Sex and money. Doesn't that make you want to read it?

In my last blog, I complained bitterly about the sex pamphlets I was being mailed, especially because they were all concerned with penises, and I was not of the proper sex to appreciate the advice I was getting.

Yet today there appeared in my mailbox another helpful document. It said if I would just swallow Amazing Maximum Power Formula for 30 days, I would have "rock-hard erections for up to 4 hours."

Gee, thanks

Here's another opportunity I declined. It's a bunch of secrets. "The truth must be told," says the author of this offer (or the offer of this author). "There are powerful special interests who spend millions of dollars to keep these secrets from you. Why? So they can make more money."

All you have to do to keep these powerful interests at bay is to buy a book. For only seven dollars. It will teach you:

"How to turn your vacation into a tax deduction."

"How to be a more potent and satisfying lover at age 55 than you were at 25."

"How to locate anyone... anywhere." (Even Judge Crater?)

"How to buy hundreds of products for 65% off."

"Legal way to double the $600,000 estate exemption." (What if you don't have an estate? Or $600,000 dollars?)

"How to teach yourself speed reading in only 20 minutes."

The guy who made these promises (he's not gonna take it any more) is troubled by "dirty little secrets. Let's face it," he writes, "you have been lied to... The powers that be have made a fortune from what you don't know..."

Sometimes, a power that be (be's?) like, for instance, Rod Blagojevich, Governor of Illinois, tries to make a fortune by selling a Senate seat. And even after he's arrested for all kinds of corruption, he sticks to his guns, and goes to his office. "The Governor," said one of his minions, "has no plans to resign."

I myself would like to try that "pay to play" stuff, but I don't have the balls. As I've said , I am not the proper sex.

Confusion Rules

My Christmas spirit is confused. I was reading how (because of the present recession which might turn into a future depression) some of the fanciest stores in New York were cutting prices. A reporter for the New York Times wrote that Bergdorf Goodman had come down 40% on handbags, and Saks Fifth Avenue was selling Valentino evening dresses at 70% "below the original price of $2,950 dollars.

I figured that either the evening dress buyer would have to pay Saks a mere $431 dollars, or Saks would have to pay the evening dress buyer $65, and tell her not to come around any more. Okay, I'm not too swift at arithmentic, but I know about broken bones. It isn't that I wouldn't like to grab up 45 cashmere sweaters at 35 cents apiece, but it would cost so much more if I got my two legs and an arm busted by all those fierce shoppers knocking me down with great big heavy new handbags.

Here's another thing that confuses me.Nothing to do with Christmas, it' about pamphlets that come through the mail. Sex pamphlets. There's a doctor out there who is pushing something called The Enhancer Patch. In his pamphlet, a married woman announced that she was not one "one of those girls who sleep around," but wham! there came the Patch, and left her wondering how she, who was "wise, prudish and faithful," could have let herself have "savage sex with a stranger... an old man completely unknown to me." Lucky dirty old man.

Some of the sex pamphlets are angry. A fellow who sells "The Ultimate Erection Supplement" is furious because "most herbal erection supplements don't work." Behind our backs, he says, "greedy companies have been ripping us off...lying about their products, robbing our money,,," This angry man started his own company "and created my own darn product." Anyhow, he's a believer. He says he's helped more than 11,765 men to get back their sex lives, and he's still at it. All a guy has to do is send a letter that says, "Yes! I want to Try the Ultimate Erection Supplement FREE in My Own House for 30 Days."

I'm happy for the 11,765 men, but I'm tired of sex pamphlets. Most of them are about what you can do for your penis, but since I don't have a penis, what with being of the wrong sex, I wish all those people would just write to someone else. Confusion rules.

