, the day I'm out there actually shooting
the commercial, I will get Boston Market to like cater
dinner for the show staff, even if I have to
pay for it myself. There was a long silence. Would
management be included in that? And can we get all
(28:55):
the side dishes too? I swear to God. So off
I flew at the beginning of December, during a winter
that had gone frigid in October in Bristol, Connecticut, and
the next thing I knew, I was on the beach
in Malibu at Leo Carrio State Park. The crew is
complaining because it is raining lightly and only about fifty
(29:17):
five degrees. To me, fresh from the hinter lands and
having not been back to l A since I had
moved out in It's like I'm in Tahiti. And my
agent was right. The scripts were funny and original. They
were a send up of the old Calvin Klein obsession
perfume commercials. There are two extremely thin models and they
(29:37):
are filmed writhing in frustration on the beach on the
big Rock outcroppings at Leo Corio State Park. She is
supposed to say, emptiness, How can I fill this empty
void of emptiness? They are in black and white, but
I emerge from behind a rock or wherever I'm in color.
(29:58):
They are in black and white, and I say, when
they say, don't know what to do by this emptiness,
I say eat something. I then sell the sandwich. Then
it cuts to a shot of me walking them down
the beach with my arm over each of their shoulders,
telling them eating is a good thing, and who's wearing cologne?
Or who likes sports or other stupid things like that.
(30:21):
For a quarter of a million dollars, Well, we start
this at eight am, and the producer and the director
John say to me and the two models and the crew, look,
this rain is just going to get heavier as the
day goes on. So what we want to do is
not take a break for lunch. We'll just shoot until
like two pm, and then you can have lunch. You
can take your lunch with you, and you'll all get
paid for a full day. And everybody agrees. The actress agrees,
(30:44):
and she swears as she agrees. The actress is named Una.
Una is from Chicago, and it will soon prove Una
swears more than a longshoreman. This blanking called can blank
my blanking blank to be fair. Una and the guy
are dressed in Calvin Klein rags, and they are there
(31:05):
and they are from there, and they are freezing while
I am wearing a production company brand new suit and shoes,
and to me it feels like it's Tahiti. We take
a couple of hours where we do all the shots
where I emerge from behind the rocks or go around
the rocks, or over the rocks, or look over the rocks,
and the director finally says, okay, we've got five good options.
(31:26):
Let's set up for the walk down the beach with
your arms around each other's shoulders. By now it's noon
or twelve thirty. And as they move the cameras and
the rain starts to move from a mist to like
a light rain. Two prop guys bring out rakes, and
I'm sitting with the crew and I've been asking them
questions all morning in between takes about how this is
(31:48):
all being arranged and made and lit. And I say, Rakes,
what do you need Rakes for on a commercial and
they say you'll see. And then each time me and
Una and the guy walked down the beach and the
director says, cut, we go back to the starting point.
Now outcome to stage hands with rakes and they rake
the sand on the beach smooth, and I say, oh, footprints.
(32:14):
So each time I walk down this damp beach with
the range just a little harder than it was the
take before, in my brand new dress shoes, what I'm
basically doing is polishing the souls of these brand new
shoes on damp sand. I mean, by the time the director,
John says, we are done, these souls of these shoes
so shiny, I could go ice skating in these shoes.
(32:36):
And John comes over and he says, listen, we got
another half an hour. Can we go back and try
a new way for you to appear on the rocks?
I mean, can you Can you climb rocks at all?
And I say, yeah, actually, I'm surprisingly good at it.
You wouldn't think so, but I can climb rocks. And
he points to one rock out cropping on the beach.
Maybe it's high, and he says, try to climb up
(32:58):
that and go as high as you can. If there's
nothing that will support you, we'll forget it. And I try,
and sure enough, I get up near the top and
there is a perfect little shelf in the rock that
I can comfortably stand on. And the director points the
camera up and he says, oh, damn, the angle is
too tough. I can't swing the camera down fast enough
for when you say eat something so I can refocus
(33:19):
on the models. It won't work. Is there anything lower
on the rock where you could stand? Can you come
down at all? And I said, I think so. I
think I can come down a little bit. Well, little
did I know. Sure enough, maybe nine ten ft from
the beach. Up in the sky, there is another little
(33:39):
foothold on this rock outcropping. It is not big enough
for me to put both my feet on it. But
I say, if you don't mind me holding onto the
rock as I say eat something, I can do it
from here. And the director says, okay, let's try it.
