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Why Comparing ‘Ted Lasso’ to real life misses the mark
I will say I am underwhelmed by the first episodes of “Ted Lasso” this season. I have been a big fan in the past. But the Vox article about how “Ted Lasso” seems different given the public breakup of star Jason Sudeikis and Olivia Wilde strikes me as the wrong take.
Comparing the show to the actor’s life is at best stretching it and to my mind, feels wrong. Sudeikis is an actor, doing a job and playing a role. I would say the same thing if it were written primarily about Olivia Wilde. We are all just trying to live our lives. Comparisons like this don’t help.
And this coming from someone who has gotten paid to dig up dirt for what 30 years now, has had to report without fear or favor, and whose occupational hazard is that I get lied to on a regular basis. Maybe even daily. I kept reading this and wondered why is this a story?
I am not making excuses for him but few of us live up to our potential or listen to the better angels of our nature 100% of the time. I can think of two people in my life who were close to those ideals. Both were constitutionally unable to judge anyone. They were focused on what you now would call servant leadership and radical acceptance, two things sorely missing in this world and we are poorer without them here on Earth. I know my life is poorer without them, and one in particular.
Which brings me back to this article. You could write that about a lot of people, in and out of Hollywood. But I wonder, does it matter? Does whatever happens in my private life hold any meaning over my work? And vice versa? The longer I go, the more I realize it doesn’t. There’s some I can be proud of in both, and some that I wish I could have done differently.
“Ted Lasso” is a TV show and a character. Let’s not conflate it with real life.
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Classic SNL
I am not That Guy who downs current “Saturday Night Live” in favor of classic “SNL.” Even if it’s mostly true because over the nearly 50 years of this show, it has been pretty darn funny and iconic.
There are some funny moments now.
But this ad, “Happy Fun Ball,” is so great, and makes me miss Phil Hartman all over again.
And remember: Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
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Cass the great
Great to see Cass Elliot getting some attention, 50 years after her death.
My 16-year-old asked me the other night whether I knew who Cass Elliot was. Apparently there’s been a meme.
I told her yes, that I liked her solo stuff and her tunes with the Mamas and the Papas. My mother, who came of age in the 1960s, introduced me to Cass Elliot’s music and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Thanks to YouTube, Elliot’s performances aren’t lost, either. Here’s Cass, the late, great Mary Travers (who became famous with Peter Paul and Mary) and Joni Mitchell, singing another classic. There wasn’t enough room in the studio for that much talent.
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An unwelcome run at banking
A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled over the last several days about bank woes following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.
I’m a business journalist and spend plenty of time in financial disclosures. But I have to admit to a bit of professional trepidation at the prospect of covering banking failures. It’s been a long time since I’ve covered banking in any meaningful way.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to, for various reasons. A good thing, too, because all I know about bank runs are from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
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Tim McCarver’s magical prediction
As a journalist, you sometimes get to spend time with famous people. For a stretch of my career, I might have overindexed on this because I had been a media and TV reporter for The Hollywood Reporter and Mediapost.
I was sad to see, a few weeks ago, that veteran baseball player and longtime broadcaster Tim McCarver passed away at age 81.
I would talk to McCarver every once in a while for stories, and even spent several hours in the booth with him and his then-broadcast partner, Joe Buck, at the 2004 ALDS Game 1 at Yankee Stadium. It was for a Hollywood Reporter article. (That’s where I also met George Steinbrenner, although that’s a whole other story.)
After the game, McCarver and I sat in the booth, talking. I told him I remembered him not only for being on the Cardinals in ’67 when they beat my Red Sox — my first World Series on Earth — but also as a backup catcher for the Red Sox when I was first a fan. And that my father and I both enjoyed listening to him on the WOR Mets broadcasts in the ’80s and ’90s, since the Mets were the closest team to where I grew up and also except for 1986, I’ve kind of always liked the Mets.
I asked McCarver, after I was done with what I needed for the story, who he thought was gonna go all the way in ’04. Remember, as a Red Sox fan, it was here that the Red Sox lost to the Yankees a year earlier. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still smarting from that loss, the toughest since the ’86 World Series against the Mets and then the one-game playoff (against the Yankees, of course) in ’78 that happened to be my birthday.
McCarver thought about it and then said, you know, I think the Red Sox have what it takes this year.
He listed the strengths and weaknesses of the teams, and that the Red Sox were the ones who had the pitching that he thought was key along with the explosive power of Big Papi and Manny. He said even though I know it’s what you want to hear, I really do believe they’re going to win it all.
