Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Charlie Steiner!  

In keeping with the "theme" of this blog (click here for our Mission Statement), I generally try to keep the topic focused in one way or another on Hollywood. 

But in the high-volume business of internet blogtasticating, you're forced to break a rule now and then, especially if the rule is kind of stupid and you're the writer of the blog and the one who thought it up anyway. 

So that disclaimer brings us back to the great Charlie Steiner, the longtime ESPN broadcaster most famous not for his hard-hitting journalism, but for laughing uncontrollably pretty much every time he anchored Sportscenter. 

Charlie was born in 1949 in New York City. After graduating from a college I've never heard of, he eventually made his way up the radio ladder until he began work at what was then a piece of shit TV station called ESPN, in 1988. 

This is where he came to my attention, as there was a point in my life where I watched Sportscenter religiously. Charlie Steiner was my favorite anchor of Sportscenter in those days, mostly because, as you can see above, he inadvertently screwed up the show a lot. As a young kid who could barely pick his nose without falling off the couch, I could relate to that. 

Sadly, Charlie left ESPN in 2002 to move into baseball announcing full time, first for the Yankees and now for the Dodgers. And from my perspective, that means he's pretty much dead, since I care less about baseball than I do about the dietary habits of moray eels. 

But before Charlie left ESPN, he starred in some of the most hilarious commercials ever made, the original set of "This is Sportscenter" spots. So, for all you sports fans out there, I leave you with this: