Quote of the Day

"I talked to the guys here at CNN and I told them I would like to end Larry King Live, the nightly show, this fall and CNN has graciously accepted, giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids' little league games."

-- Larry King, announcing that after 25 interminable years, he'll be mothballing his show (in the literal sense as opposed to the figurative) in the coming months

What say we pop this statement into the PR-speak and subtext-removing Universal Translator 3000 and see if we can figure out what Larry is really saying.

Just a few of the responses:

"I talked to Jon Klein and told him that I'm finally willing to stop being the 600-pound anvil chained around the neck of CNN's prime time lineup and he breathed a sigh of relief and, the minute I walked out of the office, picked up the phone, called a guy named Tony and told him that the 'accident' that was scheduled to happen next week to me was no longer necessary."

"To the 834 people nationwide still watching -- and those whose TVs were simply left on after they made the decision to go into the light -- it's been fun drinking the tears of CNN's upper management for the past six or so years, but now that I've banked enough to keep my household in the prescription drugs it's become accustomed to..."

"I looked around and thought, 'Funny... there's nobody else on-air in this building who looks like a cross between Andy Rooney and Reuben Tishkoff, Elliott Gould's character from the Ocean's movies.'"

"I have kids in little league. Can you freakin' believe that? What do you think about that, God and nature? Ya like gettin' nailed by the King, baby?"

Headline of the Week

AP (via the Huffington Post): "When Was the Last Must-See Larry King Interview?"/4.19.10

Oh, I don't know. For me, that revealing show he did on his childhood friend Methuselah can easily carry him for another ten thousand years.

(By the way, how much do you love that picture? The pants pulled up to his nipples, the velcro shoes, the confused look as he just stands there in the middle of a street in Beverly Hills. Somewhere there's a local news station in L.A. running one of those stories asking the public to be on the lookout for a missing elderly man with Alzheimer's who aimlessly wandered off and is in need of his medication.)

Old Testament

Apparently, naming Miramax after their parents Mira and Max wasn't enough of a mitzvah toward America's Jewish octogenarian community for Bob and Harvey Weinstein; they've just announced that Weinstein books will be publishing what it calls "the definitive autobiography of Larry King," entitled What Am I Doing Here? (coincidentally, the same thing many in the book's target demographic say after being stopped by police while wandering lonely roads in hospital robes at four in the morning -- although in defense of the name, Interview with the Vampire was already taken).

Ever the master of understatement, Harvey Weinstein claims that the book "will be absolutely devoured by Larry King's millions of fans." You have to assume that this assessment fails to factor in the number of Larry's followers who, between now and the book's 2009 release date, will grow tired of a steady diet of apple sauce, colorful pills, and unproductive trips to the bathroom and make that final decision to go into the light. Larry King himself has also already contributed the first disproportionately positive blurb for the book, saying, "This is the greatest work in the history of old Jewish guy biographies!"

On the plus side in all of this, The Boondock Saints just became the second worst project the Weinsteins have ever attached themselves to.