The First Lady and the Queen

The media has been sickeningly obsessed with a few seconds of interaction between Michelle Obama and Queen Elizabeth II. President Obama and the first lady went to visit the Queen at Buckingham Palace while in London this week for a G-20 financial summit. While there, Michelle greeted the Queen with a hug and put her arm around the Queen's waist. The Queen returned the gesture in kind. It was one of the very few times we have witnessed the Queen doing a human thing in the last 75 years.

Upon this historic occasion, you would have thought that a third degree felony had been committed by the First Lady. Newspapers and broadcast media came down on her hard...some not so hard because they really didn't know how to handle it.

The nation's news media has become digustingly obsessed with the trivial. Two famous people can't put their arms around each other in an affectionate gesture without creating an international incident that goes on and on forever in discussion. Experts from near and far, many with British accents, some with Spanish, French and American accents, are presented on cable news programs analyzing what was not more than a few seconds.

The Queen probably suffered more irreparable damage from receiving a measly IPod as a gift from the President than getting a hug from the First Lady. There is little doubt that after a few years of intensive psychotherapy the Queen will get over it. The First Lady will be guilt ridden for the rest of her life but that, too, can be diminished with the right mix of counseling, hypnotherapy, medications and relaxation exercises.

Do we really need a media that obsesses on the trivial? Do we honestly need a media that goes on for days and days about a mistake by one of our leaders that has been explained away dozens of times and poses no threat to national security?

There's a lot of time to fill on cable news stations. While I think some mention of news oddities is called for, turning an appetizer into a five course meal with dessert is not. If there's not enough news in the day to put important things into perspective, shorten the analysis and broadcast reruns of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite (and Douglas Edwards before that). I'd even go for some outdated doses of Edward R. Murrow as well.

Those old guys didn't analyze things...you couldn't say "anal" on the air back then. They let the newsmakers do their thing and they reported it. If somebody had put their arm around the Queen, they would have mentioned it once and wished the participants well.

And that's the way it is...Good Night and Good Luck!

WTVT - WFTS Marriage...An April Fools Joke???

Hugh Smith got up out of his grave to call me and tell me what he heard in the heavens...days earlier...that his alma mater, WTVT, Channel 13, the Fox affiliate in Tampa, Florida will now be sharing news video with WFTS, Channel 28, the ABC station. Yes, the economy has apparently gotten the best of journalistic ethics. No longer can viewers expect exclusivity...it won't even matter which station you may be watching.

At first look, this isn't really a big deal. Two stations have decided to get cheap because the recession has caused revenues to decline sharply. What they won't tell you is viewship has been down for a very long time as cable, Verizon Fios, satellite, the Internet and other outlets have so diluted viewership that the most practical thing will ultimately be to bring the news into individual homes for private showings.

It's long been a practice for stations to pool video under special circumstances and that has worked out well. But to join cameras in a long term marriage is a whole other story. I started working in television news in the Tampa Bay market in 1965 as a stringer for WFLA. Sharing our film with another stations would have been unthinkable. We were friendly competitors but we were guarded about information we might share...NEVER, EVER would we give away video content.

It's scary the way things are going now. There's so much more news to cover...and the stations can only afford to hire mostly beginner street reporters. That's OK, they have to get their experience somewhere. However, it sickens me that we will be now raising a new generation of television journalists who share their work product incestuously and think because it's disclosed and endorsed by management that it's the right thing to do.

Not only is it the wrong thing, it's repulsive and irresponsible. If a station is having economic problems, it ought to just get out of the news business...or go non-profit and raise money for operations through a foundation.

I don't think I'm going to get my digital converter after all. I prefer to watch snow.

Nah, Nah, this has got to be an April Fools joke...OK, I'll go along with that!

Real Estate Values, going down...down...down........

There's an Internet site where you can check the value of your home. It's Zillow.com. As the real estate bubble glided up I checked the site often and watched as the value of my home gradually increased by nearly several hundred thousand dollars. I was pretty pleased with myself, I must admit.


