1097852 For those of you who didn't watch Chinatown but who are reading this before watching Expenses, please minimize me and search around for the episode on Chinatown which debuted last Friday. For those of you who are reading this long after last Friday, just go and find the Chinatown episode. The Expenses episode will be more thoroughly enjoyed for having watched the Chinatown episode. That's not to say the Expense episode couldn't stand on its own. At least that's what the people in charge of the run order of these web shows told me. <object width="440" height="361"><param name="movie" value="http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/player.swf?mediaId=3747964"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed src="http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/player.swf?mediaId=3747964" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="440" height="361" allowScriptAccess="always"></embed></object> At one point it had been decided to blow off the Chinatown episode and simply run the Expenses episode which is based in large part on the Chinatown episode. How stupid is that? That's like going straight to Jeopardy without running ABC World News Tonight. Who's to say some of the answers for Jeopardy aren't found in ABC World News Tonight. Now I'm just bragging but my sister told me I was an answer on Jeopardy once. Or maybe I was a question. My sister is also pissed that ESPN.COM promised new episodes every Tuesday and Friday but then last Friday there wasn't a new episode. ESPN.COM made the promise to run new episodes every Tuesday and Friday about three weeks ago. What a bunch of liars. My poor sister. For those of you who are reading this long after three weeks ago, go to Google and search for "truth." You're not going to find any here. We're the same people who lied to you three weeks ago. Now we want you to watch an episode that almost replaced the very episode you needed in order to understand this current episode, if indeed you are reading this in current times. So you know that times are current, in the last week or so a New York Giant football player shot himself in the thigh. I bet he has a lot of explaining to do. There it is. That's the entire concept of this Expenses episode. Sarah and I are called in to explain how we blew $56,000 on a story that didn't happen in China. In this blog I made it all one big paragraph. I have to go now. I have to do my real life expenses. No. Really. I am so lucky I saved my taxi receipts. You have to turn in the actual receipts if the price exceeds $25. I think that's the rule. If I had lost the $45 receipts, I would have had to make up ten $10 taxi rides. They'd never fall for that. I just want my $90 back. We made up a lot of stuff on the trip that needs expensing but ESPN is OK with that because that's my regular job now. I fly to football cities and make stuff up. This time we flew to New Orleans for the Monday Night Football game between the Packers and Saints. I felt pretty bad about what we were making up this time because we had just done a fun story with Aaron Rodgers of the Packers and now we were trying to do something with Drew Brees of the Saints. Aaron worked hard for us the Wednesday previous and his story aired with some success the following Sunday. But now here we were not rooting against Aaron but not exactly rooting for him either. To make our new fake story work out as well as possible we needed Drew Brees to succeed a little more than Aaron Rodgers. It worked out for us. Rodgers had some second half problems, the Saints pulled away, and Brees had one of his best games ever. The real stuff made our fake stuff (a fake NFL "sound tracks" with fake Drew Brees commentary) turn out borderline genuine. I just found another receipt. This one is for my Jet Blue one way ticket to New York. I was supposed to fly back to Hartford but there was a terrible ticketing error and Jet Blue was the only available airline to get me back to the northeast. Not that there's anything wrong with Jet Blue. They have televisions in front of every seat. (How can they have televisions on all the time and yet the rest of us have to turn off our cell phones? Why did I see an eight year old girl being wanded at the security checkpoint? How did that make anyone safer?) I watched some ESPN out of loyalty then I watched the History Channel so I would walk off the plane that much smarter. I next had to take a town car from New York back to the Hartford airport. I've really got my blogging on. All of these expenses are valid. My producer doesn't know it but I'm going to mark down the lunch I paid for as a business meal --because it was. But now he might have to deduct the amount he didn't pay for his lunch from the lame total they give us each day for all of our meals. I think he owes the company about eleven dollars. If things go bad for him and he gets fired or something I should point out that blackberries are on sale at Super Stop 'N Shop for just 99 cents a pint. That, my friends, is a bargain. Well, it's time to get those expenses sorted out and to get my friend fired. He was great to work with. I'll miss him. true 2008-12-09T11:38:46Z 74277 1 2008-12-09T11:38:46Z