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I make no secret of the fact that I watch some trashy things on TV, including the show that taught me that hos don't get refunds and weaves can be incorrect, Cheaters.
I first fell in love with this long-running reality show back in college, when Cheaters always seemed to be on in the wee hours of the morning whenever I was over at Loyolapalooza.
Here in Palm Springs, Cheaters comes on at the almost-too-decent hour of 9 p.m. on Sundays. That means it starts on The CW right after The Amazing Race ends over on CBS, so Cheaters has become a part of the weekly Race-watching at my apartment and has also made its way into Monday Shenanigans lore with this impromptu Cheaters performance by some Christmas cookies:
Anyway, after I noted that last weekend's episode was particularly intense, my friend Kyle pointed out that the most intense Cheaters moment of all time was when Joey Greco got stabbed... on a boat!
When talk turned to Cheaters in the newsroom today, Maggie searched on YouTube and found the infamous stabbing:
Oh, that went there, Degrassi-style.
But in the comments on the YouTube video, I noticed a bunch of people saying that the stabbing was fake and referring to a story on Inside Edition that proved it.
Well, I hopped over to Inside Edition's Web site and found that they did indeed run a story in which a couple of people said they were paid to act like cheaters for the show, including a woman who said she was on the boat for the stabbing episode. They also had local cops saying no stabbings were reported around that time, even though the Cheaters episode apparently said the stabber was arrested.
Aww, say it ain't so, Joey!
Well, in a folo, Inside Edition catches Joey Greco walking his dog and gets little more than what seems to be a quite bumbling attempt at a "no comment" from the man who always sounds so smooth when describing that surveillance footage.
So now I don't know what to believe about Cheaters. I hope all that stuff is real; otherwise, my newfound dream of appearing on the show (Maggie said this afternoon she'd like to see me on Cheaters — as the unsuspecting boyfriend, of course — because it would be "like coming full circle from Ginger.") may be for naught.
And in my cursory Googling of all things Cheaters, I found that about a month after the Inside Edition exposé, the LA Times did a little Q&A with Greco that mentioned the stabbing rather matter-of-factly: "Greco has been pushed, punched, stabbed (he recovered nicely, thank you) and gets routinely threatened."
Also, The Dallas Morning News interviewed Daniel Gomez, an investigator often seen on the show, around Valentine's Day this year and made no mention of any "infidelitous" accusations against Cheaters itself.
Now, I place both the LA Times and The Dallas Morning News a little bit higher on the credibility totem pole than Inside Edition, but maybe someday I'll have to take Joey Greco up on the offer he made when the LA Times asked, "Nothing is set up or fake?"
"I will tell anyone if they want to come along with us, they're more than happy to come along and judge for yourself. If anyone wants to come to court with me next time I have to go to court, they can come along there as well."
Hmm. Perhaps I should schedule some vacation days for a little trip to Dallas.
0 comments | 3/10/2010 10:04:00 PM
This morning when I woke up (feeling like Joan Rivers), the first thing I did was grab my iPhone and get on Facebook. There, I was reminded that today is the best holiday ever created: NUBE DAY!
I literally screamed with joy as I read José's wall post and realized that it's one of my favorite days of the year.
Ten years ago today, my friends Simeon, José and I turned in our TeleNube commercial to our eighth-grade Spanish teacher, Sra. Warren. I forget what the assignment actually was, but our project that somehow fulfilled the requirements was a TV commercial for a new television network, TeleNube. As I recall, we even managed to film the thing at the CHS-TV anchor desk over at the high school.
See, nube (i.e., "cloud" en inglés) was our favorite word. Don't ask why. We were eighth-grade boys; we didn't need a reason. So creating a cloud-themed news network was kind of a no-brainer.
Check out the script of our promo below and run it through Google Translate if you must. I'm Tomás Indrelunas, and then there's Simeon Owens and Hector Jiménez...
TI ¿Estás cansado de noticias regulares?
SO Intentas las noticias de nube en el canal "TeleNube."
HJ Nosotros damos los reportes sobre el tiempo cada quince minutos.
TI Y todas nuestras emisiónes están cubiertas por la patente del canal "TeleNube..."
SO ¡Pantalla Nublada! ¡Vivo! del blimp "TeleNube."
HJ "TeleNube" el canal international numero uno de las noticias te lleva mucho más atras de las camaras y enseña visiones exclusivos que solo veras aquí.
TI Las noticias de nube es una mirada divertida en el tiempo y las noticias.
* * * * *
HJ El presidente de los Estados Unidos... [Hesitate] ...¡Se me olvidó mi linea!
* * * * *
TI Hoy es el primero de marzo y nuestro reporte especial es... [Begin laughing]
SO ¡Su cabeza está en las nubes!