These days I check the site just about once a month. For quite sometime, my little frame house...built in 1949 (a small, cheap place in a really nice neighborhood)...held steady at about $425,000. I knew it was in a great area but I didn't understand how its value could stay so high considering the bubble burst beginning in mid December, 2005. We're talking almost three years ago.

Well, I spoke too soon. Suddenly, the Zillow people found my home just like Google Earth did. Talk about a bubble bursting....whoa! We're talking a nuclear explosion here. My home plunged $75,000 in value in six months at the beginning of the year. Lately, it's been going down $10,000 or so each month.

Today, my home lost $2,000 on the site. That's right, TWO-THOUSAND-DOLLARS! That's 23 weeks pay at the rate I received at my first job as a newspaper reporter. I've decided that rather than list it with a Realtor, with action like that it belongs on the stock exchange where I could make some money on the down movement. This morning my house was worth $296,000. This evening it's worth $294,000. Now, I understand why so many people are walking away from homes. I'm beginning to understand the whole deal. What an idiot I've been. Why keep making payments on a $375,000 mortgage when your property is only worth $296,000?

As there may be good reason for abandoning such a poor investment and taking the credit hit, there are just as many reasons for hanging in there and making good on a promise. Yep, a novel idea. I promised, in writing, to pay the mortgage as odd as that may be to hear. I'm sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way and would do so if they could afford to. But in many cases the interest rate has adjusted to an impossible payment amount.

More than my promise, a house is more than an asset. It's home, it's a place where I come home to and can get away from everything. There's no place like it. ET fought to get back to it in the heavens. My home is many times more than a mortgage or anything else that could be placed on it. I've lived in massively larger and more modern homes but the one I'm in now has been more of a home than all the others. Perhaps I've changed and made it that way.

So its value to others may be going down, way...way down. It's value to me, the value of my word, its value as the one place on the entire face of the earth I can come to and be king, cannot be put into dollars.

A lot of people may have their home foreclosed on...be kicked out of that one little corner of the planet that is theirs and theirs only. But your heart can never be foreclosed on. The place we call home may change but home never changes. Money can't buy a home. Home in the truest sense of the word can't be mortgaged.

My house is my home and that place I call home. But if I ever lose it it won't be lost. It'll just move along with me, somewhere deep inside where the process server will never be admitted and civil judgments are meaningless.

Now, let me go see how much value I lost at Zillow.com while writing this narrative. If you're behind in your house payments, I'm praying with you. Hang in there and don't be afraid. You can never lose your home!

The greatest place to eat in Tampa...

I met a new friend last year. His name is Robert Kim Bailey. He likes to be called Kim but he's very pleasant and answers to just about everything. He's the master of all master chefs and runs what used to be the best kept secret in town, Bailey's Catering and Restaurant in Hyde Park.

Seldom if ever have I looked forward to going to a restaurant every week but his place has become addictive. He closed four weeks over the holidays and I just about went mad. I've also gotten used to his weekly emails featuring his upcoming menu.

His food is simple yet elegant; delicious and nourishing; excellent tasting with a wide appeal. Kim, whose main gig is catering and he stays very busy with that, is only open for dinner nine hours a week. Yep, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 5:30 until 8:30p.m. During those hours you can eat in or you can call ahead and have your prepared meals ready for you to take home.

After you've eaten there a while you develop favorites. I like all the main menu items but I've been seriously affected by the grits he prepares. Nobody in the world makes them so good and they're perfect for eating with his seafood. The summer squash is superb. He even makes turnip greens taste like dessert. All you have to do is get by there once and you'll keep coming. Kim has promised that when the day comes that he has a continuous packed house, he'll let me eat in a corner of the kitchen. I'm happy with that.

The mayor eats there sometimes and the mayor's mom is there fairly often. Lots of other local celebrities, like big time lawyer Barry Cohen, come with their families to eat with Kim on a regular basis. The REALLY BIG stars, like John Travolta, Paris Hilton, Jay Leno, Will Smith, etc., ...celebrities like that...come in disguise. If the food gets too difficult to eat through their fake mustaches, they go out back and finish. Paris has that problem a lot. Henry Kissinger just comes as himself but nobody cares.

