This is a special shout-out to the ladies of the Manor Club in Pelham Manor who invited me to be their guest speaker today.
The lunch was great (I rarely eat lunch at all) and everyone was charming. In fact, they were so nice to me that I told them I wished I could liquify their good will and shoot it into my veins whenever I need an ego boost.
My speech, incidentally, was entitled, “Column Writing In the 21st Century.”

This was a bad omen, indeed.
Last Friday night I was at the Larchmont Tavern, one of my all-time favorite haunts, where there was a slight wait for a table. So we had drinks at the bar and watched the New York Yankees implode in the second game of the first round of the American playoff series against Cleveland.
That’s the game, you may recall, when Joba Chamberlain, the phenom Yank pitcher, was overwhelmed by a swarm of midges, or gnats, that spontaneously generated from the fetid, murky waters of Lake Erie.
I remember how gnats used to be a problem when I played in the Babe Ruth League at Larchmont’s Flint Park, which was next to the mudflats and marsh of the Long Island Sound. They’d get in our eyes and stick to the brims of our caps.
But it was never as bad as the Cleveland plague last Friday. Chamberlain looked like he was on an African safari being eaten alive by bugs. It was so bad, he blew the game, and the Yankees went on to lose rest of the series.
OK, so then I go home and all of a sudden I, too, have a bug problem in my house…It’s fruit flies. They drive you nuts. It’s like a miniature Amityville Horror. You can’t spray the house if you’ve got pets—which I do.
How do ya kill these insects?
Nonsarcastic suggestions are welcome.

What is it about Yonkers and baseball fans gone wild?

Here’s the latest—Yesterday a guy wearing a Red Sox hat and shirt was allegedly beaten up outside a Yonkers hotel bar by two out-of-town thugs who apparently resented his allegiance to Beantown.

Carlos Ortez, a construction worker from Quincy, Mass, was so badly injured he had to be taken to Westchester County Medical Center, according to reports.

Arrested in the assault outside the Ramada Inn were Duane Somers, 32 and Edward McConaughey, both from Pennsylvania, a National League-only state. And here I thought Red Sox- haters were only from New York.

Nevertheless, their choice of venue, i.e. Yonkers, puts Somers and McConaughey on an ever-growing list of fans whose dubious achievements continue to awe and amaze those of us who live in the City of Hills.
That hallowed list includes Stephen Laurenzi, the 24-year-old Yonkers guy who, in a state of advanced intoxication, rolled over and fell 60 feet from the upper deck at Yankee Stadium only to miraculously survive with hardly a scratch. That was in 2000.

And then there was Yonkers’ own Rocco Grazioso who, five years ago, started a fight with Yankee pitcher David “Boomer” Wells. The 27-year-old Grazioso also went after Wells with a butter knife. Go figure.

Those loveable losers, the Chicago Cubs, have Steve Bartman. But we have these guys. It’s the pride in pinstripes—the prison variety of pinstripes, that is.

Herzner is my special phone guest on “High Noon” today on WVOX radio. He’s he guy who allegedly went ballistic when he got a parking ticket in White Plains, a city where parking tickets fly are handed out faster than handbills to porn theaters.

The cops arrested Herzner after he screamed at the parking attendant and then broke his hand-held computer.

Herzner has plenty to say on the matter and he will explain on the air what happened on that fateful day.

So tune into “High Noon” today at 12 noon. That’s 1460-AM, or www.wvox.com.

UPDATE: Here’s the podcast:

Download:

Guess when I was a Knick fan?

That’s right, back in the days of Red Holtzman when Walt “Clyde” Frazier quarterbacked the plays at point guard next to Dick Barnett and Cazzie Russell; when Willis Reed bravely played center (on one good leg sometimes); when the future senator Bill Bradley consistently hit jump shots from the top of the key; and when the forwards were Dave DeBusschere and Jerry Lucas.

DeBusschere was briefly a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. I still have his baseball card.

I rarely missed a game back then, a period covering the years from about 1968 to 1975. Bob Wolf was the Knick’s TV announcer, and he was the best basketball play-by-play man there ever was.

I worshiped those players. I wanted to be like them—they were selfless, fearless and loyal to one another. They didn’t dance and prance over minor on-court accomplishment and they didn’t taunt their opponents. They just won games.

In the spring of 1970, the New Rochelle Elks Club sponsored an invitational track meet for the area high schools and threw an awards dinner for the winners. I was a sophomore half-miler for Mamaroneck and went to the dinner with my father.

The motivational speaker was Walt Frazier. I don’t remember what he said—mostly boilerplate stuff, I guess. But I did get his autograph, which he signed on a Knicks pennant. Unlike DeBusschere’s baseball card, the pennant didn’t survive my school boy years.

