February 28, 2021

So it's come to this. Today, I don't have a rambling introductory section leading into the power rankings proper to get the writerly juices flowing. I brainstormed a few ideas and debated whether any of them had the ability to stand on their. I found each idea wanting...

When I was a little kid, my family had a Commodore 64. The kids played games on it. I think occasionally my Dad used it for some kind of accounting software, but I didn't care about that. That stuff was for adults. To me it was a game machine. We had a bunch of games for it - most of them cracked or bootlegged, I'm sure. I could do at 30,000 words on the best and worst games for the Commodore 64 (Legacy of the Ancients was the best. The worst is up for grabs - 95% video games in the 80's had a single gimmick that was a knockoff of another game - e.g. Jumpman is Donkey Kong.) Staying the course, the game that popped into my head as I sat down for this entry was Jeopardy:

Jeopardy had a "Potpourri" category for random, unrelated questions... er, I mean answers. I think it was something they used to do more in the TV show's early days, but I haven't seen a Potpourri category in years. Granted I'm not the biggest Jeopardy fan in the world, so they could have snuck one by me. In case you're wondering, 64K of RAM is not that much. So if you played the game 10-20 times, categories and questions would start repeating and you could run the table if you wanted. My brother played and always named his player Ironhorse after a character from the short lived 1988 TV show War of the Worlds (like all good things produced in Canada!) I don't recall ever seeing an episode, but I would have been 4 or 5 at the time, so who knows. I didn't really get the reference then, and I don't now. 

My flagging recall initially brought forth the name was Ironside, which was a 1967 show about a paralyzed detective starring Raymond Burr. Not to be confused with the actor Michael Ironside (Canadian!) from, well everything, but also Starship Troopers. Ironside predates my brother by too much, so I plumbed the cobwebs of memory and pulled out War of the Worlds - a TV show I've never seen, and... voila! Wikipedia provides Ironhorse. A tenuous memory is made firm again. As a little kid, I suppose would have been more familiar with an obscure TV show my brother watched and I did not than the famous Orson Welles radio play...

All of this is only tangentially related to how I was going originally going to start this recap entry sans ideas, but the gist is that I was going to do a "Potpourri" intro of random unrelated thoughts. Which got me thinking about, how did the idea of a calling a collection of random thoughts "Potpourri" pop into my head? From what room of my highly disorganized mind palace do these thoughts emerge? Well, 20 minutes of pulling on that thread and you have a perfectly serviceable (?) introduction apropos of nothing. I live by the mantra, "Apropos of nothing." I have it embroidered on my pocket squares. (Not really.)

One of the bits I was going to do as part of the Potpourri intro was ranking animals that are indigenous to Australia - I may still be a bit stuck on Australian Open tennis. This could definitely happen in the future. It's not like CBS Sunday Morning is going off the air any time soon.

Speaking of CBS Sunday Morning, The CBS Sunday Morning Power Rankings!

1) Lee Cowan

After chastising myself for weeks, about undervaluing the tireless work of Lee (seriously, three 8s and a 7 - am I on drugs!) Lee gets the nod for the top spot. Truly this could have been a three way tie, but the judges took into consideration past contributions, which is why the criminally underrated (at least by my accounting, which is the only one that matters here) vaults up to numero uno.

(Did you know that Uno was invented in Cincinnati? Sorry I need to focus up.)

Like all the best Sunday Morning stories, a look back at The Joy of Painting host, Bob Ross, is the story we never knew we needed until watching it. At my high school, the student body would spontaneously designate certain days to ironically "honor" whatever captured the zeitgeist of the school. One such recipient was Bob Ross. I think we became temporarily obsessed with Bob because of the hair. It takes chutzpah to pull off the white afro:

(We also had a Ron Gant Day, despite the fact that he played his one and only season with the Reds 7 years prior. We were a strange group of kids.)

I was by no means an aficionado of Joy, but every time I saw it come up in the channel guide as a teenager, I would yell out, "BOB ROSS!" and flip to it because of ironic teenager syndrome. That being said, I was truly surprised at how many of the paintings from the Joy clips they used in this segment I recognized. Some things just have a way of burrowing deeply into the mind I guess. That or Bob Ross paintings are remarkably similar and rely on a finite set of components: clouds, pine trees, water, birds, mountains.

Anyway, there were some delightful tidbits in the segment:

• The Joy of Painting was basically filmed in the living room of a house in Muncie, IN.
  
• Bob Ross would meticulously practice the paintings he was going to for each show days ahead of time to be sure that he could get one done in under 30 minutes. It was somewhat reassuring to know that no he was not just coming up with these on the spot. There was serious effort involved.
  