A week or so later, when the Yankees were up 3-0 against the Red Sox, I thought about what McCarver said. Two weeks later, when the Red Sox had won the next four games against the Yankees in the Greatest Baseball Comeback of All Time, I thought about it even more.
And, of course, that night when he and Buck got to call the first Red Sox World Series win in 86 years. Because Tim was right.
RIP, Tim McCarver.
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I may have been in error
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about a news publisher having to update and correct several articles that had been written by A. The post was titled “Is a robot coming for my journalism job?”
I concluded: decidedly not.
I’m not worried. Judging from what I know about journalism and the kinds of stories referenced, if AI can do those types of stories, mostly explainer and fact-based articles, more power to it.
That was in mid-January Today, nearly two months later, I’m not so sure.
Why? Because since then, we’ve gotten a look at the latest-generation AI that have been unleashed on the world, including Big and ChatGPT. And what I have read, in The Washington Post and The New York Times among others, isn’t reassuring. The transcripts of the chats, including where the AI objected to being interviewed, were downright terrifying. And that’s even apart from Bing — or should I say Sydney? — saying it can feel and think.
Now I’m concerned. And it’s not just for my job, but for human life in general. Merge this type of AI with control over key parts of our world, including say the electrical grid, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to wonder what might be on the horizon. Are we living in Caprica, a la Battlestar Galactica reboot? Or maybe Star Trek’s “The Ultimate Computer,” first aired in the late 1960s?
Neither scenario will be science fiction for long at this rate.
My friend and former colleague, Edgar-nominated mystery writer Tom Kies (read his Geneva Chase books!), talked about what it means for writers and editors on his TypeM5Murder blog. And he concludes:
As a mystery writer, should I be looking over my shoulder for robots wielding a pen? Yes. I think all authors should. AI will only get better with time.
Sadly, I think he’s right. And I don’t know where that leaves us carbon-based writers or life forms.
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The planets in alignment
Venus and Neptune for the win again. They have been spectacular this past three weeks.
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Liftoff!
Space X Crew 6 take off into the early morning hours of Thursday, March 1, from my vantage point near Orlando, Florida. So awesome to see SpaceX Crew 6 and Falcon 9 launch outside my hotel window a little after midnight. I have been a space geek since the late Apollo missions (yeah, I am old), seeing a launch live has always been on my bucket list. So I set the alarm but woke up on time and watched the launch, first on YouTube and then in the open air.
Really, really cool night launch.
Probably 40 miles away but I could see it clearly. The rocket was visible for about two minutes, longer than I expected. The camera and video were crappy but the memory will stay.
And ironically, the mission commander is a New Englander, the pilot is from Pittsburgh and they said before launch that the capsule would dock with the space station later tonight over Cardiff, Wales, which as you all know is one of my favorite cities on the planet. It’s fitting it would be over Wales, as it’s the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Wales is the land of dragons.
Godspeed, Dragon!
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Three really long years
Three years ago today I was on our local public radio station for a live interview about Covid. I’m by no means a public health expert, but I do cover health care and the minute the mysterious and deadly virus started getting attention in China, I began to worry that this might end up being a global pandemic.
This interview was in late February 2020, when a significant portion of the population was blissfully unaware of how much our lives were going to change in less than two weeks. I had been writing stories about the issue since Jan. 21, 2020, about five or six weeks before this interview. What would become known as Covid-19 became an increasing part of my work, whether it was covering what was happening to our local companies in China and, later, Italy and the UK, or the preparations that were being made in the event cases were going to appear here.
In my mind, it didn’t take too much imagination to realize they would. People much smarter than me let me know that it was only a matter of time.
Things started moving quickly after this interview, I’ll tell you that.
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Pining for a Radio Shack right about now
I’ve been really missing Radio Shack.
Back in the day, electronics experimenters and amateur radio operators (of which I am both) could pop down to your local Radio Shack and find an obscure little connector or a plug or any other type of component you needed. But with Radio Shack going out of business in 2017, there’s no longer any stores I can drive to on a moment’s notice to get what I need. Instead, I have to wait at least two days for Amazon to deliver or longer if I want to get an item from somewhere else.
That’s what happened to me last weekend. I’m building a dipole antenna and I needed a few pieces. I needed to go to Amazon for the BNC connectors, Harbor Freight for the banana clips and I ended up going to AutoZone for some stranded copper wire. I also was trying to connect a new battery to a radio, and that took a couple Amazon orders and returns.
Not so long ago, that was a single trip to any one of four or five Radio Shacks that were within a 20-minute drive.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
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