The Oppenheimer Report Oldie (1/20/96)

Well I’ll tell you, I was shocked when I heard “Chimp Boy” and Donut Man’s daughter are finally going to make it legal.... it’s splitsville after twenty-two months of marital bliss. Who’d a thunk! Why, they just made a music video together ... what more definitive proclamation of everlasting love could there be??

The lawyers will fight like wolverines over who gets the iron lung and the amusement rides. I heard Lisa Marie is about to receive a $300 million delayed inheritance from her daddy’s estate, so, if I were her, which, admittedly, I am not, I would cut bait and send that hermaphrodite back to trolling the schoolyards. Don’t be greedy Lisa, your gender is still definable. Quit while you’re ahead!

This whole thing is going to rock Bubbles. That ape was already cruisin’ for a crash before this happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if this divorce pushes the world’s most famous flower chimp over the edge. She (it is a “she” right? it’s so hard to tell in that family) just got out of the Cheetah Clinic for Recovering Showbiz Chimps... following that much-publicized cocaine binge at Johnny Depp’s Viper Club .... did you read about that? Bubbles and Melanie Griffith were caught by the LAPD, coked out of their gourds, and speeding down Sunset Blvd. in Bubbles’ Shelby Cobra at 123 MPH. Luckily, there was a riot curfew, and no one else was on the streets that night. Bubbles even tried to bribe the cop. Welcome to the Pee Wee Herman Hall of Fame, hair butt, take your place next to Hugh Grant.

What else is news? Comedian George Burns turned 100 last week. He looks pretty good, it must be the cigars.

Someone conducted a poll last week and found that 74% of Americans surveyed felt Hillary Clinton lied in her Whitewater testimony. O.K. .... next subject. I put this in the category of “cheating on your income taxes” . If I want “War and Peace”, I’ll read the book. You media guys...can’t you find something a little juicier around which to circle? Tell me Bill was a former Grand Wizard of the KKK and maybe I’ll divert my attention from the stack of Geraldo shows I’ve taped, but haven’t yet watched. I am much more interested in whether or not that mud-wrestling transvestite clergyman reconciles with his alcoholic child-molesting father... inquiring minds want to know. Also, I hear that in 1996, there will be a Geraldo special on Jimmy Hoffa. You guessed it, they’re going to excavate Meadowlands “In Search of Hoffa’s Remains”... eight hours of unedited suspense. I’m taping that for sure. Let’s give Geraldo a hand for being on the cutting edge of journalistic experimentation. Maybe we should even give him a foot, he’s earned it.

Speaking of dismemberment, the O.J. jurors are making the rounds. I saw three of them on Larry King Live the other night, promoting their new book tour. Given what they now know, they say they might have arrived at a different verdict. Why have we not heard anything from the dog lately? Where is the dog? Did you know that O.J. is producing the dog’s video ... “Stinky’s Story” .... so, not only will he rake in the rubles on his own “I-Didn’t-Do-It” video, but now he can play the “dog card” too. Face it, O.J.’s played all of us. I feel so dirty ... but I will buy it .... I buy all of it .... regularly.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©1996 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 3/17/08

Friends and readers …

Throughout this building process, many people, including Shauna and I, have joked about the project being hard on our marriage.“ If the marriage survives, we’ll end up with a beautiful home”, I have quipped more than once. The truth is, Shauna has been a wonderful partner in all of this, and we continue to share a unique vision for this dream home which is now more than half completed. But we both realize that it is now “crunch time”, when we will need to be even more focused on completing this home as we’d imagined it to be. If I value my marriage, which I do, then I must basically give up anything unrelated to the house indefinitely. Much as I love to write this report weekly, I find we are too busy and distracted now for me to indulge in this selfish writing exercise. For the next several weeks, I’ll be playing some of my favorite reruns; reports that 99 per cent of you have never read. Remember, I’ve written over 600 of these things since 1992. For any of you who do read the report, I thank you for indulging me, and hope you will still be tuning in to my miscellaneous grumblings for years to come. Without further ado, here’s an oldie but goodie …

The Oppenheimer Report 6/6/99 –

We have a movie dilemma tonight ... I want to watch Attack of the Killer Shrews, but my wife wants to watch “Night of the Twisters.” Tough call. I’ve been flipping back and forth between the two movies and I have to say, the killer shrew movie looks pretty good. I came in late, but it seems these four guys and one woman are stranded on this island which is inhabited by a bunch of giant mutant shrew things with poisonous saliva and mambo hooked canines that are about three times as long as their pointy snouts. They used to be tiny like mice but, as so often happens in these movies, someone screwed up in the laboratory, and before you know it, you’ve got giant mutant flesh-eating rodents surrounding your island, multiplying like rabbits. Oops. As if this isn’t enough plot to chew on, there is even a romantic sub-plot thrown in, for comic relief. The killer tornado movie would be OK, but it’s on the Family Network. For me, this is the kiss of death. How can I expect to see a cow flung into a light standard at three hundred miles per hour and sliced in half, or any of the other bizarre violence caused by tornadoes, on a network which regularly shows Dean Jones movies and reruns of Lassie. Lassie would never let a cow die like that. On MY score card it=s tornado movie - 0, shrew movie - 1. Of course, my wife will make the shrew movie unwatchable with her cries of disgust and disapproval, so I guess we’re watching the stupid, sanitized, Mickey Mouse tornado movie.

