Seinfeld Reunion Plot

Get Out! Secrets Spilled
By Natalie Abrams

It's been months since the news broke that the cast of Seinfeld was reuniting on Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, no plot details were released until executive producer and star Larry David sat down with reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour earlier Thursday.

Finally we know how Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards reunite for the first time in over 11 years. It's basically a show within a show, where the cast is actually doing a reunion episode in the Curb universe.

We'll let Larry explain...

"The context is that for years I've been asked about a Seinfeld reunion," he says. "I would always say, 'No. There's not going to be a reunion show. We would never do that. It's a lame idea.' And then I thought it might be very funny to do that on Curb. I kept thinking about it. I started to think of different scenarios and how we can pull this off. I called Jerry and Jerry was game. I said, 'Well, I'll call the others.' And I did and we did it. So we're doing a Seinfeld reunion show on Curb."

What exactly will we see during the creation of a faux reunion special? "We're going to see writing. We'll see aspects of the read-through, parts of rehearsals. You'll see the show being filmed and you'll see it on TV. You won't see the entire show. You'll see parts of the show. You'll get an an idea of what happened 11 years later. It will be incorporated into regular Curb episodes, so the castmembers will be playing themselves on Curb while all of this is going on."

Though it seems this could take up the entire season, he explains, "The reunion is scattered through the season and I think the cast will be on five shows. All four won't be on all five shows. Jerry is on five shows; the others will be on at least four. The season finale will be about the reunion show. It could very well be [a one-hour episode], but I haven't finished editing it yet. But that's a good possibility."

When asked why he finally caved, he says, "That will be answered in one of the episodes. That's a big thing because I would never do that. So there's a compelling reason as to why I decided to do it."

There's a lot of story to be told, but Larry says he found it quite easy to jump back to the Seinfeld state of mind. "It was surprisingly smooth," he says. "Coming up with the right ideas for what's happened in the 11 years, that took some thought. Three of the guys working on my show as executive producers were also producers on Seinfeld. I think we came up with some interesting stuff." Don't assume all is hunky-dory though, Larry says "it's possible" there will be a mention of Richards sordid past.

So will the character Larry ruin the reunion of the Seinfeld cast? He adds, with an evil laugh, "He might. My guy might consider wrecking something like that. We'll see what happens. My guy could very well wreck it. I'm not saying he did. I don't know."

Will the reunion be any good? "Yeah, you mean as opposed to the finale?" jokes Larry. "It's good. I think the reunion is pretty good."

XS 650 Bobber FOR SALE

If you like motorcycles and much as GYMI and I do, then you may want to watch this auction on eBay to see how much this great Yamaha xs650 bobber ends up selling for. This bike is AWESOME!!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE AUCTION

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change?

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change?

Click on the link above to watch the trailer for the new movie "Food Inc."

Food Inc. - The Movie

COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?

MEET THE GUY WHO DOES

In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy.

By Christopher Ketcham; Photograph by Mark Heithoff

DANIEL SUELO LIVES IN A CAVE. UNLIKE THE average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

On a warm day in early spring, I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave, where I find a note signed with a smiley face: CHRIS, FEEL FREE TO USE ANYTHING, EAT ANYTHING (NOTHING HERE IS MINE). From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it.

Night falls, the stars wink, and after an hour, Suelo tramps up the cliff, mimicking a raven's call—his salutation—a guttural, high-pitched caw. He's lanky and tan; yesterday he rebuilt the entrance to his cave, hauling huge rocks to make a staircase. His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird's nest, full of dust and twigs from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor. Grinning, he presents the booty from one of his weekly rituals, scavenging on the streets of Moab: a wool hat and gloves, a winter jacket, and a white nylon belt, still wrapped in plastic, along with Carhartt pants and sandals, which he's wearing. He's also scrounged cans of tuna and turkey Spam and a honeycomb candle. All in all, a nice haul from the waste product of America. "You made it," he says. I hand him a bag of apples and a block of cheese I bought at the supermarket, but the gift suddenly seems meager.

