Oakland Purse Snatching October 23 early evening - Lee Street

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I saw this over at the Yahoo Group Message Forum called "Adams Point Action Council". I posted it because the person who did this is still at large in the area. I did not make any corrections to the note so as to preserve its authenticity.

Hi Neighbors,

Last Friday night I heard a woman yelling (in a serious way) and my husband and I went out (as did quite a few of our neighbors) and found that a woman who was walking with her young child had had her purse snatched. No weapons were seen but he did push her down as he grabbed the purse. Another witness corroborated the account that it was a young african american man wearing a white t-shirt and a black hoodie (but not pulled up over his head). The victim had noticed something odd about him just before but thought he was just going to ask her for money. The police came out and took the report but the guy had disappeared down Vernon St.

Be careful and aware of your surroundings. This didn't happen late at night (I'm guessing it was about 8PM) and there were people out and about. Luckily she and her child are OK but it's never a "pleasant experience" to be mugged.

Name out

Brian Westbrook, Byron westbrook's Brother, hurt; NFL must upgrade helmets

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The ESPN Monday Night Football contest between two NFC East foes the Philadelphia Eagles visiting the Washington Redskins wasn't that at all. The Redskins lost a game they could have won 27 to 10, but for their sloppy play. But there was a more important story.

Unfortunately Redskins cornerback Byron Westbrook and the Eagles, the Eagles' Running Back Brian Westbrook suffered a major concussion and did not return for the game. He should not have.

Westbrook was on the ground for a while - an eternity it seemed - before he got up. His brother Byron Westbrook came over to be by his side. I hope I never in my life see a player die on the football field, especially on national television.

What this points to is the need for new helmet technology. What I don't understand is why the NFL uses basically the same helmets as were employed 20 years ago. Why can't someone make a helmet that can compress an impact and stop or at least slow it before it harms the brain?

According to my Internet research, Riddell's "Revolution" helmet is the first one designed specifically to reduce or eliminate concussions. While that comes from the helmet maker, it's not hard to be concerned over the news that its the first new helmet technology in a quarter century.

We as a culture and the NFL and NCAA have to make the creation of a helmet that comes as close to making concussions a thing of the past a top priority. Today's football players are amazingly fast and strong; so much so that they seem to have pushed the limits of what's currently used. Let's hope we never see a day when those limits are reached.

The Oscars producers are new, so roll the dice! Use YouTube!

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Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the selection Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman to produce the 82nd annual version of my favorite non-sports TV event, The Oscars.

It's their first time at bat.

Given that the Academy Awards has fallen in ratings in fits and starts over its lofty 55 million viewer mark of 1998, something new must be done. Yes. Yes. I know the rating were up last year over the year before and you say it's because of Hugh Jackman.

I say it's because of nothing - it was only a six percent increase and the ratings have been so low I think the telecast reached what in statistics is called a "steady-state" where absent any major change, Oscar ratings go up a bit from the previous year, then down.

Adding ten new possible Best Picture winners makes this a real horse race and should make for a ratings increase but if - and only if - popular movies like Star Trek make the cut.

But if we get a larger range of movies no one saw, we're back to the same ratings problem as before. Unless Mechanic and Adam Shankman do something different, Oscar's in trouble on television.

That something different should be to use YouTube and ABC to promote a program where people tell what they remember most about Oscars of years past - favorite moments. The best videos would be shown during the telecast.

I offer the idea because Oscar's ratings decline seems to coincide with the emergence of online content and digital media. A person can miss the awards and still find out what happened on a website, complete with video clips. One could not do that in 1998. You had to tune in. YouTube was launched in 2005, and the first blog wasn't created until 2001. So I think all of this is related to Oscar's ratings decline.

My idea is a variation of the 2007 CNN / YouTube Democratic Debate where viewers were asked to submit their questions for the candidates. CNN producers picked their favorites and out of that process 52 videos were shown.  This was my submission, aired for then-candidate, now Vice President Joe Biden:



In Oscar's case, five videos should be selected of one minute each.

So there are the ground rules: one person holding a YouTube account submits one video per account of up to one minute and tagged "Oscar memories".

But given that it's November, the producers better start soon. I vote for a mid-January launch and enlisting ABC to market the contest on television. The winners will be flown to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards, walk The Red Carpet, and be introduced to the audience as part of the show.

