TJ Holmes' old co-workers at NBC's Bay Area affiliate goes over a box of old neckties he recently sent them. Holmes never wears the same tie on TV twice, so he gives the extras away.
Found this item in my regular TJ Holmes Google Stalking. Seems TJ stays in touch with his old homies at the Bay Area NBC affiliate he used to work for before joining CNN. Former co-worker and news anchor Brent Cannon recently shared a story on the station's news blog of how the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of the TV Newsdoesn't wear the same necktie on television twice.
Once on air, that tie goes into re-Tire-ment. He also never wears a tie that costs more than ten bucks. He has a knack for finding great looking ties for ten bucks or less – wears ‘em once – and gets another.
When TJ left NBC Bay Area he had a massive tie giveaway. Many of those ties ended up in my closet, and you have likely seen them many, many times during our newscasts (’cuz I wear ‘em over and over).
TJ recently visited the Bay Area and swung by the studio to say hello to old friends. I mentioned that I needed a new shipment of ties. Well, the old ship came in last night. On my desk this morning, a whole batch of new ties from TJ!
Of course, I shared my good fortune with others – i.e. Mike, Craig and Scott – as you can see in the picture. I also “pass it on,” meaning I take the old ties from the first batch and pass those on to other people. I give them to friends, or to people I know who are tight on cash these days due to the economic times and I give some to Goodwill as well.
Considering how many broke people are out looking for work a free tie might come in handy.
For more TJ Holmes Google Stalking, click here. For more TJ Holmes pictures, click here. If you have any TJ Holmes related news or photos shoot a note to The Snobhere.
TJ Holmes, who is the same age as me, did not do what I did in 1996 -- which was relish over the fact that I was 18 and now had a say in the political process. Yes. I am a nerd and our sloppy Representative Republic/bootleg Democracy with a dose of socialism is my civic religion. I was ready to say "hell no" to Sen. Bob Dole.
TJ was not. But I forgive him because he's pretty.
PS. Apologizes if the video doesn't run right at first. CNN is still working the bugs out in its player. Why they can't just jack how other video players work is beyond me. If they've got the cash for John King'sfancy pants touch screens you think they could bootleg Vimeo or YouTube's technology.
For more TJ Holmes Google Stalking, click here. For more TJ Holmes pictures, click here. If you have any TJ Holmes related news or photos shoot a note to The Snobhere.
That is totally rude. I can see a guy doing this to Gloria Borger or John King (someone please do this to John King) but this is so unnecessary to do to my little Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of the TV News. (Source: Bone2Bone*)
For past Google Stalking TJ Holmes coverage, click here.
*Warning: the site is a little ... um, "penis friendly black gay erotica friendly." (Apparently "penis friendly" wasn't specific enough! Happy now!) Not that anything's wrong with that!
Scandal! TJ allegedly has some sort of "girlfriend." According to the blog Scene in Atlanta, at opening night of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, TJ Holmes arrived with "his gorgeous girlfriend Marliee." The picture is woefully small and grainy. I may contact the owner of the blog, Jill Lerner, to see if she can hook The Snob up with something larger and more revealing.
Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin's ultimate doppelganger popped up on Saturday Night Live Saturday and she was even better than I could have ever imagined.
Tina Fey, I take back anything bad I've ever said about you and I salute you. Good show, madame. Good show.
I couldn’t have been more pleased.
So many of us who saw this were right. Fey and Sarah Palin could be long lost siblings. With the stupid bouffant hair and the right pair of glasses, she was the epitome of Palin perfection, even her northern Midwestern accent was on point and Chicago Tribune writer Maureen Ryan concurred.
As the program came on, there was Fey in a bright red blazer. She was the spitting image of Palin (or wait, is Palin the spitting image of Fey?). Even Fey's flat Palin-esque accent was perfect; Fey had obviously closely studied the interviews that Palin gave to ABC on Thursday and Friday ...
As (Amy Poehler as Clinton) spoke, Fey-as-Palin struck sexy poses and pretended to fire a shotgun. "What an amazing time we live in," she said. "To think that just two years ago, I was a small town mayor of Alaska's crystal meth capitol."
