Labor Day Half Marathon

[captainsblog]

Good Lord, not the running-outside kind. Haven't hit real pavement since finishing the 5K two Sundays ago; I'm not sure where I should start at in the running regimen before looking ahead to the more-or-less 8K on Thanksgiving.

No, with Eleanor working all afternoon and the Mets running away with another loss, I was inspired by a few things and resumed watching The Newsroom. I'd been roughly current through the third episode, but the New Years Eve one just lost me when I first started watching. It magnified the biggest problem I'd had since the premiere: Sorkin spending too much time on the inside interpersonals and not enough on these guys working and making the point.

Slowly, though, it came around for me:



All the gossip-girl stuff turned out to be part of making the point. Unbeknownst to Will, to Charlie, and certainly to me, the network's uber-madam (played, in a delicious turn, by former CNN uber-madam Jane Fonda) is found to be behind the effort to Page Six their anchor to death or, even better, resignation.  The reactions from the news side over the next two episodes more than made up for the awk-warrrd of everybodys' lack of social skills through these New Years and (once I got to it) Valentines contexts.

And just as I just about couldn't bear to hear Neil go on for one more second about Bigfoot? Just as in the premiere, the cry of "Choppers!" went out, this time in reaction to the Gabby Giffords shooting (and then, and only then, was the episode date revealed) and the newsroom just cranked.  Perhaps its best cranking was with what it didn't do: declare the poor woman dead just because other networks had. I don't recall that happening, but given that this aired just after (and must've been written and filmed before) the CNN-Fox clusterfudge over the Obamacare Supreme Court ruling, it spoke more to that for me than to the original incident.



So now I'm halfway, with Number 6 locked and loaded and the rest comfortably on the way. I've heard a September 25th date for DVD release (careful- there's a 2004 movie called The Newsroom which is not what you'd want), and I'd love to see the behind-scenery of this one.

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In unrelated news, comment spam has returned with a vengeance over the past several days. Nothing patently offensive- yet- but long strings of gibberish surrounding the money-shot link they're trying to increase pagerank on. It's hitting new entries and a bunch of random old ones, and it's getting me thinking about a move again. Not that anyone not named Louis V****** is going to care at this point.