More than 700,000 fans are expected to descend on the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, for the final chapter of this year’s Grand Slam tennis tournament.

The US Open tennis tournament, a two-week sports and entertainment extravaganza that begins the week leading into Labor Day weekend, has become the highest-attended sporting event in the world.

In recent years, the US Open has been plagued by extremely hot end-of-summer weather.

Just three years ago Hurricane Irene caused a delay by sweeping through New York one day before the official start.

Rainouts are such a possibility that plans are underway for the construction of a retractable roof on the main stadium.

Once again, I attended the first five days of this spectacular event and with the singular exception of one day of oppressive heat and humidity, the weather conditions were unseasonably balmy, with cool breezes and temperatures mostly in the high 70s.

These conditions were ideal for both spectators and players. As for watching the matches in person, the choices are so numerous that it is almost impossible to keep abreast of the fast-paced action.

The star players – like Maria Sharapova, Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic, to name a few – are mostly playing to the largest crowd at the Arthur Ashe Stadium, with a seating capacity of 23,771, making it the largest tennis venue in the world.

The most fun can be had watching matches at many courts where the seating capacity barely exceeds 1,000, with players that are not as highly ranked but are often more competitively even.

To be sure, it was fun to watch John Isner, the highest ranked American male player seeded at No. 13, going against fellow American Marcos Giron in the first round who happened to be seeded No. 419, but the outcome was almost a foregone conclusion, with Isner winning in three straight sets.

Then there was the Cinderella story of 15-year-old American girl Catherine (CiCi) Bellis, a native of Atherton, Calif., beating twelfth-seeded Slovakian Dominika Cibulkova in three sets, becoming the youngest female player to win a US Open match since Anna Kournikova in 1996.

The upset victory by American teenager Bellis made for great headlines and reams of media stories. But sometimes you get lucky by stumbling upon an unheralded match where the play is equally exciting and unpredictable.

Such was the case on a Wednesday night on Court 13, which has a seating capacity of only 584. The match-up was nearly even, with Israel’s Dudi Sela seeded at No. 83, taking on Argentina’s Carlos Berlocq seeded at No. 63.

Sela, relatively short for a tennis pro, lost the first set 6 games to 1, but came roaring back in the second set to win 6 games to 3, and then won the next two sets to claim the match. Given the small size of Court 13, you couldn’t ask for a better view of a match that was not even televised.

Everyone keeps talking about the dire straits of American men’s tennis, but no one has answers.

Where are today’s Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, or even Andy Roddick, the last American to win the US Open?

Roger Federer claimed the US Open championship five years in a row after Roddick won in 2003, which now seems like ancient history.

At a press conference following his second round victory over German Jan-Lennard Struff, John Isner was asked about the state of American tennis, and could only reply that he’s not worried about the “whole state of American tennis. I’m just doing what I can do as best as I can. Simple as that.”

Armed with a credential, a member of the press can access most areas of the tennis venues with ease, including the Arthur Ashe Stadium with its reserved seating and expensive luxury suites held by the corporate sponsors.

The US Open is more than just a sporting event; it’s more like a festival, with an emphasis on food and entertainment. Inside Ashe Stadium, if you’re so lucky to have courtside seats or access to the suites, you can dine on fine cuisine prepared by celebrity chefs like David Burke and Masaharu Morimoto.

The club level of Ashe Stadium also now features $14 pastrami sandwiches from the famous Carnegie Deli.

Those with more refined appetites can visit the Oyster Bar, which sells one-ounce American caviar for $59 and oysters for $24. I was afraid to ask how many oysters you get for that price. If you have to ask, you can’t afford them anyway.

The culinary delights of the US Open are best expressed by the easily accessible and perennially popular Food Village, a collection of specialty food stands.

New concessions this year included Richard Sandoval’s Maya, serving classic Mexican flavors with a twist, and the Pat LaFrieda Meat Company, featuring its signature steak sandwiches.

Food trucks have become increasingly popular, and so it is only natural that the US Open has the first-ever on grounds food truck located at Court 17, the Moms Grilled Cheese Truck, which is no ordinary cheese vendor.

Fitting to the US Open, the vendor offers local, artisanal breads, meats and cheeses in its gourmet grilled cheese menu.

Opening night provided entertainment with a concert-like appearance by Fitz and the Tantrums, an American neo-soul and indie pop band.

If like me you don’t immediately recognize the band, their songs “Out of My League” and “The Walker” are familiar for perpetual radio play.

