Joel Keller

Ahh… it’s always good to announce new stuff of mine that pops up throughout the publishing universe. Why? Well, ego for one thing… I like seeing my name in print. But it also makes me feel good because I know a check with numbers and a dollar sign on it will soon be arriving in the mail. And, as much as I love writing, I love getting paid to write even more.

So, allow me to announce two new pieces:

1) With The Simpsons Movie coming out, I wrote a piece for Premiere.com that examines five other movies that came out while the TV shows they were based on were still running.

2) I will also have a huge profile of Monk creator Andy Breckman coming out in the August issue of New Jersey Monthly. No link yet, but I just wanted to mention it in case you wanted to run right out and get the magazine (which would be hard, since it’s not quite out yet. Should be any day, though).

Arghh. It’s amazing how when you get an idea to write an article about some band or actor, a major publication gets the idea at the same time and ends up doing an article on them.

For instance, right as I was gathering contacts in order to pitch an article about Future 86 somewhere (see the Jul. 11 post I did about them), this week’s New York Observer has a big story about them. Crap. That pretty much blows any chance I have of pitching a story about them to a local New York publication, at least for the time being.

This is the second time in a month that the Observer has crawled into my head: just when I thought it would be nice to do an article about Phil Donahue’s new documentary, I click onto the paper’s site and saw this. Double arghh.

Anyway, I will have some good stuff coming up on an interweb and newsstand near you, so stay tuned…

Right now, I’m watching this 1-800-OK-CABLE ad playing during the noon news. In it is a band called Future86, singing a ska-lite tune extolling the virtues of various cable providers’ “Triple Play” service. The singer is this adorable young woman wearing a spangly dress and knee-high boots. She seems to have a decent voice, but I was more interested in… uh, other things.

Anyway, every time I’ve seen this commercial, I think the same thing: “That can’t be a real band.” They just seemed too slick to me, like what an ad agency’s idea of a struggling pop-rock band from, say, Long Island would look like. Maybe they were dressed to nicely to seem like a real band; where are the too-small, ironic t-shirts? The hair in the eyes? The so-retro-it’s-hip aviator glasses? The dirty Chuck Taylors? This group looked like a nice bunch of IT guys and a cute suburban chick who wouldn’t look out of place wandering the tony Short Hills Mall (oops, I’m sorry, it’s “The Mall at Short Hills”).

But out of sheer boredom and journalistic curiosity, I decided to Google the band’s name the other day. Turns out they’re a real band, based out of Queens. The song used on the cable ad, “I Want It All,” is adapted from a song the band released three years ago (you’ll hear it as soon as you pop onto their MySpace page).

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My left shoulder’s been bugging me lately. Nothing major; just a twinge. But it it’s been enough of a twinge to wake me up in the morning and make me swallow some Advil, something I tend to avoid if I can.

How did I hurt it? Did I lift something that was too heavy? Throw a ball with a little too much oopmh? Did I sleep on it wrong?

I wish it was one of those three reasons. No, I’m pretty sure I hurt my shoulder while playing Nintendo Wii.

I know… sounds manly, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I was over my brother Rich’s house on July 4 and discovered that he bought a Wii a couple of months ago. Since I had never played it before, he popped in the Wii Sports disc and handed me one of those remote controllers that you strap to your wrist (I guess they have the strap there to keep the controller from braining someone if your baseball or tennis grip isn’t exactly solid). We played each other in baseball, and the results were what you’d expect from two people who each played one year of Little League: lots of swinging and missing and no score.

Of course, not realizing how sensitive the controller was, I over-swung on every pitch, and when I was pitching, I actually went into a full motion, like some spastic version of Mariano Rivera. Little did I know that you really only needed to move the controller a little bit for it to do whatever you need it to do.

After baseball, my brother handed the controller to my six-year-old niece Samantha, and that’s when the fun began. I’ll relieve the suspense right now: she kicked my ass. I don’t know whether she’s more coordinated than I am or it’s just the usual case of a kid knowing more about video games than her decrepit adult relatives. But she beat me soundly in bowling and golf.

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