Useless, and irresistable

I was so busy helping Mr. Obama (mostly I sent him messages through the air; it was a kind of mind meld, so it may not have worked all that well, but he's headed for the White House, isn't he?) and now I'm back to blogging. Since my sister and my niece and my brother-in-law are my only readers, this may be considered an act of vanity, yet I am soldiering on. My husband told me he didn't think the mind meld thing was funny so I have to get rid of him, but right now I am thinking about stuff that baffles me.
For example, I have lived all this time without realizing how wonderful I am until I was discovered by an Association. The news came in a long letter. It said I possess "very special and rare traits," and the Association is willing to accept my membership, which will lead me to " enormous wealth, love and the most phenomenal personal abilities, absolutely free." Also, the lettter said I would "learn how to be more intelligent." That hurt a little, but what the heck, I was going to be taught where the profits were in games of chance, and that "not even professional cheaters will be able to beat you.... You, Chris, have been selected to be sent our Greatest Kept Secrets-- the secrets that have laid hidden from ordinary eyes for 2300 years--"
There are a lot of pages in the document, because when the members of the Association took a "closer look at my profile, " it turned out I was even "more special than any of us imagined! Did you know that you possess some very rare, hidden traits? In fact, there is a famous person (someone you would instantly recognize, he's on TV every night) who posesses these same special , incredibly rare traits."
Well, that didn't surprise me. I myself was on TV every night when I worked for CNN. But I can't say more, because I don't want the Association to get mad at me., and punch out my ordinary eyes.
Listen, the world of wonder is far-flung, No sooner had I put the Association behind me than I got a letter from an outfit called Destiny Research Center, featuring a lady named Maria Duval who said she had more money than she needed, that she was surrounded by people who loved her, and that once
she had even "miraculously escaped from a terrible car accident ." Maria has made more than 10.000 TV appearances and "has never failed to telepathically locate missing persons (more than 20 to date)."
Why is she so lucky? Because she wears the Ring of Re, a 6,000 year old talisman "worn by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt." Maria gets mail from others who wear the Ring of Re, like the woman who said her husband had left her, but the day after she got her ring, "I received a letter from him... he asked me to forgive him and begged me to let him come back"." And how about the guy who couldn't believe his good luck because "three times in a row I won at Bingo... I just have to believe that my Ring of Re really has mysterious powers."
Maria writes that the Ring of Re is a chance for me to solve my money and my love problems, and I can wear it for 30 days before I have to pay a nickel. It seems like there are a whole lot of people out there worrying about my money and my love problems, and I'm grateful, but I'm so exhausted from thinking about it that I have to take a nap.

Katie On Top Of The World

When Katie Couric was co-hosting the "Today Show" with Bryant Gumbel, the show's ratings went way up , and NBC was happy. Katie got a big office with a view. I went there to tape her for a magazine profile, and she walked me over to the windows that looked out on Saks Fifth Avenue. "Can you believe this?" she said, laughing.
There's a bit of a back-story . Katie and I met when we were both working at CNN, she in Atlanta, I in New York. Our coversations mostly took place over the phone. Katie: "Can you cut off early and give me another five minutes?" Chris: "No, I can't." She was a producer, I was "talent." (They call an on-air person "talent," even if that person is a dope.) Katie was ambitious, dedicated to journalism, and very smart.
But when CNN sent her to Washington, she was scared. She was assigned the task of showing up at the White House every morning, and telling the audience what the President would be doing that day. The first time she had to carry out the mission, she was sick to her stomach , but she put on her blazer, combed her hair, and went to the White House "so I could stand there and say,"' 'Today, President Reagan will be meeting with National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezhinski.' I was a disaster. I looked like I was fourteen, and my voice was awful."
In the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, never mind. Katie started taking voice lessons, and wrestling with what she called her midwestern twang. ("I said things like can-a-dit.") One day (twang notwithstanding) along came NBC and offered her the world. Or at least the "Today Show." She was great for the show, and the show was great for her. She travelled everywhere, she interviewed actors, writers, musicians, big shots and nut cases. In Tripoli, she attempted to pry words from Muamar Khadafi, while he sat in his tent swatting flies, and pretended he couldn't speak English. "The interview from hell," she called it, but somewhere along the way, she had found her confidence, and after that it was onward and upward. There were still worlds to conquer.
So Katie went to CBS to anchor the Nightly News. Who wouldn't be proud to sit where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite had sat? But CBS never pulled out of third place in the ratings, and eventually, there came rumors that Katie might quit, Katie might be fired, Katie wasn't everybody's darling any more.
She soldiered on, until a couple of weeks ago when she did some interviews with Sarah Palin, the famous hockey mom, and according to the newspapers, those interviews were shown on YouTube "nearly six million times." So Katie's everybody's darling again. The fact is that I am mechanically challenged, and I don't even know what YouTube is, but it's worked for Katie. And I bet she's thinking, "Can you believe this?"

