January 31, 2025: Park bench in a puddle of melting snow at Petrifying Springs Park in Kenosha, Wisconsin
Another Week: Number 110
Last week brought our three-day cold snap, and this week brought our warmup. In practical terms, this meant that ice-fishing season lasted about two days, then quickly morphed into lake rescue-recovery season.
We may have a beautiful first crescent moon in the western sky, but two weeks into the Trump sequel, the general atmosphere seems hostile. People are being rounded up. Drivers are more reckless and belligerent. While out walking, I was accosted and followed by some geezer in a late-90s maroon Sentra who was enraged that I was using the crosswalk. Maybe it’s just me. I tend to bring out the best in people.
Meanwhile, our apparent president wears a blue suit and grins like a chimp that someone has trained to sign executive orders. Mystery men keep handing him one after another, and he makes spiked squiggles with his Sharpie.
On Wednesday night, a military helicopter collided with a regional jet, and both aircraft crashed into the Potomac River along Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. killing 67 people. I went to bed knowing that Donald J. Trump would be up all night stewing over how to blame Joe Biden for the accident.
Thursday morning, Trump finally showed up in the White House Briefing Room and started spewing deranged horseshit about how he requires ”the highest intellect and psychologically superior people” and “naturally talented geniuses” as air traffic controllers while his predecessors recruited those with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.”
Boom! Just like that, I was sucked back into watching demented nonsense plop from Trump’s puckered lips. Thankfully, several reporters — including Kaitlan Collins and Peter Alexander — called him on it, but he shut them down with insults like an overtired toddler who has nuclear weapons.
For the most important job in the world, we have hired a man who’s such a genius that — when reading aloud — he mispronounces the word “says.” We’ve hired a man with such a high intellect that he tells a room of reporters the two aircraft “shouldn’t have been at the same height because, if it wasn’t the same height, you could have gone under it or over it.”
Thank goodness we didn’t elect the DEI candidate.
I walked 12.53 miles this week.
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Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music (2025)
There’s a new style of fact-based filmmaking that overwhelms you with a firehose of audio and visuals. The David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream was one of these. The recent movies Elvis and even Oppenheimer did this too.
Now Questlove has put together this retrospective of the musical aspect of Saturday Night Live. It aired on NBC on Monday and is currently streaming on Peacock.
When the hydrant is open — as it is at the beginning and several more times throughout the show — the flood of content in Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music is awe-inspiring if not enlightening.
But when the pace slows down to focus on specific topics, the results are mixed. Too much analysis is given to phenomena like The Lonely Island and not enough to real musical history. For example, SNL was the first national show to air a hip-hop act — Funky 4 + 1. While that groundbreaking performance is noted, I would have liked to see more about its immediate ripples and less about Jimmy Fallon‘s mirror schtick with Mick Jagger.
Quibbles aside, this was a rewarding 3 hours (or 2 hours, 8 minutes without commercials).
Unrivaled Basketball League
Like many Americans, I was drawn into the WNBA last season. Now, while they’re off, I have tuned into Unrivaled, the new women’s three-on-three league airing on TNT, TruTV, and Max.
I am curious about the project as a startup enterprise — but mostly I am watching to see Lexie Hull play.
Unrivaled is little. There are only six teams: Laces, Lunar Owls, Mist, Phantom, Rose, and Vinyl — a grab-bag of “brands.” The teams are not associated with cities; all games are played at Wayfair Arena in Miami, which has a capacity of 850 and poor lighting. The court is 22 feet shorter than a WNBA court.
The first three quarters are only 7 minutes each. After that, the leader’s score plus 11 becomes the “winning score,” and the fourth quarter is played until one team reaches it. This would seem to eliminate all the fouling and chiseling that can stretch the final minute of most basketball games through many commercial breaks.
Start tro finish, an Unrivaled game lasts about an hour and 15 minutes. The commercial load is very light. Coaches are “mic’d up” so we can hear snippets of their strategy huddles during timeouts. A DJ plays music that the commentators love but viewers don’t really hear — because, I imagine, performance rights would be costly.
While the atmosphere feels like “fake sports,” the players appear to be competing seriously and the three-on-three game is faster and rawer.
Unrivaled is nowhere near as silly as the NFL’s Pro Bowl Games.
CBS Evening News
I think John Dickerson is one of the most knowledgeable and gracious TV journalists around, so I was excited to see the new version of the CBS Evening News that launched this week pairing him with Maurice DuBois,
It was not what I had hoped.
This new production is very stylish, but it does not offer a digest of the day’s events. It’s more of a magazine-type program.
The visuals are clean and uncluttered, with none of the “lower third” text commonly used to identify the person who’s speaking. Headlines go by quickly in the show’s Publico font, and most of its airtime is devoted to a couple of longer-form pieces after that. This week featured a two-parter about a woman who ended her own life by legally taking pharmaceutical drugs. It was a decent story, but it had no relation at all to the news of the day.
On Thursday, the broadcast was devoted to the Potomac River crash — but no mention at all was made of Donald Trump’s insane press conference. His name was never even spoken. There was only a two-sentence clip of him saying “We are all heartbroken. We are all searching for answers.”
Could this be a strategy? Are they trying to keep Trump from hijacking every news cycle with his relentlessly preposterous remarks? Great — but then they did note the controversy the next night, blending it in with assorted government firings and cabinet confirmations by way of promoting Sunday’s installment of Face the Nation.
When The Late Show with Stephen Colbert does a better job of recounting the day’s events than the network’s flagship newscast, you’ve got some improving to do.
The new set has a lot of screen space. The walls and even the floor are screens. For some reason, jacked-up CBS meteorologist Lonnie Quinn has a weather segment every night that features him bounding around from screen to screen and gesturing at radar imagery below his feet.
Near the end of the newscast, wall-to-wall photography takes over and the CBS Evening News basically becomes a 4K screensaver for a minute or two. Whatever — but if you want a sharp summary of the daily news, I would instead recommend Hallie Jackson NOW.
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