SO ...No hay lluvia en el pronóstico. [Thunder and Rain] ¡uy!¡ay!
* * * * *
TI Si tú no estás cerca de una televisión, visitanos en el internet en www.TeleNube.com
HJ ¿Donde puedes hallar las mejor noticias?
SO TI HJ
¡Aquí en TeleNube!
At first when I realized it was Nube Day, I got hella stoked because I realized that today was forecast to be a cloudy and/or rainy day in Palm Springs. I looked outside my window and saw that God has clearly decided to celebrate Nube Day too.
Shortly afterward, I realized that even though back in 2000, José, Simeon and I were television revolutionaries who were ahead of our time, we now live in the future and our vision of a 24/7 news network distinguished from the rest by the fact that there would always be nubes on the screen via our Pantalla Nublada system could finally become a reality!
So I hopped on livestream and made an account and then went to GoDaddy and registered TeleNube.com. And now, a mere two hours after I was sleepily reading José's Nube Day felicidades on Facebook, I'm just about to start the first-ever live broadcast on TeleNube.
You can tune in below, or better yet — head over to the newly minted TeleNube.com to celebrate Nube Day by watching the clouds hovering over Mount San Jacinto LIVE on the newly launched Web stream of the legendary TeleNube!
0 comments | 3/07/2010 01:40:00 PM
This isn't really a story about a shirt, but rather a pretty amazing day that just so happened to involve a particular shirt.
See, there's this purple shirt that's been hanging up in one or the other of my closets since I moved to Palm Springs in June. I've never worn it... until today.
While I was ironing clothes earlier in the week, I decided it was time to bring some new-ish clothes into what was becoming a rather limited wardrobe. So I got my purple shirt all gussied up and ready for its debut.
I thought the purple shirt would look good with blue jeans, so I put it on today and unwittingly joined the ranks of the purple people eaters at The Desert Sun. It was one of those days when a bunch of us all happen to wear the same color, and today, purple was definitely the new black.
Aside from being one of the cool kids wearing purple and just generally doing what I love and loving what I do, my workday was especially enjoyable because of a technical fail that cracked me up.
I'm on a companywide listserv for people who deal with video. All of us listserv members get a daily budget of notable video content from around Gannett, and the list is also often used by people who want advice or need technical help on something video-related. When one such general question was sent out to the list this afternoon, though, all hell broke loose.
For some reason, the Outlook system at a paper back east replied to the list on behalf of someone out there who's out of the office. But the e-mail system didn't just send one out-of-office reply; it sent at least 195 copies of the same "I am currently out of the office" message to everyone on the list in what was quite possibly the funniest 15 minutes of my week.
The steady stream of out-of-office e-mails prompted me to giggle uncontrollably, and other listserv members' often-frenzied replies got me to bust out laughing:
SOMEONE TURN THIS OFF NOW!!!!!!!!!!! I've got about a dozen of these same emails!!!!
This is going to crash my inbox, please turn his out of office message off. I've gotten 20 of these.
Please take me off this list!!!!!
SOMEBODY STOP THIS CRAZY THING...I'VE GOTTEN DOZENS OF THESE MESSAGES.
MAKE IT STOP!!!
IT'S CRASHING MY SYSTEM...AND EVERYONE ELSES!!!
Me too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Take me off this list!!!!!!!
Since exclamation points are something that journalists are expected to use very sparingly, if at all, I feel like the collective response to E-mailageddon 2010 must've depleted Gannett's supply of available exclamation points through at least 2050.
But it was hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!!!
Anyway, after work and a stop at my apartment, I went to the opening of my friend Jayel's photography exhibit at a local Starbucks.
There, my purple shirt came into play again (See why I'm using it as a thread here?) as friends and strangers alike told me they liked the shirt and/or asked where I got it.
After the opening ended, we all (well, most of us) headed down to the Ace, where we used a gift certificate that Stacy won during a recent Ace bingo night to get a bunch of food at the bar. Most of it was delicious, but there was one notable exception — the grilled cheese that Stacy ordered.
The offending sandwich was passed around the table, and the consensus was clear: It... was... awful. To me, the sandwich tasted like an amplified version of how my dirty/sweaty socks smell after a long walk. It was so bad that I couldn't even swallow the trial bite I took; I had to spit it into a napkin.
Apparently, that's just the taste of one of the more obscure cheeses used in the multi-cheese blend that fills the sandwich, but wow. I don't think any of us at our table could stomach much of that taste.
But we didn't let some iffy cheese get us down. Instead, we headed up to Toucans and danced the rest of the night away.
While doing so, we ran into some people we knew, at least one other person who just looked like someone we knew and (of course) quite a few notbooks I wish I knew. Good thing I was all up in their peripheral vision wearing my oh-so-nice looking purple shirt. (And you thought I had forgotten about the shirt, didn't you?)
