By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, THURSDAY, FEB. 26, 2015) — We had intended for you to join us tonight as we presented another live, in-real-time, fearless edition of PLANET VALENTI TELEVISION. PV-TV normally commences at 7 p.m. and runs the hour, broadcast from the studios of PCTV on Time Warner Channel 16. Tonight, however, we accede the studio to our good friends in Civitan, who ran into a problem with their typical taping time. Once again, THE PLANET comes to the rescue. See y’all on the live side of television on Thursday, March 5.

PLANET VALENTI TELEVISION comes your way tonight, live, beginning at 7 p.m., on Time Warner Channel 16.

For almost all THE PLANET‘s broadcasting career, with countless thousands of radio shows and hundreds on television, we have done it live without a script … or a net. Our preferred medium is “the talk show,” loosely defined. We prefer it live and improvised as opposed to taped and memorized (or read) for several reasons:

— It’s the most exhilarating form in which to tackle a broadcast medium.

— It allows for the most spontaneity and demands the most wit, since it requires so much ad-libbing.

— It lessens the long labor required by scripts, casts, props, scenery, rehearsals and the like.

— There’s no pressure of having to remember movement and lines.

— One rises or falls, succeeds or fails, hits or misses, based largely on one’s own efforts. This lends a kind of poetic justice to such a performance. The camera and the microphone do not lie.

— We also adore the intellectual challenge of having to fill an hour or more of live air on a regular basis. From William Henry‘s biography of Jackie Gleason, The Great One: “Few performers have enough interest in the world beyond their own careers to sustain hours of unedited talk. Few have the nerve to try.” Yeah, guess we enjoy doing something others find terrifying.

So we shall see you on the TV tonight. THE PLANET never knows where we might venture in terms of topics, but right now, we wouldn’t be surprised we get into Snowgate, especially the appearance by the three stooges at Tuesday night’s city council meeting; the difference between sand, salt, and snow; and the state’s budget deficit, which has doubled from $750 million to $1.5 billion.

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Keep Heat on Deadbeats Who Are Wrecking Pittsfield’s Roads, Streets, and Highways

THE PLANET is by no means done raking hot tar over Pittsfield’s corner office, Public Services Department, and Highway Division. Those three offices are occupied by (in truth, we cannot say “managed” or “led” by) Mayor Daniel Bumstead, Bruce Colonwood, and Kevin Fail (rhymes with “swail”). What are they? The three stooges? The three dumb-dumbs? The three dipshits?

Bumstead, Colonwood, and Fail sit clueless in the docket at Tuesday’s city council meeting. It’s quite a sight: three males but not a Man among them. They wimped out, failing to take responsibility for their abject failure to handle — eeek!! — w-i-n-t-e-r. (Photo iBerkshires)

While we have yet to dissect this trio’s dreadful appearance before We The People in the form of a city council meeting this past Tuesday, we have seen and heard much. Moreover, we have augmented this with intelligence from the field, including sources in (or with access to) each of those departments. THE PLANET will quote directly from one inside source: “Swail bold-face lied. The city never pre-treated [the roads] this snow season, ever.”

THE PLANET has repeatedly invited comment from these officials, and repeatedly they have ignored the engraving. Nonetheless, if one, two, or all three of them should wish to offer their defense here, we shall welcome their participation.

iBerkshires Blows The BB Away with Council Coverage

Funny how The Boring Broadsheet contained not one word about the council meeting in its Wednesday edition. Yet in the same edition, it called itself The Greatest Newspaper On The Face Of The Earth — or an equally glowing self-attributed “No. 1” — it its house ad looking for a new police reporter (our good friend, Andrew Amelimckx, has moved on the bigger and better things, a magazine gig for more money, looser hours, and no commute). On the other hand, iBerkshires beat the pants off of The BB with Andy McKeever‘s Wednesday story.

As McKeever’s story illustrates and the painful TV footage shows, the three dipspits (no “Three Amigos” here) had nothing but lame excuses and tortured rationales for the miserable failure they have demonstrated in keeping Pittsfield’s streets safe from winter. The three sacks exonerated themselves and put the blame everywhere else. Not one of them “manned up” — no surprise, actually, since there was not a Man among them.

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Q: Why weren’t the roads salted?

DIPSPITS: “Uh, let’s see, um, we don’t have enough shed space for salt. No, wait, yeah that’s it, the salt shipment was delayed. Er, homina homina, the dog ate my salt.”

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We heard Fail admit having no clue when a salt shipment was supposed to arrive. He talked about “magic salt,” dragons, eye of newt, subterranean spaceships, earth tremors, and sun spots. Colonwood sat and swigged buttermilk until he cleaned his colon for all he added to the discussion. He had the chamber enthralled when he said, “Hindsight is 20/20.” Woah! Deeeeep Thoughtssssss! He ought to know. In the colon-cleaning business, one sees a lot of hiners. Bumstead called this winter “a one in a 50-year event.” He apparently does not know that winter comes to New England 50 times in 50 years.

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Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski should bless the snow, because each flake that falls untouched on city byways guarantees the political doom of this incapable mayor. By November’s election, the snows of yesterday will have long melted away. So too Mayor Bumstead, melted away in a urine-colored puddle of irrelevancy and borne down under by his big, heavy, phat pension.

Its seal is mediocrity.

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“Why vowest thou then to live in Pittsfield here, / Who on love’s seas more glorious would appear?” — Adapted from Christopher Marlowe‘s Hero and Leander, lines 227-8, (1598).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.