Each week there's a different menu. A handful of items are offered on a regular basis but a lot of them change. He loves deserts, you can tell, and those change on a regular basis. There are none better in the universe, some traditional and some one of a kind. They all taste better than anybody else could possibly make them.

Now this may read like a restaurant review but it really isn't. It's a tribute to a guy who is passionate about food, who relishes every single bite of everything he takes in. He's a guy who'll spend years replicating a great dish at some distant eatery and put it in his place when it's finally perfect. For instance, his Macadamia Nut ice cream is hundreds times better than the original he first tasted at Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa.

Kim likes to be everywhere. On nights he serves at his restaurant (also headquarters for his catering business) he'll be in the kitchen making sure there's quality in every dish; he'll work with the serving staff to be sure things are organized and everyone is being tended to in good order; he'll be in the dining room and around the outside tables in front of his place talking to his customers to be sure they're perfectly happy and in between all that he'll be peeking out back to make certain nobody has to wait long for take out orders.

When he's not around his own place, he's out looking for fresh vegetables, poultry, seafood, meats and whatever else he needs for his coming fare. He prides himself on putting the very best into what he does. The markets aren't especially fond of his shopping style...he bites into whatever he can to make sure the produce or whatever is fresh and excellent tasting. If not, he'll look elsewhere or just not feature it that week.

Oh, yeah, he's a best-selling author to. His book, The North Beach Diet, fell slightly short of the New York Times best seller list but it did make Pat Robertson's program on satellite. He's also made a number of television appearances talking about the book after people stumbled across it in bookstores. It's just like the South Beach Diet except you learn about eating good food in great quantities, enjoying the hell out of it and not worrying about whether or not it'll put a few pounds on. You can still order it at amazon.com.

Kim has a computer tongue. The taste of every great meal he's ever had in his life is recorded in his memory and easily accessible. If you make a special request, chances are at some point he's had it the very best it can be made and he'll improve on that just to accommodate his customers.

He's the very best at what he does...a man extremely passionate about his palate and what's placed on it. His life's desire is to please people with his elegant cooking skills. He stays up late each evening writing email, asking certain customers their opinions about new menu items. He recently wrote to ask what I thought about his Goody Goody butterscotch pie. It was the best, better than the legendary Tampa hangout ever made it. I asked him to make it more often.

No matter where he tries something, he always wants to do it better and he does. You just have to experience Bailey's Restaurant one time. Get there early or you'll have to sit out back with me.

Kim's website is here: http://www.baileycatering.com/ Check it out. You can find a link to his weekly menu there...it usually comes out Sunday night or Monday morning. There's also a neat link to some videos, click up on the right hand corner.

See you at the gym,

Tony Zappone

Being nice for the holidays

It's always bugged me that there are certain people, a lot of them in fact, who are nice to me around the holidays and hardly give me the time of day the rest of the year. I've often wondered if they were just fishing for a gift or looking for a holiday way to handle their guilt. Is it something that's learned, automatic or what?

I think the idea of giving gifts is real nice but I have the greatest admiration for those who give when and because they want to and not because they're intimidated to by the season and tradition. The media almost frightens us into rushing to the mall lest the economy goes into the poopers and the country goes bankrupt. It's like our trumped up holiday generosity is holding up the entire world financial market.

There are many people who call me at Christmas time...who send me cards...who won't even return my calls any other time. So if I have to say something to them during the year I write it down and have it handy when they call in December. Their end-of-year niceness actually seems sincere. It's almost like the holiday sweetness is programmed into their genes.

I've even thought I ought to return their phoniness by asking them for some kind of favor...right around Christmas when the rules of etiquette forbid such requests from being turned down. I mean, who could say "NO" to somebody who asks to borrow $50 the day before Christmas? It seems that would be a sure way of getting them to call, perhaps repeatedly, throughout the year if the debt wasn't paid timely.

