Spero Consulting

Archive for February 6th, 2010

After shov­el­ing sev­eral hun­dred cubic feet of snow for the Basen­jis this late night/​early morn­ing, we didn’t attempt to go to sleep.

Instead, we did what we often do when work­ing on a project late into the night; we turned on Red­eye on Fox News.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s on at 3:00 AM Mon­day — Fri­day (actu­ally Tues­day through Sat­ur­day) and hosted by blog­ger Greg Gut­feld, of TheDai​lyGut​.com.

It is by far the fun­ni­est show on tele­vi­sion: top­i­cal, irrev­er­ent, acer­bic, teas­ing, and some­times mean-​spirited.

Besides Greg, there are two other reg­u­lars, pan­elist, Bill Schulz, and ombuds­man, Andy Levy.

Each night, at least two other panelists-​guests appear, and most of those guests are reg­u­lars – appear­ing every week or every cou­ple of weeks. A few of those guests are Fox News anchors and reporters and a few are come­di­ans and a few are from other pro­fes­sions, e.g. a priest, a coro­ner, a Con­gress­man, etc.

We’d describe the show anal­o­gously in two dif­fer­ent ways. Nei­ther which may make sense to oth­ers, but then it’s our little-​read blog; so, we don’t care.

First, if tele­vi­sions shows were like peo­ple, it’s what the early, ado­les­cent Sat­ur­day Night Live would grown into had it matured and stayed funny. Note that we use the word ‘matured’ very pre­cisely. We mean had the show’s for­mat matured from skit-​based to news pan­elly, and had it’s world-​viewed matured, from some­thing for teens and twenty-​somethings to some­thing for forty-​somethings who have been mugged a bit by reality.

We cer­tainly don’t mean mature with respect to the behav­ior or demeanor of the hosts and many of their guests. That gen­er­ally remains ado­les­cent and juve­nile but in a good way, and that’s the sec­ond way we think about it. If you, dear reader, hung-​out with smart, witty, funny, and occa­sion­ally mean kids in high school – you know, before those kids became self-​conscious or seri­ous or moody or thought that oth­ers cared about what they thought – then you may like it for the same rea­son. It’s what hang­ing out with those kids would be like if those kids grew up, became edu­cated, learned a bit about the world, and (gen­er­ally) had some­thing worth say­ing, but didn’t lose their sense-​of-​humor or rudeness.

So, if you hated those kids in high school, you’ll hate the show; how­ever, if you were one of those kids in high school, you’ll likely love the show. If you won­dered where some of those kids went, well it seems that few are on tele­vi­sion at 3:00 AM and haven’t changed very much. If your sched­ule isn’t as flex­i­ble as ours, you prob­a­bly won’t want to stay awake for it, but it is def­i­nitely worth record­ing and then watch­ing the next night when the sup­posed come­di­ans are on television.

Check out var­i­ous seg­ments on the show’s web site. The robots are con­sis­tently hilar­i­ous, and the priest, Father Mor­ris, gives amaz­ing answers to very dif­fi­cult and per­ni­cious the­o­log­i­cal ques­tions. Lately, those ques­tions have been posed by the robots. (Don’t ask.)

Today is the show’s third anniver­sary, so to Greg, Bill and Andy, con­grat­u­la­tions on your suc­cess and on your new table and keep up the good work.

P.S. The Daily Gut web site really sucks. We could do much better.

The Bane of Basenjis

We usu­ally work late into the night, but rarely shovel snow at 3:00 AM.

This morn­ing is an exception.

The snow has been accu­mu­lat­ing for the past eleven hours, and we’re not sure of the offi­cial mea­sure­ment – we’d guess at least a foot so far – but when we threw our Basenji bitch into the night, she splayed her legs and her paws didn’t hit the ground. (Don’t worry, other dog lovers, we quickly retrieved her and found our boots and coat and began shov­el­ing. Also, being West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, noth­ing is flat, and there is imme­di­ately two steps down so the depth was dif­fi­cult to estimate.)

Our other Boots, Our Poster Boy for the Credit Cri­sis, didn’t make it out­side the first time. When we opened the door, they both stood there star­ing at the vast, cold white­ness, and when we grabbed her, he made a run for it – in the oppo­site direction.

They (and we) hadn’t been out­side since the snow began to accu­mu­late, and we fig­ured that there would be about six inches on the ground – not easy for a Basenji, but not worth shov­el­ing until the morning.

Boy, were we wrong!

So, while every­one slept, we shov­eled the walk­way from their exit door to their entrance door and a bit of the patio. With drift­ing, it is already 18 — 24 inches in places, and accord­ing to the weather radar there is no let up in sight.

For­tu­nately, we live on the top of a hill and even when the tem­per­a­ture is in the high twen­ties, the snow is light and fluffy – well, as light as two feet of show can be. (For some rea­son, a few hun­dred feet of ele­va­tion makes a HUGE dif­fer­ence in the con­sis­tency of it.)

If you live near the East Coast, good luck and be care­ful on Saturday.