Hasta La Gadget!

Break out the puffy shirts and grab a marble rye, it’s time to celebrate Jerry Seinfeld’s birthday.

The comedian’s show was an entertainment staple in the ’90s and is still insanely popular today. Hulu even grabbed the streaming rights for a total amount that Vandelay Industries could only dream of.

Now, 26 years after the show premiered, the comedian turned 61 years old, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that. To celebrate Jerry’s big day, HuffPost Entertainment spoke with some of the former “Seinfeld” writers — Spike Feresten, whose Esquire show “Car Matchmaker” is onto its second season; Jeff Schaffer, co-creator of “The League“; and Andy Robin, who is now a medical doctor — to learn about the behind-the-scenes stories fans might not know about.

1. After getting denied by the real Soup Nazi, Jerry sent his girlfriend in his place to get soup.

Image: PandaWhale

Before the eighth season of “Seinfeld,” Jerry went with the writers to get food from the real “Soup Nazi” in New York, despite Feresten telling him the guy was not happy about the episode. Feresten says Seinfeld was berated and denied service, but the comedian sent his girlfriend back in the restaurant later: “The Soup Nazi did not recognize her, and he was able to get his soup, but I think he believed me after that.”

2. George’s answering machine message was inspired by a real one that the writers would listen to before meetings.

Feresten says Jeff Schaffer found a girl’s answering machine message that was “The Greatest American Hero” song, and the staff would laugh about it in brainstorm meetings: “For two weeks, that’s how we started every kind of brainstorming session– listening to this girl’s message. Then somebody said, ‘We’ve got to do this as a story. We’ve gotta give it to George.'” They added it to an episode and left a message on the woman’s machine saying, “Watch ‘Seinfeld’ tonight.”

3. Sometimes the writers had no idea what happened in a pitch meeting with Larry David and Jerry.

Both Feresten and Robin said they didn’t quite know what had happened after their initial pitch meetings with Larry and Jerry. Robin said he had booked the job in the meeting, but he still had no idea until his agent called a week later. Feresten said he was just telling the pair about this “weird soup guy” he went to, and they said, “That’s your first episode. You’re doing the Soup Nazi.” Feresten added, “Then they told me to get out. I was so confused.”

4. The Junior Mint was originally supposed to be popcorn.

Image: BuzzFeed

Robin’s original idea for “The Junior Mint” was to have popcorn fall into the patient because Kramer was treating surgery like going to a movie. Robin said, “I was on the phone with my brother, running the story by him, and he said, ‘No, make it Junior Mints because it’s funnier.'” So he did.

5. The movie name and slug line for “Death Blow” were taken from a real ad.

Image: Tumblr

In one episode, Jerry is forced to bootleg a movie called “Death Blow.” Feresten says he came across the ridiculous concept in a real ad: “Some kid had money, or perhaps his dad gave him money, to sell his idea called ‘Death Blow.’ We took the actual pitch and name of that movie from the ad and put it in the episode.”

6. The writers painted a traffic cop vehicle like a fighter plane and drove it through the “Gilligan’s Island” set on breaks.

“So we’re all sitting around, and we decided to get like a Cushman [utility vehicle] like what traffic cops have, and we ended up buying it and getting it painted with like a big mouth and evil grin,” explained Schaffer. “The Radford lot used to have the old set of where ‘Gilligan’s Island’ was, so we would drive it into Gilligan’s lagoon.”

7. Everyone thought some of the most memorable episodes would ruin the show.

Image: Giphy

In addition to thinking “The Soup Nazi” might fail, there were also a lot of doubts about Elaine’s wacky dance in “The Little Kicks.” Feresten says Larry David was against the story, and he only got it approved after David left.

“I remember walking through at rehearsal,” the writer recalled. “Jennifer Crittenden pulled me aside after Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] did the dance for the first time and said, ‘Are you sure about this? Are you sure you’re not ruining Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ career?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ That’s the year she won an Emmy.”

