January 9, 2022

In the interest of my own sanity, I really do need to get to a point where I can write up, edit, and post one of these recaps in less than 3 hours.

This week my intro can be brief. If you read last week, you'll know I came down with a sinus infection on New Year's Day, so most of my week was trying to get over that. I'm finally to a point where I'm no longer coughing up or sneezing out phlegm, so that's a plus. (Too much information? My Mom always says TMI - parents attempting to use modern and even not so modern slang conversationally is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Of course if it were up to me, I'd box the ears of anyone that said the word "cheugy.")

I decided I'd try to keep my weekly weedend ritual of running a 10K despite sitting on the couch (for the most part) all week. It may not have hurt while I was running, but I should have listened to the angel on my shoulder telling me to take it easy. When you've taken some time off, it's always the next day that hurts more.

I took Christmas decorations down. That always seems a little sad to me.

I also binged nine episodes of the CBS show Ghosts while taking down decorations/cleaning/exercising. It's delightful. (And I may have a small crush on Rose McIver at least 50% of which might have to do with the fact that she's from New Zealand.) The least surprising thing about the show was finding out that it is an adaptation of a British show. Do I need to watch the British version? I don't think so, but it does kind of nag at me that I'm not watching the original.

I don't know how long the show can keep up quality original episodes without falling into a rut, but the premise can go almost anywhere, so hopefully a few good seasons are reasonable. If CBS yanks it off broadcast to slides it over to Paramount+, like it did with Evil, I will be very... put... out. Please don't make this your default business model. All these streaming OTT services make me think I should just stick to watching reruns of 80's sitcoms with Mo Rocca.

The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS

1) Lucy Craft

In a surprising turn of events, Lucy Craft's postcard from Japan about small candy shops, called dagashiya, walks away with the win this week.

I have mixed feelings about Japanese culture. Well, not Japanese culture per se, but just the way it is consumed by Americans.

First, I feel it get fetishized by the West to a certain extent. I don't mean that in the pornographic sense (although, there is that), but just that the general feeling that people who are really into it, are really into it to the exclusion of everything else. It sort of becomes way to seem worldly when you actually aren't. "I'm a citizen of the world because I like Indian food and anime..."

It's one thing to embrace nerd culture. It's entirely another for someone with no Japanese heritage to call themselves an otaku. But that's just my uninformed opinion, for a valid opinion, please consult someone of Japanese ancestry.

Secondly, a list of my favorite morning cartoons growing up: Muppet Babies, Garfield and Friends, Eek! the Cat, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, The Tick, Batman the Animated Series, X-Men.

Note that none were anime. By the middle of the 90's, most of my favorite shows were replaced by Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z, or the like. The were all shows already popular in Japan that seemed less like shows than they were marketing vehicles for the related games. It became so much easier to take something that already existed, dub it into English, and slap it on TV than it was to actually develop new original content. (Really this phenomenon started with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.) Network Saturday morning cartoons were essentially dead by the new millennium. In retrospect, I now know that most of the shows I watched were made in Asian animation studios regardless of whether they were anime or not. There are a lot of things I understand as an adult, that anime is just a style and after seeing one or two Miyazaki films (I should see more) I understand that it can be quite beautiful, that Saturday morning cartoons were a niche that were always going to migrate to cable, that the serialized storytelling preferred by most anime shows, while perhaps a bit advanced for a young audience and difficult to keep up with in a pre-DVR world, was a precursor to the age of "prestige television."

Still, as a kid, I just saw it as something that was replacing a thing I loved.

That was a long nostalgic diatribe about something mostly unrelated to the subject of dagashiya candy shops. Except for the nostalgia.

The short segment is a short encapsulation of what I love most about Sunday Morning. A story about something so unimportant, it's the most important thing. Something I learned that I don't need to know, but I'm better for knowing it - usually something from another culture that reminds me were the same in more ways than we are different.

Seeing the smile of a small child trying to pick out candy at a candy shop is a reminder of what we're losing in the modern age. Our screens can connect us, but the connection is often superficial and fleeting. But this story about dagashiya reminded me of the neighborhood shops I used to frequent that are also disappearing, if not already disappeared. The music shops (Phil's records, ear X-Tacy), toy stores (Johnny's Toys), book stores (well, libraries for me), and yes, even candy shops I grew up in. The candy shop I grew with was Supreme Nut and Candy, the location next to the Value City, which shut down almost 20 years ago - it's where most of my clothes came from growing up, in Latonia. That shop no longer exists, but to my pleasant surprise, some SNACC shops are still operating in the Cincinnati area.