Tell me that's not going to be huge?! It will draw the young adult demographic that will in turn cause Oscar ratings to increase. Everyone will want to watch to see if they, or their friends or relative's, video will be picked.

Gimicky?  Yes.  New Media-driven?  Yep.  Risky?  How?  The idea taps into everyone's baser desire to see themselves on television, even in the case of the Academy Awards.

I think it will work wonders, and since the topic of "Oscar memories" is something that is never ending - provided the show goes on annually - it can be done every year.   It will help restore that "must-see" excitement to an already great and classic show.

Lil Wayne's Halloween horror should not be jail time

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Last Thursday, Lil Wayne, the most popular and successful rapper currently active, plead guilty to gun possession. His court appearance, with his business partners Cash Money Records CEOs Ronald "Slim" Williams and Bryan "Baby" Williams by his side in court in New York City brought a close to the first part of a questionable targeting of the performer on the part of New York's finest.

Lil Wayne

As far as I'm concerned, New York law enforcement has a golden opportunity to make an out-of-the-box example of Lil Wayne.

According to a must see bio called "Behind The Music" on Lil Wayne on VH1 today, New York police boarded his tour bus looking specifically for Wayne and searching for a gun but the lead officer didn't even know what he looked like.

Moreover, Lil Wayne told his audience that night that the NYPD had made repeated threats> and told him not to perform in New York again.

According to various reports, Lil Wayne faces one-year in jail due to a plea deal. Sentencing is to be set February 2010. As far as I'm concerned placing the most popular rapper in jail for a gun he may not have owned and takes DNA testing to prove is a stupid waste of tax dollars as well as a missed opportunity to have his voice leading the charge against wanton gun possession.

Lil Wayne is not just anyone. He's a master perfomer who's sold as many as 1.5 million downloads of his work Tha Carter III in one week.

A record number.

Why not make Lil Wayne the focus of creative sentencing reflective of his unusual talent and incredible fan base? The sentence should be for Lil Wayne to make a special album that counsels America on the dangers of gun use and possession and the harmful consequences of drug addiction. If there's anyone who can take a boring lecture on does and don't and turn it into a hit, it's Lil Wayne.

And let's go a step beyond that and have the revenue from those downloads given to drug treatment programs in New York City. In a recession, with non-profit programs fighting for funds and donations, that revenue would be like a welcome rain during a drought.

It's time for New York's law enforcement system to think out of the box and set an example for the rest of America, and a future course for Hip Hop.

Moreover, this unique form of punishment would give Lil Wayne a new lease on life at a time when some wonder if his sales and influence will decrease because of this low point in his storied life.

Steve Phillips fired over ESPN sex scandal; Brooke Hundley on MySpace

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Question: Is Steve Phillips like David Letterman? See this video and get ready for my poll.



It was announced that ESPN Baseball Analyst and former New York Mets General Manager Steve Phillips was fired Sunday night. Phillips was involved in a sex scandal regarding a three-week-old affair he had with ESPN Production Assistant Brooke Hundley which turned into "Fatal Attraction" when he tried to break off the relationship.

Steve Phillps and Brooke Hundley

Steve Phillips is married to Marni Phillips and the two have four kids. She filed for divorce September 14th.

According to the Huff Post, ESPN claimed...

"Steve Phillips is no longer working for ESPN," network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said in a statement. "His ability to be an effective representative for ESPN has been significantly and irreparably damaged, and it became evident it was time to part ways."

This story, which hit last Wednesday, has taken the Internet by storm with its details. There's the letter written by Brooke to Marni Phillips and more recently a report that that the whole affair started when according to Hundley, Phillips had got her drunk and then made a move on her after waiting for her to come out of the women's bathroom at a bar.

Brooke Hundley filed a restraining order against Phillips after he went to the police, but in reading the text from the Examiner it seems like she's lying about a few thing to protect herself.

She writes:

While at work in mid July, after work Steve bought me a strong drink and then cornered me while coming out of the bathroom with no one in sight trying to persuade me to come to his hotel suite to spend the night.

I told my supervisor who told me to "Get used to it." And to keep it to myself. He proceeded to text me on a regular basis with inappropriate things. I tried to get him to stop and told others but he didn’t and finally I gave in and agreed to see him a few times after work in parking lots.