Suelo lights the candle and stokes a fire in the stove, which is an old blackened tin, the kind that Christmas cookies might come in. It's hooked to a chain of soup cans segmented like a caterpillar and fitted to a hole in the rock. Soon smoke billows into the night and the cave is warm. I think of how John the Baptist survived on honey and locusts in the desert. Suelo, who keeps a copy of the Bible for bedtime reading, is satisfied with a few grasshoppers fried in his skillet.


HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them."

The experience was transformative, but Suelo needed another decade to fashion his response. He moved to Moab and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense? The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo's nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. "Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt," Suelo explains on his blog, "freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment." If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.

By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. "I wanted to be a sadhu," Suelo says. "But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it—the idea enchanted me."


THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE IN SUELO'S cave for two, so I sleep in the open, at the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. No worries about animals, he says. Though mountain lions drink from the stream, and bobcats hunt rabbits under the cottonwoods, the worst he's experienced was a skunk that sprayed him in the face. Mice scurry over his body in the cave, and kissing bugs sometimes suck the blood from under his fingernails while he sleeps. He shrugs off these indignities. "After all, it's their cave too," he says. I hunker down near a nest of scorpions, which crawl up the canyon walls, ignoring me.

The morning ritual is simple and slow: a cup of sharp tea brewed from the needles of piñon and juniper trees, a swim in the cold emerald water where the creek pools in the red rock. Then, two naked cavemen lounging under the Utah sun. Around noon, we forage along the banks and under the cliffs, looking for the stuff of a stir-fry dinner. We find mustard plants among the rocks, the raw leaves as satisfying as cauliflower, and down in the cool of the creek—where Suelo gets his water and takes his baths (no soap for him) —we cull watercress in heads as big as supermarket lettuce, and on the bank we spot a lode of wild onions, with bulbs that pop clean from the soil. In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says.

I tell him that living without money seems difficult. What about starvation? He's never gone without a meal (friends in Moab sometimes feed him). What about getting deadly ill? It happened once, after eating a cactus he misidentified—he vomited, fell into a delirium, thought he was dying, even wrote a note for those who would find his corpse. But he got better. That it's hard is exactly the point, he says. "Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it. My hardships are simple, right at hand—they're manageable." When I tell him about my rent back in New York—$2,400 a month—he shakes his head. What's left unsaid is that I'm here writing about him to make money, for a magazine that depends for its survival on the advertising revenue of conspicuous consumption. As he prepares a cooking fire, Suelo tells me that years ago he had a neighbor in the canyon, an alcoholic who lived in a cave bigger than his. The old man would pan for gold in the stream and net enough cash each month to buy the beer that kept him drunk. Suelo considers the riches of our own forage. "What if we saw gold for what it is?" he says meditatively. "Gold is pretty but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance."

He sautés the watercress, mustard leaves, and wild onions, mixing in fresh almonds he picked from a friend's orchard and ghee made from Dumpster-dived butter, and we eat out of his soot-caked pans. From the perch on the cliff, the life of the sadhu seems reasonable. But I don't want to live in a cave. I like indoor plumbing (Suelo squats). I like electricity. Still, there's an obvious beauty in the simplicity of subsistence. It's an un-American notion these days. We don't revere our ascetics, and we dismiss the idea that money could be some kind of consensual delusion. For most of us, it's as real as the next house payment. Suelo doesn't take public assistance or use food stamps, but he does survive in part on our reality, the discarded surfeit of the money system that he denounces—a system, as it happens, that recently looked like it was headed for the cliff.

Suelo is 48, and he doesn't exactly have a 401(k). "I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured? I have great faith in the power of natural selection. And one day, I will be selected out." Until then, think of him like the raven, cleaning up the carcasses the rest of us leave behind.

The original article may be found by clicking HERE.

Three Balloons

For more of Mr. Lynch

Jay Walking

Four Amazing Holes

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

He's In

All the voting worked, Inge gets to go to the All Star Game courtesy of fan voting. I think he should have got in as a starter, but I don't make these decisions. Shane Victorino of the Phillies also made it on fan voting. So the duo known as Bran-Torino made it.
Good luck guys.

Vote For Inge

You have untill July Ninth to vote. You can vote as many times as you want so vote often.

