Ordering justice for Murdoch

John Bercow is the break-out star of the swirling Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. phone hacking scandal.

He’s the British Speaker of the House of Commons and the man the cameras focus on when they want to show the tumult the scandal’s wreaking on British government, media, law and society.

Bercow, 48, has been in the spotlight for bellowing, “ORD-da! ORD-da! ORD-da! ord-DA! ORRRD-daaaa!”

The first time I saw him shouting the only word I’ve ever heard him utter, I thought, “That man would be brilliant in a restaurant that discourages diners from dawdling over menu options.”

“ORD-da!”

His cadence and phrasing are almost Dylanesque. Like Dylan, he can say the same two syllable-word five times and make each redundant syllable sound distinct.

Bercow’s a father of three, but I have to wonder about his parenting skills. He’s got the shouting part down perfect, but the kiddies in parliament pay him no mind.

I haven’t seen anyone so ineffectual at crowd control since Lt. Frank Drebin tried to clear sidewalk gawkers after the runaway gas truck slammed into the fireworks factory: “Move along! Nothing to see here! Nothing to see!”

Of course, there’ll be plenty to see in parliament today.

We’re witnessing the first act in a corporate de-pantsing the likes the world has never seen.

No one else on earth matches Murdoch’s level of pernicious and insidious influence on world opinion. He oversees a global corporate culture that runs on ridicule, bullying and hateful vituperation.

Without Fox News, the world would never have heard of freedom fries, terrorist fist jabs, birther movements or the $3 trillion Iraq War.

And it’s all served up with a smug sneer, the kind that let the Murdochs think this 9-year-old phone hacking scandal was behind them.

It is anything but.

“A week ago people thought this scandal might lap at Murdoch’s feet, but the waters are now over his head and his empire is at risk of submerge,” says journalist Michael Wolff, author of “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.”

“The name Murdoch now stands for something very clear -- you hack people’s phones. And now the Murdoch brand is irrevocably tainted.”

With his reach into every level of conservative government, some are already calling this Britain’s Watergate.

That means it has the potential to be America’s Watergate II.

You could argue Murdoch’s done more to promote the conservative Republican brand in American politics than even the sainted Ronald Reagan.

Murdoch first appeared on my radar screen in 1984 when Mike Royko, the great Chicago columnist (and reason I became a writer), quit the Chicago Sun-Times after Murdoch bought it saying, “No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper. His goal is not quality journalism. His goal is power for Rupert Murdoch, political power.”

More than 27 years later, Forbes Magazine ranked him the 13th most powerful person in the world.

The unraveling begins today. Today for the first time, the Murdochs will be on the record and fact-checked in ways he’d never get on bootlick shows like Fox & Friends.

Cutthroat competitors and every enemy the Murdochs ever made -- and they are legion -- now have an opportunity to exact a revenge that’s long simmered.

And all those unblinking fair and balanced news consumers are about to learn what the rest of us have known for a long, long time.

Mr. Murdoch is of order.

And about out of time.

16 things you didn't know about Peter Frampton

1. I met him in 2000 at a New Orleans entertainment conference I was assigned to cover. We talked for about 10 minutes and he couldn’t have been more friendly, funny or cool. Having met him, my ears always perk up when I hear one of his songs or news about him. He’s touring the country playing the entire “Frampton Comes Alive!” for its 35th anniversary. Here’s some other things about Frampton you may not have known.

2. He’s buddies with Tone-Loc. As I was chatting with Frampton, the singer of the 1980s hits, “Funky Cold Medina” and “Wild Thing” walked by and the two exchanged warm hellos. I talked to Tone later, too and he was cool, too. My wife was thrilled when I brought her back an autograph. I think she kept it about a week.

3. Director Cameron Crowe said the look on Frampton’s face on the album cover looks identical to a man who’d just been shot into outer space.

4. The album was so popular that Mike Myers’s Wayne character joked in “Wayne’s World 2 that “if you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide.”

5. Rolling Stone contributor Alan Light called “Frampton Comes Alive!” the definitive musical document of the 70s because it had long hair and long songs. He has a point, but the definitive musical document of the 1970s is “Exile on Main Street.”

6. Frampton won a Grammy for a 2006 instrumental album called “Fingerprints.”

7. “Frampton Comes Alive!” was on the Billboard 200 for 97 weeks, of which 55 were in the top 40, of which 10 were at the top. With sales of 6 million copies it became the biggest selling live album. More than three decades later, the album is still the fourth biggest live seller.

