Katie Ledecky Reclaims 400-Meter Record -- World Swimming Championships -- June 18, 2022

Links everywhere. Here's one.

Katie Ledecky has started the United States’ medal collection at the world swimming championships with a gold by reclaiming her title in the women’s 400 meters.

Ledecky clocked 3 minutes, 58.15 seconds on the first day of racing Saturday for her fourth world title in the 400 freestyle after 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Ariarne Titmus pipped Ledecky to the title in 2019 and took her world record last month but the Australian has skipped the worlds in Budapest to focus on the Commonwealth Games next month in England.

Canada’s 15-year-old Summer McIntosh finished 1.24 seconds behind Ledecky for the silver. Both were well ahead of the competition, with American Leah Smith 3.93 behind Ledecky in third and Australia’s Lani Pallister finishing fourth.

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Call Me

I've not heard this version before. I'm amazed how good it sounds coming out my little MacBook Air speakers. I can only imagine how good this sounds if one had "real" speakers. LOL.

Play loud.

Call Me, Blondie

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PGA

Now that the dust is settling, history will clearly show Tiger Woods is the one and only during my lifetime of watching golf.

There were only two in my lifetime of viewing: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

The rest were also-runs.

Nicklaus' main competitors won 29 percent of all major championships played during the prime of Nicklaus' career. During Tiger Woods' career, his main competitors in majors have been Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh, and Jim Furyk.

And, now, good, bad, or indifferent, Phil Mickelson will fade away from the world stage. As will Bryson.

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Cheers

I think I wrote about Cheers very recently, perhaps the best sitcom ever. 

Well, what do you know? Literary Hub has an excerpt from the book Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and more, by James Burrows, c. 2022.

Turns out, 1980s midwesterners did not want their sitcoms set in Boston bars. Oh, really? I wonder what midwesterners thought of all that sexual innuendo on Friends and then, OMG, homosexuality on Will & Grace. 

From the book:

It was one of the first true financial partnerships between a studio and creators. We got a small office on the Paramount lot, and we started talking about what kind of show we wanted to do.

We all loved Fawlty Towers, a British show set at an English hotel. Monty Python co-founder John Cleese got the idea for the show after he and the Pythons stayed at a hotel on the English Riviera. Co-created with Connie Booth, John starred as Basil Fawlty, the glib and frustrated hotel manager, who dealt with a variety of demanding guests and eccentric staff.

We loved the outrageousness of it. I was not that big a fan of Monty Python, but I adored Fawlty Towers, because that character was so brazen. This was not sketch comedy. There were no dead parrots or Ministers of Silly Walks. Here, John was committed to one character and was a center for other characters.

I have always been a big fan of British humor. It’s much more sophisticated, intellectual, and unexpected than most of American humor. There’s an amazing blend of edginess and silliness. You don’t know where they’re going with it. You can say the worst curse words in the world and they sound refined. I went to see Beyond the Fringe on Broadway in 1962 with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett.

(Side story: When I got to the box office with my tickets, the agent said my seats had been changed. I asked why, but they enigmatically wouldn’t tell me. We’d been moved to the second row. Right before the show began, I looked back to see who had our tickets—it was President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy.)

I watched the show and roared. I had never seen anything like this. I was so in love with these guys, who were Monty Python before Monty Python, maybe a tad more intellectual. They were way ahead of their time. At Yale Drama, when I had to do a required scene in acting class, I did one of their monologues: “I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin.” I got roars.

When it came to agreeing on an idea for the show, the Brothers and I knew that most everybody loved bars, especially sports bars. The Brothers had grown up in Las Vegas, and one of our earliest ideas was to set the bar in Barstow, California, because we thought about its proximity to Las Vegas and how the guests on the show would stop over in Barstow en route to or from Vegas. The main action would take place in the hotel bar. The structure was similar to that of Fawlty Towers in that the stories would walk into the bar.

Yes, this will be my sixth book, six week. Right on schedule. Whoo-hoo!

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My Wife And I 

We have had a wonderful life. Married in 1977, if I recall correctly. Been everywhere, have done everything. 

I think we would have grown closer together had we lived our entire lives together in Los Angeles. It would not have been boring but it would have been different. A lot of concerts. A lot of sushi.

Instead, having been everywhere, having done everything, we now have completely different interests. The military lifestyle forced both of us to develop our own lifestyles, our own interests. We did not become one, something that might have happened had we lived our entire lives together in Hollywood. 

We might even have the same friends.

I think about that a lot when listening to music and reading the current literature.

I know I would be a lot less happy going into my eighth decade of life.