Spirit Woman, 33rd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): I realize this site is getting perilously close to becoming a weather blog ("it rained today," "yesterday was a pretty day"), but I feel compelled after bitching about the recent rain to point out that today is as beautiful as Georgia days get. Sunny with clear, cloudless skies, warm but not hot (78° F) and dry (38% humidity, 50° dew point). A day to be outdoors, even though Electra is a sitting and not a walking day. I compensated by doing a bit of yard work and puttering around outside.

Today I learned that the couple who bought ol' Charlie's house have two children, age 2½ and 5½, so  they are young, too young, in my old-school, working-class way of thinking, to be buying $1.23M homes. 

It's a shame what CBS has done to 60 Minutes as well as to Stephen Colbert, but seriously, who watches CBS anyway? As for 60 Minutes, there have been three stories they've covered over the years where I had some level of knowledge, and all three times I feel like they misrepresented the story.

• I'm not going to rehash the whole Barbuda story again, but in their second segment on the proposed development there, 60 Minutes kept referring to the New Order of Aragon, even though they had long stopped being a part of the plan, and kept splicing in humorous clips of Rosanna Brazzi, the New Order's former spokesperson, for comic effect. It felt like 60 Minutes wasn't letting reality get in the way of a more entertaining story.


• Back in 1979, when I was in college, the Boston University faculty went on strike in protest of the policies of the University's right-wing Republican President, John Silber. Those policies were so polarizing that the faculty first formed a union, and then the faculty union went on strike, suspending classes. 60 Minutes sent Mike Wallace, an old Texas colleague of Silber's, to cover the story, and if you watched you'd be excused for thinking it was the students, not the faculty, who were striking. The story was twisted into "no one told the BU students the 60s were over" and "where have all the flowers gone?" (an reference to the old flower-power hippies). They missed the mark completely in an epic face plant.


• Way back in those flower-power 60s, a young indigenous Vietnamese Montagnard boy transferred to my 8th-grade class, sponsored by some American missionaries working there. He didn't speak much English and as a result was quiet, shy and reserved, but well mannered and easy going. 60 Minutes did a segment on him, and portrayed him solely in the polarizing light of the then-current Vietnam War. They mused that although he was a quiet schoolboy now, a year before, he may have been killing Viet Cong, with the word "may" doing a lot of work in that sentence. A year before,  I "may" have been the boy-genius CEO of a multinational finance conglomerate (I wasn't). They expressed no sympathy for the culture shock he must have been enduring, or the cultural and language barriers he needed to overcome. He was just a convenient symbol to them of an unpopular war, and their story missed the mark entirely.

So if Bari Weiss and the Stable Genius destroy 60 Minutes and CBS News, I'll protest because fuck those two, but I'm not so sure those institutions were the gold standards of journalism they're being held up to be, based on my own personal experience.