A Gloomy Tale

Last week, my husband got up in the middle of the night and fell down a flight of stairs. He thought he was in New York City on a nice flat floor, but he was in the woods of Suffolk County. It was no fun at all, because he sprouted large purple and red maps of the world all over his arms and chest, and his back hurts something awful
So here's what I want to know. Why do they call a flight of stairs a flight? Stairs can't fly. If they could, my husband would have been somewhere over the rainbow by now, and his back wouldn't hurt at all, instead of me dragging him to doctors in the hope that he might be pressed back into one piece. I guess the house in the woods needs to be exchanged for a ranch house that is satisfied to sit on one level. I mean, I myself fell down those perilous stairs three times. Once, my niece's boyfriend picked me up and carried me out to the car, once a kindly old lady picked me up and planted me in a chair, and once nobody else was around, so I had to phone for a taxi driver and a taxi to get me home.
A gloomy tale, but we can't all be laughing all the time.

ODDS and Odders: Things I Love

1. I love Sarah Palin. I haven't heard anything like her since Daisy May ran around Dogpatch in her underwear. Sarah knows how to win a war-- she hasn't yet shared her knowledge, but she has told us, "Dog-gonnit, change is comin'", and that's good enough for me. Who can resist, "You wok the wok, you don't just "tok the tok," because if you don't wok the wok, it "hurts our koz." To be sure, this may need some interpretation, but "darn" and "heck" are easily decoded, and somebody who is willing to go after both Wall Street and Afghanistan is okay in my book. I wish she wouldn't say "nucular" instead of nuclear, but George W. Bush has been doing that for eight years, and my gosh, he's the President.
2. I love the post office. At least the F.D.R. Roosevelt Station in New York city. If you go there to send a letter-- let's say to Prague-- you get a receipt for your 94 cents, and at the bottom of the receipt it says, "Tell Us About Your Recent Postal Experience." What the hell is a postal experience? Standing on line grumbling? Because it's taking so long? Discoverinng there's only one clerk at a window, and all the other windows are closed? It's mysterious, isn't it?
3. Here's another mystery. In a booklet sent out by AARP, there's a picture of a 65-year-old retired woman named Marilyn. While walking home one day, "Marilyn tripped on the curb and twisted her ankle. " What made her accident "a little easier to handle" was that AARP's Medical Supplement Plan "covered most of her medical costs." Nice, right? But, staring up at us from the botton if this page is a confession. AARP says Marilyn "is a fictitious person used for illustrative purposes."
4. I love Yale Galanter. He's the lawyer who tried to get O.J.Simpson out of a recent mess in Las Vegas, "Being stupid and being frustrated is not being a criminal," said Mr. Galanter. If I ever need a lawyer, he's the one I'm going after.
5. I love my grandmother. She's not around any more, but she made me laugh. She was a passionate watcher of soap operas, and she talked back to the actors. Some guy would be vowing that he was going to marry Our Gal Sunday, and Grandma would stand up and cry out, "That's what you think, you damn fool." She was right, of course.

Paul Newman

The world is going crazy, gloom is everywhere, and on top of all that, Paul Newman died.
It's enough to make a sane person cry, but when I went back into my files-- I'd interviewed Newman long ago, though he didn't much like the press-- I started laughing. He was a funny man who didn't give himself airs, and he said what he thought. Here are a few of the things he thought, both amusing, and serious.
1. "I had the doubtful honor of being in 'The Silver Chalice.' It was the worst movie made in the 60's. It's a wonder I even survived it. It was a disaster from beginning to end. Here I was in this curly hair and a very short cocktail dress."
2. "You build up a lot of muscles playing trombone. Then you stop playing trombone and your whole face falls. As long as you keep on playing, it's great."
3. "The studio puts out that I drink 24 bottles of beer a day. I only drink 22."
4. "I believe in sauna, sit-ups in the morning, pushups etc. It's marvelous to discover at the age of 41 that you love to run. I thought I was a natural athlete, but I was a terrible football player, and I couldn't handle tennis all that well. There are readjustments you have to make in mid life. I'm convinced I'm only about 23. It's my friends who are a lot older."
5. "Because I have six kids, I worry about a military out of control, technology out of control, the pace of our lives. Can we reverse apathetic indifference to our own future in this country? The pollution, the non-responsiveness of the government to people? There are a lot of people I consider my personal enemies. i get up in the morning, take binoculars out of my pajama pockets and scan the horizon for enemies. It's necessary to thrash away like terriers at the bad things surrounding us, and do something about it."
And here is one more bit from a man who was nominated four times for an Academy Award, but never won one.
6. "You know what I'd like t do? I'd like to win about 69 nominations-- I think that's an interesting number-- and at the age of 90, crawl on my hands and knees, ridden with arthritis, to pick up on Oscar. That would be kind of stylish."
He didn't make it to 90, but he was always stylish, and he leaves a big hole in the universe.