I have a sweet tooth. I am Lord Wyndemere - I want sweets. When most people think candy, they immediately go to chocolates, but the candies that remind me of youthful privilege of dropping into the candy shop were hard candies, probably because parents and grandparents could measuredly hand them out not worry about a kid woofing down a full pound in under ten minutes causing instant diabetes. The top three candies I remember fondly remember procuring from Supreme Nut and Candy were root beer barrels, lemon drops, these strawberry flavored thingys with a soft center that my grandma always had on hand. There is just something delight about purchasing candy by scooping them out of bulk bins into paper bags and weighing them instead of grabbing something off the shelf at a supermarket.

Being a kid is pretty "sweet".

Did somebody say diabetes?

2) Jane Pauley

There's something comforting whenever Jane says, "It happened this past week..." Usually that phrase precedes an obit, but sometimes it's to signal the end of some cultural touchstone, like say the last Twinkie getting loaded onto a distribution truck. Whenever she says it and I don't have to contemplate mortality, it's always sort of a fun nostalgia trip. It's also the closest thing I'll ever get to the Sunday Almanac coming back. It's a boon to people like me who live for random trivia.

The cessation of Blackberry service is an odd thing to get nostalgic about. It's also strange to hear that the number of users actually peaked in 2013 - I assumed it was well before then. I just assumed there was this sharp cutoff marked by the introduction of the iPhone and the end of Blackberries (Blackberrys?). It weird that it seems like ancient history, but those first iPhone/touchscreen Androids kind of sucked and the number of people who insisted they could not be without a physical keyboard were legion. So I guess, like everything, the transition was gradual at first at then all at once.

The nostalgia for me comes in because my dad, a stalwart cell phone holdout until maybe 2014, always had a beeper for when he had to be on call for work. I remember when he had a terminal at our house that he could use to dial into the mainframe at his work when necessary. I personally enjoyed click and springing sounds of the mechanical keyboard that came with it. The key covers could be popped off and put back on, which was sort of a childhood game for me. Fun as long as I didn't break anything.

Then one day in the aughts (remote terminal long since gone now that secure remote connections from a home PC were possible), that beeper was replaced by a Blackberry, which was probably surrendered back to his company when he retired.

Also, Jane sticks the landing with a solid joke.

3) Mo Rocca

Mo's really been doing a deep dive into sitcoms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s these past few weeks. It's nice that he gets to do what he loves. I got to learn about the long and winding career of Sonny Curtis, who wrote and performed the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, "Love Is All Around". And when I say long and winding, the guy was basically there when rock 'n roll was invented and helped form Buddy Holly's first band in West Texas. The man wrote "I Fought the Law" and I had no idea who he was.

Truly an overlooked legend. I'm certainly glad Sonny Curtis is alive and well to participate in this story, but it certainly had the feel of a Mobituary as we could certainly call Sonny Curtis a forgotten forerunner.

Buddy Holly has been mentioned, which means I can slide in a reference my favorite bit that Venture Bros. ever did:

4) Lesley Stahl

So this was going to be #1, and there is an argument that still should have been. But since the segment is a re-airing of Stahl's 2013 interview with recently deceased acting legend Sidney Poitier, it has to come down a notch for not being original content. It would be within the rights of the committee to leave it out of the rankings entirely, but attention must be paid. I suppose the segment could have been left unranked my accompanying remarks for this segment coming at their rightful place in the introduction, but the decision has been made.

Sidney Poitier, originally from the Bahamas, had an extraordinary path to acting, attempted to audition for the first time while being barely literate. I'll leave you to watch the interview if you wondering how that went, but it's a great story. He won an Oscar for Lilies of the Field. He was nominated three times, but it just feels like he should have been nominated and won more than that because for a period in the 60's, almost every role he played could be described as iconic. I kind of just assumed that he won for In the Heat of the Night, but he was not nominated for that role. Almost everyone else associated with the movie was nominated and won. So yes, that Oscar was the only Best Actor award a black man won for almost 50 years.

I must confess I haven't watch that many Sidney Poitier movies, which feels a significantly detrimental mark against my moral character. He did have a supporting role in one of my favorite movies growing up Sneakers. Warning, the following clip is from the end of the movies, so spoiler alert or whatever, but the movie came out in 1992 so go watch it.

