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Don’t mind me. I’m just over here getting ready for tomorrow.
I don’t understand why we don’t do Valentines notes like this all year long. I have thought up six or seven in the time it took me to make that one, which really took no time at all. I would be insufferable, is what I’m saying, and maybe that’s why this isn’t a year-round exercise.
Oh, the puns.
No one in television knows anything about puns. You can ask them. Very serious, all the time. See?
I think these two items work together nicely.
A U.S. Senate report released on Thursday says Republican congressional leaders’ refusal to publicly acknowledge Russian election interference in 2016 contributed to a watered-down response by the Obama administration
https://t.co/9lD2DeaV9u— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) February 6, 2020
That tweet is framed politely, the report spreads the condemnation a fair bit. Which is easy to do, there are many fingers to point in many directions. But, ultimately, everything seems to follow the rule of gravity, and point downward. Lowest common denominators being what they are.
What if rhetoricians were studying the wrong sort of speakers? https://t.co/aMGUJVpfF5
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) February 6, 2020
Full day in the office, followed by several hours in the studio. So there’s not a lot here. (Initially I wrote lout, which was more typographical error than subliminal message, but I fortunately caught it just in time.) I do have some video from the studio, however. Tuesday night we watched the news:
And they made white chocolate strawberries, which may be the way to go there, it turns out:
Tonight was sports:
So many sports:
I hope that’ll keep you for now. We’ll try to do better next Thursday, and at least a few of the days in between. See you tomorrow, then, right?
Standing in the back of the control room this evening, talking with the engineer, the young man running the teleprompter and the reporter who was casually sitting at the lighting position. We work in a dark control, as you should, and on the light panel there is a small gooseneck lamp so you can see the many buttons and potentiometers.
The reporter, says to no one in particular, that she thought it was a microphone, until she saw the little beam of light coming out of the bottom.
So I started singing “Ground control to Major Miya,” which she took up. And then she asked me what my favorite Davie Bowie song is. Which was a mistake on her part.
I’m not a Bowie fan, really. I know the hits, and I appreciate his place in the scheme of things, culturally, and his artistic image. He’s just not for me. But, I said to the young woman who may know Bowie’s entire catalog or just has a tenuous grasp on her parent’s appreciation of Bowie’s music, I’m going to say his duet with Bing Crosby.
I could write an essay, I said, on how Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy allowed for the post-postmodern remix culture we all live in. This was where I looked at everybody listening, to make sure they were still with me, and the two college students and engineer, who is about my age, all agreed.
Some music executives, I said, sat in a boardroom with a lot of drugs and said what if we put Bowie and Mr. Crosby together. And there were a lot of drugs in that boardroom to come up with that idea. But then you take a look at the conceit of the special, Bing is house-sitting for his distant relative, Sir Percival Crosby, and along comes Percival’s neighbor, David Bowie. He comes over to borrow a cup of sugar or his piano or something, a conversation develops and then they sing this song.
Bowie hated Drummer Boy. The show writers had to add in the Peace On Earth bridge to get him to go along with it. He only did the special, Crosby’s last, since his mother was a fan of the crooner. And so this unlikely thing was born.
I’m riffing on this singularly odd musical moment, we’re out of ideas, we can only mash things up, and the continued success of this bizarre collaboration has made every pop culture thing possible in the last 40 years. Everyone is really going along with the argument. (Remember, this Christmas special, where the gag is Crosby staying at a relative’s house, which turns out to be the former home of Charles Dickens, is older than everyone listening to me.)
Sometimes I wonder if my best role here is just in saying random things like this that makes people think. But right about then another student walks up. He’d been sitting at the camera position, as far away as possible in the room.
“I heard you say Bing Crosby’s name. I have a Bing Crosby story. Well, my family does.”
And if there’s one thing that life tells you, when people come from across a room to interject themselves into the conversation with an anecdote, it’s worth hearing out. They don’t always pay off. But this one did, in a big way.
Sadly, it isn’t my story to tell. But if you see a studious young man with an intensity about old crooners behind his eyes, ask to hear the story. He’ll happily tell you about it. And it is worth hearing.
Anyway, that all happened between these two shows. Miya, interviewed the baseball coach in this show. She’s doing a nice job with it, but everyone here is doing some good work. Even the freshman, who’s apparently taking over everything:
And they talked, what else, basketball in the talk show. It is, of late, not the happiest of topics. But, hey, angry talk is sometimes successful talk?
(It’s actually easier, and better, to do happy sports talk. That’s why they’re putting smiles on their faces.)
Anyway, let’s all put smiles on our faces. Tomorrow’s Friday, and then the weekend will, happily, be upon us.
My in-laws have this perpetual calendar by their kitchen door. It’s the sort of thing where you swap out the month tiles and move the numbers to get right under the days of the week. It’s the sort of thing that a lot of people have, but let it quickly fall out of sequence within a month or three. But, in all the years I’ve known them this calendar has always been up-to-date. Even when you come downstairs into the kitchen on the first day of the month, it is ready to go. I imagine that appeals to my mother-in-law’s sense of order. It’s a thing she can keep nice and tidy, and keep her organized for the days ahead.
