Another Week: Number 144

I admit it: I have tried for years to use the awesome power of my thinking, visualization, and sheer will to influence the outcome of televised sporting events. Sometimes, I have even made various spell-casting gestures in the direction of the TV screen.

It has rarely worked.

On the contrary, when watching the Chicago Bears in recent years, things often go completely and unbelievably wrong, like some sort of painful lesson in the folly of belief.

But this past Sunday, events suddenly began unfolding onscreen with such an easy power that I felt like I was whispering directly into God’s ear. The Browns sacked Jordan Love. A Packers field goal attempt got blocked. Caleb Williams threw four touchdown passes — one to Cole Kmet following a 19-play drive!

The Packers lost; the Bears won. That’s a rare and wonderful Sunday — the kind that hasn’t happened since … well, the last time the Bears played the Packers, back in January. For good measure, the Indiana Fever beat the Las Vegas Aces in the first game of their playoff series, and Kelsey Mitchell scored 34 points. Pure sports joy.

I thought hummingbirds had vacated our area, but my salvias were riffled some more this week, and I saw a pair of females dogfighting around my butterfly bush. Maybe birds from up north, just passing through? I don’t know, but it seems late in the season to see them. They usually seem to wait for a storm to ride, but we’re rather droughty and warm right now.

Donald J. Trump hasn’t held one of his tedious rallies since July 3. Instead, these days, he often holds some sort of sideshow in his junked-up Oval Office, during which he makes his spiky signature on yet another oversized proclamation like he’s performing the same magic trick for the three hundredth time. Then he pushes nuggets of horseshit out of his mouth for 30 minutes or so.

This schtick often occurs during the 5 p.m. Eastern hour, which is when I want to watch Hallie Jackson NOW, the best news roundup on TV. Instead, they broadcast the Trump routine and grant him free rein to lie, propagandize, and make idiotic assertions for however long he likes.

Monday afternoon, on my way to pick up some Dickey’s Barbecue (meh), I was listening as Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. went on a harebrained bender about Tylenol and vaccines for children and autism. I always pray for someone to interrupt and say, “Okay, the president is babbling horseshit again, and we have other news to cover,” but that never happens.

On Thursday, one of Trump’s flunkeys got James Comey indicted just before that weak sauce hit its expiration date.

It’s like The Three Stooges are running the country now — and yes, they’re awfully mean and dangerous, even to the health of America’s children — but because they’re also just bumbling imbeciles, we somehow tolerate it.

American Experience: FDR

My mom has a special affection for two U.S. presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she listened to via radio as a child, and Abraham Lincoln. Recently, her cloud DVR snagged several old American Experience episodes via Milwaukee PBS, so over several visits, we watched the four hours and ten minutes of “FDR” from October of 1994.

She was on the edge of her seat, soaking up details regarding Roosevelt’s controlling mother, his marriage to Eleanor, his affair with Lucy Mercer, his grappling with polio, his Warm Springs Institute in Georgia, his Works Progress Administration mobilization, the Supreme Court decision that thwarted him, and his bromance with Winston Churchill during World War II.

Great stuff — which now seems like in took place six hundred years ago in some forgotten country.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, by James S. Shapiro

Whenever I hear about a book that sounds interesting, I add it to my Amazon wish list. Last week, I browsed the list and bought A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 for my Kindle. It was a fortunate choice. Author James S. Shapiro knows his stuff and makes potentially highfalutin subject matter entertaining and arresting.

Shapiro takes us through the gritty logistics of Shakespeare’s life that year, when the Globe Theatre was being erected in Southwark from pieces of a previous playhouse. Later, we ride on horseback out to Stratford, where the playwright’s wife and home and hoard of malt were stashed.

The author shares his deep understanding of how show business worked at that time — what audiences expected, how writers developed their scripts, and the competition between various companies.

We get an in-depth examination of the politics of the day — everything from the misadventures of Essex in Ireland, to how particular lines in a play might be edited for a royal audience, to how the stained glass windows of Shakespeare’s hometown chapel were destroyed when he was a boy, as part of England’s Protestant sanitization.

Reading this book in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, as Donald Trump launches his autocracy, I was struck by how the same themes keep ricocheting through history. While he was writing Julius Caesar, with an assassination of a tyrant at its center (Shapiro notes that Macbeth introduced the word “assassination” into English literature), some of Shakespeare’s countrymen — unironically known as “Republicans” — considered getting rid of their monarch, Elizabeth I. As a countermeasure, the Bishop of London banned all satire.

Most importantly, Shapiro highlights how and why the content of Shakespeare’s plays — their structure, language, and central conflicts — underwent profound refinement during 1599, culminating in Hamlet.

This was a stimulating and richly rewarding read.

Bob Odenkirk on Family Trips / Nobody (2021)

I really like Bob Odenkirk — so, awake too early recently, I listened to his episode of Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, the podcast on which Seth Meyers and Josh Meyers talk to celebrity guests and ostensibly reminisce about vacations with relatives.

Odenkirk grew up in Naperville, Illinois, and a family trip to the Wisconsin Dells is one of the rare outings his stressed family was able to pull off in his youth.

My mom is planning to attend a wedding in the Dells soon, and that reminded me of the podcast, where Bob mentioning that even viewers who don’t usually care for semi-violent action movies nevertheless enjoyed 2021’s Nobody — the sequel to which, Nobody 2, he is now promoting.

I liked Nobody the first time I saw it. On Saturday, I decided to test it out on my mom, and hooked her by mentioning that Bob was born in Berwyn, and once played a character from Cicero, Illinois — her own hometown.

She got a kick out of the movie as well — and even laughed at some of the over-the-top brutality.