bad Luck for good TV

I am so bummed that HBO canceled Luck. Just when I was getting the hang of the horse racing stuff, too. Byt while I was trying to pick up the racing biz, I was so enjoying the phenomenal cast: Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz, Kevin Dunn, Jason Gedrick, Jill Hennessey, Ian Hart, Nick Nolte, Gary Stevens. That's an incredible collection of acting talent. In the last episode, Dennis Farina just broke my heart when he looked at himself in the mirror after killing the hitman in the men's room. Acting your ass off without saying a word is a very special skill; I knew exactly what the character was thinking. It's just a terrible shame.

Canceled, BTW, because three horses died over the filming of 12 episodes; very natural deaths and not uncommon for racehorses, but those assholes at PETA got their accusations all of the media before the real story came out, and HBO chose to cancel the show over the bad press. I hate PETA, and not just for that. I'm as opposed to animal cruelty as the next person, but they spend way too much time and money on issues that pale in comparison to human issues in this country. When everyone in the US - or maybe the world - is properly fed and housed and has health care, then we can talk about fur coats and leather shoes. Plus a lot of their press is extremely distorted. Hate'em.

I just took a look at the last published post on this blog, and it has an ad for Utsav Fashions, Indian clothes! Way cool! and they do sell beautiful stuff.

amul, amat, utz

Let's see if I can explain this stupid thing properly. It's kind of stupid, but also kind of cute. Or maybe just a WHOLE lot of explanation for a very small chuckle.

Anyway, there's a brand of potato chip called Utz, which I think is a local east coast brand, from Pennsylvania. They have a trademark of a little girl who looks like this:

Barry always says that the Utz girl looks like me. There is of course no physical resemblance, but he thinks I'm as cute as she is. He says, "Look, Sweetie, there are those potato chips with your picture on the bag!"

We now travel to India, where the Amul Dairy girl bears a striking resemblance to the Utz potato chip girl:

Seriously, they could be mishpocheh (family, related).

OK, so if the Utz girl is me, and the Amul girl is the Utz girl...wait for it...stupid joke...

Yes, ladies and gents: a get-well picture of me and Amitabh.  Well, even if it isn't me, it's extremely adorable.

I've started watching Luck on HBO, and the excellence of the cast is carrying me through the learning curve of horse racing. There's a lot of jargon and racetrack details and so on that are going to take a while. But hey, there's also Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina. Michael Gambon, Richard Kind, Kevin Dunn, Ian Hart, Jason Gedrick...and then there's Gary Stevens.  I had seen him in Seabiscuit, a movie I really liked a lot, and thought he was absolutely perfect as George Woolf (since I'd read the non-fiction book on which the movie was based, I had some firm opinions about the casting. I knew that Stevens was a former jockey, but that was about all. I was impressed that his acting was pretty good, since most professional athletes are poor-to-middling actors.

I was glad to see him again in Luck, partly (I must admit) because he's a way handsome dude. And he's actually a very talented actor - he has quite a bit to do, playing a drunken, addicted jockey. Pulls it off like a boss. And then I looked him up. He's not just some former jockey, he is a fucking legendary jockey, with eight wins in Triple Crown races. He actually won the George Woolf Memorial Award around six years before he played George Woolf! I'm really impressed. Remind me if you can think of any great athlete-actors.

And speaking of athletes, I'm sad about Gary Carter. He played for a really great Mets team and always seemed like a very sweet guy. Baseball was pretty important to me at that time (it hasn't been for a while now), plus I was a pretty serious baseball card collector, so Gary Carter almost seemed like family. (All of the Mets were, really, and big local heroes. I used to go to an upper east side gym that had a fair smattering of celebrities, but what really excited me was seeing Rusty Staub and Keith Hernandez, multiple times.)