The media has done a lot to set our minds on giving gifts and seeing friends at Christmas time. But isn't it sad that we need this kind of prodding to do something we surely ought to be doing by our own nature all the time?

A good friend of mine and popular Tampa Bay area radio personality Jack Harris began (and ended) a celebration in 1976 he called "Leon" - that's Noel spelled backwards. He decided it ought to be on June 25 of each year since it was at an equal distance BEFORE and AFTER December 25. He actually played Christmas carols on his program. His several listeners dropped to ZERO quickly and by the middle of his shift he had given up the idea, taken off his winter coat and went back to playing "Bridge over Troubled Waters."

What Jack didn't know at the time was that the Christmas spirit ONLY takes place during a few weeks in December, by genetic mandate. People so inclined will resist being nice and thinking about giving any other time of year no matter what the day, Christmas Carols or any other reminder be damned.

I'm willing to go along with all of this. But I'd like for all of us to be totally honest about it. Let's accept reality but also tell the truth. Christmas is a time for giving because a whole lot of us don't feel like being forced to part with our riches any other time of year. The holiday season is a time for goodwill towards men because there are so many people we don't like it just takes too much energy to be kind and generous all year 'round. To be fair, there are a LOT of extraordinarilly giving people who are that way all the time.

It's also a time we don't have to remember we are the most obese nation in the world and a third of us will die prematurely from abdominal fat. Dieting during the holidays is like driving the wrong way on the expressway. It just isn't done. The holidays have become a boon for the multibillion dollar diet industry which begins cashing in right after the department stores close their books on the Yule season.

If I have to be nice all the time because Santa is watching and making a list of my misbehaviour I'm just going to count on Santa feeling guilty about leaving me out on December 25 even though I've been an asshole the previous eleven months.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to ask Santa to look into his reindeer situation. I mean he's got a LOT of those animals that pull his sleigh who are certified hypocrites. They had totally nothing to do with Rudolph, wouldn't even give him the time of day, until one foggy Christmas eve Santa asked him to guide the sleigh. Yeah, right. THEN all the reindeer loved him. Hell, how much more fake can you get than that?

My friend, Hugh Smith

Hugh Smith, who anchored the local evening news on Tampa's WTVT for almost 30 years, died Sunday. I'm a little pissed at him about that.

Hugh and I talked on the phone regularly for the last 15 years. Though he had been in treatment for stage four melanoma (a deadly form of cancer) for about ten months he never said a word to me about it during our monthly telephone conversations that usually lasted at least an hour.

We always talked about the TV business, speculated on how long it would be before Katie Couric would be relegated to doing voiceovers for Saturday morning cartoon programs, discussed personnel changes at Tampa area broadcast outlets and reflected on times past. I had lots of chances to ask him about things he did when I worked for him that I really didn't understand. Some of the reasons he related I believed, others I took for a lapse in his memory.

I grew to become very fond of the post-broadcast Hugh Smith. That he never once discussed his illness torks me. But then again he was a very private person and held some things private even from his good friends. That doesn't make me any less peeved.

My first meeting with Hugh took place in 1965. A high school student, I walked into the newsroom at WTVT on a Saturday in March with a Bolex 16mm movie camera I had borrowed from a friend. I had shot several stories for his 6p.m. newscast after arranging to be accepted as a stringer at the station. He accepted me graciously. All alone in the small newsroom, he seemed very happy to have company. I couldn't go far because once I got off the city bus in front of the station there I was stuck for an hour or so until another passed going the other direction. Hugh thought I had a car...haha!

He was very respectful to this pimple-faced teenager who knew almost nothing about writing a TV news script and only slightly more about shooting film. He took the time to teach me about panning, cut shots, in-camera editing and all the things he felt I needed to know to make my life as a stringer easier...and his as an anchor easier as well. Being around him felt good. He knew I only got paid fifty cents per foot of film used so he lengthened my scripts a bit to ensure me some profit. Thirty second stories equaled about 18 feet of film.

