Saturday Night Live – Malcolm's Round Table

Two days ago, a Time Magazine story headlined: “The Controversial Saturday Night Live Performance That Made Sinéad O’Connor an Icon.” I agree, it did , but that wasn’t the reaction at the time. Then, and probably up to the day she died, the reaction was pure hatred and scorn for her protest against the Catholic Church about a problem that had for years been obvious to everyone. Even her friends had nothing good to say about her on October 4th and afterwards.

She followed a long tradition of protest singers that went back to Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and almost everyone else who was singing during the Vietnam War years.

According to Time, “Speaking with the New York Times in 2021, O’Connor said she had no regrets, though the backlash was overwhelming. ‘I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant. But it was very traumatizing. It was open season on treating me like a crazy b-tch.'”

Jeremy Smith, writing in Film said, “My memory is tainted by the ensuing smear campaign, a campaign that did not end until today, when Sinéad O’Connor died at the infuriatingly young age of 56 – and I’m probably a fool to believe this denigration will cease just because she’s not around to defend herself anymore. I’ve never seen a popular musician face such unremitting scorn. Not even close. But O’Connor — contrary to the narrative seared into our psyches by a media that could not bear her scorched-earth declaration that the Catholic Church is, charitable works be damned, a factory of institutionally abetted child abuse — never stopped speaking her truth. That continues to be our truth and our shame.”

Well said, and I hope that in time those who slandered her will one day see that she bravely spoke the truth, a truth that most people preferred not to mention.

–Malcolm

Speaking of rain, many of us are getting tired of water and flash flooding. And yet there are some nearby farms that haven’t gotten a drop. We’ve had some heavy showers even though North Georgia isn’t in the dark green area on this map.
The 2001 Ken Follett novel Jackdaws about French resistance fighters during World War II has a surprising formatting problem at the beginning of the paperback. In the middle of chapter four, we suddenly find the front-matter praise for the book followed by the title page and the entire book starting over. Assuming that the initial print run was done via offset, an error like this would have been easy to spot during proofreading. My copy is from the 2017 printing which may well have been produced via print-on-demand. Even so, there would have been a proof copy where this error should have been found. I don’t expect this kind of screw-up from a publisher the size of Penguin.
Typical of indoor/outdoor cats, Robbie occasionally leaves a dead mouse or a dead bird on our welcome mat where they probably aren’t very welcoming to guests. He came inside late yesterday afternoon after the rain had made it dark enough outside to obscure the gift. When I opened the door to let him out this morning, he acted like the dead bird as a bomb and came to a sudden halt. Finally, he jumped over it and ran off. I have since removed the bird. Maybe he thought another cat left it there. Cats!
Kenan Thompson thinks “Saturday Night Live” could end in three years: “50 is a good number to stop at,” he said on “Thursday on Comedy Central’s “Hell of a Week” when asked about rumblings that the show could be planning its exit. “Well, I need to start planning,” he joked, but acknowledged, “there could be a lot of validity to that rumor.” Personally, I haven’t watched it much since the original cast disappeared.
Speaking of rain again, there was a storm approaching when I started typing this post. Now it’s mysteriously gone and we have a sunny day once more.
We sat down with a snack last night, flipped on the TV, and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” was running. We left it on the screen while deciding what to watch and got hypnotized into watching the whole thing. Normally, we would record it because there are way too many ads on the SYFY channel. Nonetheless, we had fun seeing it again. And, isn’t that cemetery really awesome?
Huffington Post: “Stuart Woods, an author of more than 90 novels, many featuring the character of lawyer-investigator Stone Barrington, has died. He was 84. Woods died in his sleep on Friday, July 22, at his home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, his publicist, Katie Grinch, said Wednesday.” I read a fair number of his lightweight novels featuring the globe-trotting attorney Stone Barrington, so it’s too bad there won’t be any more. I guess Woods paid his dues–and then some. Barrington seemed to end up in bed with every woman he met. What an inspiration!

—Malcolm