Okay, new question. Have you ever been interviewed for the television news? Could be local TV news (you’re the witness to an event) or national news (you’re a subject matter expert).
When I was in high school I did a PSA, does that count?
I was on strike while at the ESB. It was freezing cold, January. So we spent a lot of time in a bar ‘warming up’. Getting drunk. So I put my sign on and stumbled back to the picket line.
Where I was blinded by a spotlight attached to a news camera. I thought the interview went very well. Needless to say I wasn’t on any news show. Probably for the best.
Twice - once for a planetarium opening when I was a grad student, once for the 2017 eclipse event I was running for my school at the time. Both were very short and almost none of the footage was actually used.
I was a guest on a local morning breakfast show once.
Last one was a college bar fight back in 88, was drunk so I don’t remember what started it but we ended up out in the parking lot. Punches were thrown, he came at me, I managed to hip toss him to the ground, went down with but across him, smacking my head off the asphalt, which stunned me for a few moments. I was still laying across him, when I realized he’d reached down and grabbed my dick through my jeans, ostensibly to make me get off him, there was nothing sexual about the yanking my shaft was receiving. My reaction was to twist my torso so that I could better reach his face and basically drove a elbow/forearm into his mouth and nose, making him let go of my groin. That pretty much ended the fight. Woke up the next day with a large scab on my forehead from bouncing it off the parking lot, which healed and fell off a week or so later, revealing a small stone embedded in a new indentation in my head. Flicked the stone out of its nesting place, which remained a fixture until finally going away several years later.
It’s funny because I’ve spent so much of my life in bars and yes, frat houses and etc. and it’s come up so much but I haven’t ever been in anything considered a fight. And I’m a complete dick in many ways to hear it from some folks (those who don’t get my subtle reductive humor, haw haw) But on the other hand I am usually the guy breaking up the fight or preventing it.
Some of that has to be that I’m tall and fairly thick, if not muscular. (Think early Steven Seagal without the frowning or training) and some of that is that I have zero desire to fight, even if I’m drunk as a skunk or someone is in my face.
I get that fighting is a thing. I watch MMA YouTube frequently and love it, but my personal sense of fear/worth is a thousand times higher than my sense of whatever I would gain from getting into an adult fight.
I had an older brother by 4 years, and back when fights were happening at 12 years old, the other guys couldn’t punch me 1/4 as hard as my joshing around fights with my brother, it seemed silly. Then puberty and high school and I turned into an enormous coward re:fights.
I am a drinker so don’t think that is the point of this post, but everyone of these fighting stories involve alcohol.
The beeb came to my studio for one of those not-actually-news longer segments about tax breaks in the industry or whatever and went around shoving a camera in everyone’s face. I made a point of glaring at it weirdly so they wouldn’t include me and they didn’t, save for a glimpse of my right elbow when they showed the guy working next to me.
Take that, 15 seconds of fame!
I don’t think me stepping in the ring to get some consensual violence going counts.
I have never been on the news sadly. I would love to spread the word about how I run my company.
Been on TV twice. Once was as a sophomore in high school when our band was in DC for the Cherry Blossom Festival parade. I was in the 2nd or 3rd line. But they only showed us for about 2 seconds heading into a commercial, so that wasn’t all that cool. But I was on TV.
Second time, for some reason one of the national news programs (I think it was NBC News) was doing a story on recycling, and they were interviewing people dropping off electronics at this place where we take our electronics to recyle the one time a month they do it. Anyway, they interviewed both me and my wife, but they only used one of my wife’s responses (while I was standing next to her just nodding - don’t even remember doing that). They did get a nice shot of me getting out of the car with my car key in my mouth, tho (which is just something I’ve always done getting out of the car - especially if I have a drink or something. Don’t even realize I’m doing it).
I didn’t really think of yours as a “fighting” story.
I was on Today in Australia shilling a new Need for Speed game. I’ve done quite a few televised interviews, but that was the one time I filmed a segment in a studio.
Does, “America’s Most Wanted,” count? If so, yes I’ve been interviewed. The story is a bit long for the thread but needless to say, interesting. i knew a guy who kind of joined the friend group I was in during high school. Said guy had been to my house, dated my sister very briefly, and hung out with us for a bit. But he had a bit of a wild side and kept doing more escalated things, “for fun.” This lead to him stealing a car and getting in trouble for it. He got out on bail.