• Lee Cowan sitting in on a Joy of Painting class and producing a perfectly cromulent landscape.
• The Smithsonian recently purchased four Bob Ross originals for their permanent collection.

Revisionism of the artistic merits of Bob Ross aside, I'm not sure Bob would care if any of his work hangs in the Smithsonian. He was more interested in being a teacher. He was more interested in what you and I could paint than in what he could. And it wasn't about the artistic merit. It was about, well, the joy you got from painting. So let W. paint his dogs in peace if he wants to. He's not doing it for you. Watching Lee paint made me think that even I could do it. That maybe there is something latent inside me, planted during trips to Baker Hunt all those years ago.

Alas, if that were only the case. I've resigned myself to the fact that my talents do not lie in the visual or audio arts. But, oh how I enjoy them.

2) Mo Rocca

If I could be any Sunday Morning correspondent, it would be Mo Rocca. Mo, the first runner up in this week's power rankings, gets to interview the people I'd want to interview and go to the places I'd want to go. I'll go ahead and plug Mobituaries one more time for good measure.

I have a childhood love of LeVar Burton. The segment classified LeVar Burton fans into 3 groups - those who know him from Roots, those who know him from Reading Rainbow, and those who know him from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I am actually an overlap of groups 2 and 3, I grew up on both Reading Rainbow and TNG. I actually remember Abiyoyo from Reading Rainbow and Geordi was/is one of my favorite Star Trek characters. I present one of the greatest TV moments from my youth:

(About 2:30 minutes in Michael Dorn says, "Step aside! I take large steps." I still say that at random to this day because I am so tickled by it.)

I love the way Mo includes the trailer for Roots is included to show how many stars of the day were in it. Mo loves his TV history and one could easily argue that nothing on TV was or has been quite as historic as Roots. I'm also a sucker for Battle of the Network Stars clips and there is a dunk tank clip with LeVar and Robert Conrad. 

(Most people have mixed feelings about Bill Simmons, but credit where credit is due: the race between Gabe Kaplan and Robert Conrad was the best Network Stars moment. How crazy was that show? It's a shame that something like this can never exist again, but I'll spare you a diatribe on why trying to revive it was a dumb idea.)

Closing thoughts on LeVar Burton. Apparently, he came close to becoming a Catholic priest as a young man. I come from a Catholic background and I always get a little excited when I hear a story like this. I want to shout, "See! Religious people aren't always weirdos!" I defy you to dislike LeVar Burton. He also has a park in Sacramento named after him and this is what he wore to the dedication:

Damn, he looks cool wearing that. Is it racist to be a little jealous that black person can pull off that look off, while I, most decidedly, cannot?

3) Serena Altschul

(Second Runner up)

I love snow. In theory, I love skiing - I've only actually been once in my life. I live where I live. But loving snow, I naturally loved the Winter Olympics as a kid. They took snow days and turned them into sports! I distinctly remember rollerblading down hills as a kid with plastic wiffle ball bats serving makeshift ski poles to reenact slalom events from the Olympics. Also this look of shock was the best moment of the 2018 Winter Olympics:

It is always a treat when Serena Altschul does a Sunday Morning story. I seriously think we should give strong consideration to having her doing a complete newscast while skiing down a mountain - she looks quite at home on the slopes. According to her IMDB page, where she pulls of a look with a high degree of difficulty, she made an appearance as herself in Josey and the Pussycats - a movie I feel worked fairly well as satire despite the middling reviews. I mean, it's not great, but it ain't bad - 2.5 stars.

Something that is apropos of the story for a change: for some reason, a kids chapter book called Avalanche stuck with me. It was undoubtedly purchased via a Scholastic book order and it is about a teenager who gets buried in an avalanche and goes through what he did and thought about to survive. I think he was trapped for a couple days in the story - I'm not researching this. He played mental games to try and stay alert and wiggled his fingers and toes as much as he could to try and stave off frostbite. *Spoiler alert* In the end he gets rescued, but I think does lose some toes to frostbite. This segment made me question the plausibility of that obscure youth novel.

4) Nancy Giles

Nancy Giles and her awesome red rimmed glasses are back for a second week in a row. Honestly, when I started the rankings, I didn't expect Nancy to be making a hard push for the top spot, but it's only a matter of time.

The segment lives and dies based on the quality of the music. It turns out, The 5th Dimension were highly underappreciated by me. At the beginning of the segment, I kept yelling, "Play Aquarius!" at the TV like an annoying fan screaming "Freebird!" at a concert. I dropped it once the segment definitively proved to me that Dimension had many other great songs. It may just be that for some odd reason, Age of Aquarius was a random part of my parent's record collection. Not that they had many. I think they had Aquarius, a Simon and Garfunkel greatest hits, the Chariots of Fire soundtrack, Thriller, and the Star Wars soundtrack. So a small, yet eclectic group or records. Marylin McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. still sound great. To Mr. Davis Jr., I'm sure you already appreciate your wife of many years, but good job locking that down.