Fishing in New Orleans

Bob Marshall of the New Orleans' newspaper "The Times-Picayune" writes a great weekly article on great places to fish here in New Orleans.

All of his articles can be found HERE.

Here is last Friday's article by Bob Marshall.

Fishing Fridays: Redfish Bay, Heading south is well worth the trip

They say spending a day fishing is like taking a week's vacation. Well, going to Redfish Bay south of Lafitte is like going to another state -- such as Florida or Texas.

Gone is the marsh, or fragments of marsh, and the cane islands and spoil levees we normally associate with southeastern Louisiana. Instead, you find your boat drifting past long, curving shell reefs exposed to the hot summer sun, fringed by a combination of mangroves and green summer grass. Your hull isn't bouncing over cafe-au-lait water, but floating through shallows clear enough to see the silver streaks of mullet scattering ahead of your bow. It's a scene you might expect to encounter in the Everglades of the Laguna Madre.

Except there is one major giveaway that this still is Louisiana, not Texas or Florida: You have a chance of finding plenty of fish during the summer months.

"You can find reds in here year-round, but specks really like this place in the summer because there's a lot of water moving between Hackberry Bay and Barataria Bay, so you get a lot of bait coming through here," said Sidney Bourgeois, co-owner of Joe's Landing in Lafitte.

"When the water is moving through here, pulling shrimp or mullet or pogies, the fish kind of stack up on the down-current side of these reefs and just wait. It can be a great place."

It has another bonus as well: Most anglers ignore it.

"I guess everyone is so focused on either Little Lake or Barataria Bay, they just kind of run around this without stopping," Bourgeois said. "It's a little out of the way if you're heading to the hot spots in those places, so it never seems to get much traffic."

And that only adds to its lure for anglers who enjoy a fishing experience that includes pleasant scenery and fish.

GETTING THERE

From Lafitte marinas head south of the Barataria Seaway to marker 28, then head southwest for about 1.5 miles. It's about a 20-mile run. The best chart is Standard Mapping No. 8 Barataria Bay.

GEARING UP

While you might find a speck up to four pounds here, most of the fish will be between school-size and 2 pounds, but there can be reds and some hefty flounder. So medium-light to medium action gear is a safe bet.

Topwater baits work early and later, but live shrimp, croakers and cockahoes are the top producers. Due to the shallow water, a weighted cork is a good idea, but Carolina rigs are a favorite here as well. If the fish are feeding aggressively, you can switch to plastics.

A trolling motor is really a must because it will allow you to move around this shallow area without clouding the water and spooking fish. But you'll also want an anchor or pole to hold you once you locate a school.

FISHING IT

This is a great place as long as you have a tidal range of one foot or better and a wind from any direction but the east. It's especially good for those days when the wind is from the west and southwest, a direction that typically turns Little Lake and Barataria Bay into a muddy soup. Redfish Bay, by comparison, has protection from those quarters, plus its shell bottom means it won't muddy as quickly.

Approach the first set of islands with the trolling motor looking for current lines off the ends of one of the islands. Trout and reds like to lay down-current from the reefs, hoping to pick off meals pulled around or over the shells by the current. Every reef looks so fishy it's tempting to stop at the first spot, but you'll increase your chances of success by taking a few minutes to scout for any spots that also show bait activity.

Anchor about 30 feet off the end of the reef but also about 10 yards up-current. This will allow you to cast down-current on either side of the current line. Bring the live bait with some hopes of using the rod tip. If you're throwing plastics, start your retrieve before the lure hits the water or you'll end up hooked to shells on almost every cast.

If you first stop doesn't produce after about 10 minutes, pick up and continue moving.

Sweetsauer Photo Hunt Challenges

I just participated in the 2nd Sweetsauer photo challenge. I have not entered a photo contest of any kind before, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised as to how much fun I would have chasing down the challenge pictures. Kristi Sauer came up with the idea to host the Sweetsauer photo challenges and has obviously decided she likes the challenges so much she is going to have a bi monthly photo challenge. I can say I am looking forward to the next one.You can check out the current contestants work on the Photo Hunt Challenge page. The rules and guidelines for participation are listed as well if this is something you might like to do in the future. Click here to see my entries. And thanks Kristy for hosting this fun event.