If I were in charge of the US Open, I wouldn’t have just defaulted Novak Djokovic from the tournament yesterday for hitting a line judge with a ball. I would have also taken him into the locker room and vaccinated him against his will.
Speaking of tennis, before they serve, players should stop their ridiculous habit of getting three balls, looking at them, rejecting one, and throwing it back. You can’t tell the balls apart, so just take two and get up to the line already.
I’m sorry to hear that Netflix has cancelled Hasan Minhaj’s “Patriot Act.” Of all the half-hour topical comedy shows the service has tried — including ones from Michelle Wolf, Joel McHale, and Chelsea Handler — Minhaj was alone in finding a formula that worked. He did long looks at issues like “Why Doing Taxes Is So Hard,” “We’re Doing Elections Wrong,” and “Why The News Industry Is Dying” — and those are just three examples from his final season. Like John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, “Patriot Act” had crisp writing that added humor to some very serious subjects, presented in a way that was more palatable to younger audiences, with Minhaj displaying real confidence and great timing as he stood on and in front of a massive video wall. But Netflix shows live and die by analytics, so perhaps viewership had dropped off in season six — or maybe it was contract renewal time and CEO Ted Sarandos didn’t want to cough up more money for Minhaj and his crew. In either case, it’s too bad “Patriot Act” is gone.
Seeing commercials in the Shop Small campaign (like the one for American Express) — urging us to go back to local businesses we used to visit pre-COVID — remind me of the messages we heard repeatedly after 9/11, “Go shopping or the terrorists have won!” The difference is that the 2001 attacks didn’t cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs and have so much less money to spend at any business.
I am so tired of movies about someone who disappears without a trace. When I disappear, I’m going to leave two traces.