I don't know much about The 5th Dimension beyond this segment, but in every clip the first person my eye is drawn to is Ron Townson. The big guy just had a cool look. Not that the others didn't.

5) Snowy Owls

Nature! The nature segment is still, regrettably, too short. Birds are cool and are often the bellwether for how ecosystems are fairing, which is unfortunately not too well in most cases. Owls may be the coolest of all birds. Owls keep rodent pests in check. They were cool before Harry Potter and they'll be cool long after. It has recently come to my attention that Selma Hayek and Big Boi keep owls as pets. I... I don't know how to feel about that.

The prospect of Snowy Owls in Ohio drives all the girls and boys crazy.

6) Jane Pauley

I'm no longer punishing the host for the disappearance of Sunday Morning Almanac. Jane is always good, and someday we'll do a historical ranking of the hosts. We'll all be pretty happy when COVID has subsided enough for Sunday Morning to be hosted from a studio and not in front of a green screen - I'm not positive on that, but it has had that green screen look for a year now.

Absent Sunday Almanac or her own segment contribution, I've still decided to put Jane at #6 on the basis of her red dress/white jacket ensemble and the fact that none of the other stories reached out and grabbed me.

7) David Pogue

Once we no longer measure time in units of coronavirus, will David Pogue become less frequent a contributor to Sunday Morning? I don't want to say I'm getting tired of him. It's just that, there's only so many angles to tackle to this thing. Also his sunny disposition is a strange juxtaposed up against the existential crises he is prone to covering. At this point, I'm starting to think that David Pogue is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. War, Pestilence, Famine, Death - all covered by David Pogue in a strangely upbeat way. Please don't take this wrong way David. Sometimes we just get burnt out.

There is a good tip for checking the effectiveness of masks - shine a light through them. If you can see the threads or even space between threads, they are crap. Those gator mask pull up things are crap.

8) Tracy Smith

I have no opinion on Ellen Pompeo. I have not seen one full minute of Grey's Anatomy in my life. In fact when I saw a commercial for it maybe 4 years ago, I was like, "That's still on? You can't catch SVU, just give it up." (Yet somehow, I remember that Private Practice was it's failed spinoff. There were a lot of commercials for that once upon a time. Ad saturation can't buy you love, ABC. Speaking of which, I wonder how long Clarice and The Equalizer will last on CBS.)

In conclusion, before they introduced the segment and I only saw the name Ellen Pompeo, my first thought was, "I can understand interviewing Cindy McCain, who cares about Mike Pompeo's wife?" Sorry Ellen, I am not in the demographic for your show. Feel free to slap me if we ever meet.

9) Steve Hartman, Jim Gaffigan (tie)

"'At the time you thought you were rescuing her.' Little did he know he was saving his savior." Man, is that a cliche setup for a story about a rescue dog. Except it is literally, not figuratively, true in the Hartman story about a man who has a stroke and is dragged to his phone by his very large and very strong dog. Call me cold and heartless, but I am not a dog person. (You're cold and heartless!) Fine, but I have my reasons.

Gaffigan's been in lockdown for a long for a long time. A year on, the segments are starting to run a little thin. It's not his fault. We're all experiencing some form of psychic repetitive stress disorder.

10) Martha Teichner

Look, I understand the link is really to an Erin Moriarty about #MeToo and McDonald's. It's an awful story. Don't sexually harass teenagers. Just don't do it. Or don't sexually harass anyone. Is that so hard?

I understand these stories need to be told. Otherwise this crap just keeps happening because people look the other way. I'm not one to quote scripture, but I'm sure there's one about living in the light and not in darkness or not doing in darkness what you wouldn't do in the light or letting the light shine on all things. (I should really look that up to, you know, actually get it right.) Well, this is the journalism that shines a light. So don't be a damn hypocrite McDonald's. Like most of the world's most powerful corporations, you could stop it if you wanted to.

But I don't really come to Sunday Morning for hard journalism, even though it insists on doing that from time to time. If you're going to do a segment more at home on 60 Mintues or 48 Hours on Sunday Morning, in my head I'm going to the museum with Teichner.

I'm sure there are lots of typos. I'll edit this in the morning. It's late.

Update 20 hours later: It has now been edited, boy that was a rough rough draft. Maybe I should just wait before posting next time. What say you non-existant fans?