I loved the route SNL took with it, contrasting Palin’s relative newness, inexperience and fraudulent yet “Manchurian Candidate” feeling with a scorned Hillary Clinton who viewed as an undeserving profiteer of her tough loss in the Democratic Primaries. (A pregnant Amy Poheler looked way more like Clinton than usual because of her puffy face and additional poundage.)
My favorite part was when they compared their battles with sexism, where Hillary had to deal with a lot of negativity and vilifying because of who she was and what she represented (I believe the terms “bitch” and “grating” were thrown around a lot), while Palin is being objectified for her sexuality and good looks, with the bulk of her criticism coming from tangible, suspect issues demonstrating she was not vetted by the McCain campaign.
As for Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance, it was canceled at the last minute due to the campaign’s sensitivity over the Galveston/Houston area being battered by Hurricane Ike. And was that a freaky hurricane to watch? I mostly watched CNN’s coverage reporters getting beat up by wind, rain and the ocean and, oddly, of Anderson Cooper removing, then putting back on then removing then putting back on his red CNN parka.
Per usual, Andy was wearing a fitted-to-obscenely-tight black shirt.
And it was surreal with Houston being a ghost town with the exception of crazy folk who showed up in a chicken costume or pretending to swim behind Anderson as he attempted to report the news.
The way CNN and Cooper himself handle his causal, metrosexual, withholding, but nervous newsman style, I have to say, Anderson seems to be the only anchor on TV who actually displays sex appeal overtly on television. (Rick Sanchez tries, but he’s the Rob Riggle of CNN.) This critique doesn’t mean Cooper’s the only sexy person. Gosh, no. As readers may have noticed, I dubbed Sir TJ Holmes of CNN Weekend the sexiest teleprompter reader, but TJ never wears a muscle shirt when he’s covering some flood or tornado in northern Arkansas.
Although I wouldn’t mind that. Not at all.
Seeing Anderson Cooper in a black muscle shirt is almost the equivalent of a hot news woman baring cleavage or wearing tighter, more alluring outfits while reporting, like the women who do the news on Univision and Telemundo. The Spanish speaking airwaves are filled with voluptuous figures with huge chi-chis, sometimes baring cleavage and oozing sex appeal. FOX News does a lesser, slightly more buttoned up version of this, but CNN and MSNBC are all complicit in hiring young hot people to deliver the news (as chronicled in one of my favorite “The Daily Show” sketches of 2008, “NILF: News I’d Like to Fuck.”)
If those shirts get any tighter during natural disasters I fear CNN will start playing Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" when AC360 comes on.
The weirdness was further contrasted when Dan Rather was brought on via satellite for an interview about storm coverage (since Rather pioneered live hurricane reporting). Rather, of whom I’ve never seen as “sexy,” still has that perfect anchor man voice and devil-may-care panache. Despite being the crappiest of the three major network anchors in the 80s and 90s (he was always coming in third to Peter Jennings and the iconic Tom Brokaw), I love Rather, largely because of his “Ratherisms,” notoriety for spitting out some crazy Texas turn of phrase and his occasional loss of composure, often like he was breaking the “fourth wall” of reporting by going into something bizarre, like ending his newscasts with the word “courage” or saying “somewhere in the Bible it says … keep hope alive” when the Coast Guard was out trying to find John F. Kennedy Jr. after he flew off and got himself killed, further fueling my speculation that his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, is the highlander.
Well … it’s either him or West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, newsman Mike Wallace, news satirist and columnist Andy Rooney or talk show host Larry King.
CNN is pushing all their anchors and reporters to go digital so our favorite Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of the TV News has his own Facebook page (as well as MySpace and he's on Twitter ... although he's done zero out of zero twitters).
Of course I've already friended Sir TJ Holmes of CNN Weekend ever since a dedicated TJ watcher briefed me of his new internet status. (Thanks Martha!)
Per my own rules of not bogarting all the TJ for myself, I chose to share these things with you rather than be a TJ hog. Although it was tempting to scream "MINE!" because you know I'd rather have my future husband all to myself.
I'm so gracious. Yes I am. I'm patting myself on the back right now.
TJ Holmes in an article from USA Today, an article about "upscale" bowling alleys that offer a little fancy pants nosh with a seven-to-ten split. Holmes is talking about Atlanta's Ten Pin Alley where they make "gourmet junk food," including surf-n-turf corn dogs, sticks of lobster, Kobe beef deep-fried and served with honey mustard dipping sauce and truffle mac and cheese balls, made from elbow macaroni, English cheddar and shaved white truffles.
