The great achievement of The Social Network is that it manages to be entertaining while telling the story of a young man who spends most of his life looking at a computer screen. But it is also depressing, as you realize that all the man's brilliance and creative intelligence went into producing a high-tech bulletin board.
Last night during the Colts-Redskins game (I flipped back and forth between innings) they showed an instant replay of Peyton Manning calling a timeout. If not quite the television equivalent of somebody tweeting that he was going to take a nap, it was certainly just as riveting.
If Ken Burns is such an intelligent documentary filmmaker, then why did he begin "The 10th Inning" with the statement: "Despite what happens off the field, it's still a beautiful game" and then show, as illustration, a player hitting a home run? And not just any player, but one embroiled in the bulking up scandal? It contradicted the message of all the previous hours of "Baseball," which is that it is the small things, the often unnoticed subtleties, that make baseball such an exquisite game. Whether it's the "greatest game ever invented," as someone claimed last night, is debatable, and awfully jingoistic. Is it superior to soccer, chess, or solitaire (which our electronic age has given a new life).
One of the small things that is sadly disappearing from the game is the organist (you don't get that with chess). After four decades, Chicago White Sox organist Nancy Faust is retiring, and taking with her an era of graciousness, individuality and wit. (She would, with input from fans seated nearby, play songs appropriate to the opposing team's batters.) She personalized the game, and made sitting at U.S. Cellular Field different from sitting in almost any other ballpark.
Now, the White Sox want to give their fans the same blast of canned, homogenized music that's everywhere these days, even in the retro stadiums. (Retro only goes so far.) Burns - if he really wants to capture the spirit of baseball today - should play some of this music over a shot of George Will, mouthing words we can no longer hear.
Standing in the check-out line at Whole Foods yesterday I noticed a new magazine - new to me at least - titled "Cesar's Way." It was devoted to the work of Cesar Millan, the Oprah, clearly, of the canine world. (While writers still struggle with editors, certain entertainers simply skip the fraught realm of gatekeepers and start their own magazines. If only I had the money for the "Swickian," or perhaps the "Swickette.")
I wondered what could be in a magazine about a dog trainer and my curiosity was satisfied by the words at the top: "Help Dog Whisperer: Terrorized By A Chihauhau."
We recently switched cable companies, going for one that is cheaper and offers more channels than the previous one.
I like paying less, but the greater selection isn't the boon I thought it would be. Surfing the other night I was struck not so much by the mediocrity of the fare - which has been widely documented - but by the almost total lack of anything foreign. Yes, there are a few stations in Spanish, but many of their shows are produced here.
The movies, no matter how high you surf, are unrelentingly American. The Sundance Channel, to its credit, occasionally shows French and Italian films. But what about movies from Asia, Latin America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe? You can surf all you want and you won't find them. Is it that subtitles aggrieve a post-literate generation? Or are we as a people simply stuck on ourselves?
I have never desired Carl Kasell's voice on my home answering machine (Hania does a lovely job with hers), but I do like listening to the NPR news quiz show "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" The questions tend to be fairly easy, but the panelists are usually funny and irreverent.
Usually. This past Saturday, the celebrity guest was Pete Carroll, the new coach of the Seattle Seahawks and the former coach of the University of Southern California Trojans. USC was recently penalized by the NCAA for a number of violations, mostly in its football program. Carroll is believed by many to have taken the job in Seattle so he could avoid the mess at USC. He has claimed that he knew nothing about the violations.
The always affable Peter Sagal refrained from bringing up this matter during his interview with Carroll - perhaps forgetting that he is the host of a "news quiz show." It is also a humor show. And none of the normally astute panelists noted that the coach now under suspicion for turning a blind eye was on the segment of the show called "Not My Job."