November 7, 2021
I feel bad about not having time for last week's episode, but last week was hectically busy. Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but I could have used that extra hour of sleep right around Halloween. And I'm not really even a Halloween person. Last week's episode was good, so I'll make time for it soon.
Usually I spill way (way) too many words by way of introduction. Since nobody reads this blog (except for David Pogue, occasionally) I don't worry too much about alienating readers with inane blather they don't care about. You come here just wanting an episode recap? Usually I'm going to make you go through a couple thousand words about tennis or music or biking or whatever.
I sometimes share little tidbits about myself - enough that you could probably track down who I am in real life if you wanted to. Eeven though I am a private person, I'm not too worried about that though. That would take time and effort that I assume most people do not have. At least time and effort that I don't have. And aren't we all inherently narcissists that assume that all others share our thoughts/motivations/worldview? So if I wouldn't put in the effort, god help me if someone else would.
I get off topic easily, but the point is that I'm comfortable sharing some oblique references to my personal life because this blog also serves, for better or worse, (worse) as a de facto journal of my thoughts, feelings, and general musings. It's a way for me to safely shout into the void and unburden myself of certain things, i.e. catharsis.
However this week, there are personal things I'm dealing with that I'm not comfortable addressing in this space, even in an oblique way that I naively believe gives me some sense of anonymity. This week, I'm not aiming for catharsis, but merely distraction. For better or worse? You decide.
I already tried listening to music for distraction, but there are too many reminders. There are only so many ways to arrange notes so songs that I don't know remind of songs that I do know which of reminds me of... well, I already said I don't want to talk about it.
Sometimes you listen to a song for which you have much fondness. Such a song becomes detached from itself and becomes only about your relationship with it. You don't think about what the song actually means, just what it means to you which may or may not be relevant to the actual meaning. And then you go through some stuff and you hear it again for the first time. What was once beautiful is now just sad - even though it was always sad. As someone once pointed out to me, "You've changed."
Case in point:
On the other hand, I did finally finish reading Dune. It's a good book. I would like to read on in the series, but right now my local library is fresh out of copies of Dune Messiah. (I wonder why?) Should I try hunting down a copy in a local bookstore? It would be so much easier if there was a local bookstore nearby and not just endless suburban sprawl.
On that uplifting note (What can I say? Not every week is going to sunshine and kittens.) we proudly present:
The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
Actual words spoken by John Dickerson during his segment about Jazz Age madam, Polly Adler.
It was the bees knees for flappers with their jellybeans on their arms to get sozzled from jag juice at parties.
Stag Parties at the time... they didn't just play peaknuckle.
Polly didn't parrot what she heard and saw.
Adler was said to have quipped, it was a business doing pleasure with you. Which makes it sound like everything in her life was just Jake. It wasn't.Welcome home to Sunday Morning, John. Never leave us.
I could write a few words about the salacious details or how Adler's famous male clients (Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, the Marx Brothers, Franklin Roosevelt - allegedly) were protected over the women they used for sex. How it was perfectly acceptable, if not expected for powerful men to step out in such a way and need not worry about their reputation. I could write a few words about the seductiveness of jazz and liquor.
I could say those things, but it would be but a pale shadow of the way John Dickerson can tell the story.
2) Hua Hsu
I believe this is Hua Hsu's second appearance on Sunday Morning and also the second time he's covered Black culture and it's contributions to music in America. His previous story was about ?uestlove's Summer of Soul doc. I got around to watching it a few weeks ago and it's great. This time he talks to Terence Blanchard about his new opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones. It's the first time an opera written by a black artist has played at The Met. I'm not an opera guy. As much as I always say that I'm going to check out a museum or go to the theater more often because of something I saw on Sunday Morning and never actually do, I make no pretense about going to the opera.
But... apparently I've been listening Terence Blanchard through much of my life thanks to his frequent collaborations with Spike Lee. I love the sound of a good horn. Give me a musical performance - classical, rock, pop, or otherwise - with a strong horn section and I'll give you my money. Case in point, Phoebe Bridger's performance of "I Know The End" embeded above.
Even though I'm not an opera guy, I just enjoyed Terence Blanchard's whole vibe. Terence and Hua throw shade back at the Met's dismissive ledger of opera submissions from 100 years ago: "It's funny that they take themselves so seriously that he writes out 'Metropolitan' each time. There's not that much space." Astute observation Hua Hsu. We laugh at systemic racism to avoid crying in anger.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that Mr. Blanchard's opera was the subject of a joke told by Amber Ruffin in my favorite recurring Late Night segment, "Jokes Seth Can't Tell".