At that point, he just vanished prior to his full court date. Like, completely gone, nobody knew where he was, etc.
The show had a special about him since he’d shown up in California claiming amnesia. He was eventually placed with a family there and was back in school and doing relatively well when … he decided to steal a car again and ended up killing the owner of said car. The show’s premise was that surely SOMEONE knew him well. As it happened, hundreds of people called in from the town I was from after the show aired. They came with a crew and interviewed many of us, including me. My nervous comments about him never aired but still, it was a surreal moment knowing someone highlighted on that show and also knowing Kelly was still alive and had killed someone.
At any rate, he’s still in prison, doing hard time in Maricopa county, Arizona.
September of '92. After Hurricane Andrew devastated Miami, my Army unit was pulled from a field training exercise and deployed as a humanitarian force. As a battalion of Airborne infantrymen aren’t known for being very humanitarian, we mostly did foot patrols through devastated neighborhoods as a faux show of force, as we didn’t actually have any ammunition. But we looked really mean.
After a couple weeks, every news channel in the country was sending teams to cover the relief efforts and to try and find the “local angle” to show the folks back home. I was tabbed to be interviewed by one of the hometown channels. Lots of shots of me walking with the reporter (I was way taller than him), questions about how the damage compared to Desert Storm, how great it was to help these poor people, “we can call him Doug when the brass is not around.” I did not mention how we were living in an empty elementary school with no roof and that it rained every day at 3:30. It ended up being about an 8 minute story that my parents were very happy to see. The reporter, Bob Orr, eventually became CBS’s Homeland Security reporter for 21 years.
Interviewed or featured? I’ve been on local a few times, first would be back in the 80s when there was actually a local UHF station that would televise all sorts of stuff, the equivalent of “free cable” channels back in the day. I was the captain of the Quick Recall team and had to do a 30 second monologue about our school. I’m guessing you can imagine how that went for a nerd introvert farmboy at age 14 or whatever. We were too embarrassed to ask what a palindrome actually was, so we didn’t do well.
Spotted on bigger local, I was such a ridiculous UK fan back in 94 (96?) I wound up on Lexington TV standing on my chair and rooting for the team.
Featured, I’ve been on the Outdoor Channel and Shooting USA I would guess maybe 6 times (contact your basic cable provider) and NBC’s main channel, I think on Hot Shots! once or twice. I’ve only ever seen one, I haven’t done cable in thirty years, but I do send that link around now that I’m older and even less notable.
I had a good buddy that wasn’t quite as good at me at the sport, but he had about 20x the personality and made it onto a reality show, Top Shot, and lasted roughly 2/3 through it. All this was around 2010-2013, but after Sandy Hook all competition shooting shows were canned.
Yea, one that actually happened to me! I was ‘a man on the street’ when I was walking in Minneapolis. The reporter asked me if I would share my opinion on the Iraq Was and i said sure. I watched the news that evening and I was on it for about 5 seconds.
My wife has been on the news multiple times, in multiple states for university events and interviews about topics.
I have only ruined two friendships due to face blindness. :CringeFaceEmoji:
[EDIT: Actually, possibly a 3rd, but I am not in a position to confirm, almost by definition.]
I was once interviewed by the local news after they spotted us filming this video:
Okay, new question.
I debated this one cause it could get graphic, so feel free to spoiler any gruesome details.
Have you ever broken a bone?
Yes, but amazingly I’ve never had to do anything but wait for it to heal, if crookedly in one case.
In 3rd grade, I had to stop playing baseball because my arm would hurt when I tried to throw the ball all the way from center field. In 4th grade, I found out why when my arm snapped as I tried to throw a tennis ball in the daily game of wall ball. Apparently a tumor had been growing in my humorous (stopping juuust shy of the growth plate) leaving just a hairline of bone around the circumference for me to snap. It took a long time, but eventually the bone all grew back in on its own, good as new.
In my teenage years, I was learning how to do front rolls in tae kwon do, and I accidentally turned it into more of a flip. I came down right on my collar bone and snapped it clean in two. Ouch! This one is crooked and a bit shorter now, but it healed all by itself.
Flash forward to my roller derby years, and I’ve broken:
-A middle finger playing Argentina
-A pinky finger playing Vancouver
-A big toe right before playing Australia (and also a rematch against Vancouver, plus a couple US teams)
-A scaphoid just trail skating last summer :EmbarrasedEmoji:
I’ve never had to do anything more than stabilize them and wait.