After three or four months at WTVT, I moved over to WFLA. It was closer to downtown where I had more of a choice of buses and they came more often. It was also near The Tampa Tribune, for which I served as free lance photographer. Later I went on staff full time.

Once while I was working at The Tampa Tribune, he called and asked me to come see him. He offered me a job making a lot more money than I was getting at the paper. Hell yeah Hugh, I'll come to work for you. I'd love to be a big TV news star! I went back to the paper and told my managing editor, Doyle Harville, about the offer and that I was giving my two-week notice. He wouldn't have it. Doyle asked me what I was being offered, I told him, and he matched it plus a few dollars to make up for the fact that I was giving up TV stardom.

Harville pissed me off at that point because he had always poor mouthed the paper when I started talking money. Now I was fixing to leave to become a big time TV newsman and suddenly money's gushing out the elevator. I called Hugh and told him I had to rescind my acceptance of the job and explained that I just couldn't leave the paper. He got mad....real, real mad. He thought I had simply used his offer to negotiate a better deal at the newspaper. He didn't talk to me for a number of years. Time does heal.

Years later after I had graduated college and left the newspaper business, he was once again gracious to me. I never understood why some in the newsroom squirmed when he came near, others were fearful of him and some just did their jobs and avoided contact with him. On the other side of the spectrum, there were those who stood up to him and who challenged him and his authority. They always lost.

I remember one day in 1978 we came into the newsroom and learned he had fired our beloved assignment editor (Chip Collins) and another top banana or two. He said he wanted a new newsroom backbone and the firings were backed by station management. The entire news department was shaken by the loss of friends...and by the inexplicable action Hugh had taken. It was explained to us in a meeting but to this day few of us totally understand his reasoning.

One of our conversations before his death was about that incident. He was too weak to recall much detail. I still didn't get many answers. He couldn't say much between coughs. I asked him if he was OK and he said he had a bad cold. Bull shxt, Hugh. You were fixing to croak on me.

He was my good friend. I simply can't understand why somebody who I had known very well for most of my lifetime would not at least help me prepare for what was going to happen. If you're around here somewhere, Hugh, I can forgive you for a lot of things but...... I guess you are entitled to your privacy and you have it now. Hell, your family's being tight lipped about funeral or memorial service arrangements. Maybe you just wanted to skip that part. OK, have it your way!

We'll miss you.

The Kennedys, Thanksgiving and Novembers...

Occasionally, Thanksgiving falls on November 22. Though I have a lot to be thankful for and look forward to turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce as much as anybody, November 22 is always a very reflective day for me. It was one of the most emotional days of my life some 44 years ago. It was on that day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

That day was just two days after his brother Robert's 38th birthday. JFK's funeral was held on JFK, Jr.'s birthday. Junior's famous salute to his father's passing casket was burned into the psyche of the time on that day. I had shaken President Kennedy's hand and photographed him during his visit to Tampa just four days before he was killed. It seemed like so much, good and bad, happened to the Kennedys toward the end of November.

Enough for November. I try every year to have the best time I can on Thanksgiving. I don't get home cooking a whole lot so it's one day I let myself be consumed in a culinary way at the expense of friends kind enough to invite me over. However, when Thanksgiving is on November 22 my thoughts often pause and wonder just how tough this time was...or still is...for the Kennedy family - a family that sustained so much pain and loss around this time.

I hope there will be joy flowing to the Kennedys this year and to all other persons in our country. With people losing their jobs, having their homes foreclosed on, having to decide between buying gasoline or medicine, etc., I know I have a whole lot to be thankful for no matter what my circumstances.

It wouldn't be right for me to omit our military people overseas from my thoughts. They're having to spend Thanksgiving far away from their families and in very close proximity to bombs and artillery that could end their lives at any time. Their Thanksgiving is at the end of each day they remain alive.

Somehow, it seems like what many others are going through makes my troubles trivial and should enrich my holiday knowing there are so many people more broke, more lonely, more endangered and just plain worse off than me. I think I'd like to give them all my Thanksgiving pass and just have a nice meal today and return to my Weight Watcher's meetings next week.