My fervent wish is for John Isner to make it pass the third round, or for any American male player to get closer to the finals.

As of now, American victory rests with Serena Williams looking for a third straight championship.

The US Open runs until Monday, Sept. 8, and is being televised at various times by ESPN, CBS and Tennis Channel.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – The Old Time Fiddlers Association continues its monthly First Sunday Fiddlers Jam sessions hosted by the Ely Stage Stop and Country Museum from noon to 2 p.m. 

Fiddlers will meet in the Ely barn to perform their wonderful Americana music. 

The stage stop is located at 9921 Soda Bay Road (Highway 281) in Kelseyville, near Clearlake Riviera, just north of Highway 29 at Kit's Corner.

The pendulum often swings wildly in the world of network television programming, and even the most stable and profitable networks are susceptible to a changing landscape of shifting tastes in the popular culture.

Case in point: The CBS network, which has thrived for years with police procedurals and shows skewering to an older demographic, rolled the dice last year and pursued a different direction, namely launching four comedies and only one drama.

The CBS 2014 fall season is fast approaching, and the ratio of new comedies to dramas has been completely flipped. We’re going back to the good old days.

The one anomaly is that last year’s only new drama, “Hostages,” couldn’t pay the ransom and got canceled.

Two of last year’s four comedies remain on the schedule, “Mom” and “The Millers,” and I am not sure why.

The other two series were dropped, the egregiously bad “We Are Men,” and most famously “The Crazy Ones,” starring Robin Williams, the cancellation of which occurred before his tragic suicide.

The other big news this year about the CBS network is that Nina Tassler, longtime president of CBS Entertainment, got a big promotion to Chairman of CBS Entertainment.

A fixture on the TV critics press tour, Tassler announced that “CBS is also coming off another season as America’s most-watched network, the 11th time in 12 years.” That’s an almost typical yearly refrain.

A few critics challenged Tassler about the network’s lack of diversity, as compared to ABC, for example, which has several new series with mostly minority casts.

The charge was leveled that there’s not a single show on the fall schedule where a non-white person is the star of the show.

Tassler pointed that network programming is a year-round event, and if one were to look at the overall picture it would be evident that one of the biggest stars just happened to fit the diversity mold, namely Halle Berry in the summer science-fiction series “Extant.”

The diversity question offered Tassler an opportunity to plug the one new comedy. “The McCarthys,” though it is about a close-knit, sports-crazed Boston family that is pure vanilla, one of the lead characters in the family is openly gay.

Interestingly, Tyler Ritter, the son of the late comedian John Ritter, plays the part of Ronny McCarthy, the one member of the family disinterested in sports but recruited by his reluctant father (Jack McGee), a gruff high school basketball coach, to become his assistant.

A recognizable figure from many TV shows, Laurie Metcalf plays the part of Ronny’s mom, who claims Ronny is her favorite child, probably because he’s the only who is willing to watch “The Good Wife” with her rather than a sporting event.

If it’s not yet clear, Ronny is the gay family member. This does not upset his mother; she’s only distraught that Ronny wants to leave Boston and his family to take a teaching job in faraway Rhode Island. An abrupt change in career plans should lead to comic relief.

The “NCIS” franchise hardly needs a boost. It is claimed to be the most popular drama on television, drawing a viewership near 20 million. “NCIS: New Orleans” looks promising as a spin-off, and not just because Mark Harmon will be on hand in the beginning for the effective crossover effect.

Drawing Scott Bakula back into primetime as the head of the New Orleans office, “NCIS: New Orleans” looks to succeed on its own merits, regardless of pedigree.

For one thing, the pilot episode was thrilling, with the added bonus of authentic location shots straight out of the Big Easy, a visually compelling metropolis.

“Madam Secretary” is pure fictional drama, but it is sure to invite comparisons to a famous female secretary of state, and I am not talking about Madeleine Albright, whose memoirs have the same title as the CBS show.

Far too attractive for a high government post, Tea Leoni stars as Elizabeth McCord, a college professor and brilliant former CIA analyst tapped for the top diplomatic post.

The shrewd and determined McCord returns to public life at the request of the president, following the suspicious death of her predecessor at the State Department. The president values her deep knowledge of the Middle East and her ability to think outside the box.   

McCord may have to handle intrigue, debate third world problems and finesse foreign dignitaries at work, but that’s just a warm-up to going home at the end of the day to a supportive husband (Tim Daly) and two independently-minded bright children.