And I climbed down the rock and he's moving the
camera and I put my left foot on this flat
part which is nine or ten feet up from the beach,
(34:01):
and for a couple of seconds everything is fine. I'm good.
And that's when I feel that my left shoe, my
brand new left shoe, straight from the floor, shyme catalog,
bright and shiny, and now having been polished by four
hours of walking up and down on a wet beach,
complete with two guys there to rake the beach and
(34:23):
make sure it is as shiny as it possibly can be.
My left shoe, slipperier than a diamond, is now moving
of its own accord. I'm holding, I'm doing a good
rock climbing job, but the shoe, the shoe is not holding. Hey,
I say, with some alarm, I'm about to fall off.
(34:48):
I hit the sand no more than five seconds later.
So that's about a sixteen ft drop from my head
to the beach. And for weeks, for years still to
this day, it has amazed me more than anything else
that happened. It has amazed me how much went through
my mind before I crashed. In fact, before I actually fell,
(35:10):
I know, I did a quick height calculation fifteen sixteen feet.
I recognized that the outcropping was so vertical that I
was unlikely to hit any of the rock on the
way down. But just the same I remembered that the
rocks continued under the sand sea. I took two years
of geology, and this was going to be a hard landing.
(35:32):
More amazingly than all that. Though I had taken judo
as a kid, I hated every minute of judo nineteen
sixty six, So twenty six and twenty seven years before
we shot this commercial, I was in the studio, the
Judo studio in White Plains, New York, the day of
(35:54):
the nineteen sixty five Northeast blackout, and the only happy
memory of the entire judo experience I had was when
our instructor, Bob Durocher locked us in the dojo that
had been converted from a store that had a front
door that was set in several feet from the streets
so they could put display cases up. And now it's
(36:14):
pitch black. So he went out and got his Volkswagen
Karmen Dia, drove it up over the sidewalk into that
set in entryway of this converted storefront. He put his
high beams on. He flooded the dojo with enough light
that weak kids could change out of our judo stuff
and back into our regular clothes and wait for our
parents to come get us. He did a great job.
(36:37):
I didn't like the judo so much, but his blackout
operations practice was superb. So now, with all of this
having gone through my head in a second, I began
to fall, and everything else from that year of once
a week judo classes comes back to me. Relax. As
you drop, the more of your body that hits, the
less you'll get hurt. Hands protect. The head dropped like
(37:00):
a sack of sand. I did not hit the sand,
her say, I kind of splattered on my left side
swoop as I rolled over onto my back and took
a breath and sat up. Of all people, Una was
the first to race over to me. You want some
blank and tea? I said, uh no, no thanks, Let
(37:21):
me let me see if I'm dead. The grips tried
to help me to my feet, but I felt some
very sharp pain that which suggested we should slow down.
The problem was, though, even if I needed an ambulance,
there was no way to get one down to where
we were shooting. As that rock outcropping that I had
just fallen from suggested, I like to call it a
(37:42):
cliff every now and again. Leo Courio State Park had
a real cliff in it, and a flight of stairs.
I mean a hundred steps, two hundred steps up to
the Pacific Coast Highway and a park. Sure enough, I
was able to stand, but I couldn't move easily. Everything hurt.
So the two biggest members of the crew let me
drape my arms over their shoulders, exactly the way I
(38:04):
had draped my arms over their shoulders of the models
during the beach shot. I stopped for a second. Hey, Oona,
are you sure you don't want to Frankin carry me
up the stairs? She said, with genuine sincerity. Now that's
blank and funny. Seemed to me like it took about
(38:26):
a month to get up those stairs. I assumed there
would be an ambulance waiting by this point. Instead there
was a park ranger. This is a state park. I
have to see you first, then I have to call
the fire department. I said, well, this pain on my
side here, this feels like fire, but I don't think
it's actually fire. He called the fire department. They showed up,
They assessed me, They called the ambulance. At some point,
(38:49):
probably when I was being half dragged up the steps,
something happened on the impact side. If I now tried
to lower my left arm from way above my head.