8. The “Dolores” joke was yelled out by an audience member.

In “The Junior Mint,” Jerry struggles to guess his girlfriend’s name, which supposedly sounds like a female body part. For a final joke, he yells, “Dolores!” out of his window. Up until an audience member shouted out the name, Robin said the girlfriend’s true name was going be a mystery.

“When the audience member shouted it out, and the audience laughed, it was like this is a great exclamation to put on the end,” said Robin.

9. The writers often put their real friends’ names in scripts to “give them a thrill.”

Robin told HuffPost that Bob Sacamano, a mysterious friend Kramer often spoke of, was a real acquaintance or friend of writer Larry Charles. Feresten says a number of other characters were also based on real people. The real Kramer even had a real bus tour.

10. Some episodes have running gags only the writers notice, like the phrase “heat pump.”

Robin says there are a lot of little inside jokes in episodes, “heat pump” being one of them. He explained, “Gregg [Kavet] and I were kind of nerdy, and we just liked making sort of these obscure science-y references. We weren’t looking to get the phrase into the scripts. It just sort of worked out that way.”

11. Festivus was a real holiday invented by the father of one of the writers.

Image: Giphy

Schaffer says Festivus was an actual holiday celebrated by writer Dan O’Keefe’s dad: “There was a pole, and an airing of grievances for sure. […] A lot of times, the stories of real life are still better than sitting there and manufacturing stories.”

Happy birthday, Jerry Seinfeld! Thanks for “serenity now.”

Image: Giphy

All Getty images unless otherwise noted.

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Botched executions, inmate exonerations, lethal drug boycotts and admissions of prosecutorial misconduct — in recent years opponents of the death penalty in the United States have been calling attention to serious concerns about when and how the state kills.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the closely watched case of Glossip v. Gross, which centers on the constitutionality of using the drug midazolam in executions.

The plaintiffs, all inmates on Oklahoma’s death row, argue midazolam has no pain-relieving properties and “cannot reliably produce a deep, comatose unconsciousness” to ensure the inmate doesn’t experience “intense and needless pain and suffering” when the paralytic and heart-stopping drugs are injected.

The state of Oklahoma argues that midazolam is humane and effective.

The court is expected to issue its ruling by early to mid-June, and how it will rule is far from obvious.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt told HuffPost via email: “Seven previous courts have considered the same facts that will be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. All previous courts have ruled that the lethal injection protocol used by Oklahoma is constitutional. My office believes the U.S. Supreme Court, after considering these facts, will also find that Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol is constitutional and thus allow the sentences for these heinous crimes to be carried out in accordance with the law.”

Fordham Law professor and death penalty expert Deborah Denno told The Huffington Post, “I find it very hard to predict what the court’s going to do. I do think this is a court that’s going to be much more educated in pharmacology and science and medicine than it was in 2008” in the case of Baze v. Rees.

It’s “a statement in itself” that the court chose to hear the case in the first place, Denno noted.

How we got here

Currently 32 states have the death penalty, and all of them use lethal injection as the primary method of execution. For years, states used a fairly similar three-drug protocol in which the first drug, sodium thiopental (also know as sodium pentathol), was used to render the inmate unconscious, a second drug stopped respiration, and a third drug essentially induced cardiac arrest. In the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, which challenged that protocol, the court ruled in a 7-2 decision that Kentucky’s protocol did not violate the Eighth Amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment.

Nevertheless, drug manufacturers decided either to stop selling sodium thiopental to prisons or to stop making the drug altogether, forcing departments of corrections to look for alternatives.

Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and history at Hofstra University, told The Huffington Post Tuesday that in the wake of Baze, a patchwork of protocols sprang up where there previously had been just one.

Now many states use midazolam as part of a three-drug protocol. Other states, like Georgia, have started using lethal doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital on its own.

“Baze was a spectacular failure because [the court] didn’t provide clear guidance to anyone,” Freedman said.

What’s at stake

In states like Oklahoma that have a three-drug protocol, the controversial sedative midazolam is the first drug deployed. It was used for the first time in 2014 in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

“The case is a very narrow case,” said Dale Baich, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “We’re simply asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that states cannot use midazolam as part of the lethal injection protocol.”

