Cops Fire Guns To Stop Gunfire

Every year, around New Year’s, the district attorney or something trots out a kid who was injured by a stray bullet shot into the air to celebrate the New Year. And, every year, the DA tells everyone not to fire guns into the air. The citizens of Philadelphia promptly don’t listen to the teevee telling them not to shoot into the air in celebration, of course. The Inquirer reports today there were 257 incidents of gunfire at midnight reported on 911 calls.

The only way for the police to stop all the shooting, of course, was to apparently fire into a house and arrest the wrong guy. The Inky reports:

“As soon as everyone said ‘Happy New Year!,’ bullets were flying through the house,” said Clinton Rogers, 30, who lives in the 5600 block of Boyer Street, where the party turned to chaos. He said he was near the front door holding his 3-year-old daughter, Camirah, when the gunfire erupted and door fragments struck him in the face.

More »

New Year’s Rockin’ Eve

Back in 2003/2004, the first interview after the New Year on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve was with two M&M’s, who had just lost their coloring for a promotion. (Sadly, it was probably the best interview of the entire night.)

Everyone’s been watching Dick Clark on New Year’s for pretty much their entire lives. By my estimation, he’s been doing the show since about the French & Indian War. Last year, though, he couldn’t do it because of a stroke, and so we TV viewers had to suffer through Regis Philbin instead.

I only caught a very little bit of this year’s New Year’s Eve special on ABC — it was on at the place I was at — but I did see Dick Clark’s intro. It was, erhm, hard to watch. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. Maybe it was just shocking because Dick Clark had turned from the world’s oldest teenager into the world’s oldest man in just a year or so. He looked okay, but he sounded bad and the whole thing (at first) just seemed like a shameless ratings ploy.

As you may have guessed by some of the jokes on this site, I don’t really get all that offended. It takes a lot, at least. But I was ready to write a letter to ABC all offended about Dick Clark. (Perhaps the alcohol contributed to this.) But I did read that the head of the National Stroke Association found it “courageous,” and who better to have an opinion on the situation than him.

I don’t know what the point of all this was, except to do that one-liner about Dick Clark becoming the world’s oldest man. I just hope that if he’s on the show next year, he’s a little more, well, Dick Clark-like.

Reaction Mixed To Dick Clark’s TV Return [NBC 10]