I got severe shooting, burning pain from my left armpit
to about my left knee. Cleverly, I figured out not
(39:10):
to do that. Keep your left arm above your head
and it won't hurt. I use the restroom in the
ranger station. There was no blood, so no kidney damage.
I'm okay. It does, however, hurt, and something could be broken.
Now I go back outside, my arm above my head
like I'm signaling for a cab on the streets of
(39:32):
New York City. And the ambulance shows up and the
A m t S tell me to get on their gurney,
and I said, I can't. I can't lower my arm
unless I want excruciating pain. I can't move my arm.
I have to stay in this position, looking like like
a Flamenco dancer. But I said, listen, can you lock
(39:53):
the wheels on this gurney? And they said, sure, we can,
of course we can. And I said, don't just lock
the wheels and I'll just back up onto the end
of it and I'll fall backwards. And it worked, and
so with my left arm still extended over my head,
they loaded me into the ambulance. Apparently, when I fell
from that rock or cliff, as I call it. It
(40:14):
looked like I had been shot. Fifty sixty people on
a commercial crew. The shooting day is over. They have
missed lunch. There is a very nice catered lunch sitting there.
And they told me later that everybody was so disturbed
by what happened to me that only three people even
took something to go and know. The director was not
(40:35):
filming as I fell, sadly, so we hid every pothole
on Pacific Coast Highway on the trip from the beach
to the hospital. Oh. I called my agent from my
cell phone. She laughed. I called ESPN actually to check
on the catered dinner. Oh what's new. Oh, I fell
off a cliff shooting the commercial, they laughed. And I'm
(40:56):
lying there in the emergency room waiting for X rays
when my cell phone rings again and I reached into
my left pocket and I had the phone halfway to
my ear when I realized, my left side does not
hurt anymore at all. It does not hurt at all. Well,
that was a quick recovery. I sat up. My left
side felt fine, In fact, it felt great, and a
(41:19):
nurse came over and suggested I should lie back down again.
I said, why. Somehow I got better on the trip
from all the potholes and just lying here. In fact,
I feel great. Did you guys remove my left leg
while I wasn't looking? Did you replace it with the
left leg that I had when I was twelve? Because
I could hop back to Connecticut on my left leg.
Right now, just cancel the flight, she laughed. She said, no.
(41:41):
What I was feeling would be the morphine they gave
me so they could twist me around and take the
X rays they needed. And I said, please, never ever
give me any more of that ever again. Thank you.
My Judo flashback, as it turned out, had done the job.
I had broken nothing. The e R doctor complimented me
on my fall, and he said I probably had six
(42:03):
or eight different sprains on my left side. It would hurt,
but it would keep getting better and I'd be able
to make my flight home the day after next. He
was completely right, although I now I found twenty five
years later that it's beginning to hurt, like I just
fell off the cliff. Anyway, I went back to the hotel.
I ate well, I slept well, I managed to walk
(42:23):
around with the help of a cane and I went
back for day two of the commercial shoot. This one
is in a mansion in Pasadena, a room teeming full
of UNA's lying on the floor. They're photographed through chandeliers.
They're lazy, rich kids who also need to be told
to eat something. I arrived and walked into applause from
the crew and I delivered a well rehearsed line. And
(42:46):
now from my next trick, which is when the director
John came over and apologized, and he said he thought
this entry into shot for me would be way easier.
