I’m normally not much of a TV watcher when there’s no baseball season to occupy my early night-time viewing, but this winter I’ve come across a show I consider my own little guilty pleasure and reward for my long work days, and that’s “Happy Hour” on - believe it or not - the FOX Business Channel. Now anyone who knows me well enough is well aware I know as much about finances and economics as your average 3-year old, but I have to admit I enjoy the show immensely and have made it my own little must-see viewing habit.

So what is “Happy Hour” like? In reviewing the show’s inaugural week last October, Market Watch’s Jon Friedman had this to say about the show:

Welcome to “Happy Hour,” a new breed of news show, where a younger version of “Regis and Kelly” meets “Cheers” with the breeziness of “Entourage.”

The closest thing I’ve seen to it on TV, in terms of combining a fast pace with conversations and information, has been ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” and “Cold Pizza” as well as Fox’s own “The Best Damned Sports Show Period.” These shows all have the same kind of freewheeling, informative style. (Interestingly, CNBC, FBN’s main rival, seemed to pluck parts of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” for its popular morning show “Squawk Box,” and now FBN is showing an ESPN influence, too.)

The idea, as Friedman quotes FOX’s senior VP of operations, Brian Jones, as saying, came to him while he was - surprise! - sitting at a bar having cocktails:

I noticed a lot of (business) conversations happen at a golf course or over drinks at a bar,” said Brian Jones, Fox’s senior vice president of operations, who conceived the idea for the show while he was sitting in an Upper West Side bar.

When Jones and Kevin Magee, Fox News’s executive vice president, couldn’t find a suitable venue in the Wall Street district, their colleague Valerie Alexander suggested the Bull and Bear [a bar at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel]. “They already had a ticker,” Jones said with a laugh, noting that Fox doesn’t pay a fee to its host.

The show is a central part of FBN’s daunting game plan: to make financial news fun for Main Street. Instead of reciting dry numbers in earnings reports, “Happy Hour” is more likely to explain what the news means to shareholders and the general public.

I think the show succeeds at doing exactly that. As much entertainment as it is informative (there are lots of interviews with Wall Street types and corporate big-wigs), the pace remains breezy and light throughout, making it a perfect option for people like me who don’t mind being informed as long as we don’t have to think a lot about things after a long, hard day at work. And a lot of the credit has to go to the FOX head honchos who paired up the delightful team of Cody Willard and Rebecca Gomez. I’ll admit, I’m a Cody Willard fan, and Gomez is, well, how you say, very easy on the eyes.

And the great thing is, here in AZ it starts at 9 PM, so that, even after the baseball season arrives I’ll still be able to enjoy “Happy Hour”.

If you haven’t seen it yet, consider it a Great White Shank pick to click.

So here I am, reading and enjoying greatly Vincent Ferrer Blehl’s “Pilgrim Journey”, his study of John Henry Newman’s life and religious formation from his childhood, through his years at Oxford and his involement in the Oxford Movement, and up to to his ultimate conversion from Anglican to Roman Catholic at the age of 44.

As I’ve been reading it, it occurs to me just how much and how little the Anglican Church has changed in the time since. As to the former, much of what many know as the Anglican “worship style” - covering everything and anything from liturgy, vestments, church architecture and decoration, Anglican religious orders, etc. can be attributed to the embrace of many practices now associated with the term “high church” (or Catholic) practices influenced by the Oxford Movement’s popularity; to me, this is a definite improvement over what must have been the overwhelmingly dreary and gloomy Calvinistic practices left over from the battles of the 16th century and the English Reformation.

As to the latter, you still have many of the same concerns inside the Church’s power structure over polity and doctrine, never mind Anglicanism’s place in Christendom. And those, of course, whose own individual journeys with Christ are affected in one way or the other by the winds of change fanning those inherent tensions. In that regard, I admit to seeing more than a little of my own experiences with the Episcopal Church’s power structure in both Newman’s own journey and others associated with the Tractarians (another name for those involved in the Movement), illustrating that, at its very core, not much has changed, or likely will change, in the Church in that regard over time. The Church’s power structure - priests and bishops - never did, and still don’t understand, and at times actively resist, those who don’t appear to fit a particular mode, or are called or moved to challenge in their own ways “the way things are done”.

