Skattershooting as fast as I can . . .

• From a pretty good movie, One Hour Photo: "People take pictures of the happy moments in their lives. Someone looking through our photo album would conclude that we had led a joyous, leisurely existence...free of tragedy. No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget."
• Do you think Troy Aikman has the highest winning percentage of any Cowboy quarterback? Nope. He is in fifth place behind Roger Staubach (.746), Danny White (.674). Don Meredith (.595) and even Craig Morton (.699). Aikman came in at .570 (94 wins and 71 losses).
• Business talk: Did you see that Tommy Hilfiger is in discussion with Dillards to “explore cutting distribution to the department store chain”. The company considers itself “overdistributed and is looking to reduce distribution to balance supply and demand."  Translation: Make us cool again. 
• Doesn't it seem like every day someone is being arrested for possession of child porn?
• I was happy to see that the comic strip "Opus" had debuted. I hate all comic strips with the exception of the strip where Opus got his birth: "Bloom County".
• Apple's I-Pod, the tiny MP3 player, costs around $275. When Newsweek asked Apple founder Steve Jobs if he thought it cost too much, he replied "No, of course I don’t think it’s too costly. Fifty million homes have DVD players that cost that kind of money. For music lovers, I don’t think it’s a hurdle at all."  Where is he buying his DVD players?
• Elton John has signed a three-year, $50 million deal to perform 75 shows at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas beginning in February 2004
• As much as the National Enquirer gets dogged for being a tabloid, it sure is right sometimes (i.e. Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction)
• I don't understand why we call Jessica Lynch a hero.
• I don't understand why Elizabeth Smart's parents place money over their daughter's privacy.
  
• I saw Kill Bill the other day. Very cool. Very dark. Very bloody.
• The Florida Marlins have been in existence for nine years. In two of those years they won the World Series. In the other seven, they did not even break .500.
• Jim Dent, a local columnist and author of The Junction Boys and other books, was sentenced to eight years in prison for violating his felony DWI probation. The DWI probation included a few month in jail as a condition. On the day he was released, he received a new DWI in Oklahoma which ultimately led to his eight year prison sentence.
  
• Michael Irvin says that the baseball player's union is far and away better than the NFL player's union. Case in point: Each baseball player receives $125,000 annually due to the sale of merchandise and other liscensced products. NFL players, on the other hand, average only $5,000 from NFL products.
• How often does this occur on the day after Thanksgiving: "How was your Thanksgiving?" "Good, except I ate way too much."
• A couple of weeks ago, TCU beat the University of Houston in football by a crazy score of 62-55. Last year the two teams met in basketball and the final score was 61-56.
• University of Texas players Cedric Benson and Matt Nordgren were both arrested recently. Benson was accused of breaking in an apartment to retrieve his stolen "plasma television set". Nordgren was arrested for criminal mischief which began after he "got out of his Lexus SUV". (Star Telegram 10.29.03, page 7D).  Those are pretty pricey possessions for a couple of college kids.
• I always thought Odessa Permian was a legendary powerhouse high school football team. Did you know they haven't made the playoffs in five years? (And it isn't that hard to make the playoffs these days).
• Southlake (that used to kick Decatur around when it was at the 3A level) has won 28 straight games at the 5A level.
  
• The Hummer 2 commercial with the kids in the soap box derby race going down the hill beats me down to no end.
  
• In preseason college basketball, the Harlem Globetrotters are playing real games. So far they have beaten Michigan State and Syracuse.
  
• Emmitt Smith made headlines earlier in the year when he proclaimed that he was like a "diamond surrounded by trash" last year while in Dallas.  Well, if you wish to hear what has to be the craziest Emmitt quote ever, listen to this audio clip. Emmitt was talking about how he felt like a diamond during the early 1990s with the Cowboys when he was surrounded by . . . . well . . . . you just have to listen.
  
• Friday's Front Row Grill at the Ballpark in Arlington has closed for good.
  
• You think the U.S. has received causalities in Iraq? On November 12th, there were nineteen Italians killed which is the worse military loss of that country since World War II.
• Don't you think it is time that people who hate Ted Kennedy quit mentioning Chappaquidick ?
• As I was thumbing threw some new recent legal cases the other day, I came across one where a lawyer and doctor were convicted of engaging in organized crime by "staging" car accidents and then making fraudulent insurance claims. An undercover officer got involved and documented them receiving over $200,000 because of their scheme. See Gemoets v. State, 115 S.W.3d 59.  There is sorriness everywhere.
  

• I do not believe in a conspiracy
• I do not believe there had to be a "magic bullet"
• I traveled down to the site of the shooting on the afternoon of the 40th anniversary with a digital camera. There were a ton of people there including some nut cases. My brush with greatness came when Jessie Ventura walked towards me and then got really close.
• Since the City of Dallas refuses to hold any official program to commemorative the anniversary, the conspiracy theory groups simply take over the scene, microphone included.
• At one point, the crowd began chanting "We want the truth! We want the truth!"
• The Zapruder film is the most important film footage in United States' history
• Zapruder sold the film to Life Magazine for $250,000 which was a huge chuck of change in 1964. Heck, it is a lot of money today.
  
• If the Zapruder film did not exist, how many more conspiracies would there be?
• I still have difficulty watching the Zapruder film at the moment of the "head shot".
• Want to see the type of camera that Zapruder was using?
  
• Can you imagine a more horrifying experience than what Jackie Kennedy went through?
• An amazing still from the Zapruder film right before the fatal shot is here. This is known as frame #312.
• An amazing web site that documents every single frame of the Zapruder file is here.
  
• On the Saturday of the anniversary, WBAP reran 6 1/2 hours, unedited, of  the actual radio tapes that were broadcast on the day of the shooting. It was fascinating stuff.
  
• The first witness on the radio was a female who claimed she heard the shots coming from a grassy hill near the overpass. (One awkward moment came when the radio reporter asked "What type of car was it?" which prompted the lady to respond in a condescending voice, "What kind of car was it? It was the president's limosine!")
  
• There were reports that vice-president LBJ had been hit.
• Edwin Newman was anchoring the NBC national broadcast that WBAP would patch into on occasion. He mentioned a couple of times that a "negro woman carrying a baby with blood on him" had entered Parkland Hospital after Kennedy had been taken there. They speculated that the child had been hit by a stray bullet.
  
• About an hour after the shooting. a person was arrested in Fort Worth on Belknap Street who was believed to be involved in the assassination.
• It's amazing that Kennedy's was shot at 12:30 p.m. and his body was back in Washington that evening.
• After my Thanksgiving lunch, I was rummaging around old papers that my parents had kept over the years. There were several from the days around the assassination. One interesting issue was the one that had the big headline that Oswald had been killed by Jack Ruby. On the sports page of that issue was a story that Baylor University had voted to integrate all of its sports programs.
• Oswald is buried in Fort Worth. For obvious reasons, the burial plots beside him were not in high demand. A few years back, a radio DJ and/or comedian purchased the plot next to Oswald and placed the very odd headstone on it bearing the name "Nick Beef".