No athletic clothes allowed!
Sayeth Sir TJ of CNN Weekend:
"There are plenty of nice restaurants around Atlanta, but this has its own unique blend. You can't go wrong," says T.J. Holmes, an Atlanta area news anchor who considers himself a regular. Holmes even takes first dates to Ten Pin, "and I usually get a second date out of it, too."
Higher quality picture via the good folks at Upscale Magazine who heard my pleas.
Sister-of-Snob, Big Sis, was able to snag a copy of the August Upscale Magazine por moi in West County, St. Louis where she homesteads. I informed her to "Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie!" so now I have a copy of the picture and article on the site. (Click to enlarge.) This will all be added to the TJ HolmesFlickr page. (For an even larger shot of the article, click here.)
Also, TJ went to UNITY. That's a big diversity journalism conference that I wish I attended (bummer) and will probably try to attend next year in the future. (Along with the Society of Professional Journalists' and the National Association of Black Journalists' conferences. I need to return to networking with more and more journalists. I already couldn't make the "Blogging While Brown" shindig. Money's been tight this year.)
But UNITY posted some video of TJ talking about the biz. All of it sounds sooo familiar. I was originally going to go into television in college, but my writing professors persuaded me to go for an "electronic" journalism degree where I studied both print and broadcast. I still wanted to go into TV, but just my luck, print was the first to offer me a reasonable job ... in Midland, TX. Between it and Bakersfield for almost seven years I wandered in the desert of journalism. It was fun, but hard work, and B-town (big ups!) was definitely the better of the two. I'll always have some love for that Buck Owens worshiping, dusty, Republican red ag/oil town.
As previously reporter on The Black Snob, Upscale Magazine is supposed to have TJ Holmes as their "Maleman" in their August issue.
Well, it's August, Upscale. WHERE'S MY FIX?
I keep going to the Barnes & Noble, the Target, the Walgreens -- nothing. Everyone else put out their August editions in July. Like normal magazines. But noooo ... all I keep starring at is an old picture of Meagan Good. Mind you, I like Meagan Good, but ... YOU OWE ME A NEW PICTURE OF TJ!!!
You haven't updated your Web site. (Which cruelly still features Good.) Where is the August issue? Where? What is the hold up? Has Upscale gone down scale without notice? If Ebony, Essence, Heart & Soul, Vibe, Uptown, XXL, Savoy, Sister 2 Sister, even Rap Pages and Black Hair Sophisticate can get an issue out on time, what is your deal?
For the love of God. It is Aug. 1. Put out your August issue! I beg of you! I have needs!
How anyone could ever discriminate against my little Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of TV News is beyond me. I mean, look at that face? So sweet. So pretty. How could anyone find him threatening? But alas, TJ, like all black men, has to deal with the crap that comes with being "Black In America."
What I loved about his snippet was that he included some personal, "TJ facts" along with his story about racial ignorance at a Bay Area car wash. For instance, the winner of BlackSnob's 2008 Ed Bradley Award for Journalistic Hotness is 5'11" and 165 lbs (he's thin but fit!)
Here's a taste of TJ's views on racism:
I haven’t come in contact with a lot of blatant racism in my life. Yes, I’ve been called the N-word. To be honest, it never really upset me because as soon as that word comes out of someone’s mouth, I’m pretty sure that I’ve won the argument. That person has just confirmed how ignorant they are.
I don’t necessarily consider most people racist. I have, however, seen a lot of racial bias. What I mean by that is people don’t hate me because of the color of my skin, but they simply don’t see me as an equal. Some may say that by not seeing me as an equal, that’s the very definition of racism. Rather, I believe people have so many misconceptions and preconceived notions about black people. They make assumptions based on the color of my skin.
And about that Bay Area car wash?
One of the clearest examples of what I’m talking about is a simple incident at a car wash. I was a news anchor for three years at a station in the Bay Area in California. And when I lived there, I drove a big, white SUV. It had 22″ chrome wheels, dark-tinted windows, and a few personalized touches. It was hot! I would always wash my truck myself at one of those car washes with the pressurized hoses where you spray your vehicle down yourself.