Oh, and Jayel and I staged a very brief performance atop one of the platforms reserved for go-go dancers, as I believe they're called, before we were told to get down by an angry-looking bouncer-type fella, a la getting booted from the stripper poles at Cherry in Tempe. That was like the cherry on top of a wonderful, full 7i, purple-shirt-wearing day.
0 comments | 3/06/2010 02:53:00 AM
About a month ago, Blogger, which I've used since '01 to make this site, announced that they're dropping support for FTP publishing. That's geek speak for "The way that stuff gets from Blogger's system, where I put it, to the Indrelunas.com servers, where you find it, ain't gon' work no more."
Because I'm way too cool for blogspot, I'm in the market for a new content management system... and unless one of y'all speaks up soon with news of a fancy new CMS that would be perfect for Brian.Indrelunas.com, it looks like I'm moving to WordPress.
I used to make fun of WordPress, especially when sites that were supposed to be serious launched sporting a default WordPress theme. But apparently, WordPress has grown up a bit over the years, unlike Blogger, which still kinda feels like it almost 10 years ago.
To be fair, I haven't opted into many of the new things the Blogger team has created, but that's because they've mostly been dumbed-down WYSIWYG-type things. The list of features that I can actually implement as a guy with a hard-coded template who uses the non-WYSIWYG post editor is kinda short — a title field, post labels, comments... all things that are kinda seen as a given these days. And that said, Blogger has sported some cool features that I've used all along, like the ability to post via e-mail and, therefore, via my barely e-mail-enabled brick phone that I had in college.
But it's time to move on, and I'm pretty confident that I can make WordPress bend to my every whim... especially after seeing what Scott did with the new statepress.com, which runs on WordPress.
So prepare yourself for yet another new (and hopefully improved) Brian.Indrelunas.com, coming sometime before Blogger shuts down FTP on March 26. Depending on how much I feel like messing around with WordPress and how successful I am in said messing around, the new Brian.Indrelunas.com may be a lot like this one or it might have a new look and feel by the end of next month as well.
0 comments | 2/28/2010 01:42:00 PM
Indeed.
As I tweeted earlier, today was hella exciting — and also hella frustrating.
Today was a day full of breaking news, which really gets my journalistic juices flowing. But the fact that I started out one step behind a local TV station made me lose sight for a while of just how much I enjoy going out and reporting.
For some reason, my ears did not perk up like they usually do when, presumably, our newsroom scanners crackled with news of a structure fire, which is usually a phrase I can hear on the scanner from seemingly across the newsroom. But instead of hearing county fire dispatcher chitter-chattering about the fire at an Indio self-storage facility, I first heard about it when KPSP, Channel 2, mentioned it at the end of their morning newscast just before 7 a.m. By the time I had called the Cal Fire command center, the fire had been contained, so I handled that story from the newsroom.
Still, I kept an eye on KPSP's "Early Show" cut-ins to make sure the contained fire didn't look like something I needed to roll out to, and I looked on with bemusement as KESQ, Channel 3, repeatedly didn't mention the fire in their GMA cut-ins, even after both KPSP and mydesert had stories about the fire online.
An hour later, I looked to the TV to see if KPSP had anything new on the fire for their 7:58 a.m. cut-in when I saw that they were reporting a whole other incident in Indio — what was initially thought to be a chemical explosion. I wheeled around and saw that not only had KESQ caught up on the storage-facility fire but they also had gotten word of this hazmat situation.
Again I cursed my ears, and again I tried to play catch up. After some frustrating minutes in the newsroom trying to get basic information on what turned out to be a punctured chlorine gas cylinder at a scrap metal and recycling center, I was sent out to try to cover the whatever-it-was from the scene.
Luckily, the drive to east Indio was about 20 minutes, which gave me enough time to chill the eff out.
Eventually, I sort of got into my reporting groove as I covered the second of two fire-department-related Big Things that went down in Indio this morning. But the frustration and stress would come back in waves throughout the day, in particular as I was faced with another twin set of Big-ish Things going down in the same city at almost the same time.
The afternoon set consisted of two car crashes that were literally around the corner from one another in Palm Springs. Luckily, I avoided some of my morning frustration by having a mostly-charged laptop battery in the afternoon, and I was able to handle the crashes with more ease than I handled the morning brouhaha.
After a very belated lunch break, I got back to my desk and cranked out the STORM WATCHAGEDDON 2010 story I had promised the editors in the morning before tying up as many loose ends as I could and getting all my content from the Web site and/or my notebook into the systems we use to make a printed newspaper.
Three sets of photos, three stories, one brief and one extended photo caption later, I was more than ready to call it a day — and yet, not altogether opposed to the idea of doing this all again tomorrow.