April 24, 2022
Random Introductory Topic(s)
It's a busy spring. I wasn't able to post last week because of Easter. I actually also took an extra day off work, but that was done with the express intent of cleaning my house. It was long overdue. The day after Easter was cold and rainy and just perfect for vacuuming and scrubbing counters and floors.
Then I had to go to St. Louis for work. It was a mildly pointless trip, but on the drive I listened to the entirety of The Trojan Horse Affair podcast. It was pretty interesting as these sorts of things go. Expecting some kind of neat resolution at the end was a bridge to far, which I guess is the moral of the story. Or a moral of the story. If you can call that a moral. Am I using the word moral too much? Moral.
Then stuff sort of hit the fan at work. It sucks when you're the only person who can fix something. I've begging them to have some redundancy built in to the system. Basically, if I had been hit by a truck last week, somebody somewhere stood to loose millions of dollars or something. I somewhat considered the truck option rather than deal with the stress of it all.
But I unwound by going to see A Comedy of Errors live on stage. Shakespearean comedies are all ridiculous and delightful. They also all seem to involve twins separated at birth and this was no exception. I laughed a lot. I also may have a few beers at the show as well. What? Don't give me that look. It's not like it was Hamlet. I needed to relax.
I also had to get in my requisite biking and running in to prep for the Flying Pig Half this coming Sunday. Humblebrag alert, you say? Eh. It's only the half. I keep saying I have no desire to do a full, but maybe someday, just to say I did one. I usually listen to music while running. Usually the Chemical Brothers or Fiery Furnances. Or Prince (natch). However, I picked up the podcast Dead Eyes thanks to Connor Ratliff's appears on Late Night close to when I started training for the run in earnest so I've been listening to it on runs instead. I cannot express how happy this podcast makes me or how delighted I get upon hearing Bebe Neuwirth's show introduction. (Is that a spoiler?) Anyway it's been about 6 weeks and I only have 2 episodes left now. I'll probably finish it this weekend. I'm stretching the last few out because I kind of want make it last longer now that I've been on the journey.
Oh, I totally left out that last week a good friend was in town, so we went to the Reds game. I saw the one where they won. Their first (and only) home win of 2022 thus far. I get the Castellini dragging. It's wholly deserved. But I can't help but check in periodically to see if Joey Votto will break out of his slump and get a little closer to Cooperstown. He's the best:
In 2019, I went to 5 Reds games and they lost them all by about a combined 30 runs. Karmicly, I was owed this one.
CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
Ah... the Money Issue. Not my favorite issue. It lacks the obvious appeal of the food episode, which is just G-rated (food) pornography. No one like discussing money. Given the Sunday Morning treatment, though, it's just a launching pad into food, art, celebrity, etc. They already talked about billionaires in January, so it did not raise my pinko, commie hackles... for the most part.
It's the Money Issue. So naturally Martha Teichner, a woman who possesses a degree in economics, does a segment about art. I love it. I love it all.
I'm a mildly conflicted about Crystal Bridges. Maybe it's naive to think that the collective wealth of the world's billionaires could solve problems like hunger, poverty, disease, and global warming. Is a museum in Bentonville, AK anything more than a lasting monument to the Walton family? Didn't the Sacklers go around attempting to whitewash their name via art museum based philanthropy? Am I supposed to take this at altruism and emphasis on access to the arts for all at face value? Couldn't they do more than just be a patron of the art with their billions. Plural.
But the truth is I would love to spend a day or two or three at Crystal Bridges - even as pretentious a name as it is. I keep meaning to visit one of the local art museums and never making it out and Martha keeps giving me more that I need to visit. Instead of focusing on the wealthy backers, lets focus on the beauty, because we all need to believe in beauty in our lives. It's good. They did something good.
It seems like a nice place to go for a jog.
Part story about empowering women entrepreneurs, part silicon valley startup pitch, the segment on Shef supplies the G-rated food pornography I crave.
I'd love to believe that two white guys who come off as a bit tech-bro-y really are all about empowering largely immigrant minority women and not somehow exploiting their labor to enrich themselves. Color me slightly skeptical. But, at least they say the right things and don't talk in awful incoherent jargon.
The food obviously looks great, but most of the featured foods seem to skew heavily south and east Asian. I'm not knocking ethnic foods, but I personally often struggle to find dishes of this variety that sit right in my tummy. No points deducted though.
Lilia Luciano has very blue eyes. I dub thee, "the Daniel Craig" of journalism.
3) David Pogue
Chris Smalls: American Hero.
It's not just that I don't like Amazon, or Jeff Bezos, or any overly power billionaire run company allowed to operate as a monopoly, although all those things are true. But who doesn't root for the underdog?
I'm just saying when this guy:
Figure 4: American Hero.can defeat million dollar corporate lawyers organizing union busting campaigns, all is right with the world. I'm waiting for my economist friends out there to explain the sound academic theory of why there should be no minimum wage, but I'm with this guy.
I like that Kelefa is becoming Sunday Morning's go to music guy. No offense to the old stalwarts, but he's a little hipper and younger, even when talking to Air Supply. My Dad got an Air Supply CD as a gift at a company Christmas party about 20-25 years ago. It prominently remains in its shrink wrap. I hope to inherit one day. Do I dare open it?
With all due respect to Adam Yauch (R.I.P.), who won't show himself in no TV ad (except this one), I always sort of got a kick when songs from indie bands I liked cropped up in commercials, TV shows, or sports. There's been a bunch, but a few that stick out in my memory are Spoon being used as bumper music going to commercial during a NFL game on FOX (I forget the specific song, but it had to have been "I Turn My Camera On" or "The Underdog"), Bloc Party on How I Met Your Mother, and Interpol on Friends. (Full disclosure: I did not like that last one. I never liked Friends.) Anyway, the point is, I was excited that other people were hearing music that I liked. While I can be an elitist snob, I'm not an exclusive elitist snob. I have no use for keeping the riffraff out. "Come join the party!" I say.
