Pittsburgh Dish

Planet Harveywood: You bum!

Uncle Harvey gets the poop on national story

Dish’s West Correspondent Uncle Harvey Goldenberg was one of the first to get the scoop that a man was detained at LAX yesterday after a wire and magnet were found up his bum.

Yesterday morning, Goldenberg witnessed heavy security at LAX before boarding a flight to Las Vegas. That afternoon, he learned from an off-duty pilot that a Middle Eastern man was found with a wire and magnet up his derrière. A radio station had some details yesterday, but not the full moon.

Goldenberg’s story was confirmed by AP this afternoon:

LOS ANGELES, CA (AP) --Federal officials say a New Jersey man is being held for a mental evaluation and a possible immigration violation after he was found with a suspicious device stuffed into a body cavity at LAX.

The device had a wire and what may have been a magnet concealed in the man's rectum.

The FBI says the device was found when Fadhel Al-Maliki, an Iraqi immigrant, triggered an alert during a secondary screening for a flight to Philadelphia

The terminal remained open during the incident and no takeoffs or landings were affected. But a US Airways jet en route to Philadelphia was diverted to Las Vegas because Al-Maliki's checked luggage already had been screened and put aboard the plane. The plane was searched, declared safe and then cleared for takeoff.

Moral of this story (aside from refraining from wiring your seat in an airport): Always listen to Uncle Harvey.

Planet Harveywood

Introducing Dish's one-man West Coast entertainment bureau

Uncle Harvey is not Dish's uncle, but he is the uncle of Dish's friend and technology guru Kyle and his name is indeed Harvey, so we feel pretty comfy with the monicker. In any event, Harvey J. Goldenberg is an actor. Born in the Bronx and bit by the acting bug, he lit out for Hollywood to pursue his dreams. In his career, Harvey has married Sophia on the Golden Girls, played Army Dentist Dr. Kaplan on MASH, played Mr. Hodnet on Mr. Belvedere and appeared as a member of the Carson Arts Players on the Johnny Carson Show. Check out his website for more roles and personal tidbits.

Harvey, in his infinite kindness, has agreed to be Dish's West Coast entertainment bureau. He'll be reviewing movies, commenting on the culture of Hollwoodland and, frankly, writing whatever the heck he pleases whenever he feels like it, as Dish isn't paying him a dime for any of this. Let's begin with the first installment of Harveywood: The [Rolled Up] Red Carpet Report.

I've lived in the same neighborhood in Hollywood since 1968. The building I've lived in for the last twenty years is about two blocks south of the Roosevelt Hotel where the first Academy Awards was held, the world famous Grauman's Chinese Theater and the new Kodak Theater where the Academy Awards are now presented.

If Hollywood had a hey day, it certainly wasn't during my tenure. Sure, the hippies, derelicts, drug dealers and prostitutes of Pretty Women fame are gone from the boulevard along with colorful places like the lilac, wedding cake building that housed Frederick's of Hollywood and clothiers to the stars like Sy Amber. In their place are fast food joints, schlock shops for tourists. There are a few vestiges of the good old days like the 1924 Musso & Frank Grill (not one of my favorite eating places, but a friend loves it. Go explain for taste) and the restored theaters like Grauman's Chinese, The El Capitan (which exclusively runs Disney fare) and The Egyptian built by Sid Grauman in 1922 and which now houses American Cinematheque.

Despite the hype, for the most part, the old Hollywood is just a memory that comes alive once a year. That is the night of the Oscars. It's the night no matter how cold, a bevy of glistening women bare their backs and parade with their escorts down a luxurious red carpet and into a huge auditorium so they can be seen by and nervously rub shoulders with people most of them have only seen on the screen.

Not to be left out of the excitement, I moseyed up to Hollywood Boulevard the morning of the Academy Awards.

Instead of being able to look down the street to see the final preparations for Hollywood's biggest night, barricades and eight or ten foot high fences for security reasons, shielded the sight from view. The best I could do was to hold the camera over my head and shoot.

Last year, it had taken the crew several days to demolish the Hollywood set that ran the very long block between Highland Avenue and Orange Drive. This year the tent city for the press, the scaffolding for the lights and cameras and the army of eight foot "Oscars" they'd built for the 79th Academy Awards was for the most part gone by morning.

All that remained was rubbish from the night before, a golden curtain still draped for the occasion and a thirty foot gold Oscar standing guard at the entrance of the Kodak Theater watching the last remnants of the magic of the night before disappear with the morning light.

From Hollywood,
Harvey

Photo by Harvey Goldenberg