Strange Loops
Had a weird encounter with synchronicity today, apropos of nothing, but curious nonetheless.
It started with a link to an old article in The Huffington Post; which one isn’t important. That led me to some commentary on the presumed insult of comparing Bill O’Reilly to Ted Baxter—a fictional stuffed-shift newsman who Keith Olberman imitates when he quotes O’Reilly. Baxter was a character on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, played by Ted Knight. Yeah, I don’t remember him, either. That was a little before my time; so I drifted over into YouTube and href="http://wikipedia.org" target="_blank">Wikipedia to see whether I can find a clip. While searching for Ted Knight, I found that he was the voice of the narrator for the old Superfriends cartoon—remember that one?—as well as playing the father on a lousy sitcom called Too Close For Comfort, which I am also old enough to remember. Too Close for Comfort featured two college-age sisters (daughters to Ted’s character), a blonde bimbo and a brunette who passed for “the smart one,” although frankly, neither of them had all that much on the ball. That reminder got me to wondering: were they really as hot as I remember, or did they just have big hair, and I an adolescent lack of discrimination? Turns out they just had big hair, and I wasn’t yet old enough to distinguish between beauty and glitz, but that’s beside the point; the point is that Lydia Cornell, the actress who played the blonde sister, is no bimbo. After a lackluster acting career, she moved into blogging, earning awards for political commentary and a feud with Ann Coulter, which put her on the Huffington Post.
James Burke, whose praises I have sung here for his TV series “Connections,” allowed himself to be trapped by his own success. Having struck upon a winning formula in “Connections,” he tried duplicating it with “The Day the Universe Changed,” “Connections 2,” “Connections 3,” and “Circles,” all of which narrated surprising connections between widely disparate elements of human history and culture. Unfortunately, none of the imitations captured the original’s insight. Chief among the reasons for their failure is that relationships explored in the later shows weren’t always causal, and because they weren’t, they seemed trivial: two not-very-famous people being born in the same city, for example, or sharing a fondness for a particular breed of dog. Instead of Instead of describing how powerful and unpredictable the effects of advancing technology upon our lives are, the sequels descended into an elaborate version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” “Circles” was particularly guilty, a direct result of employing the variation of bringing the narrative back to its starting point, as I did above. The circular nature pretty well prevented a strictly chronological order, and with it, a causal one.
Okay, okay, I can learn a second lesson from Burke, albeit slowly. I promise not to inflict another one of these on you, at least not for a long time.