CBS Chairman Tassler could have pointed to Maggie Q as a prime example of minority representation in a starring role.

In “Stalker,” Maggie Q stars as Lt. Beth Davis, a strong, focused expert in the field of investigating stalking incidents for the Threat Assessment Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

A recent transfer from the same type of unit in the NYPD’s homicide division, Dylan McDermott’s Detective Jack Larsen has a history of questionable behavior that has landed him in trouble before.

Larsen has a few personal issues involving his ex-wife that cause him to be a borderline suspect for stalking. Besides, he’s got problems with his new boss, Lt. Davis.

That “Stalker” is created by Kevin Williamson, the talent behind “The Following,” should be a clue that this could be an eerie and disturbing drama. Let’s just say that the opening scene of this series is definitely frightening and unsettling, which is likely the effect the creator had in mind.

If the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” just happened to tune into an episode of a new CBS series, that show would have to be “Scorpion,” a high-octane drama that is apparently inspired by a true story of eccentric high-tech genius Walter O’Brien.

O’Brien (Elyes Gabel) and his team of brilliant misfits form the last line of defense against high-tech threats of the modern age.

As Homeland Security’s new think tank, O’Brien’s “Scorpion” team is a collection of socially awkward oddballs who are not comfortable with the outside world.

The nerdy masterminds in “Scorpion” get the perfect job, a place where they can apply their exceptional brainpower to solve the nation’s crises.

This series celebrates nerd power in a way that could make Sheldon and the gang to have a look that is positively retrograde.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – “The Boys of Summer” continue their busy 2014 national touring schedule, bringing their acclaimed Eagles tribute show to Twin Pine Casino & Hotel on Saturday, Sept. 6.

The band recently performed for an overflow crowd at the "Live On The Boulevard" Concert Series in El Dorado Hills, Calif.

The Twin Pine performance begins at 8 p.m.

The Boys of Summer are James Williamson, drums-vocals; Darrel Monson, guitar/vocals; Craig T. Fall, guitar/vocals; Chris Turbis, keyboards/saxophones/acoustic guitar/vocals; Bill Winkler, bass/vocals, five hardworking musicians from Southern California who play and channel some of the greatest music ever created and produced on the West Coast, that being from legendary rock group, the Eagles.

Tickets cost $20 in advance, which includes $10 of “free play” casino money. On the day of the show, tickets cost $25.

Twin Pine Casino & Hotel is located at 22223 S. State Highway 29 in Middletown.

For more information call 707-987-1220 or visit http://www.twinpine.com/ .

Faith Shearin’s poetry is conversational while moving gracefully and almost effortlessly toward conclusions that really have some punch to them.

This one is a good example of that. Shearin lives in Maryland.

Music at My Mother's Funeral

During the weeks when we all believed my mother
was likely to die she began to plan
her funeral and she wanted us, her children,
to consider the music we would play there. We remembered
the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept
the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings,
the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album
about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months
each errand was accompanied by some kind
of dramatic movement. After my brother was born,
there was a period during which she wore a muumuu
and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his
African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted
to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused
to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music
of an automated bell going off every few minutes,
which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter
to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval,
its insistence that someone was unsafe.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2013 by the Alaska Quarterly Review. Faith Shearin’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Piano, Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press, 2011. Poem reprinted from the Alaska Quarterly Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 & 4, by permission of Faith Shearin and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

The FOX television network is coming off a season of struggling series and declining ratings. On top of that, the longtime head of entertainment, Kevin Reilly, suddenly departed the network last May, leading to speculation about the stability of FOX’s executive leadership.

For this summer’s gathering of the nation’s TV critics, Peter Rice, the Chairman and CEO of Fox Networks Group, was asked only one question about Kevin Reilly and it had to do with the perception that he wanted the pilot season to be eliminated.

The answer was a kind of “yes and no” response. So let’s move on.

More interesting is that not one question was asked about FOX’s most promising new drama series for this fall.

That would be “Gotham,” an origin story of the great DC Comics villains and vigilantes that form the essence of “Batman,” which now has a long history of various cinematic iterations.

The only time Peter Rice even mentioned “Gotham” was to note that it will be paired with “Sleepy Hollow,” a returning sophomore series and one of the network’s few successes from last year, in a time slot on Monday nights, because as Rice observed the network has found success by “being the only dramas on Monday night.”

Advance viewing of the first episode of “Gotham” for critics was so closely guarded that the only opportunity occurred on a sunny afternoon on the Warner Brothers studio lot, following a catered lunch and a press conference or two on reality programs I have already forgotten.