It was a gift, many years ago, from a beloved family friend, and that probably plays into it, too. And they have custom tiles for important events, which is another added feature she surely looks forward to every month. And, look! This year I got my own tile!
The Yankee’s god-brother-in-law’s mother made that one for me. And, the joke this year, is that it only took 14 years for me to earn it. I suppose they think I’m going to stick. Time, as the cliche says, will tell.
Anyway, today we had New Jersey Christmas. Every year we drive down to spend a day with the family folks. The Yankee’s god parents are lifelong friends of my in-laws. It’s a cute story, really. Bob and Nancy met a year after she finished nursing school. Her best friend in school was Marge. And when Bob and Nancy got married, Marge met Clem at their wedding. Bob and Clem have been friends since before they were in school. They’re all lovely and wonderful and it’s really neat to see people who’ve been in each other’s lives for so many decades. They all raised their daughters together, and they vacation together, just this summer taking an amazing trip through Canada. And they let us all invade their house at Christmas time.
We opened presents:
And dinner, which was homemade lasagna (so, if you’re keeping track, that’s ravioli on Christmas Eve, shrimp cocktail and prime rib for Christmas and shrimp cocktail and lasagna at New Jersey Christmas) and we had homemade poppers to go with it. My mother-in-law made these:
They had little prizes and puns inside. Here was mine:
And before the night was over the girls, the ladies, recreated their traditional pyramid picture:
Isn’t that awesome? Aren’t they beautiful? They’ve been doing this all their lives, literally. There are teeny tiny kid pyramid pictures at the beach, and one from every time they get together as adults, including each of the weddings, and one from from the shore this summer. So, of course, they also do them every Christmas. Someday we’ll have to guess how many there actually are.
We’re trying to get all the kids trained to do a super pyramid. It didn’t quite work out today. Maybe next year.
Got it a little present last night at the hardware store. We needed parts, and this was one of the next things I was going to acquire anyway.
It was this or a router. And I think I’ll use a Kreg jig kit more often. Because, having spent more than a few minutes on Pinterest, I have come to realize that the entire DIY industry is entirely a front to prop up sales of Kreg products. But now I can make pocket joinery and there’s a custom drawer build in my future. (When I finish another pre-existing project or two.)
This morning I repaired two panels of my folks’ fence that were felled in Monday’s storm. It seems as if this fence has been there a while. It was, in fact, in the yard when they bought the place. And it seems that if a determined wind blows through the neighborhood one or more of the brackets holding one or more of the panels is going to fail. So they are replacing the thing bit by plastic bit, basically.
These two will, hopefully, be some of the last repairs required on this fence before they replace the whole thing. We’re down to spare part repairs, otherwise. As with anything, you get better at it over time. That first panel, on the left, took a long while. The second one went much faster because I knew what I was doing. Not, necessarily that I knew how to do it right, mind you.
Still, I’m not going to become a fence installer when I grow up.
We went to the movies this evening. While I was out wrapping up the day’s run the women in my life decided we should see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It’s a fine movie, but you should definitely read the article first.
While we’re standing in line at the concessions stand — where you buy tickets now because box offices are for oldz, and movie theaters are full of cost efficiency consultants these days — we saw this. Two of the three kids working working behind the counter were fussing with one, and off to the side I saw the price. Someone said something snarky. Probably it was me. The Yankee, always ready for a joke, gave me the I-have-a-reply look and her line let me say “Of course I’m not going to buy one because I’m a grownup.”
The guy in front of us looked back over his shoulder and smiled: Ha! Good one! And then he bought one.
He also asked them to not fill it with popcorn and his drink.
I bet he could have purchased the same thing at Bed Bath & Beyond for half the price. (It’s in the Beyond section, if you were wondering.)
We visited a downtown Italian restaurant for dinner this evening. We’ve been there before, and it hasn’t let us down yet. You’d think, Italian? In small town Alabama? Yes, my friend, but this is Florence.
An Italian immigrant named Ferdinand Sannoner, of Livorno, surveyed all of this land 200 years ago and he named it after Florence, which is just 50-some miles from his hometown. Part of his payment was in land. He died and is buried in Memphis, where his grave sat unmarked for almost 120 years. Today his old property, here, is home to the public library, and a very short walk away is the restaurant where we had dinner. Maybe he’d like that. Maybe he’d like the food. Who can say what a man born in 18th century Italy who lived in the 19th century American southeast would like today.
He’d probably think this was cool, though:
Well, once you explained who Hemingway was. Elvis? Transcends time. That’s the only way we can keep the artful graffiti honest. The restaurant was established in 1996.
I wonder what was there before that. Someone break out the ouji board. Let’s ask Sannoner.