8. Since 1977, he’s had more marriages (3), than top 10 hits (1). He divorced his third wife on June 22.

9. Besides Los Angeles and New York, he’s also spent many years living in Nashville and Cincinnati.

10. The 9/11 attacks moved him to become an American citizen.

11. He was born in Beckenham, Kent, England, on April 22, 1950. Fifty-five years later, one of his daughters (he has four children) graduated with a fashion merchandising degree from Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, which couldn’t be more different from Kent, England.

12. He is a strict vegetarian.

13. He suffered a near-fatal automobile accident in the Bahamas in 1978. Dealing with the severe pain led to a brief period of drug abuse.

14. “Frampton Comes Alive!” was a double album with a special reduced list price of $7.98, only $1.00 more than the standard $6.98 of most single-disc albums in 1976. Here’s some interesting thoughtfulness: The album was pressed with sides one and four on one record, followed by sides two and three on the other. This arrangement was intended to make it easier to listen through the whole album in sequence on automatic record changers. Remember those days of waiting for the needle to hit the groove. I love the convenience of digital, but sometimes I still miss the sublime expectation of waiting for the needle to find the groove.

15. The follow-up to the mega hit was the widely-panned 1977’s “I’m in You.” I guess I’ll never make a good critic because I still like it. Mick Jagger lends back-up vocals on both the title song and the great “Tried to Love” and Stevie Wonder plays harmonica on “Rocky’s Hot Club."

16. Tone-Loc and Frampton should get together for one of those oddball collaborations that make all the critics giddy. I’ll bet it would be a huge hit.

Small town funeral etiquette

In hindsight it seems ghoulish to follow up a re-run post about death with a fresh post about death. I don’t care.

Death is topically evergreen, I’m doing it with a cheerful heart and my intentions are pure, so writing again about death, well, it won’t kill me.

I live in one of those small towns where the daily obituaries are crowded with friendlies, church acquaintances and kin of people who fix our cars, our furnaces, etc.

Live here long enough and attending funerals becomes as ritualistic for some people as Bingo Night down at the VFW.

There was a big funeral here last night and the whole town turned out. The woman and her family are beloved and at 62 she died way too soon. Karen will be missed.

I was talking with some friends about it earlier in the day. One man said he wasn’t going to attend.

“It’s going to be too crowded. I’ll just send the family a ham on Monday.”

I said I admired him for his indifference to both grieving convention and doctor-recommended dietary considerations regarding the leading causes of high blood pressure.

Another friend said it drove him crazy when many people sought to console him about the death of his parents by telling him they were in a better place.

“How the hell would they know?”

He’s right. Murrysville may have better schools but if the NFL lockout is resolved Steeler training camp will again be here at St. Vincent College through August and that’s always a fun time to be in Latrobe.

So thoughts of proper etiquette were on my mind as we waited in the long line to pay our respects.

Lucy’s just 5 and I was worried the experience might unsettle this impetuous kid. I figured I’d better lay down some funeral ground rules.

First: don’t try and stick anything up Mrs. D’s nose. She’s unlikely to react the way I do when you try shoving crayons up mine when I’m sleeping, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

Do not sneak behind the coffin and start shouting in your little cartoon voice, “Help! I’m not dead yet! Get me a doctor! Help!” Sure, it’d be funny, but it would likely offend stuffy traditionalists.

I told her not to remove from the coffin anything shiny she thought was pretty, to pinch the body or yell, “Boo!” an inch from the deceased’s ear.

The family was delighted to see me. I could tell because they immediately began to insult my hair, my sobriety and the way I was dressed. One sarcastically said it was “real classy” of me to wear a bowling shirt to his mother’s funeral.

(It wasn’t a bowling shirt. It was “recreational sportswear.” Val talked me out of wearing an actual bowling shirt because she said it wouldn’t look real classy.)

The ridicule was so intense I briefly considered faking a massive heart attack just so they’d be forced to say nice things about me in the hopes I might revive and not upstage their mom’s funeral.

I did nothing of the sort. It would have been very poor funeral etiquette.

And I knew Lucy might reach for the crayons in Val’s purse and jam one up my nostril. My antics would exposed as fraud.

EMTs should keep a box of Crayolas in their lifesaving kits. I swear they work better than -- “Clear!” -- those high-voltage defibrillators.

I’m glad I live among a people resilient enough to prevent even the saddest of occasions from taking the fun out f-u-n-erals.

I guess I should have encouraged Lucy do her macabre ventriloquist act behind the coffin.

Everyone would have had a good laugh.

I know Karen would have.

Death to boring dinner deaths (from 2008)

I like to think maybe someone is sitting at his or her desk and watching the clock roll on in slow motion to 5 p.m. They don’t feel like working. Me, neither.