Full disclosure, I didn't get the joke until the internet explained it to me. Either way, it's still funny because me not getting the joke is part of the joke.
3) Jim Axelrod
True story time. Last time my true story was unfortunately long, but I'll keep this one brief:
When I was a senior in high school, I had an assignment to take a nihilistic literary quote and pair with it with some visual - kind of like a version of the New Yorker cartoon caption contest that is somehow more pretentious. (We also had to do one for existentialism as well.)
Anyway, I took the second half of what is probably the most famous line from Macbeth,
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
and I superimposed them over a headshot of Bob Costas.
I thought it was hilarious. My English teacher gave me a C. It was one of the few poorly graded assignments I had in that class. Until recently, I insisted that she just didn't get it. Bob Costas was a talking head. I may have been taking a wider shot at sports as entertainment in general, but I loved (and mostly still do love) sports.
But no, I was the one who didn't get it. Bob Costas is funny and self aware (see turn in Brockmire). While he can be a grandstander, at least he's up on the right soapboxes. I, too, watch less and less football as time goes by due to a growing discomfort about the effects on those that play the game... among other things. He got his start calling ABA and featured prominently in one of the better 30 for 30 films, Free Spirits. Maybe it's just down to mythology, hair, and the lack of surviving archival footage, but the ABA just seemed cooler than the NBA. Of course the ABA folded several years before I was born. As a kid, I probably got to know Costas primarily through the NBA on NBC. Oh, those were the days of Roundball Rock my friends... pure nostalgia.
But Bob Costas's pure one true sports love is and always will be baseball. Which is correct. Few can opine the way Costas can.
Final story. I vividly remember watching the 2012 Olympics opening ceremonies' parade of nations, when Bob said the following as the Ugandan athlete's walked out.
Winston Churchill once described the African nation of Uganda and its lush landscape as the pearl of Africa. Of course, Churchill never met Idi Amin.
Here's a blog entry tearing apart Costas's performance that evening. I have to admit, I chuckle recalling that evening. I don't hold it against Bob though. Filling what is essentially dead air for 2 hours is a near impossible task and you would do much much worse than Bob, believe you me. Mary Carillo can only vamp about badminton for so long.
4) Faith Salie
Watch the Faith Salie segment and let me know how many times you yawn. It think it was a solid dozen for me. I'm yawning right now just thinking about it. Until now, I've always been a little embarrassed by inability to stifle a yawn during a lecture, during church services, during a business meeting. But thanks to Faith and the academics studying yawning at SUNY Poly and Cal State Channel Islands and am no longer burdened by the shackles of social embarrassment. (At least with regards to yawning. I'm still a socially awkward creature.)
I have two questions for Faith left answered by this segment:
- How much grant money has gone into studying yawning?
- What's it like to talk to Captain Sisco?
(No, I'm never never gonna let DS9 go.)
Salie segments are usually humorously lighthearted, yet informative. It was a reliably fun segment, but for me the apex of the Salie segment format is still Pockets.
5) Teddy Roosevelt, Sunday Index (tie)
There were no birds this week, but there were buffalo hanging out in North Dakota in a national park named after soldier, hunter, conservationist, and 26th president, and distant cousin of possible bordello frequenter Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt.
This will sound ignorant, but what's the difference between buffalo and bison? I had some bison chili on Halloween and now I might feel sort of bad about it.
It was a banner week for the interstitial "Sunday Index" cards. I think there were somewhere between 5 and 7 of them this week. I understand they are probably there to pad out an episode that runs short, but I am unreasonably fond of the little bits of trivia they present.
On the other hand I think there is a rule that says when you draw 5 or more Sunday Index cards in a single episode, you're allowed to trade them for a "Sunday Almanac" entry.
By now, I get it. "Sunday Almanac" is dead.
Long live "Sunday Almanac"!
(There's a bunch available on YouTube, so I'm just going to start posting them here at random.)
6) Steve Hartman, Jane Pauley (tie)
Seth Meyers has a recurring bit on Late Night called, "The kind of story we need right now." Steve Hartman did 2 minutes on an 82 year old named Don Issett who pole vaults competitively. Sorry Seth, but I think Steve just did your bit better. For what it's worth the pole vault is at least a top 3 track and field event for me. Why? I talked about playing computer games on a Commodore 64 growing up before.