Someone at work found out and call his house. Then he began to spread word that I was just the office slut and ruining my reputation. He continued to text me however about getting together on our next business trip and I begged him to please be honest about what happened with us that he had pursued me and that I was not this poor character as he had stated.

Over the phone he threatened me stating that if I spoke a word of this to his wife that he would ruin more than just my reputation but could easily get me fired. At that point I told him I cannot continue on like that and if he couldn’t come clean to everyone that I would have to tell. I wrote a letter and left it on their doorstep to his wife.

I then thought twice about it and asked a young woman to retrieve it for me. She drove up in my car and he saw the car and immediately tried to ram into her over and over. He obviously thought I was in the car and now I’m scared where this might go next.

What's interesting and not surprising to me is that her ESPN supervisor told her to "get used to it" and I believe that because it affirms something I wrote when ESPN's Harold Reynolds was fired in 2006 for hugging a white girl.

Turns out I was right! But I knew that.

I wrote then that relations between ESPN analysts and interns were common, but it was "OK" for the white guys to be in them because (from people I talked to in 2006) it was white male and white female going after each other, if you will.

Reynolds is black and also married and was fired for a hug while I was told some other ESPN men were having full on sexual relations with female employees. I wrote that Reynolds ran into a kind of racial boundary issue that's grounds for another blog post because times have changed in three years.

It takes two to tango and for every one of these romances that goes bad, there are some that go well and unreported.

Boy, folks howled about that but the truth hurts.  Deadspin's now former editor Will Leitch and I had fun with that one at the time. 

What really happened is known mostly to Reynolds but he sued and settled with ESPN, which means that somewhere along the way he wasn't the only person who was to blame for something.

The focus should be on ESPN's culture. Instead it's on people as others try to criticize those like Phillips, Letterman, and Reynolds as if those throwing the criticism are totally innocent.

They're not.

It's widely known in the sports and entertainment industry that women who work for those organizations try to get dates with executives and players and actors they work with. Don't even try to argue with me on that one. Some of the women are interns right out of college working without pay, and they chose to do so.

But what happens when a story like this comes out is "The Big Lie" is put in place to cover it up - where the man is the one going after a date with the woman and she has done nothing to pursue a relationship - and we never get to the real story or a real conversation about how our society really is.

It would help because then we could have some real talk that render stories like this not popular. You know? Right now, it's volcanic on the Internet because it shows how we really are versus The Big Lie. The truth is "The Big Lie" keeps the gossip train going.

Someone emailed me asking if I wanted to buy a photo of Marni Phillips.

NO I DON'T!

Steve Phillips is out of a job now, but what about Brooke Hundley? Is she still in the employ of ESPN? For some reason they've not issued a statement on her at least as of this writing.

Brooke Hundley has an interesting resume in that she, according to the New York Daily News, worked for ABC Studios as an intern and also Jimmy Kimmel Live, but I don't know if she reported directly to Kimmel.

As you may remember, Kimmel himself was the focus of a little inter-office romance himself, but this one's gone well so far.

In the end, it's all just bunch of gossip done by people - including commenters - who have their own interesting stories. So what. The reality is Steve Phillip should not have cheated on his wife, period. All the other stuff is conversation but Marni Phillips is the victim here. Steve owes a lot to her and to his kids.  

Nicole Kidman in Congress what Erin Andrews should do: speak on violence against women

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Nicole Kidman gave a heroic and timely presentation before Congress last week that set an example for what ESPN reporter Erin Andrews should do with her new-found heightened celebrity in the wake of the "peephole" incident.

Erin Andrews recently closed a difficult chapter in her life with the arrest of her alleged peephole stalker Michael David Barrett, who reportedly followed her to different hotels to make "peephole" videos of her in the nude.

During the period of time that the videos were bring thrown around the Internet, and showed in part even by CBS, Erin Andrews did not use the spotlight given to her to speak out on issues of concern to women, specifically violence against woman.

As I wrote before, if Erin's serious about making sure other women aren't treated in the way she was, she should speak out about it.

Instead of doing anything beyond talking to Oprah (nothing wrong with that, Erin Andrews let GQ Magazine release a racy photo spread that was done in April before the peephole scandal started. She should have blocked it to make a powerful statement.