I have a solution: I’ll post this item from 2008 and if the boss strolls by you can pretend you’re reading something important. The lack of porn on your screen ought to keep you safe.

Have a great night. Do something fun and lively. I’ll try and post something fresh tomorrow.

I put a moratorium on boring dinner deaths the other night after yet another old neighbor lady passed away in her sleep.

It’s not that I’m opposed to morbid death talk at dinner. On the contrary, I’ve always considered myself a death connoisseur. I enjoy lively talks about death and dying.

As a young newspaper reporter, I was daily immersed in the grisly ends of strangers. I’ve seen with my own eyes the mangled bodies of gunshot victims, sidewalk suicide splatters, and hapless casualties of no-win confrontations with runaway trucks.

Their scarred corpses haunt my dreams. I wonder about the searing pain, the fateful recognition that death was imminent. And I invariably put myself in their doomed shoes, hands raised in futile defense the instant before the pin hits the shell.

It’s not death I mind, it’s boredom.

And our daughter, Josie, 7, shares those impulses. So when Val said the other night about the neighbor lady dying in her sleep, Josie was naturally curious. How’d she die? What happened?

“She was old,” Valerie said. “She died in her sleep. Very peaceful.”

It was maybe the eighth old lady who’d died this year. If you’re looking for a tidy, peaceful death, become an old lady in my neighborhood and just bide your time.

I could sense Josie was disappointed. I set my fork down and wiped my lips with my napkin. “Look, I’m tired of all these old ladies dying in their sleep,” I said to Val. “The next time some old lady passes away, you make damn sure you have a good story to tell us. It’s not going to make her any less dead if she was eaten by a bear or struck by lightning. And we’ll all enjoy our dinners a little bit more.”

So recently we’ve had wonderful dinner conversations about Mrs. Miller who was struck by a meteor when she was gardening; Mrs. Peterson, who died heroically trying to save her kidnapped husband from Colombian rebels, and poor old Mrs. Benson who was killed trying to retrieve her wedding ring from the cranky wood chipper in the back yard.

I have absolutely no fear of death as long as it doesn’t have to hurt.

I probably spend a lot of time thinking about dying because I spend so much time thinking about living. I really enjoy my life and know it’s so finite. We’re all born the same way, but death’s a real crap shoot. Even mean rich people can die grisly, untimely deaths and we all feel a little bit better about ourselves when something like that happens.

It’s one of the most fair things about this confoundingly unfair life.

Ideally, I’d like to live to be about 90, stumble drunk out of a friendly tavern and get creamed by a bus. I want the bus to be traveling so fast that bystanders will swear they saw my soul shoot out of my body bound straight for heaven. And that my soul wasn’t wearing any pants.

But I’m guessing it’s most likely to happen in a movie theater where I’ll be gunned down by some rude, yapping kids who don’t like being shushed by an old man who feels it’s his duty to police the audience so every one can hear the witty dialogue animating what I guess will be Shrek 19.

No matter what happens, I’ve started a family tradition that when I do go, it’ll be something that’ll entertain my darling daughters.

Val: “Kids, I’ve got bad news. Your father was killed today. He was struck by a meteor while fighting Colombian rebels with a wood chipper. His body fell off the mountain he was climbing and landed in shark-infested waters just as the nearby volcanic island erupted . . .”

Sure, some of that might hurt like hell, but it ought to give me bragging rights when I run into all those old neighbor ladies who, yawn, died in their sleep.

Conservatives illuminating only own ignorance

I may not agree with all their wacky views, but I can understand conservatives getting in their typical purple-faced tizzies over things like gay marriage and keeping government out of our lives.

These are bedrock conservative issues.

Yes, the party that’s opposed to government intervention is ceaseless in its defense of personal liberty until it comes to issues like who’s rocking whose bed.

But when did conservatives become so opposed to conservation?

I’m, of course, referring to the latest conservative bogeyman, the compact fluorescent light bulb.

Conservatives say they are evil. They say they are destructive. They say they threaten the very fiber of American society.

It makes me nostalgic for days when they used to say things like that about Osama bin Laden.

Yes, these are dark days for light bulbs.

When I heard there was an innovative new light bulb that could save Americans on average $85 a month, I reacted the way an old conservative would have.

I thought, “This will let me conserve about $1,000 a year on electric bills.”

That I vowed to lavish the savings on donations to ultra-liberal organizations like the Sierra Club didn’t diminish the initial conservative motivation.

When exactly did the conservative movement begin to lose its mind?