Of course, when I go wash my car, I don’t necessarily look like a news anchor. I look like a guy who’s washing his car. I wear sweats or shorts or jeans with holes, I wear tank tops or t-shirts, I might have on a bandanna or be wearing a baseball cap backwards.
One day a man came over to me as I was washing my truck and said, “Man, I just gotta know. What do you guys do to have nice cars like that?”
He was a nice enough guy and wasn’t really nasty when he asked the question. He truly seemed puzzled about how a young, black man could be driving such a nice car. He went on to ask me if I played for the San Francisco 49ers. Again, I’m 5′11″ and 165 lbs. No, I don’t play for the 49ers.
The guy’s first thought at seeing a young, black man in a nice car was not that I could have gotten it through education and hard work. That is what I mean by bias.
It didn’t cross his mind that maybe this young, black man went to college on an academic, not athletic, scholarship.
If he couldn’t imagine that then he couldn’t imagine that maybe this young, black man graduated from college in four years with a degree.
If he couldn’t imagine that, then he certainly couldn’t imagine that maybe I used my college degree to start a successful career.
And, if he couldn’t imagine that, he certainly couldn’t imagine that maybe, just maybe this young, black man was making more money than him.
Well said, my little sugar loaf. Well said, indeed. West Memphis, Ark., represent! What! What!
But it's not his fault entirely. He interviewed a couple about their book Saturday where they discussed their attempt to have sex every day for a whole year. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my Peanut Butter Cup o' TV News is about as giddy and as horny over this prospect as the next dude, but most don't get to have a cringe worthy interview about it.
Back in April when TJ revealed he didn't cook and ate out all the time I suggested that someone go to Atlanta and cook that Razorback a meal. But ... um ... if he needs more than a meal, I'm going to suggest the rest of you get out of my way. I love you all. But I'm from St. Louis and I'm not afraid to cut you. (Thanks, Tami for the link!)
Thank you, anonymous TJ-aficionado, for sending me a link to this mini-Reese's Peanut Butter Cup nugget with The Snob. This photo is part of a trio of shots featuring CNN Weekend'sTJ Holmes and Betty Nguyen at a photocall for Skirt Magazine. It's sort of freaking me out that with those aviator shades on, TJ looks a lot like my fam, Newport, Ark.'s finest, Cousin Snob, who is also fond of aviator shades. (TJ is from West Memphis, Ark., BTW.)
PS. Also, I've added more pictures to my collection of news reporters and anchors, specifically adding more pictures of war correspondents Christiane Amanpour and Michael Ware of CNN, Lara Logan of CBS and Richard Engel of NBC, all of which I'm so fond of that I'm "this" close to writing porn slash/fiction about them. Check out my collection of reporters, pundits and news anchors here.
An assist from reader, megthebar, who helped me procure this photo of TJ Holmes from The Morning News in Arkansas. TJ, like Mama Snob, is an Arkansan. He grew up in West Memphis and went to the University of Arkansas (Go Razorbacks!)
Holmes was in "The Natural State" to receive a special award for notable Arkansas Alumni. TJ receivedg the Young Alumni Award. The story first ran in the paper October 27 of last year.
Holmes, a native of West Memphis, received a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism in 1999 and now works as a news anchor for CNN in Atlanta. Before joining CNN in September 2006, his career took him to KSNF-TV in Joplin, Mo., KTHV-TV in Little Rock and NBC11 in San Francisco, the fifth market in the country. When Saddam Hussein was executed, T.J. Holmes brought the news into living rooms across the world, the same day that CNN also covered the memorial services of President Gerald Ford and James Brown. Sitting in the anchor chair for eight straight hours, Holmes took the lead as information came in fast and furious with no scripts. He describes it as the biggest and best day of his career.\
That said I have no idea if the woman TJ is pictured with is his girlfriend, wife or random chick. Her name is Dana Baxter. She appears to be very pretty. But this photo is old. As far as I know he's single to mingle. I call dibs!
For more pictures of TJ, click here To get caught up the all the Google Stalking pieces, click here.
TJ Holmes' old co-workers at NBC's Bay Area affiliate goes over a box of old neckties he recently sent them. Holmes never wears the same tie on TV twice, so he gives the extras away.
