Rooney Rants

All week, like listeners to NPR and classical radio stations all over the world, I been hearing about the special programming for Mozart's 250th birthday bash in Salzburg today. I like Mozart a lot. I'd enjoy a birthday cupcake, particularly if it was devil's food chocolate with homemade frosting. Given Wolfie's era and proclivity, one of those doll cakes so popular at birthday parties in the Sixties might be appropriate.



All week during my commute to work I've been irrationally annoyed by the radio advertising phrase spoken in that nostril flaring I'm-such-a-cultured-wine-snob announcer voice, "The intermission is timed to coincide with the exact time of Mozart's birth. More than 100 churches in Salzburg will ring their bells for seven minutes. " How in the hey-ho do they know the exact time of Mozart's birth? Was it in the newspaper, or on the birth certificate? Was there a bright star shining above No. 9 Getreidegasse? A solar eclipse?

For nearly a decade I've had Andy Rooney attacks any morning when my radio commute was brought to me by Pockets Menswear. Just put a cocklebur under my saddle blanket, or a pea under the stack of mattresses. When I hear, "brought to you by Pockets Menswear, educating Dallas men to dress better than they have to since 1973," I just want to hurl. Pockets Menswear features "designs by Ermenegildo Zegna", which sounds like an untreatable illness characterized by itchy, oozing froo-froo cufflinks, pink neckties, and bright green liqueurs.

For a decade and a half I've been irrationally repulsed by Nicole Kidman. Sure, I hear she's a great actress, but when I see her face I have the fingernail-on-the-blackboard reaction. Maybe it's the spacing of her eyes in relation to her other facial features...Maybe it's something more sinister..Maybe she looks like the doll in a lime green frosting cake.