The federal energy legislation that has them frothing was championed and signed by George W. Bush in 2007. It didn’t infuriate them then.

Was it when they were revealed to be so wrong about each and every aspect of the misguided $3 trillion Iraq War, the most costly and wasteful government program in American history?

Was it when they realized that eight years of conservative rule didn’t lead to panacea, but led instead to the election of America’s first black president, a man they despise?

The debt ceiling crisis has all the experts terrified -- and Michele Bachmann’s not an expert.

Not me.

Here’s what’s going the happen: Fiscally-minded grown ups of the conservative movement are going to begin exerting pressure to get a deal done. It’s already happening with Mitch McConnell.

Republican negotiators are going to cave because President Obama’s looking like the adult here.

Then Tea Party conservatives will do what they do best: They will become furious, only this time the sum of their wrath will be directed at inter-party allies.

That means the party will nominate the most extreme candidate from the most dysfunctional slate of presidential aspirants either party has ever considered.

The best candidate, the one who could engage voters from both parties, is Mitt Romney, a man so earnest he makes me wish I could get him drunk and passed out long enough to draw Sharpie eyebrows on his forehead before his next candidate debate.

But he’s a magic underpants-wearing Mormon and that won’t fly with primary voters in places like South Carolina.

If his complexion was just a shade darker they’d be demanding he produce his birth certificate.

That’s why I’m comfortable predicting the nominee will be reactionary Texas Governor Rick Perry. Yes, the man who recently mentioned seceding Texas from the union will soon be campaigning to run the country he considered abandoning.

Perry recently signed a law exempting Texas from the Bush energy and light bulb standards and is seeking manufacturers who -- yee! haw! -- come to Texas to open a plant making bulbs the old-fashioned Edison way.

The idea was mocked by Bob Keefe of the Natural Resources Defense Council that argues on behalf of conserving our resources.

“It’s pretty unlikely any manufacturers are going to be rushing to Texas to make a product based on technology that’s 125 years old, is highly inefficient and is something the majority of consumers have widely said they’d don’t want.”

He’s saying it’s not a very bright idea.

It’s just what we’ve come to expect from a movement that’s increasingly being led into the darkness by a bunch of inefficient dim bulbs.

Space needs more, not less, junk

NASA worry warts are once again saying the sky is falling, and this time they may be right.

The once-pristine heavens are starting to resemble Earth’s trash-strewn streets.

Experts estimate somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 objects larger than a centimeter (half an inch) are in Earth orbit. At orbital speeds of up to 17,500 mph, even a space bottle cap destroy a satellite or the manned space station.

The gist of the news is there’s too much junk in space to which I respond: Garbage.

In fact, there’s not nearly enough trash in space.

We need to think of creative ways to litter space with our litter.

Think about it.

We have way too much trash here on earth, both land and sea (check out my Great Pacific Garbage Patch post).

I see it everyday on my two-mile strolls through small town America.

I vowed long ago I’d pick up and dispose of any trash carelessly left in my path, and just in my path. I would not go out of my way to pick up debris in the gutter or caught in the shrubs.

There’s just too much. Weaving to pick it all up would take too long and observers would mistake me for a stumbling drunk about six or seven hours before I actually become one.

It’s on these walks when I think about how I can solve the world’s most pressing problems.

And I keep coming back to ways to launch our trash into space.

There’s nothing deceptive about the name Space. Space is what fills up a totally empty closet. Except in the case of Space there’s a whole bunch more of it.

Space is space. It is empty. There’s nothing there there.

That’s why words like landfill drive me insane. Land is land that’s already full of land. You can’t further fill it. You can only pile all our unsightly crap up on top of it.

Space is something that needs filling.

That’s one reason why being an astronaut in an unhappy marriage is so convenient.

When an astronaut says he needs some space, he (or she) can really truly get some.

So what’s to be done with all this trash and all that space?

Ideally, someone will invent a machine that will transform all our trash into ozone. That way some future space craft can fly into orbit and just empty the boxes full of artificial ozone where all the natural stuff used to be.

But that may be years off, at least until the geniuses at Apple get bored figuring out ways I can carry 20,000 songs, rather than a measly 15,000, in my pocket and decide to do something sensible.

Another solution is to equip every piece of disposable trash with a really tiny little rocket that would ignite after a detector signaled the waste had become trash.

The innovation would have the added benefit of keeping snoozing airline pilots in a lively enough state to dodge skies filled with projectiles.

Less expensive might be the application of a new generation of super magnets. Again, all disposable items would be implanted with tiny powerful magnets that could be activated when the human touch goes undetected.

