Hallmark. Practice good penmanship by picking up a greeting card; because text and e-mail isn’t the only way you can send a nice, naughty or risqué message. Go on, show someone special that you can write more than just a shopping or to-do list; show your appreciation with a Hallmark greeting card, available at your local drugstore. We have a channel, too, watch it, it could use some viewers. We’re Lifetime without the Runway, TNT without the Closer and Food Network without Paula Deen and Bobby Flay. We need an identity, damnit! Someone help Hallmark. It’s a good brand and deserves a better image. Okay, now along comes Martha to save the day and the network and she’ll likely buy the channel in a few years and call it MSN – Martha Stewart Network. oh wait, I think that name’s already taken, isn’t it? If Oprah can have OWN, Martha can have MINE – Martha Is Now Everywhere — Kmart, Macy*s, NBC and Hallmark.
Buy a card and sample the damn channel already, will ya? I usually get the lower-priced American Greetings cards but hey we’re doing a Hallmark plug here so let’s stick to the story. HALLMARK GOLD CROWN, baby!!! Where’s the 7-UP?
Here’s the first in a series of Hallmark Birthday Greetings, as part of our soon revived “Starfile: Famous Luminaries” program, this is where we present some of the day’s birthdays. Blow out the candles and cut the cake! Don’t forget to make a birthday wish!
Celebrating a Virgo birthday is film director and ex-Mr. M. Guy Ritchie, who turns 43 today, Sept 10th. He and M. made a dynamite couple of power meets efficiency and convenience. Guy fulfilled or at least indulged M.’s fleeting desire to raise children in a traditional nuclear-family setting while living happily ever after behind that white picket fence in London. Wait, wrong! You can’t fence in a feisty Leo; and M. has never cared what anybody thinks about her, anyway, right? Well, I don’t know about that but Ritchie represents M.’s second house of values and income, so they got “Swept Away” by the notion that they could make movies together, too.
And to Guy, Madonna represented the 12th house of secrets, so he likely uncovered any carelessly kept secrets, the biggest probably having to do with a Brazilian beefcake.
from beefcake to meathead…
Happy 62nd Birthday to commentator Bill O’Reilly. Ever a pragmatist, Bill is known and renowned for his bruising candor and shouting contests during the verbal spars he has with guests of his top-rated Fox News Channel program “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Flash back to twenty or so some odd years ago: Bill O’Reilly at the helm of the syndicated newsmag “Inside Edition” as the mild-mannered anchor. He hadn’t quite yet adopted his style of fierce talk yet; except that one time he went ballistic on a producer because he refused to say, “play us out” to end the show as a cue to air music. ‘Fierce,’ by the way, is a word that Tyra Banks has used more times than Ru Paul has dressed in drag! We digress again, back to Bill. Around the same time O’Reilly started his gig as host of “Inside Edition,” the new fourth broadcast network was formed by Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch and they named it Fox, after the studio owned by the latter of those two billionaire media barons. Well, Fox started out broadcasting only a couple of nights a week and its programming was often derided by the right-wing republican defenders of family values as “outrageous” and “in bad taste” and they even threatened FCC sanctions. The only classy thing about “Married…with Children” was its Frank Sinatra-sung theme song “Love & Marriage,” cried the right wing conservatives.
Ahh, how times change. Flash forward about ten years after Fox Broadcasting first went on the air and the Fox News Channel is born out of angst and rebellion of “Slick Willy” and the “Democrat-controlled, left wing media.” Is it pandering? Perhaps. Is it smart business? Definitely!
Also celebrating a birthday today (if he were still alive) is Charles Kuralt, the Virgo who was never afraid to travel alone. As one Virgo friend of mine once put it, “If you want to go somewhere and have to wait for someone to go with you, you’ll probably never go. So just GO already, damnit! Whattaya waitin’ for?”
I’m packing my bags as I write!