Sunday Morning

From my mother I cultivated a love of movies; from my father, sports. Politics I picked up as I went along. From those three avocations come Sunday morning, the most structured day of my week:

8:45 wake up

9:00 Watch "The Sports Reporters" on ESPN.

9:30 Read Phil Mushnick's Sunday column in the New York Post. Mushnick is almost sui generis as a sportswriter, covering not games nor players nor history, but rather behaving as an Old Testament scold against the stupidity, cruelty and excesses of the modern sports scene. His favorite targets: ESPN, Don Imus, and Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN. If ever you've seen the tail end of a forty-foot putt blocked by some stupid "Sportscenter" graphic ("Mickelson's 65: Fourth Lowest Ever on a Saturday Round at Sawgrass") Mushnick is your man.

9:35 Read Mike Lupica's Shooting From the Lip in the New York Daily News. I fell in love the the rat-a-tat-tat style of Alan Malamud in the old LA Herald Examiner before that paper folded, and then at the LA Times. Lupica is the foremost standard-bearer of that style, which probably has its roots in Jimmy Cannon's "Nobody Asked Me, But" ("Nobody Asked Me, But . . . all women look prettier in polka-dots . . . Thursday is the most underrated day of the week"); and in Walter Winchell's gossip columns. My only wish is that he didn't limit Shooting From the Lip to Sundays.

9:40 Read George Will's Sunday column. Will is a hero of sorts of mine: his essays gave rhetoric to my conservative impulses and reading his his clean, eloquent prose style was always a way to kick-start my own graduate-school efforts when the syrup refused to pour. This morning, a nice surprise: a column datelined from my old hometown, Phoenix, about a local giant, Carl Hayden, whose name (but not whose exploits) are familiar to most Phoenicians. Having lived in Houston for 17 years, I can rattle off last names familiar--but only as names--to most Houstonians: Jones, Fannin, Hofheinz, Cullen. In Phoenix the names run as follows: McClintock, Rhottas, Goldwater. Carl Hayden, so crucial to Phoenix's steady supply of water, and hence its population, is a giant in that tradition.

9:50 Read Roger Ebert's biweekly Great Movies essay. With the retirement of The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and the unfortunate death of his colleague Gene Siskel, Ebert has stood alone for nearly a decade as the dean of American movie criticism. In the past few years, Ebert's politics have done a great deal to distort his reason; his politics prompted him to give four stars to "The Contender," a two-hour anti-GOP scream that could have been cobbled together by moveon.org. Still, Ebert can still knock them out of the park--and no better evidence is today's appreciation of Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye."

10:00 George Stephanopoulus. This week, John Kerry once again provides the entertainment so lacking in my life since the cancellation of "Everybody Loves Raymond." Five years on, Kerry still complaining about the failure to capture bin Laden in October of 2001, as if pushing this pedal on the organ for the fiftieth time would, unlike the other forty-nine times, be his ticket to the White House.

10:40 George Will again. The only reason I watch ABC's train wreck of a show is for Will's six or seven sentences of sanity.

11:00 Type all this

11:30 Off to brunch

1:00 Grocery shopping

2:00 Put myself down for my nap

4:00 Work out

6:00 Dinner

7:00 "The West Wing"

8:00 "Sopranos"

9:00 "Gray's Anatomy"

10:00 Type stuff

11:00 Question: What have I accomplished today?