by John Walters
Starting Five
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
After a two-week hiatus, Saturday Night Live was a one-woman wrecking crew last night, as Kate McKinnon portrayed both Jeff Sessions and Kellyanne Conway. The cold open was the night’s best skit, but then McKinnon made cameos at least three other times that I noticed as Kellyanne in her now famous kneeling pose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xSXjQ0R5dY
The night’s best line belonged to Michael Che, though. After Colin Jost talked about how his family came over from Ireland a few generations back because of a serious lack of potatoes, Che quipped, “At least they had a choice.”
2. All The Prescient Men
If you’re following what’s happening in the White House (it’s kind of difficult to avoid), you may be feeling a sense of deja vu. That’s not imagined, especially if you’ve seen the 1976 Oscar-nominated film All The President’s Men. Inside Newsweek I did a blow-by-blow comparison between some of the film’s quotes/scenes and what is transpiring today. As I filed it on Saturday, the Donald was kind enough to send out the following tweet….
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
3. Berry, Berry Good
Berry II put up 28 in the best impersonation of Frank Mason III we’ve seen this season
North Carolina took down Duke in Chapel Hill, 90-83, as reserve 6’0″ guard Joel Berry Carroll played 36 minutes and scored 28 points. Luke’s Duke Kennard, or is it the other way around, also put up 28. Grayson Allen, still nursing a boo boo, did not start. If you were Coach K (who does know a little more about hoops than we do), wouldn’t you just sit Allen out of next week’s ACC tourney and let it “heel?”
About that tourney, to be held at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, Duke, Carolina and Louisville are all in the same half of the bracket. That’s a good draw for Notre Dame, who will likely open with Virginia (who, admittedly, owned the Irish in their lone meeting this season) and if they win could get Florida State next. Still, a more favorable draw.
(Speaking of the Irish—aren’t we always?—the men’s lacrosse team took down No. 1 Maryland 5-4 on Saturday).
4. Who’s Fast? J.R.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6miMpBZr8Ks
University of Washington wide receiver John Ross made himself a lot of cabbage yesterday when he smoked a 4.22 in the 40, the fastest time ever recorded at the NFL combine (breaking Chris Johnson’s nine year-old record). The 5’11” flash out of Long Beach, Calif., caught 81 balls and scored 17 TDs last season for a Huskies team that, you may have already forgotten, made the playoff.
Watch the video. It doesn’t even look as if Ross got to top gear there….
5. Princeton’s Back! (Rock on, Old Nassau!)
Over the weekend Princeton beat Harvard (73-69) and Dartmouth (85-48) in Jadwin Gym to become the first Ivy League school since Cornell in 2008 to finish the conference season undefeated (14-0).
In years past the Tigers would have an automatic berth into the NCAA tournament, but this year the Ivy League has christened a four-team conference tournament, a.k.a. “Ivy Madness,” so Princeton (21-6) still must win two more games. The tourney is at the Palestra in Philly and the Tigers open with Penn (13-14), so that’s a home game for the Quakers, who beat Harvard on a last-second shot on Saturday night to punch their ticket to the mini-tourney.
Princeton and Vermont were the only two schools to go undefeated in conference play this season in D-I hoops.
Reserves
Lord of the Lord
CNN propagandist Jeffrey Lord moved up to the big leagues on Friday night, and it didn’t go too well for him. “I like you, Mr. Lord, and I hear you’re a very nice guy, but don’t bullshit me.”
Another Day Of Trump
Much of what President Trump said on Tuesday night was easy for anyone on either side of the aisle to support. Not all. But much. Here’s something he said near the end of his speech to Congress:
The time for small thinking is over. The time for trivial fights is behind us.
And here’s something he tweeted yesterday, currently his latest tweet. Alas, I think we all know which one the REAL Donald Trump is.
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
While I agree fsu side of draw is better for ND than unc/Louisville the first possible matchup vs UVA is not good at all. ND has lost all 5 ACC games vs uva w an avg loss of 14 pts.
Not sure why the Ivy League succumbed to the lure of the conference tournament – which, via postseason upset, annually deprives top-quality small-conference regular season champs of a chance to play in the NCAA tourney (and weakens that tourney in the process).
John –
Great article in Newsweek on the Watergate comparison to modern day U.S. presidential politics. I actually just watched All the President’s Men yesterday afternoon, upon your strong recommendation on Twitter. I’d never seen it, though I was aware it existed and that it starred young versions of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman with a character named Deep Throat.
Really enjoyed it. For a movie that is very dialogue-heavy, with little action, it held my attention throughout. The only thing I didn’t like was the ending. To me, there could have been another 5-10 scenes to help tie everything together.
We go from the heroes (Woodward & Bernstein) having their most recent article completely smashed by public figures – and their sources – to getting the rest of the picture from Deep Throat (including that they were being wiretapped by the FBI), to getting a pep talk from their Editor-in-Chief.
From there, it’s a couple minutes watching (from a middle distance) the heroes typing furiously on their typewriters (TV in the foreground playing vintage news clips), which gave way to what looked like AP news wire stories coming in 1-by-1 showing the fallout of the hard journalism work done by W & B.
As a viewer, I’d want to see a few scenes between the one outside Ben Bradlee’s house and the “resolution” where Nixon resigns. I felt like there was more to the story that didn’t play out on camera that should have been captured.
I’m a young guy (though not as young as I used to be – who isn’t?), that didn’t live through this time period and I haven’t read much about Watergate – perhaps there just wan’t anything that interesting to film after the pow-wow outside Ben’s house?
The other thing I liked about this was the scene where their trying to track down Dahlberg. Modern-day research would have just turned to a quick Google search – which would have pulled up Dalhberg’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts, with, probably, a post of his Starbucks coffee cup at his local Minnesota location of choice.
Last thing – as if that’s not enough – it was fun (and always is for me) to see the depiction of the workplace pre-computers. All those desks and the only keyboards are those attached to typewriters. No monitors, no mice. Just type writers and a ton of papers and reference books. Weird compared to today’s workplace. How did people get work done without computers?
Thank you, Micah!
One of the things I loved about the movie was just how accurate they depicted newsrooms. Everyone’s desks or offices are overloaded with files or paperwork.
I began at SI in 1989. We were past typewriters but pre-internet. I never used a computer in college, so the ones at Si were my first. Yes, I did love how Redford was looking through phone books for Dahlberg.
At SI we had librarians whose lone jobs were to go through every day’s major papers and cut out articles and then file the articles in red folders according to who’s in them. So, a profile in the NYT about Serena Williams would go in her file. If a story had two major subjects, they’d copy it on a Xerox machine and put a copy of story in both files. It’s only 25 years later but now that sounds like monks re-copying the Bible to make more of them. Think about how time-intensive that was.
When Lexis-Nexis finally came along—type in a few search words and see what stories come up—we young reporters at SI equated its importance with that of the wheel. Even now Lexis-Nexis is still better than Google.
As to why the movie stopped there, I think it was a good place to stop. The movie was Woodward & Bernstein’s journey, not Nixon’s. That final scene sorta showed they’d pricked the establishment and won the loyalty and respect of their boss. Plus, it was already 140 minutes long and as we both agree, wordy. I loved how they showed that these guys weren’t geniuses, they just kept persevering.