Remember Mike Pomranz, the young man who blasted me in a letter to the editor a few weeks ago. Well, in a cruel twist of fate, he got press from the Inquirer last week. (Apparently open mic night at The Fire is newsworthy, but the largest and most prestigious team trivia event in the world is not. Not that I’m bitter.) Here’s my favorite part: So why go to open mic? “To meet people and to find support,” Pomeranz says with a laugh. No wonder he was laughing. “To meet people and find support” is a hilarious line, and it comes as no surprise that Mike came up with something so witty.
Apparently the surge in recognition had all sorts of folks just crawling out of the woodwork to be his Myspace friend, so he changed his status to private. Not just anybody can be Myspace friends with Mike Pomranz, author/signer/letter to the editor writer! No sir, it’s an exclusive club, and only a few are allowed in his inner circle!
Anyways, he has emerged from an important meeting with his well-rounded, intellectual, and extremely urbane circle of Myspace friends to engage us with his thoughts on my last two columns, first the one on the NCAA tourney I did last week, then on the one I did on celebrity run-ins a few days ago. Click below to read Mike’s take on the two columns.
Sorry I missed you last week. While you were dipping into your cliche handbag for 48 games worth of rehashed NCAA office-talk tripe, I was out in Tahoe betting games in a Nevada sportsbook. Luckily you slipped in an accurate Davidson reference or you could have been sued for plagarism of an article from the 2003 Times-Herald. A lot of people don’t know that Tahoe is actually a great place to watch the tourney: just like Vegas, you have full on legal sportsbooks, but instead of sweltering in the March heat, in Tahoe you can get one last chance to hit the slopes as the ski season is coming to a close. A perfect combo, one might say. But your readers wouldn’t be interested in unique insights like that, better keep them abreast of the fact that everyone outside of Durham still hates Duke. Who knew????
But I’m glad to see you’re finally admitting your weaknesses and letting other people write your column for you: outsourcing the role of creating humor and interest to people far more skilled than yourself. You were able to hunt down a couple interesting celebrity brushes, almost to the point where I’d say you might want to make a stylistic change to investigative journalism. But, alas, actual journalist usually try to tie quotes and anecdotes together with an angle or a thesis, instead of stringing them along in a meandering mess. Oh, no wait, you did have an angle: that celebrity run-ins are “meaningless but fun.” Bravo! A treatise worthy of dissemination throughout the Philadelphia area for debate and discussion!
I guess you could make the argument that the Goodtimes File itself feels no need top such lofty goals as brushes with famous faces, settling for being “meaningless but fun.” It’s not that I don’t concur, its just that, as usual, I am left wondering how much it leans on the former instead of the latter.
‘Til next week!
cheers!
Mike Pomranz