I’m keeping tabs on the NBA draft tonight.  Amazing …

On this one night, every young prospect is a mature young man, coach-able and will, no doubt, be the league MVP one day and lead their team to a Championship one day.  So apparently …

NBA players turn into prima donna, immature punks after they enter the league.

In the next five years 15 different players will be voted league MVP and 15 different teams will win the NBA Championship.

So Ozzy’s new album is out.  Good to see the old school rocker still putting complete sentences together.  How much electronic assistance was required is debatable but I would encourage a close listen to “I don’t wanna stop” if you doubt what drugs do to the human brain.

So, Ozzy’s latest is OK, and I’m being kind.  But in a big picture sense I’m an Ozzy fan.  And the recent hubub over his new album got me to reflecting …

Why am I an Ozzy fan? Easy.  “Blizzard of Oz” and “Diary of a Madman.”  The first two shots in the salvo that is Ozzy Osbourne’s solo career.

For my money this was the best “one-two” opening flurry in rock ‘n’ roll history.  Seriously.  These are two epic albums and I’ve been wracking my brain to think of another band that has offered as much in their first two albums.

Now I know right off the top that Led Zeppelin fans are going to serve up LZ I and II.  I’ll concede that there is some merit there, but I’m not a Zeppelin fan so I can’t go there.

Van Halen came to mind.  Their first two were awesome.  But they were also a festival of cover tunes.  Ozzy’s first two were original and they were gold.

I don’t emulate the man, but I have to admit … given original Black Sabbath combined with the Randy Rhodes years of his solo career … Ozzy is legendary.  The choices and consequences are his.  The music is mine.

Man … I remember the good ol’ days when Robin Williams was funny.

Ahhh yes.  We’ve just completed another round of MLB’s El Dorado - inter-league play.

Everyone email Bud Selig and thank him for this.  Some of you may not remember, but there was a time when the enchantment of Yankees vs. Pittsburgh (farm club to the rest of MLB) would not have been possible.  If not for Selig’s genius we might have had to wait until the 3012 World Series to partake in such magic.

Thanks Bud.  Now get back to work on figuring out how you’ll convince the MLBPA to accept the mandatory one paragraph reprimand for a third positive steroid test.

OK, TV is fiction, so I can flex with liberties that are taken in the name of entertainment.  But tonight I caught a rerun of Miami CSI that was just silly.

One of the mainstays of the CSI editions is all the awesome technology and the ability to scrape a speck of dust off of a quarter and tell you the last three things that the coin was used for and the blood type of its owner at the time.

Tonight they needed to find the words “dig” and “Hoberman” in the newspaper.  You’d think there would be some kind of technological application availabe to speed such a search.  The words “Yahoo!” and “Google” come to mind.

No, there were two members of the team sitting amid a stack of dailies, thumbing through the papers page by page until the words are miraculously found in the obits.

Hope they washed the ink off their hands before they moved on to analyzing the one magic pubic hair that seemed a little out of place despite it being in a public rest room two miles from the crime scene.

Well, I was surprised.  After Project Runway, Top (Interior) Designer, and Top Hair Stylist or whatever it was called I figured that next up on Bravo’s parade of trades heavily populated by gay men would be some sort of competition for ChiChi’s waiters.  Instead we are treated to another installment of Top Chef.  Time will tell if we are looking at a cast of refreshing real people who are actually about the cooking as in season one, or a batch of whiny pissants, one of whom unfortunately, must win, as in season two.

Since it’s too early to start in on a blow by blow, let me talk instead about the short shelf life of reality show concepts.

As long as the concept isn’t lame, the first one or two seasons of a reality show are usually pretty good.  The players arrive not knowing any better, so they embrace the actual premise of the show.

Then the dark side of reality sets in.  Suddenly the cast members have agents on retainer before filming begins.  They show up ready to fit into a reality role; the bad guy, the good guy, the eccentric, etc.

In TC3, Hung proclaimed himself the bad guy in his opening vignette.

See, that doesn’t work.  The real bad guy doesn’t come through the door introducing themselves as the bad guy.  In fact, as with Bada-Bing Betty and her ubiquitious cleavage from TC2, the bad guy may even think, or try to convince others that they are the good guy.

The problem with the role playing is that suddenly you’ve got half the cast more intent on making a big splash in hopes that their name will live beyond the show, than on actually winning.

It’s all downhill after that.  Just ask Donald Trump … if you can get him to admit it.

This piece speculates that the Soprano’s finale is to blame for the NBA Finals’ falling ratings.

Yeah, that’s it.  Certainly it has nothing to do with the fact that the San Antonio Spurs, easily the NBA’s most boring team, are dominating the series, and Lebron James, the fresh young superstar who was supposed to breath life into this annual drudgery, has yet to even show up for a game.

Oh man!  Just arrived at my hotel in AL. Turned on the TV and found this:

Relax.  My dad is a television repair man.  He’s got an ultimate set of tools.  I can fix it.

- Jeff Spicoli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High)

I’ve got a post germinating in my mind on how today’s “comedy” doesn’t hold a candle to some of the vintage stuff.  This could well be exhibit A.

Seriously, I still laugh harder at “Fast Times” or Seinfeld reruns, despite having seen all of them enough times to know them line for line, than I have at anything that’s come out on TV or in the movies over the past several years.

Besides Spicoli in the comic relief role, “Fast Times” has that “funny because it’s true,” thing going.  Anyone whose ever been to high school can appreciate how well the film captures those years.  At the time you took all that stuff too seriously to see the humor.  Looking back, it was freaking hilarious.