Writer Joe Bob Briggs has (or had) a show called “Joe Bob Briggs Drive-In Theater” in which he airs crappy movies, such as the afore-mentioned shrew flick, and he always begins each movie with a discussion about why that movie got the Joe Bob thumbs up or down. He had a rating system which essentially took two variables into consideration: breast count and body count. The number of naked breasts and/or dead bodies logged in a movie is directly proportional to Joe Bob’s enthusiasm about that movie. Obviously Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater had more of a guy following than a girl following. I love crappy movies, but to achieve the Jim Bob Oppenheimer seal of approval, the movie cannot just be bad; it must be atrocious.

One of my all time favorite crappy movies is a movie I saw years ago with my friend Bob. It’s called “Night of the Zombies”, and let’s face it, any movie with the word “zombie” in the title can’t be all bad. It began almost immediately with someone chowing down on someone else’s arm, and went downhill from there. Absolutely no attempt was made to establish any kind of a plot, theme, or even temporal continuity. This film did not pretend to be “about” anything; it was simply a film of people tearing the flesh off other people’s bodies and eating it. What was particularly bizarre about this monumentally awful film was that, dubbed in at completely inappropriate moments, were 1-2 minute clips of nature scenes. One minute we were watching some screaming victim with a baseball bat, beating off a blood-soaked zombie who was trying to eat his leg, and then suddenly, we’re watching a flock of Canadian geese flying out of a marsh. This went on throughout the movie, and seriously eroded the continuity of the film. Marlin Perkins might have enjoyed it, but for Jim Bob the film critic, this flaw knocked a perfect “ten” down to a dubious “eight.” Anyhow, I’ve got to go now, this tornado movie is picking up ... an old lady was just flung two hundred yards into a stack of hay. There haven’t been any naked breasts, and only one person has died so far, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s certainly no shrew movie.
- Jamie Oppenheimer

The Oppenheimer Report 3/5/08

Our dog Jasper has been acting rather strangely of late. I’m not sure whether her actions are merely a cry for attention, or whether they indicate some latent creative talent she is trying desperately to communicate. Several times over the past few weeks she has uncharacteristically peed on the rug, and each of these “accidents” has been uniquely artistic. Her last urination perfectly replicated the head of a schnauzer and the accident before that clearly depicted a map of Italy. If there is another “mistake” and it turns out to be in the shape of say, Rodin’s “The Thinker” or some other such famous work of art, then I will know we have a genius for a pet. Perhaps her carpets will hang in the Louvre some day. I can dream, can’t I? If in fact this behavior is a cry for more attention, well, nice try girlie, but three walks per day and fifteen minutes of play time is all you’re going to get. Deal with it.

This week’s report is late for a reason; my laptop hard drive crashed and we scrambled madly to recover the data quickly, as all our house building information is on this computer. Thankfully, Zura, our computer wizard, was able to recover both the data and the hard drive. It was a sickening feeling I felt as I turned my computer on the other day, to a blue screen displaying a bunch of technical gobbledygook about hives and memory dumping. This, I have discovered, was not a good thing, and basically indicated that my hard drive was lunchmeat. I do back up most of my data files, but I was two weeks behind when this happened, and much has transpired over the past two weeks. It is apparently a bit more difficult to back up the actual emails and internet information we have amassed over the past year. All the hardware settings, etc. can be saved, but someone with more expertise than I have is required to plug them all back in properly. There is probably some simple program that will dump a mirror of everything onto another drive, but I’m not sure how to use it. As I have said many times before, I have absolutely no interest in fiddling with computers; I merely want to use them, without the myriad of problems I seem to face on a regular basis.

How ‘bout them primaries? Defying the predictions of the all- knowing media, Hillary has clawed her way back, kicking and fighting all the way. The Democratic nominee could very likely be determined by super delegates. Will it be that Al Gore becomes the tie breaker in the Obama/Clinton standoff? Yikes … how ironical! Hey, don’t laugh at MY English … last night I heard political correspondent Candy Crowley utter these words: “It’s not that big OF a deal.” My Canadian wife has been asking me questions about our American electoral system, and I feel like an ignoramus. Why, for instance, do some states caucus and others use primary elections … why do states like Texas employ both? Why do Democrats use super delegates but the GOP’s do not? I can’t explain any of this to her, or why the electoral college is fairer method of determining a winner than is the popular vote. I understand how it is supposed to work, but I doubt the founding fathers expected presidential elections to be determined by the Supreme Court, as happened when Gore lost to Bush. There is something strange about losing an election when one wins the popular vote. This Democratic primary race is beginning to look as if it will dredge up the same ugly questions. Perhaps we should draw straws … you know, give Ralph Nader a better chance. I’m going out to the pet store now to see if I can find an apple core hat for my dog the artist.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED