Jamey Tucker

Beside the Point

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Archives for November 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

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I’m working Thanksgiving day. I’m working the day after too. First time that I’ve had to work both days of this holiday.

I watch this episode of WKRP in Cincinnati every year. The famous “turkey episode”. I got the boxed set earlier this year but I’ll admit, this episode is not the same without the original music. In fact, in this episode they actually cut part of a scene because, without the music, it didn’t make sense. Station manager Carlson walks into the studio as Johnny is playing Pink Floyd. I don’t remember the name of the song at the moment but it’s a slow creepy song with dog’s barking. The boxed-set version substituted generic rock music and without the dogs, they wound up scrapping most of the scene. Too bad.

So here’s the best we can do…from YouTube.

Anyway…wanted to wish everybody a Happy Thanksgiving. If you’ve got a lot to be thankful for, and most of us do, take a moment at least to think of what you have and say thank you to the One who makes it possible and Who gives you the blessings.

And take a moment to think of folks who are going through a tough time during this holiday. A member of our Sunday School class passed away this week. Not a month ago he was diagnosed with cancer. He leaves a wife and two young daughters. I’ll also think of former Alabama football player Siran Stacy who’s wife and four of his children were killed in a car wreck this week.

There are many others who’ll celebrate Thanksgiving for the first time without a loved one. I’ll say a prayer for those families tonight.

Iron Bowl Week

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Best line on sports talk radio this week?

The American dollar shows signs of weakness. Bama’s loss to Louisiana-Monroe proves $4 million doesn’t buy what it used to.

It’s Iron Bowl week and in the state of Alabama, nearly everything talked about, everything worried about and everything wished for, revolves around what happens when the Tigers and Tide meet on Saturday.

The honeymoon seems to be over for Nick Saban. He and his family are finding out what it’s like being the coach of a not-so-good Alabama team. Then, he sticks both feet in his mouth equating the loss to ULM to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.

Seems all of this has taken a toll on Saban. This photo was snapped by a buddy of mine before the Alabama-Mississippi State game. It’s a bama fan but look at his face closely. Tell me this isn’t what Saban might look like after a few more seasons like this one.


All right. I don’t know where the photo came from. It looks like it’s been doctored since Sylvester Croom crounching behind the tailgate…and is that a reflection of the bear in the side-view mirror?

“Your Daughter Has MRSA”

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It’s been a really long day. My youngest got a bug bite sometime last week and Sunday we learned it was a staph infection. She went back to the doctor this morning who said it was likely MRSA, the dangerous staph that is resistant to most anti-biotics.

We took her to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital where another doctor confirmed it. I’ve seen enough stories on the news about MRSA to know this is serious. Several children have died from it. But our doctor didn’t seem to be that worried.

“Oh, we see this every day.” That didn’t make me feel much better though. Being in the news business our station and others have reported on children who’ve been hospitalized for days trying to beat this thing.

“The media makes it sound a lot worse than it really is” our doctor told us. “We see someone with MRSA every day, and not just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen this for a long time.”

It’s serious, sure. But in a lot of ways, MRSA is like the summer of the shark in 2005. Two or three people were bitten by sharks and suddenly, the news media reported on every time someone came remotely close to a shark in the Gulf Coast waters. MRSA is scary but the news media has reacted to every case making it seem, maybe, worse than it really is.

Delaney wasn’t admitted to the hospital. They drained the sore and gave her a strong round of the two antibiotics MRSA has responded to. She’ll go back to the doctor tomorrow morning and hopefully we’ll learn she’s responded.

I was supposed to leave early this morning for Kingsport to cover the Tennessee Baptist Convention. My news director didn’t hesitate when I told him about the phone call just a few minutes before I was going to leave. “Forget the story. Go to the hospital with your daughter. Get out of here!”

Around 4pm, I walked back into the newsroom and told him I thought I would still go, even though it was about 5 hours away. “No, you’re not going, go home to be with your daughter.” Part of me wanted to do just that, but I knew she was okay and I knew the story I was going to cover needed to be covered.

I talked with Cameron, talked with Delaney and finally decided to make the trip. So I’m sitting in a hotel room in Kingsport. I’ll cover the story tomorrow morning, feed my report back through out sister station in Knoxville and head back home.

I’m worried about her for sure, but she seems to be fine now.

Night Night

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This time change has really put the kabash on the Tucker family’s nightly routine.

The kids usually go to bed around 8:30 but because we “fell back” last Sunday morning, my youngest is falling asleep around 7:30 every night. Junior, who usually stays wide awake until around 9:30 is going to bed early too.