What I had to do is lie on the floor,
then sit up and deliver the line eat something. If
you can sit up, he said that if you can't,
we can do something else. Can you sit up? And
(43:08):
I thought about it, and I rubbed my lower back
and I said, based on the day so far, yeah,
I could, but probably only six or seven times. And
and I said, while I can sit up, it's clear
to me one of those bad sprains was in the
muscles somewhere my lower back. And if I try to
lay back down, I lose control. I just crashed back
(43:29):
to the floor. That actually happened getting out of bed
this morning. So after each take the same. Two guys
who had walked me up the stairs after I fell
at the beach gently held my arms and shoulders and
lowered me back two lying on the floor. We got
what we needed. I went back to the hotel. I
(43:49):
had dinner with some friends. The next day. I was
a little sore, but perfectly fine to get back on
the plane east, and sure enough, only time ever I
had a west to east tail wind. The flight from
l a X to Newark took three hours and forty
eight minutes. We traversed the country like at art shot
from a gun or an alderman falling from a rock
out cropping. Oh, by the way, the commercial was an
(44:13):
immediate success, unlike any that Boston Market had ever done before.
In those days, they were packed each night for dinner
at every location, selling half chickens and full meals with
potatoes and salads, and they were getting an average of
twelve dollars out of every customer. The rest of the
day the place was empty. The idea behind my commercials.
(44:36):
They were designed bringing a lunch crowd a sandwich in
an soda and a bag of chips for four dollars.
Soon they were swamped at lunchtime. Boston Market ordered three
more commercials. These two be shot in a studio in
New York. They offered me fifty grand a day. An
entire new career Vista was opening in front of me.
I was, for a week or two in early the
(45:00):
most successful male commercial actor in the country. We shot
those three spots. I interrupted a grunge concert to shout
eat something at the band, and then I got carried
off by the crowd in a mosh pit. And I
interrupted a Romeo soap opera surgeon coming on to his
nurse by rising from the operating table to shout eat something.
(45:22):
And then we did something with ball players at the
stadium on Randall's Island. And I remember nothing of that because,
unlike the first two, they never edited the film. Because
that's when it happened. They're equivalent of falling off the cliff.
I will confess it had not occurred to me. Then again,
I did not own Boston Market. I did not work
(45:44):
for their marketing department. I did not run the ad
agency they employed. But none of them anticipated it either.
After the first few weeks of giddy glee about the
lunch crowds I had brought them somebody noticed something unfortunate
and unexpected. Basically, for every four dollar lunch they were
now selling, they were selling one few twelve dollar dinner.
(46:07):
They had not gained any new customers. They had just
managed to get their customers to each spend eight dollars less.
These very well made, very memorable commercials worked very very well.
And the problem with that was each time they did work,
it costs Boston Market eight dollars. By the end of
(46:29):
Boston Market was something like nine hundred million dollars in debt,
it had filed for bankruptcy and had been taken over
by McDonald's. On the other hand, I got my money,
and in the twenty five years plus since, Boston Market
has not once used a celebrity endorser to try to
sell their food. Oh and there was one other positive outcome.
(46:52):
I'm actually very proud of this. The ad agency got
the award in question. I did not, so I don't
know which group gave it to us, but that eat
Something campaign actually one in a award because somehow my
shouting eats something at Una and the other way thin models.
Somehow that cuts through to at least some victims of
(47:15):
eating disorders. The Boston Markets. Eat Something ad campaign for
which I fell off a cliff. Okay, a rock outcropping
for which I fell off a rock outcropping got an
award from a national Bolima association. I've done all the
(47:46):
damage I can do here, most of it to my
left side. Thank you for listening. Follow this podcast if
you can tell a friend, tell a passer by. We're
number one among news and political podcasts not produced by
any network. Here are our credits. Most of the music,
including our theme from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and
performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Chanelle. They are
the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John
(48:10):
Philip Chanelle. Guitars based on drums by Brian Ray, produced
by t Ko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged
and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is
the Olverman theme from ESPN two, and it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments
from Nancy Faust the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
(48:30):
announcer today was Richard Lewis, who I had dinner with
on the trip that I took to film that bloody
Boston Market commercial and everything else is pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this, the six hundred day since
Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government
of the United States. Arrest him now while we still
can a new episode tomorrow. Till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
(48:53):
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
Keith Alderman is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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