The Things That Come to Mind

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When I was in grade school, at 10:30 in the morning on the first Tuesday of every month, every air raid siren in the city of Chicago went off. It was a regular test of the warning system. Our job, as third graders, was to duck under our wooden desks and cover in place. After a few minutes, the “all clear” sounded and we went back to our studies. I may not have known what “geopolitics” even meant in those days. But I do remember wondering, if the nuclear bombs were as dangerous as everybody said they were, how much protection would those wooden desks provide?

By the time I got to high school, the Cold War was simply an unpleasant fact. A substantial portion of the wonderful Promontory Point Park just a block from our apartment building, where I used to walk my Scottish terrier, had been taken over and surrounded by a fence. On the fence were intimidating notices to stay out. And inside were several towers, each one a couple of stories tall. At the top of the towers were antennas. This was part of the early warning system, designed to detect Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole, down from Canada.

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Republicans Engage in “Legitimate Political Discourse”

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There was a time when our two major political parties took policy matters seriously. I remember my first political convention, the Democratic meeting in Miami in 1972 which nominated George McGovern to face, and be pummeled by, the incumbent Richard Nixon. One of the things that impressed a then young reporter was the work of the platform committee.

The committee met and considered the issues of the day. They heard presentations, took testimony, and in the end voted on a position to take. At first, I wondered how valuable the exercise was. While the platform represented a compromise position so the party could say what it stood for, it could not bind all its members. And with opposition when it came time to govern, there is no way to expect the positions of the platform committee to translate directly into policy.

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Passing

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There are some people you just think will be around forever. Betty White was one of them. I cannot claim to have watched her first television program, the self-produced “Life with Elizabeth.” I was only one year old when it premiered in 1952. And coming in the days before television programming could be recorded, or prerecorded, there is no record for me to review, or add to my insanely enormous collection of television programming.

But as to the rest of it, the game shows including Password, Match Game, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, The Hollywood Squares, and the $25,000 Pyramid. Or the soaps and dramas, The Bold and the Beautiful, Boston Legal, and the comedies/variety programs including The Carol Burnett Show. Her biggest roles include Sue Ann Nivens on the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1973–1977), Rose Nylund on the NBC sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992), and Elka Ostrovsky on the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland (2010–2015). She gained renewed popularity after her appearance in the 2009 romantic comedy film The Proposal (2009) and was subsequently the subject of a successful Facebook-based campaign to host Saturday Night Live in 2010, garnering her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.

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Want to Steal the 2024 Election?

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It may not be likely that Republicans will steal the 2024 Presidential Election, but it is certainly possible. A new paper by a Yale Law School expert in election law, Professor Matthew Seligman, says all it would take is a single corrupt Republican governor and a Republican controlled House of Representatives. Anyone want to bet that won’t happen?

Let’s make something clear here. I am not generating an ambiguous set of facts. I’m dealing with the universe where a fair and legal election, as determined by state election officials and courts, has occurred, been reviewed, certified and the results have been published. None the less, a Republican majority in the House of Representatives votes to challenge the Electoral College votes from a state and that state’s governor, without any legal authority, then sends to Congress an “alternate” set of EC votes, changing the outcome of the election for President of the United States.

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Tids and Bits

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Thirty years. Ten billion dollars. Launching on Christmas morning, the Webb telescope is finally off the earth and on its way to a point in space one million miles away where it will point its eighteen gold-plated mirrors into deep space, hoping to look back in time to the beginning of the universe. The Webb is far more sensitive, especially at the low infrared radiation frequencies than the Hubble Space Telescope. It is hoped it will succeed and surpass that amazing instrument to study the formation of the universe and the most distant worlds. It will take about six months to maneuver into position and be calibrated, ready for its first observations. Bon Voyage Webb.

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Remakes. Why?

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Have you ever seen a remake that was better than the original? Or at least as good as the original? Neither have I. So why do they continue to go down this road? Has Hollywood run out of new ideas?

The entertainment business is a land of superlatives. So, let’s get this out of the way. Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest film directors of all time. Stephen Sondheim is one of the greatest composers/lyricists of all time. West Side Story, in its various incarnations, the book of the 1957 Broadway musical the work of Arthur Laurents, is a modern implementation of the outline drawn by William Shakespeare in his drama Romeo and Juliet and as such, one of the greatest romance stories of all time. Leonard Bernstein wrote the music. Jerome Robbins was the choreographer along with Peter Cennaro. More of the greatest.

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