Tuesday night, I barely finished my dinner before Delaney was sound asleep on the couch. Jr.. who’s really “the third”, rolled over on his side and was out like a light by 8:15.

Now for a middle-aged married couple, this “early-to-bed” for the kiddies might be good news but no such luck. The wife has been sound asleep by 8:30 every night this week. That leaves me, all by myself to watch the 9pm tv shows and update the blogs and read the websites.

Funny thing is, I’m getting sleepy, not just an hour earlier but several hours earlier than usual. Instead of staying up until midnight, I’ve been heading for the pillow by 10. Surely this time change isn’t going to affect our sleep schedules until March.

The CMAs, Carrie The Eagles and Alison

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How cool are the Country Music Awards? Maybe it’s because I’m such a country music fan but for my money, the CMA is the best of all the awards shows.

The Eagles are on stage now at the Sommet Center and I can’t help but wonder how many country music fans (like my dad) are thinking, ‘this is a pretty good band. too bad they had to wait all this time to get their big break.’

It’s good to see Timothy B Schmidt, Glenn Frey and Don Henley back together and making new music.

How about that Alison Krauss? I could listen to her voice all night. She doesn’t get the attention she deserves but she gets my vote every year for top female vocalist. Nobody sounds like her and nobody sings country music better than AK. Her performance of her new single “Simple Love” was perfection and the home video of her as a child with her mom and dad had me fighting back tears.

And Carrie Underwood…man that girl can flat out sing. She may become the greatest female singer of all time by the time she’s done.

I think what sets this awards show apart from all of the others is the sincerity of the performers. Country songs have always relied heavily on the lyrical content. And you won’t find in any genre of music more emotional and moving lyrics than what the songwriters in Nashville churn out for these artists.

Brooks and Dunn are on stage now continuing that with “God Must Be Busy”. Wow, I’ll bet there’s a lot of Christian artists in this town who wish they could get their hands on some of songs going to the country artists.

“Kind of a Nice Break in the Day”

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Coach made that comment to Sam when the bartender was talking about his black-outs while at Cheers.
I don’t suffer from blackouts but these migraine headaches are pretty close.

The aura started during Sunday School while we were going over prayer requests. Like most of them, it caused me to try to figure out where I was and what I was doing. Five minutes later, the headache started.

If you’ve never had a migraine, consider yourself very lucky or blessed. I had never experienced one until about 5 years ago, though my mom suffered from them quite often when I was growing up.

My migraines are sometimes painful and sometimes just gives me that ‘fuzzy’ feeling in my head. This weekend, the migraines are giving me both pain and an out-of-body feeling. We called them dizzy spells for a while but my kids thought we were saying ‘disney”. So daddy’s Disney spells are very familiar. They know when I start to feel one coming on, to give me some space, and maybe some time in a dark quiet room.

My doctor gave me a different prescription last week but it doesn’t seem help. My cardiologist also decided to move up my annual EKG a couple of months so I’ll head in there next week.

I’ve had CAT scans and MRIs which all come back fine so I don’t suspect these headaches to be anything more than an old fashioned migraine. It’ll go away in a day or so.

Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt

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We’ve wrapped up what is usually the busiest week of the year at casa de Tucker. Three birthdays within a week. My wife was born one day after me (I can’t say when that was since I don’t want to keep my teeth in my pocket) and Trey was born one week after my birthday.

The last week of October finds the Tucker clan trying to eat three birthday cakes along with trying to figure out where the money’s coming from to buy all of these presents.

My wife gave me the boxed-set of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, the short-lived NBC drama that aired early this year. The dvd has every episode in the series. Watching the first few episodes again this week makes me long for the days of good programming on network television with smart, well-written dialogue and thoroughly developed characters.

Even as I watched these episodes nearly a year later, I wondered where this show went wrong. I can only believe it was too smart for the people who are still showing up to watch television shows on the networks. Sometimes I think the well-educated viewers have abandoned the four networks for entertainment. Maybe they’ve seen too many inane sit-coms and forced reality shows to think there’s any reason to turn on the boob tube for quality shows.

One scene in one of those episodes illustrates this point. NBS (the network most feel represents NBC) was hoping to buy the rights of a new reality show in the mode of Temptation Island. The new entertainment chief passed on it because it was crude and inappropriate for a major network airwaves. Then, she goes after another show that one writer called “too good for a network and belongs on HBO” because it was intelligent.

Other than a few cop dramas, I find most network programming to be more like the show she passed on than like the one thought to be “too good”.

In a few years, maybe none of this matters. The viewers who’ve left network programming will continue to find their entertainment on the internet, dvds and on cable television. The networks will be left with shows only a portion of the public cares to watch.