They’d work in concert with a Rhode Island-sized magnet orbiting the earth. Every few weeks this magnet would sail overhead and all the trash on the streets would magically rise to heaven.

It would be a beautiful phenomenon reminiscent of the above-pictured rising lamp scene in the captivating Rapunzel movie “Tangled” (see it, now! It’s wonderful! Honest!).

The magnets would also clear up all the pesky space junk endangering all the crewcut bores so devoted to tending International Space Station ant farms.

Sadly, those are likely solutions that will be enjoyed by our children’s children.

See, I’ve come to realize the men and women who could make this stuff happen lag in the kind of creative thinking readers of this blog enjoy basking in -- God bless each and every one you.

Just imagine the scorn they’d heap on me if I ever tried to bring these ideas to our corporate big shots.

They’d say I was nuts. Crazy.

They’d say the same things about me they said about Galileo when he was ridiculed for the then-heresy of declaring earth revolved around the sun.

I like to think me and the historic genius have at least one thing in common.

We’re not lunatics.

We’re just both just a little bit spacey.

Roberto Clemente, Mr. 3,000

Baseball fans all over America were celebrating Saturday when Yankee great Derek Jeter got his 3,000th hit.

Not me. I love Jeter, but I was on the edge of my seat until he banged out hit no. 3,001.

The 3,000 hit club in Major League Baseball is one of the most grand achievements in all of sports. Only 28 men in baseball history have had that many hits.

That’s 28 out of -- who knows? -- maybe 1,000,000 athletes talented enough to play professional baseball.

It’s taken professional baseball 166 years for 28 batters to secure 3,000 hits (only two, the disgraced Pete Rose and the disgraceful Ty Cobb, have more than 4,000).

It could take another 100 years for the list to get to 50.

When that happens, anyone engaged enough to look will ponder at least two names: the first and the last.

We don’t know who the first will be, but we know who’ll be last.

It’ll be Roberto Clemente. He’s forever last with precisely 3,000 hits.

It’s probably already happening in places other than Pittsburgh, and I hope I’m there at least once when it does someplace.

A group of kids will be gathering at some ballpark where the club is listed (PNC Park in Pittsburgh has a 3,000 Hit Club Tavern). They’ll go through the list and they’ll come to Clemente.

They’ll wonder, gee, what’s this guy’s story? Did he hang on for a bunch of years just to get his 3,000th hit?

They, in fact, made a 2004 movie, “Mr. 3,000,” about a guy who did just that. It starred the late, great Bernie Mac.

It wasn’t like that with Clemente. His last regular season at bat was his 3,000th hit, a stand-up double on September 30, 1972, in Pittsburgh’s old Three Rivers Stadium. He finished the season batting .310.

Just 92 days later he was dead. He was 38.

That’s compelling stuff right there. If you’re a storyteller, it gets better.

Clemente died a saintly death.

He is considered the Jackie Robinson of Latina players and Latin players throughout baseball to this day consider it a great honor to wear his number 21.

He spent much of his off-seasons doing tireless humanitarian work in impoverished Central American villages like the Puerto Rican one where he was born the youngest of seven children.

When Managua, Nicaragua, was devastated by a massive earthquake on December 23 the newest member of the 3,000 hit club began arranging emergency relief flights. He’d been in Managua three weeks previous.

He was furious when he learned three planeloads of aid packages were diverted by corrupt officials of the then-ruling Somoza government never reaching the victims.

Clemente, who played his entire 17-year career as a Pittsburgh Pirate, decided he’d personally oversee the fourth flight. He knew his presence in a land where he was idolized could make a crucial difference.

The flight crashed in the Caribbean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico.

The body of the pilot and part of the fuselage were recovered. A flight bag belonging to Clemente was all they ever found of the great Roberto.

Of his teammates, with whom he’d won the 1971 World Series when he was awarded MVP, only one did not attend the memorial service.

It was catcher Manny Sanguillen. In a grief so poignant it practically shrieks, Sanguillen instead spent weeks diving in the waters where the plane went down in the hopes of recovering the body of his friend.

Baseball in 1954 instituted a mandatory five year waiting period for any former baseball player to be considered for the Hall of Fame.

For Clemente, it was waived and three months after his death he was awarded baseball’s highest honor. He’s the only player in more than 57 years deemed worthy of the waiver.

There’ve been many books written about Clemente, most recently by David Maraniss.

But there’s never been a memorable movie about this most unforgettable man.

I wonder if the reason is physics.

Maybe cameras are incapable of capturing something so dazzling as the idea of an athlete who was as magnificent a player as he was a person.

The man who died last on one famous list lives first forever on so many, many more.