“If we’re successful in the Supreme Court, it doesn’t mean that lethal injections cannot go forward,” Baich said. “Oklahoma can purchase pentobarbitol. Since a stay was issued in our case, Texas and Missouri and Georgia have all carried out executions using pentobarbitol.”

If the court’s opinion is broad, however, it could ripple out to other states, according to Rick Halperin, a death penalty and human rights expert at Southern Methodist University.

“The decision has the potential to affect other states’ protocols, even if they have a different one from Oklahoma,” Halperin said. “It depends on if the order is narrowly applied just to Oklahoma or more broadly.”

Who to watch

“We have four justices who are pretty fed up with the way things are going,” Denno said, “but even [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor’s dissent in the stay [for Oklahoma inmates] was a narrow dissent. It seems pretty clear than Kennedy is going to be the swing vote.”

Denno suggested that evolving public opinion about the death penalty could also be an X-factor.

“We always know the justices are looking at the surveys, the reports. They’re factors we know the court considers, but how much they weigh them is an open question,” Denno said. “The court certainly isn’t immune to what’s happening in the public sphere, and they’re not supposed to be.”

Another figure to watch will be Oklahoma’s expert witness, Dr. Roswell Lee Evans. Though doctors are ethically barred from participating in executions, Evans has previously offered testimony that inmates “would not sense the pain” of an execution after receiving a large dose of midazolam.

Sotomayor is likely to have some of the strongest opinions on this score. She wrote previously she was “deeply troubled” by Evans’ research, which she criticized for not citing any case studies and for appearing to rely heavily on the website Drugs.com as a source.

Possible outcomes

Abolitionists who hope the court will strike down the death penalty entirely will almost certainly be disappointed by the ruling: All the experts interviewed by The Huffington Post agreed that SCOTUS tends to write its opinions narrowly and is unlikely to address any wide-ranging questions about the death penalty.

“Technically the court could make the opinion so broad that it would get rid of the death penalty,” Denno said. “The court isn’t going to do that.”

Halperin agreed: “The court is certainly, almost assuredly, not poised to strike down lethal injection as a method of execution. It’s never struck down any method of execution. The court is going to allow executions to continue.”

Freedman said the court has an interest in ruling narrowly if they want a consensus.

Halperin, for his part, thinks Glossip v. Gross will be a small but nonetheless meaningful step toward the eventual elimination of the death penalty in the U.S.

“It took 17 years — from 1988 to 2005 — for the court to see that executing juvenile offenders was wrong. It took 13 years — from 1989 to 2002 — for a pro-death penalty Supreme Court to decide executing someone with mental disabilities is wrong,” Halperin said. “We’re now at a point where a lot of people can really see an end to this.”

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The regional response in March 2015, to the advance of Iranian-backed Shia Houthis on the Southern Port of Aden in Yemen exposed two very revealing components of Middle Eastern geo-politics.

The first was the ability of Saudi Arabia to galvanize the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Arab League (AL) into forming an 11-country coalition, mobilizing 150,000 troops and wielding over 200 jets with air-to-ground capability and Naval Gun Fire Systems — all within 48 hours.

Second, was the clear prioritization by the GCC and AL that places Iran as the central threat to regional stability vice the metastasizing lunatics of The Islamic State (I.S.) across North Africa and the Middle East.

Iran’s influence is indeed expanding in the region. In October 2013, I spoke to Hezbollah Member of Parliament, Nawar Sahli, in Hermel, just south of the Syrian border, who spoke about the expanding sphere of the Iranian-backed proxy force outside of South Lebanon.

Nawar Sahli – Lebanese MP for Hezbollah

Hezbollah’s engagement in the Syrian conflict in support of Bashar al-Assad, was marked by the battle for the strategic town of Qysayr early in 2013, against Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Jabhat al-Nusra rebels. I interviewed members of the Free Syrian Army in the Qalamoun region of Syria on Lebanon’s border in October 2013, who confirmed that Hezbollah were not only omnipresent in the area, but wielding a ferocious artillery capability. Abu Khalid (below) commanded approximately 20 fighters, and is, according to sources in Lebanon, now deceased.

