Sunday Morning Comin' Down

A few Sundays ago, I noticed that NBC appeared to be beta-testing a burn-the-village-to-save-the-village strategy of salvaging the awful, awful Meet the Press by not actually airing Meet the Press:

The Meet the Press ratings death-spiral was briefly arrested due to preemption by a soccer game, which meant that the John McCain/Lindsay Graham Human Neocon Centipede was able to sleep in today, and Chuck Todd had to read his 2016 goat entrails alone in his kitchenette with no one listening.  I think this bold "Saving Meet the Press by not actually airing Meet the Press" idea has a lot of promise.

And last week you may recall during the Glenn Greenwald Book Tour segment of their little Sunday pundit ratings hospice melodrama, NBC investigated the concept replacing their defective and very expensive proprietary "David Gregory" module with the much cheaper open-source alternative of "a bunch of unrelated questions gleaned from random people on Teh Internet" (which, to my utter astonishment, no dirty hippie has as yet labeled "Twit versus Twitter".)

Either that or Mr. Gregory had an old friend come in from out of town or something:

My hat went off to them for yet another bold experiment in not having that establishmentarian testicle cozy, and since the questions came in single-serve, one-off packets with no meaningful follow-up, had you put Twitter and Gregory behind a curtain and had them each conduct the "interview", you would have been hard pressed to tell them apart.

(Now that Twitter has passed the Beltway Pundit Turing Test, I wish it great success in its next endeavor: mating with the algorithm that generates David Brooks' column, and producing offspring that go on to enslave the human face and battle Neo for control of the Earth in a terrific movie that should never, ever had been pimped out into a trilogy.)

Well damn if the brain wizards at NBC didn't decide to go back to a daring, 100% Not Airing Meet the Press strategy this week.  Instead, viewers were treated to an hour of Formula One racing from Monaco.  For those of you unfamiliar with this race, its the part of the disappointing Iron Man sequel during which Tony Stark's car is carved to bits by Whiplash.

Two more fun facts about the race for which NBC preempted the awful, awful Meet the Press.

First, the race consists of participants repeating the same the same course, round and round, over and over again.

Second, two of the most famous turns at the Grand Prix are Sainte Devote and the Casino.  Sainte Devote "makes a prolonged turn to the right" which drivers are advised "to approach...from the middle".  The Casino is fraught with potentially dangerous bumps which drivers can only avoid "by staying well to the right."

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, Ben Carson continues to embarrass his species on the network which pioneered providing huge platforms to species-embarrassing lunatics (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars):

Dr. Ben Carson calls the recent scandal at the VA "a gift from god" which will help alert Americans to the dangers of Obamacare, which he and his cohorts continue to pretend is socialized medicine.