Yesterday evening, World News Tonight with David Muir devoted more time to Pat Sajak’s announcement of his upcoming retirement than it did to the death of Cormac McCarthy.
About an hour later, also on ABC, Anne Applebaum appeared in a question on Jeopardy!
When Sam Zell purchased the Tribune Company in April of 2007, employees didn’t quite know what to think – at least those of us toiling in the far reaches of the empire. At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the day the news broke, we took the elevators downstairs and watched a video relay of the meeting being held in the Tribune Tower in Chicago. A reporter asked President and CEO Dennis FitzSimons what Zell’s vision for the Tribune was. FitzSimons, looking trim and relieved in shirtsleeves and tie, said he didn’t know.
Zell appeared to journalists as a swashbuckling moneybags. Soon we all knew the Horatio Alger story of how, as a boy, he had ripped off classmates by selling them Playboys for more than he had paid for them, and how, later in life, he had gotten a reputation for reviving moribund businesses (the latter action earning him the title “grave dancer”). Much was made of the fact that he never wore a tie.
Zell took over as chairman of the Tribune Company at the start of 2008, and came down to Fort Lauderdale to address the troops. He climbed onto the stage wearing jeans and a tight-fitting sportcoat, his shirt generously open at the neck. He declared, in a voice dripping with self-satisfaction, “I’m filthy rich” – adding that whatever happened to the company (which he had made private) would have little effect on him; we were the ones who stood to gain, or lose. He slouched and cursed and brought down the house.
The stuffed shirts were dead! Long live the enemy of cravates!
Soon, we began receiving emails from “Sam” asking for our suggestions on how to make the Tribune better. This struck us, at the time, as more democratic than desperate. Just as the new employee handbook, glib and cavalier, seemed to be a salvo fired at a bland and overly-cautious company (and product), not a green light for the top brass to behave like adolescents.
Zell’s stated resolve to increase revenues without reducing resources quickly eroded. One afternoon in July our editor gathered everyone in the newsroom and announced the first layoffs in the history of the Sun-Sentinel. Somehow I imagined that I would be a part of them.
A few days later the banner that had hung in the stairwell for months – “You Own This Place Now” – was gone. And Zellmania was officially over. After being thrilled that he didn’t wear a tie, people now realized he didn’t have a clue.
In his final chat with Ken Jennings last night, Sam Buttrey – my favorite of the Jeopardy! Masters – gave an eloquent speech in praise of the unsung writers of the show. Matt Amodio, my second favorite, gave a heartfelt tribute to Sam.
It’s been a great week for Jeopardy! fans, as the half-hour show has been followed by a one-hour show featuring six recent “masters” – a group that contains a number of colorful characters. These latter games are high-intensity, with as much showmanship as is allowed by the format (thanks especially to Matt Amadio, Mattea Roach, Sam Buttrey, and James Holzhauer). And you see what a huge role fate plays in the proceedings. Last night Amadio missed an easy one – answering Peter O’Toole instead of Paul Newman as the actor with piercing blue eyes – that Roach then answered, and shortly after landed the Daily Double, which she got right, and went on to win the game – after having been in the hole at the start of Double Jeopardy! This also illustrated the game’s fatal flaw, which is that someone with prodigious knowledge can be tripped up by a piece of worthless trivia.
The May issue of The Atlantic features an article by Helen Lewis titled “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis: My very British romp through America’s weirdest state.” Unfortunately (from my perspective) it’s more a dissection of the governor than an exploration of Florida, but there are moments of travel writing that, curiously, made me glad there weren’t more.
Lewis was told that there are the three Floridas: the Panhandle, central Florida, and the south. There are more Floridas, of course; South Florida is a completely different entity from southwest Florida. Also, except for The Villages, central Florida is not, as she states, particularly ripe with seniors (unless you’re counting horses and cattle – which I’m sure she wasn’t; that Florida went completely unmentioned). Retirees, like most Floridians, tend to gravitate to the coasts.
And her summation of “south” Florida? A place “where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys.”
Any writer who associates beaches with the Keys is revealing her ignorance. There’s also the strange division of “condo towers” and “Spanish-speaking enclaves” (I’ll ignore the cliché of “bustling” just as I did the one of “laid-back”.) Does she think no Hispanics own condos – even in Miami? In Brickell, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, the condo towers are Spanish-speaking enclaves. Admittedly, they may not be all that bustling.
No one is more critical than a travel writer reading an article on his home.
My filmmaker friend texted me yesterday that the festival to which he had been invited advertised itself as the Palm Beach International Film Festival – a well-known festival that closed in 2017 after 28 years. He added that the people at the Hilton, a reported partner with discounted rooms, had never heard of it.