I think Nicole Kidman would have backed Andrews. Before Congress, Kidman said "Violence against women (Worldwide) is not prosecuted because it is not a top government and urgent social priority. We can change this."

But it takes more voices than just that of Nicole Kidman, even though she is the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. That's where celebrities like Beyonce, Erin Andrews and Megan Fox and Meghan McCain can make a real difference.

What's needed is a massive day where women make a statement of action against violence against women. Nicole Kidman's voice should not be the only one out there.

Does Oakland Councilmember Jean Quan care more about Oakland or being Mayor?

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Yesterday I received an email from Oakland City Councilmember Jean Quan (District 4 - Oakland Hills, Montclair) regarding her decision to run for Mayor of Oakland.  Here's the text from that email:

You are receiving this because you are a subscriber to my newsletter.  A few times a year I send out separate political blasts.  You may know by now, I have launched a run for Mayor for November 2010.  We've formed an Exploratory Committee and have met with hundreds of Oakland residents in house parties and other events to hear what they want the next Mayor to do and to share my vision and passion for the Oakland we love.
My family has lived in Oakland for over a 100 years; I've raised my family here and love this city. For more than 20 years I've fought for Oakland, working with people at the grassroots to rebuild our schools, save our libraries and the arts, protect our environment, revitalize our business districts, and to make our neighborhoods safer.  I've worked with Oaklanders in every neighborhood and have taken on tough, complex issues.  As Mayor working with you, block by block, school by school, neighborhood by neighborhood...I know together we can realize Oakland's great promise.

Councilmember Jean Quan

I will stand-up for Oakland with undivided loyalty.  I am not looking for a resting spot because I am termed out of office. I am not looking for a spring board for another office. I want the job of Mayor.  I will be a full-time, accessible, hands-on Mayor who will make sure that City programs are working on the street.  I'll hold town hall meetings in every district and continue my weekly newsletter so you'll know what is happening.


I hope you will consider attending or hosting a house party and joining our campaign as a supporter, volunteer or donor. It will be an opportunity to meet many of the wonderful neighborhood activists who are joining us around the city to make Oakland a city that works for all of us.


I have a busy schedule of house meetings, community outreach and fundraisers. Right now our focus is on two important milestones:

• Raising the first $100,000 of the $380,000 maximum under Oakland Campaign Limits.
  
• Recruiting the first 250 volunteers.

Now Councilmember Quan's newsletters generally contain positive Oakland news, or information about events or concern for some issue. But when it came to writing her first message to explain why she wants to be Mayor of Oakland, she included no issue of concern that was driving her desire, save for her.

That's right. Councilmember Quan's mayor's race message used the word "I" eleven times! By contrast, Former State Senator Don Perata, who's also running for Mayor, explains that his motivation for the decision on the death of four Oakland police officers this year and his contention that Oakland lacks leadership.

Say what you will about the popular Perata, at least Don's always started a reason for being beyond himself. No, this isn't an endorsement...yet.

So the question I have for Councilmember Quan is simple: is the push to run for Mayor really about her ego? Look, everyone in politics has a large ego so if she says "yes" I give her massive points for the guts to admit it.

But if she says "no" then the other question is "What does she stand for?" There's nothing in the message to address that question. It's not enough to listen to the needs of Oaklanders because if Quan doesn't actually have each one as a priority then she's not engaging in what really motivates her.

While I disagree with Councilmember Nancy Nadel (District 3 - West Oakland, Downtown) on some decisions as well as her overall style, I know where she's coming from and what drives her. She's concerned about the poor and minority and elderly in West Oakland and how to make sure they're not pushed out due to a wave of gentrification. She's concerned about environmental pollution from development.

While she's not the best candidate for Mayor, I can see and feel what drives her.

I can't see and feel anything from Jean Quan. I'm not being mean, just honest. And also picking up on a new theme that the City of Oakland does not care about Oaklanders, it cares about itself.

It's doing everything it can to survive and at the literal expense of the people its suppose to serve. Hey, I just talked to another friend of mine who got their car towed and talked to someone on BART today who also lost their car the same way.

This is not Oakland caring about Oaklanders. Councilmember Quan's message seems to reflect that self-centered ethic.

Sad.

We need mayoral candidates driven to help Oaklanders, not themselves. I hope I'm wrong about Councilmember Quan; but if I am she's got to explain that email message as soon as possible.