Over time, my interest in the Knicks waned. The team changed. The nature of professional sports changed. And I changed. Every now and then, I’d regain a spark of interest in the team, but it never lasted.
In every way the Holtzman-era Knicks spoiled me. They were real men. They were to be admired.

But now I can’t stand the Knicks at all. I can name only one of them—Stephon Marbury and I only know his name because of his tangential role in the sordid sexual harrassment suit that was just concluded against Isiah Thomas, the coach and team president. I really don’t want to know who else is on the team.

The Knicks are a disgrace but more tellingly, they are owned and operated by a disgraceful organization, the Madison Square Garden Corp.
For the most part, the players seem to be greedy, narcissistic losers. But this is a reflection on the ownership. And the buck stops with the boss, James Dolan.

You would have thought that Dolan would have fired Isiah Thomas a long time ago. Thomas has consistenly delivered a terrible “product” over the last three or four years and Dolan only rewards him with a vote of confidence and more money.

That’s the high-powered corporate world for you. The principle of pay-based-on-performance is a quaint notion today. It’s for suckers, or bottom feeders—at least that obviously holds true with the New York Knicks.

And now Thomas is nailed for sexually harassing a female Knick executive by the name of Anucha Sanders. She was awarded $11.6 million—about the going rate for a power forward who can’t hit from the free-throw line.

You’d think that this time Dolan would show Thomas the door. Nope. What he did was squire him out of town on a private jet.
This is beyond crazed loyalty to one indivdual. At best, its demonstrative of one organzation’s complete absence of a moral center. Clearly, Dolan has money to burn and no sense whatsoever of the message he sends to young basketball fans, who will learn nothing good from the craven retention of an overpaid, over-sexed services man who freely refers to women as “that bitch” and worse.

But maybe there’s more to this. It does make me wonder. Maybe Thomas has something on Dolan. Maybe he’s got “pictures,” either literally or figuratively.

It wouldn’t be the first time somebody held onto an executive postiion because they had the proverbial goods on the boss. I’ve seen it happen before…and it will happen again.

Nothing surpises me anymore. It’s the way the world turns.

I’ve just e-mailed an invitation to Sen. Hillary Clinton asking her to come on my WVOX radio show in New Rochelle. Forgive my pessimism, but I think my chances are pretty slim.
Kucinich—yeah, I can probably get him. Maybe Gravel. On the GOP side, my hero was Tommy Thompson, who looked like a G-man out of a 1930s gangster movie. Too bad Tommy dropped out of the race.
But Hillary? Well…
Gee whiz. I’m offering her a chance to be cool. Isn’t that one of her goals, to appear to be more fun-loving, a good sport and cool?

I mean it would be cool for her to come on a local radio station, especially since its in her home-county, a point I tried to drive home in the e-mail I sent to her press office. (See below).
There were a couple of other things I wished I said in the invitation like the fact that my mother and sister went to Wellesley College and Buddy, my radio sidekick, is a huge Hillary fan. He’s also a big fan of Barbra Streisand, too, but that, as they say, is another story.

Anyway, I’ve written several columns in which I have said some unkind things about the senator. I called her a cyborg once—and she never forgot that.
Oh well. I think she should surprise me and accept the invitation anyway.

“To Whom It May Concern:

I am a columnist for The Journal News, a daily newspaper in Westchester
County, N.Y., which as you know is Sen. Clinton’s home county. My columns
also appear on the Web site, www.lohud.com, and from time to time in video form on News Center Now, a daily, two-hour news show produced by RNN-TV.

I believe the senator is aware of my written work.

But she may not know that I host a weekly radio show on WVOX, 1460-AM in New
Rochelle. I’d like to invite her to come on the show for a one-hour
interview.

OK, don’t laugh. I know what you guys are thinking. The station has about
the same reach as two tin cans tied to string. Nevertheless, the audience,
as small as it might be, is intelligent and influential. I think Mrs.
Clinton would be terrific.

Besides, this is her home town! Right?

So what do you say? Pick any Thursday. The show airs at noon.
Please let me know.

I can be reached via e-mail, or you can call me at 914-694-5008.

Thanks for your consideration,
Phil Reisman”

After he was caught in flagrante delicto, as it were, in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, Larry Craig, the U.S. senator from Idaho, apologized and said, “I have little control over what people choose to believe, but clearly my name is important to me.” Craig, as you know, was caught in a sting operation in which he allegedly was soliciting sex from an undercover cop.
The sordid tale included details of secret under-the-stall hand signals.

Well, that was way back in June. Three months later, another story got almost as much attention as Craig’s dubious nomination for “vice” president. It was the survey that revealed that one-third of men don’t wash their hands after going to the men’s room.
I’ve always assumed it was closer to one-tenth which is why I touch I try not to touch anything in the newspaper’s pissoir without practically wrapping myself in paper towel.
But the question for Craig should be obvious: Does at least wash his hands?
Inquiring minds want to know.