fired

Because he's promoting his new series 30 Rock, Lorne Michaels is getting awfully chatty these days about the goings on at his "other show", Saturday Night Live. First, he mentioned that the cast was going to downsize for creative and budgetary reasons. Now, in a talk with Don Kaplan of the New York Post, he goes one step further and says that aside from Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch, who already left to do 30 Rock, four additional cast members are about to get their pink slips. According to the article, the four even know who they are, but the names have not been made public yet. In addition, there will be auditions among the remaining cast in order to fill the "Weekend Update" hole created by Fey's departure.

According to Michaels, change like this is good for the show. "After about four years . . . there's a staleness that comes over the show," he told Kaplan. The reason why he had such a large cast last year, apparently, was because he knew budget cuts were going to be made, and he'd have fresh (read: cheap) names ready to go when it did. But some of the high priced talent, like Amy Poehler and Darrell Hammond, will likely stay on, states Kaplan, as will last year's breakout star, Andy Samberg.

After news leaked that ESPN baseball analyst Harold Reynolds -- one of the only guys on Baseball Tonight that wasn't a raving lunatic -- was let go by the network after 11 years, there was speculation that he got pink-slipped because of one too many incidents of sexual harassment. There was other speculation that he got in a shouting match with BT producers over the show's continuing obsession with the woes of Yankee star Alex Rodriguez. But Reynolds and the network weren't talking.

Until today. This morning, Reynolds confirmed to the New York Post that he indeed was fired for sexual harassment reasons, over what he deemed a misunderstanding. "To be honest with you, I gave a woman a hug and I felt like it was misinterpreted," he tells Andrew Marchand. He also hopes to straighten things out with The Worldwide Leader and come back to fulfill the six-year contract he signed earlier this year. Deadspin, though, cited a blog that said that this was the latest in what was a string of incidents, so we may not be seeing Reynolds argue with John Kruk about on-base percentage anytime soon.

I recently started listening to the podcast of Penn Jillette's radio show. Jillette is the loud, boisterous half of comedy/magic team "Penn and Teller," whose show Penn and Teller: Bullshit! is currently in its fourth season on Showtime. At one point, Jillette suddenly went on a hilarious rant about one director's alleged desire to have Paris Hilton play the role of Mother Theresa in an upcoming movie. Ever the contrarian, Penn's rant was not against Hilton, it was against Mother Theresa, whom he claimed did not actually help people get well, but merely set up places where people came to die due to what Penn claimed was some kind of sick perversion on her part.

I almost blogged about this when I heard it, but I think I was distracted by a shiny object or something, because I forgot about it. However, the AP reports that another radio host didn't cotton to Penn's rant, and sarcastically offered to pay a listener $5,000 to kill Jillette. The host, John London, was fired for his comments, along with the show's producer, Denis Cruz, and Chris Townsend, a sports reporter.

Click here for an MP3 of the Penn Radio episode.

American Idol judge (and my junior high crush) Paula Abdul is being accused by two workers at the Silverton hotel and casinoin Las Vegas of getting them fired. The story goes that Abdul called the front desk in the early morning to change her flight plans for later that morning. The two girls working the front desk began to print out flight schedules, but in the midst of it all were called again by Abdul who told them the flights were all booked. She then blamed them for causing her to miss her flight. The workers, Carol Good and Damon Rosa, were both fired. I won't pretend to know who was right or wrong in this situation, but I was impressed that Good stayed past the time her shift was supposed to end in order to help out, if only because I used to work in the hospitality industry. Typically, once my shift was over I pretty much stopped caring about the residents of the hotel. This makes me a bad person, I know. I've been trying to improve myself through meditation.