Final note: I always have this bit of questionable I do at restaurants that have Mr. Pibb on the soda fountain instead of Dr. Pepper where I walk up to the soda fountain and announce, in my best Sidney Poitier voice, "They call me... Mr. Pibb!" I don't even like Dr. Pepper or Mr. Pibb, but I still maintain that if some had devised a marketing campaign with a Poitier sound alike that Mr. Pibb could have actually been a serious rival to Dr. Pepper's hegemony.

They call me... Mr. Pibb!

5) Wood Ducks, Peter Bogdanovich (tie)

Wood ducks are wonderfully decorative looking birds. But they have those creepy red eyes. Once again, any birds featured in the moment of nature are brought you by Audubon Florida.

On another note, I swear there used to be some clothing brand called wood duck or that had a wood duck head for its logo, because I swear I used to wear some of their pants as part of my school uniform growing up. Does this ring a bell with anyone? It's sort of driving me crazy because a brief internet search came up with nothing.

I actually did get around to watching The Last Picture Show last year. It came up in a couple episodes of Sunday Morning close together, one had to do with the passing of Cloris Leachman a year ago, so it seemed like someone was sending me a message. And it is a brilliant film. It's the only Peter Bogdonavich movie I've ever seen, which is probably ok because he never hit those heights again. (Not to speak ill of the dead, but I watched some of the director interviews on the DVD after watching it, and boy did he sound full of himself.) It's a good enough and important enough movie that he warrants at least a passing mention in the power rankings.

6) Chip Reid

A new statue of JFK was unveiled at the Kennedy Center recently and Sunday Morning DMV correspondent Chip Reid has the inside scoop on the craft of making these statues. The details are kind of remarkable. With the whole touching the jacket button in stride thing, you could almost not even have a head on the statue and still know it was JFK. But the bronzed head also very well crafted, unlike some bronze recreations:

Christiano Ronaldo got the bust he deserved.

7) Rita Braver

Rita and Sunday Morning try to take the long view on Trump and interview historians taking a first pass at evaluating the former president's legacy. I mean I don't need 12 minutes of hand wringing to know that academics are going to have a problem finding nice things to say other than he was the most successful demagogue in American history. I just don't want to hear the man speak, and his delusional hubris that he could meet with the historians in some kind of PR spin to paint himself in the most flattering light possible would be funny if it also wasn't so sad.

I mean the Harrisons and Harding and Hoover weren't good presidents but I can only think that the fact that wasn't ranked second to last on that list, only in front of Buchanan, must be due to some kind of recency bias among "conservative" historians out there who would point to the economy or some nonesense about him standing up for personal/religious liberty or whatever to put keep him out of last. I'm guessing these would be the same people who would argue that Lincoln isn't a top 20 president though.

Although in defense of James Buchanan, he merely shamefully let the country devolve into civil war over long standing differences, whereas Trump exacerbates such differences and seems to actively foment such conflict if he can find a way for it to benefit him personally. In time, perhaps Buchanan might find some cushioning below him on such lists.

8) David Martin

When the committee gets around to Sunday Morning voice power rankings. David Martin is going to be up there. I mean #1 is going to be Martha Teichner because she's Martha Teichner. In the world of the power rankings committee, everyone else is playing for second. And David would have a strong case for it.

(Also in the running would be Holly Williams, but it begs the question, is an accent the same thing is a voice? I probably shouldn't constantly rehash how fond I am of Australian and New Zealand accents, but I'm American and easily impressed.)

David interviewed Carl Bernstein who has a memoir coming out. I think my take away from the interview is that Bernstein does kind of look like (a taller, bigger) Dustin Hoffman - at least when Hoffman had the hair in All the President's Men. 

(Woodward looks nothing like Robert Redford, but who does?)

9) David Pogue

I'm not on TikTok and I don't really care about TikTok. I don't really get the medium and I'm probably not the target demographic for it anyway. (Get off my lawn!)

Having said that, here's a TikTok a graphic designer friend sent that is pretty funny:

@emilyzugay

Putting my degree to use

♬ original sound - Emily’sTikTok.edu

I am a fan of stand up comedy, yet I have only every been to one stand up show in my life. It was Bob Saget, who sadly, be part of Sunday Passage in the next episode.

10) Steve Hartman

I don't like fortune tellers. It's not that I think they are scam artists - I acknowledge the entertainment value and I have nothing against them personally. It's for a very specific reason that I cannot go into because it's not my story to tell. Was Hartman's fortune teller framing device a simply a setup to squeeze in stories of kindness and hope? Was the draw of the last card real? I don't know, but I learned everything I need to know about the future by watching Terminator movies:

Until next time...