Blehl’s book contains more than its share of instances where otherwise fully-qualified people who are either refused ordination to the Church or professorships at Oxford because they either dare to challenge trhe status quo, or associate with or write in support of those who do likewise. And it’s interesting to see where many of those who were persecuted to some extent eventually found themselves - many ended up leaving the Church of England for Rome, others lost their faith and their belief in Christianity outright, others simply disappear from the pages of history.

My sense from all this is that it doesn’t really matter in the end what you end up doing or where you end up doing it, as long as you leave enough room open in your heart and mind for new possibilities brought about through God’s Divine inspiration. The journey may not always be pleasant along this road, but I have my doubts as to whether it was ever or is supposed to be easy to begin with. Like the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It all began with a phone call one Sunday afternoon last summer. My brother Mark, who had shown little prior interest in re-visiting the years spent playing together in our mid-’70s band, called Top Priority, asked if I had any pictures of us playing together. His two sons (my nephews) Matt and Mike have their own band, and evidently they wanted to see how their old man cut his chops in the rock and roll thing. Well it just so happened that I did, but just sending him the pictures seemed to me to be a little dry, so I made a document that not only had the pictures I had, but featured a little band history that his boys might appreciate.

We ended up having a long conversation about those days and laughed our asses off for a hour just recalling some of those times, the good and the not-so-good. And from that we got the crazy idea to try and look up the other two members of the band and see if they were alive and what they were up to. A look through the phone book and a search of the Internet helped locate our keyboard player, Jerry “Keys” Palma, and I’m sure my call to his law office one morning from clear out of the blue caught him completely by surprise. But we had a wonderful conversation that ultimately led to a reunion over dinner several weeks later.

A few days after that, a call on a Saturday morning from our guitar player, Ken “The Cat” McDougal, caught me totally by surprise and I was glad to hear he was alive and well, living in Jacksonville, FL, and doing well heading up his own photography business.

Ordinarily, in most cases, that would be the end of that, right? But in this case it wasn’t. Evidently, the various communications between the band members caught the attention of one Victor N. Cugini, former CFO of Kittyhawk Productions, the legal and marketing front for everything that was Top Priority back in those days. Even though Mr. Cugini still owed me $2.76, “Keys” $5.12, Mark $0.76 and The Cat a whopping $3.49 after skipping to The Netherlands following the band’s break-up, I was nevertheless willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and authorized him to pen the “official” biography of the band, which he intended to call “The Band That Never Changed Rock: The Definitive History of Top Priority”. His appearance on C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” program, recounted here, received such widespread publicity that Mr. Cugini was prodded into contributing the highly-acclaimed five-part series on the band’s evolution and history, further whetting the appetite of America for more information about Top Priority.

One of the consequences of this series, as well as a later post remembering an old Tewksbury landmark from my youth, resulted in a reunion with Bob Noftle, an old high-school friend of mine. What a joy it has been to not only share a wonderful lunch with him last December reminiscing about the “good old days”, but a rekindled friendship that (if he doesn’t mind me speaking for him) has been a blessing to us both. During a long flight back to Phoenix the next day, looking back over the year that was just hours away from being over, I couldn’t help but marvel at how fate and the Internet had brought back into my life friends who I otherwise would never, ever have heard from ever again. Technology indeed has its blessings as well as its curses!