As for Jane, I'm just going to cop to almost forgetting to put her on the list and sticking her here (I've done it before). There's are maybe a few bits I should just abandon and one is not limiting the power rankings to a top ten so as to avoid the whole ties schtick. While not referenced in today's show, kudos to Ms. Pauley for her mental health advocacy and being public about being bipolar. Speaking of mental health....
7) Lee Cowan
... it's a big issue. Or at least it should be acknowledged as being a big issue. The treatment for depression developed at Stanford seems miraculous, but let's not call anything a miracle cure right now and just let the science play out. They said the treatment is 80%-ish effective which sounds really good, but the scary thing about depression to me (as someone who does not suffer from depression) is the idea that a treatment can just stop working. The device works by using magnetic fields to stimulate portions of the brain that essentially "turn off" when someone is in a depressed state. (Terrible hand-wavy explanation I know...) But don't anti-depressant drugs essentially try to do the same thing? I'm sure there's literature out there, but why do those drugs sometimes stop working. And why would this treatment keep working when drugs fail?
I'm being overly harsh on SAINT because while the treatment does not involve metal probes being shoved into you brain to induce the stimulation, it's a medical device and therefore makes me queasy by default.
I also just want to point out how many universities were name dropped in the first two segments. In Faith's segment, we had SUNY Polytechnic, Cornell (not flattering), the estimable Cal State Channel Islands, and Lee comes along and pulls the pin on Stanford. Bold move.
8) Tracy Smith
Tracy Smith talked to Benedict Cumberbatch. He made a movie where he plays a cowboy.
I have a bit of a rant about Benedict Cumberbatch that I'll refrain from posting because I worry it might come off as a bit mean spirited. Maybe if I ever end up a stand up comedian, it can be part of my "edgy" material, but now that I mull it over in my head, it's probably not that funny anyway. It may or may not make reference to female fans that proudly referred to themselves as "Cumberbitches". Is that still a thing? Or did it end when they stopped making Sherlock.
I did like Sherlock, but ironically Sherlock was maybe the 5th most interesting thing about that show to me. That's not a knock against Cumberbatch who was about as perfectly cast in it as possible. But Martin Freemen as Watson was more relatable and Sexy Priest as Moriarty was the more enjoyable sociopath. I guess the interesting thing about the show was portraying Sherlock as a functional sociopath. It usually worked, but a character that is proud of being coldly dismissive of those around him sometimes leaves me a little, well, cold. Still, it's a good show. Was a good show? I don't know which tense to use since they keep jerking us around about maybe, just maybe, there being a fifth run of episodes.
9) Ben Tracy
If I had really wanted to be clever, I would have given Jane Pauley her own spot and combined spots 8 & 9 into Ben Tracy Smith - the "Before and After" Jeopardy category of CBS Sunday Morning.
Lithium batteries. Good or bad? I'm sure they're environmentally problematic, but as a professor teaching a condensed matter physics course once told me, we can either try to find solutions for our power generation problems or go back to living in the bush. She was also known to ride her Segway around campus sometimes, so you can guess which side of that rhetorical proposition she fell on.
We are always going to need more electricity. We can improve efficiency all we want (and it can be improved a lot), but that demand is never going backwards. Batteries need lithium.
Nuclear power is tricky. It's not renewable. It leaves behind radioactive waste that lasts for tens of thousands of years. The fuel can be weaponized to create WMDs. It also does not significantly contribute to greenhouse emissions. I think I finally came down on the anti-nuclear power side with Fukushima. In a world with increasingly dangerous weather patterns due to global warming, how much would it cost to build a nuclear power plant that can withstand, say a category 5 hurricane.
However, I truly believe that if there is a silver bullet to get us out of the climate crisis, it would be nuclear fusion based reactor. Not only would could such a reactor exceed the capacity of a fission based reactor, but the fuel (hydrogen) is the most abundant element in the universe, it's incredibly difficult to weaponize the way fissile materials are, and there virtually no environmental impact.
If only cold fusion wasn't a sci-fi myth! Hot fusion is hard!
Look we all love Jurassic Park, and would that a preachy velociraptor could be the tipping point where humanity decided to save itself from an epoch of environmental disaster. Call me cynical, but I don't see it happening. Therefore, preachy climate velociraptor, the committee has chosen to Teichnerize you!
Maybe if the velociraptor could open doors and hunt us down, we'd pay more attention to it:
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