As it happens, DC Comics-based programs, whether television shows or movies produced by Warner Brothers, are always cloaked in secrecy prior to public release.

There’s a strong desire to protect this intellectual property from the inevitable bootleg copies that would soon find their way to street vendors along Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown community.

Mark your calendar now for Monday, Sept. 22, at 8 p.m. for the series debut of the one-hour drama “Gotham,” starring Ben McKenzie (“Southland”) as the fresh-faced police detective Jim Gordon, assigned to the homicide squad in Gotham’s police department.

“Gotham” is described as an origin story because Jim Gordon is the city’s future police commissioner during the heyday of Batman’s vigilante crusade to rid the corrupt, rotting metropolis of a hodgepodge of super-villains and their thugs, henchmen and assorted criminal followers.

As a rookie, Gordon is partnered with the brash, shrewd police legend Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue), a veteran detective whose methods seem unorthodox.

For one thing, Bullock has a somewhat unusual relationship with gang boss Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett-Smith), a ruthless underworld character.

Gordon and Bullock stumble upon the city’s highest profile case ever, the murder of local billionaires Thomas and Martha Wayne.

At the scene of the crime, Gordon meets the sole survivor, Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz), the intense 12-year-old son of the murdered couple.

Moved by the boy’s profound loss, Gordon vows to catch the killer. What does Fish Mooney know about the heinous crime? What about her devious, scheming henchman, the Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor), soon to become one of the greatest villains in “Batman” lore.

We also get our first glimpse of the lurking future Catwoman (Camren Bicondova) and the Riddler (Cory Michael Smith), who starts off with a respectable day job.

“Gotham” will follow Jim Gordon’s turbulent and singular rise through the Gotham City police department, but will also focus on the unlikely friendship Gordon forms with the young heir to the Wayne fortune, who is being raised by his unflappable butler, Alfred (Sean Pertwee).

Another drama of great promise is actually a ten-part mystery event series based upon a British program of a different name.

“Gracepoint,” now located in a small California seaside town, seems to mirror the British hit crime drama “Broadchurch.” David Tennant, who was on the British series, stars as detective Emmett Carver.

Resentment is in the air because Carver’s police colleague is detective Ellie Miller (Anna Gunn), who resents that Carver is an outsider recently hired to fill a high position in the police department.

When a young boy is found dead on an idyllic beach, a major investigation gets underway, and the death is soon deemed a homicide.

That such a horrible thing would happen in Gracepoint sparks a media frenzy, which throws the boy’s family into further turmoil and upends the lives of all of the town’s residents.

Everyone is pulled into the investigation. One of the fascinating suspects is Nick Nolte’s Jack Reinhold, a private man who runs the kayak rental service on the beach.

Then there’s the mysterious woman (Jacki Weaver) who lives in the RV park near the coast. “Gracepoint” has the potential to pull you in for every riveting episode.

FOX is heavy with drama this fall. “Red Band Society” is set in the children’s ward of a hospital and its story is narrated by a kid in coma.

This is a coming-of-age drama that follows a group of adolescent patients facing life-threatening medical challenges.

The young actors are most likely unknown to adult audiences. “Red Band Society,” which emanates from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, may be best described as “Breakfast Club” for kids stuck in a medical institution rather than detention. One of the few adult stars, Octavia Spencer is the nurse running the pediatric ward.

At least there’s one new comedy on the schedule and it’s “Mulaney,” a story that is not unlike “Seinfeld.” John Mulaney, a stand-up comic, is the show’s titular star, working and living in New York and whose pals and wacky neighbor (Elliot Gould) insert themselves into his life.

Mulaney is looking for his big break on the comedy circuit, but his life is drastically altered when self-centered comedy legend and game show host Lou Cannon (Martin Short) hires the comic as a writer.

“Mulaney” looks to be promising for the comic’s stand-up routines and the perpetual clashes with his obnoxious boss.

The wild card on the FOX schedule is “Utopia,” an experimental reality series based on a hit Dutch program.

Fifteen pioneering Americans will be moved to a remote location and forced to create a society from scratch. They’ve got limited supplies, wildly diverse backgrounds, and zero bathrooms.

This disparate group will have to build a community without any rules. So what could go wrong? Plenty, I would assume, unless they’ve got some people as wise as our Founding Fathers.

“Utopia” just may turn out to be an adult version of “Lord of the Flies,” and that just may get people to tune in.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.