Then, the other day, a new comment posted by “BeatleTracks” appeared under one of Victor Cugini’s Top Priority-related posts. A couple of days and a few probing comments later, yet another reunion had taken place - this time with Ken Sandler, my best friend from junior high school, who not only taught me how to play bass (on the lower strings of a cheap acoustic guitar rigged with a pick-up for amplification, no less), but introduced me to playing in a band (a four-man garage outfit called “The Instamatic Vibration” - still a great name, if you ask me). Back in the early ’70s, Ken and I were very tight, and I learned a lot about music from him. I would ride my bicycle down to his house after school, and we would listen to music (a lot of Top 40, Glen Campbell and Creedence Clearwater Revival, I recall). I still remember him recording himself plugged into a reel-to-reel tape player in order to create a distorted “fuzz” sound, which we both thought was the balls. My brother Mark and I had originally hoped to have Ken front the band that ultimately became known as Top Priority, but life somehow intervened and Ken ended up playing the Pete Best role in what later became the phenomenon known as Top Priority. Music remained a central part of his life, however, and it gives me great pleasure to know he is now a member of an acclaimed Beatles tribute band called “Beatle Tracks”.

(Ed. note: I have to admit to being surprised at Ken involving himself with a Beatles tribute band - where he really belongs is fronting a Creedence Clearwater Revival tribute band, because no one - and I mean no one - could replicate John Fogerty’s swamp-bayou blues licks like Ken could.)

If there is any one reward that has come from my time blogging here at Goodboys Nation weblog, it is to have it be the vehicle that has brought me back in contact with friends I loved and enjoyed hanging around with during my school and band years so many years ago; to be reunited with them after all this time is an incredible blessing. In some ways, it has brought my own life full circle; in others, it is simply remarkable how everyone has, in their own ways, hung in there with life long enough through times both good and bad, to a point where we can all be reacquainted in various ways once again.

Like my old (and new) friend Bob Noftle says, another chicken has come home to roost, and I have to admit, it’s all pretty cool.

While I think it’s way too early for people to be proclaiming Hillary Clinton’s once-inevitable acension to the Democratic nomination dead, she is clearly in troubled waters. More than that, she has found herself in the unenviable position of not being able to effectively counter Barack Obama in traditional political ways - if she tries the high road via the earnest, well-meaning, “policy wonk/issues” route, Obama has already proven he can out-wonk her and be just as articulate about it; if takes the low road and goes on the attack, as she did on Saturday, she sounds shrill (frankly, bitchy), thus revealing her general “unlikeability” problem.

In the end, if indeed her campaign does go down in flames, it will boil down to two general factors, one she could little to overcome, and one horribly self-inflicted, whether by her, her campaign, or both.

In the first case, Kirk Caraway in Sunday’s Nevada Appeal, more than anything, points to what I have been saying all along - that Hillary Clinton’s Barack Obama problem hints at an even greater hurdle she would face come the general election - the fact that, at the very core, she remains, after all this time and all this campaigning, virtually unelectable:

Forty-seven percent. That is the hurdle that has stood in front of Hillary Clinton since the day she announced her intention to run for president.

Forty-seven percent is the portion of Americans who have a negative opinion of Clinton, and getting them to change their minds is extremely difficult.

Not that she hasn’t tried. Her campaign began with an effort to “reintroduce herself to the American people,” and her claims that she was the most famous person Americans didn’t know.

How did that work out?

Overcoming that 47 percent is not an insurmountable task. George W. Bush won both his presidential elections with 48 percent of voters casting their ballots for his opponents.

But going into a race knowing that she had 47 percent of the people against her meant that Clinton had to run a perfect campaign. There was no room for any slippage of support, any gaffes that might push more voters to oppose her.

And for a while, it looked like she was doing just that.

Early in this contest, she was positioned as the front-runner, always on message and riding high above the rest of the field. She was the New England Patriots of presidential candidates.

But then along came Barack Obama. More of a movement than a campaign, Obama created a real challenge to Clinton. And when they lined up to battle for the top prize, the vaunted Clinton Machine fell apart.

As I’ve pointed out previously in this very spot, Hillary’s main problem is that, frankly, people - especially men - don’t like her, and, given the chance in a quiet dark ballot box, would go out of their way to vote against h