My Computer

The reason you haven't heard from me lately is because my computer ate my blog. My computer is very sensitive, and I think it was upset with the failed economy, and also the threat that Sarah Palin might be only a heartbeat (the heartbeat belongs to John McCain) away from being our next President, without her having 1: taken any classes in presidency, and 2: having been mean to the Russians.
New York is kind of irritable these days. For one thing, the annual United Nations assembly assembled, and for the past week and a half there was so much traffic nobody could get across town, and besides that, the United Nations welcomed a foreign leader whose name nobody could pronounce, and that guy got up and explained that he wanted to kill everybody in Israel, and then we lost all our money.
"Broad Public Anger is Cited," said the New York Times, and indeed, we the public were angry, and wondering if we would have to go on the dole or if, in fact, there wasn't enough money to have a dole.
The New York Times also told us that leadership had broken down, and as if that weren't bad enough, the Mets collapsed after producing "only five runs in a key three-game series."
I'm going to stop now, because this is all too sad.

Opus Three

This is my third attempt to produce a few lines for my new blog. (That is to say, my only blog.) My sister told me that blog #2 had made her laugh out loud-- twice-- but my sister is fiercely loyal, and I'm thinking there might be very little sense in writing a blog if no one wants to read it but your sister. I mean I can reach my sister on the phone.

Still, I have heard that there are about four hundred thousand million billion people blogging every day, and they probably haven't got around to me yet, what with their own problems and the pressure of all those other people wanting to hear from them. However, I am going to remain hopeful. For instance, I would very much like to hear drom my nieces, who live in California. But they are only four and six years old, with better things to do than try to make me feel good. And, alas,they are not yet adept at the computer, so far as I know.

But they can both swim, which I can't. They are also entertaining. When I last visited them, I asked Hayley (the older one) why she didn't like school, and she said it was because of a kid named Algernon or Charlie, or something like that. Why? "He knock me," she said fiercely, and that was that.

Her younger sister, Alexa, is equally direct. She ran up a flight of stairs, woke me , and announced, "I have a idea." Whenever depression threatens, I tell myself , "I have a idea," and I'm good for the rest of the week.

Whoops!

About last week:
Timidly but proudly, I sent my first effort at blogging into the world. Ten minutes later, I realized I had it all wrong. I had said Reese Schonfeld had founded CNN. Reese Schonfeld did not found CNN, he found Ted Turner, and together they founded CNN. The Reese part was unfounded some time later. You might say the men parted as friends, but then again, you might be hallucinating.
There was a gathering one night -- in New York, I think--whern Ted Turner, on the podium, was talking about people who had helped shape his network, and someone in the audience called out, "What about Reese Schonfeld?"
"Ah, yes, Reese," Mr. Turner is reported to have said. And then, with a beatific smile, added, "I shouldn't have fired him, I should have killed him."
Thayt's the way it goes sometime.

Okay. a short story

The reason this blog is called Chase in New York is be cause my name is Chase, and I had a boss named Reese Schonfeld. He was-- and probably still is-- a very smart man. I had been on the CBS Morning Show when he discovered me. He decided I needed to come work at CNN, which he had recently founded. He is a man of many talents, and he's founded a lot of things including the Food Channel. I assured him nobody would watch such a channel except maybe his mother, but fortunately for him, he didn't listen.
Anyhow, he put me on a show called Chase'n New York, because he liked the pun. It was a great job for a long time. I went out with a crew every day and recorded strange and wonderful things. There was a lady down in the lower East side where needles and other drug paraphernalia was strewn everywhere, and she cleaned up a whole empty lot, and grew flowers and trees and performed wedding services for those who wanted them. I met a little man who was holed up in a huge empty building on Fourteenth Street, because the owners of the building couldn't get him out, so they could tear the place down. He-- the little man was a barber-- had to come down several fights to open the locked door whenever he had a customer. I also went to the upper east side, where there was a beautiful old town house, which had once boasted a horse ring out in the back.
It was now used as a place that taught tea ceremonies, and I got to squirm around on the floor in a rather unsightly fashion, but learned quite a bit about the ways of tea. I'll tell you other things I've learned when I know you better.

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