Free Syrian Army Commander – Qalamoun

Free Syrian Army Rebels – Qalamoun

Today, as the Syrian civil war enters its fourth year, the threats have become exponentially complex. I.S. has declared the Northern Syrian town of Raqqa its so-called capital with regional territorial aspirations spanning across North Africa and the Middle East. As a consequence, al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as well as Hezbollah remain firmly ensconced in Syria.

Undermining the common notion of sectarian strife in the region, Assad is actively avoiding targeting I.S, in a clandestine marketing campaign that supposedly positions his regime as a better alternative to the Syrian people, than the barbaric atrocities of al-Baghdadi’s henchmen. You would be totally within your rights to question the difference between the horrendous effects of Assad’s indiscriminate barrel bombs versus the systematic executions of I.S. In the Syrian towns of Aleppo and Raqqa, both atrocities are weekly [if not daily] occurrences. Iran, clearly, have a preference.

In Eastern Iraq, Iran is also backing Shia aligned Populist Mobilization Forces, including the Badr organization and the Hezbollah Brigades, that are taking an equally brutal approach to any individual or groups suspected of belonging to, or sympathizing with I.S. The rapid onslaught by I.S. militants across Iraq last summer was greeted by the capitulation of Government of Iraq forces, and the subsequent capture of Mosul and Tikrit by the jihadists. Arguably, had it not been for the Kurdish peshmerga and Shia militia forces, Kirkuk, Erbil and the provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin would have also fallen, placing I.S firmly at Iran’s doorstep.

And what of Iran’s interests in Yemen? Recent evidence suggests that I.S has already arrived, whilst an Al Qaeda franchise has been creating instability in the country for 6 years. AQ on the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) was formed in 2009, is headquartered in Yemen, and has a mandate of conducting terrorist attacks on the West.

The Houthis are a key pillar of volatility in Yemen but as the National Dialogue Conference demonstrated, to ignore the fracturing of society created by decades of Yemeni rule under President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who established an elite foundation imparting wealth and privilege to a minority makes a long-term political solution difficult. Saleh continues to undermine the current displaced President Abdrabu Mansour Hadi to this day.

In the short-term, the relentless bombing of Shia militia in Yemen is redistributing the balance of power in favor of those groups in the South and East more closely aligned to austere interpretations of Sunni Islam and jihadists movements. Moreover, AQ & I.S.’s ability to exploit power vacuums created by intensive military campaigns is a lesson state actors should be weary of.

It is no coincidence that Iran’s interests reside in areas that are, or could, succumb to a rising tide, nay tsunami, of cult-like jihadists spewing a demented version of Sunni Islam with dangerous territorial objectives. The Saudi’s may think their primary objective of degrading the Houthis and countering the threat of Iranian influence in Yemen is almost done. But if I.S. gain a stronger foothold in the embattled country as an undesired consequence of the Saudi-coalition bombing campaign, the real problem may only just starting.

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One might think that a guy who was an NFL general manager for 16 years would be more composed during an interview.

But NFL Network draft expert Charley Casserly seemed totally rattled when Dan Hellie asked him an unscripted question.

The query didn’t seem particularly challenging: In the clip above, Hellie merely asks Casserly what questions the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who own the first pick for Thursday’s NFL Draft, would ask of potential No.1-pick Jameis Winston’s middle school teachers and high school coaches for the team’s background research. But Casserly balked.

“I’m not gonna answer any specific questions,” he said. “We didn’t talk about that inside.”

Hellie tried to proceed but Casserly interjected, “Na, na, na, you don’t ask me a question we haven’t talked about.”

Then Casserly appeared to be unaware that the interview was live and still asked for a do-over even when he was told they were on the air. Hellie kept his cool and the segment finally resumed.

Curious, no?

H/T Sports Grid

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