Where was I? Music and commercialism. If people want to sell out, more power to them. I'll defend Bob Dylan's Victoria's Secret commercial till the day I day. Or at least to the day he dies. What Nobel laureate hasn't hawked lingerie? Don't answer that.
I have this nagging feeling that there is some particularly brilliant use of Air Supply I wanted to mention, but it escapes me, so we'll just go with this:
By the way, those insurance commercials are brilliant.
5) Reedy River
Even the Money Issue needs a nature segment. Ducks make me happy. I was on a bike ride last night and riding by about a couple of dozen ducks was the highlight of the ride. Well that and the psychedelic chicken statue in someone's front yard. I'll try to get a picture next time.
Geese? No offense, but I just want them to stop pooping on my car. They can be cute when young and fuzzy though:
6) Nancy Chen
The Zillow segment is a little to zeitgeist-y to be a great Sunday Morning segment, the best of which are generally evergreen. Especially when they are about evergreens. But still the segment and the houses featured are a hoot.
CrazyI'm not even a Home Town truther.
Bonus points for including the SNL skit. The Dan Levy episode wasn't the greatest episode in the world, but it was a solid pre-tape bit:
The Money Issue is, shall we say, segment heavy. We're going to have to start combining segments
to fit fourteen people into a top ten list.
On Lee Cowan's segment obviously, I'm not a fan of these companies that build giant warehouses. I'll try to see it from both sides. Yay, for jobs I guess. I wish warehouse employees and truck and van drivers were treated a little better than placeholders for the robots that will eventually take all those jobs away. They recently built and opened an Amazon distribution center about a mile from my office. While an eyesore (I work in a nondescript commerce park, so what isn't?), it's seems to be less disruptive to the surrounding area than I originally assumed it would be. There were some unfortunate traffic disruptions during construction. But I don't want the old rust belt communities highlighted to just die and disappear.
Still, boo. There is no beauty in a utilitarian box the size of 100 football fields.
Serena doesn't stop by often enough. I almost overlooked her segment about the auction of book dealer William Reese's collection of historical American books, papers, and sundry other documents. A rare book dealer who went to Yale screams upper crust pretense and would not seem to be for me. But there was something about seeing the collections contents that struck me. These were the originals of famous things I'd seen before in actual history books. Such as:
That's actually kind of something.
8) Tracy Smith, Seth Doane (tie)
Tracy's interview of Grace and Frankie stars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda's connection to money is tenuous at best. I guess references to Jane's fitness video empire (all for charity) were shoehorned in.
I'm running out time so for Lily Tomlin, I'll say Nashville is an amazing movie and while people like to rag on the Oscar's I still find Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep introducing Robert Altman's lifetime achievement Oscar delightful. Maybe I didn't get the bit at the time - I hadn't seen Nashville or many other Altman films at the time, probably just M*A*S*H, but it's a pretty good bit for film buffs in the know. I should make a point to watch some Altman films this summer.
On Jane Fonda: For some reason I decided I wasn't going to watch The Newsroom because I decided I was over Aaron Sorkin. Sure Sports Night and The West Wing were formative shows for me, but he was obviously preachy and pretentious. I might not be wrong about preachy and pretentious but I was wrong about The Newsroom. It was great because mostly everything Aaron Sorkin does is great, preachy and pretentious notwithstanding.
On Seth Doane: I like a good wine. Or probably I even like a bad wine. I don't claim to have the most discerning palette. I think I like cabernet sauvignon and chianti over something like a merlot or pinot noir. I'm not entirely sure what that means about my taste in wine. I remember hearing about the flooding disaster in Germany. It's a melancholy segment that is more about the human toll of natural disaster the resiliency of trying to build back (and a little bit of how climate change is making it harder). I'll probably never drink a flood wine. But if I'm every in Germany, unlikely as that sounds, I'll try to find a nice bottle of wine to enjoy one evening because it can't be German beer every night, right? The startling revelation that there is such a thing as German wine.
9) Mo Rocca, Rita Braver (tie)
My love for Mo and Rita should go unquestioned, but segment heavy, amiright?
In the past year and a half there have been at least double digit stories on royals, which is just too much. It's ridiculous and insane that the royal family gets over £90m pounds from British taxpayers to be royals. Let's see what Lorde has to say about it:
At the same time, I think I kind of like Queen Elizabeth. I think that she is primarily motivated by a sense of duty to her country, which is, in fact, noble. This is what happens when you look at things from both sides. Humans are capable of holding two diametrically opposed ideas as true.
I don't have to deal with it, but many of my friends have to deal with the child care struggle. It makes me angry that child care workers get paid so little and that low income families that need it can still barely afford it. I know that for some insane reason subsidizing childcare is anathema to right wingers who view it as a gateway drug to socialism. And while they complain about the disintegration of the family unit, they also demand that both parents work full time to support a household and keep the free market economy humming along. Either pay for their childcare or pay for a parent to stay home.
10) Jane Pauley, Luke Burbank (tie)
In a segment heavy episode, Jane sure had a lot of introductions to get through.
Again, we all love Luke's wry wit, and the Kaji's seem like a solid, loving family. However, the idea that they have been able to monetize their kid playing with toys for YouTube videos to the tune of millions of dollars just reinforces to me that social media is the Pandora's Box of our time. Thought's Jeff Goldblum?
Comments
Post a Comment