| Issue #35, November 24, 2006 |
JOHN STEINBECK, BORAT AND THE SOUP NAZI
By Dan Rattiner
The game console Sony PlayStation 3 came out in a store near you last week. This has been much anticipated and the lines were long everywhere and occasionally violent. Two armed men tried to rob people waiting in a line for PlayStations at a Wal-Mart in Putnam, Connecticut. When one refused, they shot him. In a store in Manchester, Connecticut, two men attacked a man and beat him until he handed over the PlayStation 3 he just purchased. The attackers fled. In Sullivan, Indiana, two other young men became violent when they realized the store was out of them, and one pulled a knife and attacked two other men heading for the door carrying a PlayStation 3. In the scuffle, the knife was kicked away, and then one of the attackers, Dylan Moss, 19, was injured by a stab wound with his own knife. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, a teenager got his PlayStation 3 safely out of the store, got into his car, locked the doors and started it up, but before he could leave, he was approached by two men who tapped on his windshield with a handgun. He rolled down his car window and handed his PlayStation 3 to them. In Fresno, California, a surging crowd trampled some of the slower people in the front of the line as they moved toward the PlayStation 3 counter. Six people were hospitalized.
Meanwhile, it’s been announced that the PlayStation 3 is not as good as it was cracked up to be, when Sony originally said it was fully compatible with earlier models. Turns out that the console might or might not play the background music to the Tekken 5 combat game. Scenes from the Gran Toruismo racing game sometimes freeze. The game Suikoden III can’t read data from the first-generation PlayStation, and a virtual gun from the Biohazard game will not fire properly. Some of the combat games from earlier PlayStations won’t play at all.
By the way, Sir Howard Stringer, the CEO and President of Sony, lived out here for many years. He did the sports broadcasting of many an Artist-Writers Softball game. Say hello if you see him around town.
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The Soup Nazi on “Seinfeld,” the man who would make you wait in line at his soup counter and then either allow you to buy the soup if you were polite and quiet, or throw you out while shouting “no soup for you” if you were bothersome, is going global.
Businessmen have made an arrangement with the scowling, military soup chef himself. Al Yeganeh has his name, so far, on the doors of eight “Original Soup Man” franchises in New York City. And he’s about to open his newest soup store in Hanover Square where he will unveil a special soup he’s invented for the Rangers hockey team. He’s got three soup stores in the suburbs, one in Garden City, one in Princeton, New Jersey and one in West Nyack, and eight more have opened elsewhere in North America in places such as St. Louis and Toronto, and he has a plan for another 5,000 soup stores around the world. The company is also now marketing a line of canned soups which bear the scowling face of Yeganeh on the label saying, well, they don’t have to spell it out for you. The Soup Nazi is coming to a supermarket near you.
Is his original store on West 55th Street still open? No it isn’t. Yeganeh plans to make it either a shrine or museum to Yeganeh. No soup for you.
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A company called Business Car Service has become so successful in Moscow that the government is now considering new laws to rein it in. Its activities have caused many traffic jams and auto accidents.
Business Car Service rents cars in bunches. When you sign on the dotted line, you get a whole entourage of cars, including one limousine in the center with various black cars with flashing blue lights on the roof at the front and rear to protect it. Also, sirens, official supporting documents in case the authorities want to look you over, and special license plates, which are a knockoff of the special AAA license plates giving high government officials, members of Parliament and special businessmen in government business permission to flout the traffic laws, and all appropriate chauffeurs and bodyguards. So now, you’re a big shot. One call does it all. And the cost? Just $600 a day.
The business is less than a year old, but it now has more than a hundred of these motorcades roaring around Moscow with sirens blaring and lights flashing every day. There are so many that the sheer number of them creates a serious problem on the crowded streets of Moscow.
There are reports in the newspapers of all sorts of poor manners and crude behavior on the part of the drivers of these motorcades. Motorcades stop the traffic, and then pull into, well, the parking lots of supermarkets where the big shot might just need a pack of cigarettes. For those inconvenienced, it is infuriating. And now it is commonplace that a planned twenty-minute journey takes forty. And forty-minute journeys take an hour ten. But worse, people have now become unclear about which vehicles are responding to true emergencies and which are not. Chaos has arrived.
The new legislation would severely limit both the number of people and the level of officialdom that are permitted to have cavalcades. It is endorsed by President Putin.
It does occur to me that such a rental operation might present a real business opportunity here in the Hamptons.
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A court in California has ruled that the heirs of author John Steinbeck may legally terminate all previous copyright agreements regarding the re-publishing of Steinbeck’s works. All they have to do is send a letter to the court to have that go in effect.
The Steinbeck heirs are making their claim for Steinbeck’s work as a result of a new federal law that went into effect a few years ago, known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. This was passed in 1998 after the untimely death of that singer and Congressmen. Bono’s heirs demanded and got the rights to Bono’s work.
Some of Steinbeck’s books include Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flats, The Red Pony and The Pastures of Heaven.
John Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, spent their last twenty years in Sag Harbor, New York, where John wrote his final novel, Travels With Charley. Steinbeck became the first honoree for the Sag Harbor Whaler’s Festival. And his memory in that town and in the community are noted with the holding of the annual John Steinbeck Writer’s Event and the John Steinbeck’s Writer’s Program. There is also a plaque honoring him on the windmill at the base of Long Wharf in Sag Harbor. A stage in the Bay Street Theatre is named for his wife.
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Have you seen the movie Borat? The movie grossed $90 million in its first three weeks. It will make a lot of very ugly, stupid and bigoted people rich beyond their wildest dreams. These are not the stars, these are the ordinary people who had all the minor roles in the film. They are all suing the major players, including Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) for libel and defamation.
The three college guys in the trailer say the producers got them all drunk so they didn’t know what they were doing when they signed the waiver. And then they said all these bigoted things they would never say in public.
The 30 people who played the part of villagers in Borat’s hometown in Kazakhstan are suing because they were only paid the equivalent of $3.60 each to make appearances and now there is $90 million on the table.
They are, by the way, not from Kazakhstan. They are gypsies living in a tiny village 80 miles outside of the capital of Romania with neither electricity or running water. They are a proud people. Now they’ve been made to look like fools. The producers made them put animals in their living rooms, made them mess up their usually spotlessly broom-cleaned village, and made them pretend they were peasants from Kazakhstan. They’ve been defamed.
The Pentecostal Church elders are suing because they were lied to. The producers told them this would be a small documentary. They were deceived. And they want restitution to their reputation too.
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Sounds a bit like that movie Revenge of the Nerds. Call it the Revenge of the Stupid, Bigoted and Ugly.
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