The Ricochet Podcast - The Newspaper Rules

Episode Date: August 9, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, Rob and James are cruising but their deck shoes are more than filled by Ricochet editor Mollie Hemingway. She and Peter discuss traditional households and the effect the ever changing culture has on them. Then, The Weekly Standard’s Phillip Terzian joins to discuss the sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. Later, we’re joined by Baseball Crank blogger Dan... Source

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Is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Activate program. This bill. 24 pounds. 1,000 pages of a rushed job of a bill. That literally was rushed through. It was Pelosi. Pelosi to Pelosi to Pelosi. This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everyone, to Rico, fascinating setups and introductions. James Lilacs is on vacation and Rob Long is on a cruise, on the National Review cruise. So this is Peter Robinson plodding along with the introduction saying, again, this is Ricochet Podcast number 178. However, you may settle back and relax and look forward to dazzling conversation, not because I'm here, but I can play straight man. And Molly Hemingway is here. Molly, how are you? I'm doing great. Although I am also not funny. So we will just

sympathize with our listeners right now. How are the kids? Oh, they're doing great. We've been having a lovely summer. Excellent. Excellent. This podcast, like all Ricochet podcasts, is brought to you by Audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment. Molly, what's your favorite? Would you have an audible.com book to recommend? I do. I have two, actually. Two? Fire away.

So the first one I would definitely recommend is Jonathan Last's What to Expect When No One's Expecting. I think you've had him on the podcast before. We have. That book is so readable in print form. And he narrates. He does his own audible. Oh, does he really?

So I can't imagine a more delightful experience. But my – what I'm going for is Elmore Leonard's Raylan. I've been watching a lot of Justified recently. Are you familiar with this? Justified? No. I'm familiar with Elmore Leonard. Get Shorty and the brilliant – you can't – the dialogue.

Elmore Leonard is famous for telling aspiring novelists, write your novel, then go back and cut out all the boring parts. And Elmore – there is not a boring sentence in anything he's written and he's written – it must be 40 or 50 books by now. Yeah, and he just does great characters. He wrote a short story called Fire in the Hole that became this TV series that's fantastic called Justified about this sort of Kentucky lawman and his arch nemesis, Boyd Crowder, who's my favorite character. Anyway, he also wrote a book based on these characters called Raylan. So that's my pick. And I have to mention Elmore Leonard had a stroke this week. So he's been riding for forever. So that's why I thought it'd be good to read while thinking of him.

Is Justified still on? Oh, I watch all my television through Netflix. So I don't really know the answer to that. But I'm in season three. I assume it's still on. Fantastic. You've just done me the biggest service you can possibly imagine. Because my wife and I, we just finished looking at the Wallander series.

We've been using the Apple TV device to download television programs from iTunes and Netflix. Exactly. And we're absolutely bereft because we don't have any – we were watching almost no actual live television. Now, I can say this because Rob isn't on. It would cause Rob's blood to curdle. So, Justified. We'll go to Justified next. And people should listen to Jonathan Last and Elmore Leonard on audible.com.

Very good. Now, I have a Molly question. One of my favorite writers, actually one of my two or three favorite, I have a lot of favorite writers, but one of the writers I most admire is Andy Ferguson. And Andy has a review in the current issue of the Weekly Standard on a couple of books about

the way men are dropping out from the workforce and also from marriage. And I thought to myself as I was reading this, I read everything Andy writes twice, first to enjoy it and the second time to try to figure out how he did it. And so I thought I would ask, here we are.

The discrepancy between the book that he's quoting from here, Dr. Helen Smith, Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream, and Why It Matters. The discrepancy between the life of the freer single man and the life of the less respected, less free of the married man is at the heart of why so many men have gone on strike. Now, Andy quotes that as an example of her bad writing actually. But he continues to say that she's on to something. And her point, he's critical of this, but her point is that they're responding simply to incentives that getting married and supporting a wife and children

is really hard work. And why should men put up with it when the culture no longer requires it of them? Thoughts? Oh, it's just fascinating to me. And it actually reminds me of when my husband and I were dating and we were talking marriage. And he thought that a good model for marriage is that we would have this egalitarian feminist model. You can make fun of him for this all you want. Mark said that? And I explained, oh, yeah. Oh, he was, you know, he's from Oregon. He was raised in, you know, in a country where that was just totally normal behavior. So I was explaining to him that he would be the head of the household, and that's the model we follow. We were just talking about this, how the benefits that you get when you have a more traditional model of male headship, they make a lot of the work more worthwhile. So does it make sense?

So what I don't quite get, I mean, I think back to my father. I skipped myself, who you can never use yourself as an example of anything. But I think through my father and his generation, my dad graduated from high school during the Depression. The best job he could get was with the Department of Public Works in Johnson City, New York. So out of high school, going to college was out of the question. Out of high school, he dug ditches.

Then the Second World War started. He served almost all four years in the Second World War. And then he came home and got married and started a family and did all his life a job he didn't particularly like because he needed to do so to support his family. And yet, there's no doubt that in the end of his life, he would have done it all over again. In other words, I think if you pick up my father and set him down 30 or 40 years later when the culture has changed and the economy is more buoyant, I don't think he would have walked – I don't think he would have boycotted marriage. So I don't get it.

Men have changed. What's changed? Everything's changed. What's changed? And the respect and honor that men get in marriage, it's being able to have this empire in which you are respected is very important, I think, for men and for their sense of honor. And feminism has destroyed a lot of that. I'm not saying everything about feminism is awful, but I don't even really understand the secular logic for marriage in many ways. I mean, you don't need it for sex. You don't need it for, and you don't, you don't receive many of the benefits that you used to receive within marriage. So why bother? Yeah. So, oh, well now we're headed off into, in other words, there's no point. In other words, what you're saying is the culture is right and men are right. Marriage makes no sense unless you bring to it a religious point of view.

No, I think- Some sense of transcendence. Is that right? No. The transcendence is definitely key. I don't think in any way you need religion. I mean, there's a natural truth to marriage. There's a natural understanding that two halves become a whole in marriage, that it is far and away the best way, if not the only way, that society has figured out how to care for children, women, and other vulnerable people, and men. So there's just a logic to it that does not require religion. But if you have this new model of the secular logic that we see in society right now, I have a hard time understanding why

people would get married under these circumstances. Okay. So let me ask you this then, Molly. Do you – broadly speaking, two positions. I'll caricature both but to make the point. One would be the libertarian position, which is that the state should be just totally neutral, hands-off. As a matter of fact, marriage probably should be a completely civil, private, or not civil, but a completely private and perhaps religious, when people choose to be religious, about it, arrangement. And the state should be at best neutral about whether people get married, whom they married, whether they marry a person of the same gender, whether they marry three people.

That's sort of the libertarian position. Then you get the socially conservative position, which is no. Marriage is both difficult and invaluable to the society. So the government should not be neutral toward marriage. It should actually take steps to encourage it. Tax incentives. It should lean in the direction of marriage, but it should lean. Which do you choose? Well, I choose libertarian.

Ironically, I think that the state involvement in marriage has done so much to destroy it. I think that if social institutions are able to create the rules for what makes for a strong marriage, we would be in a much better shape than we are now. It's hard for secular government to say that you can't dissolve a marriage or that people shouldn't be free to group together however they want. It's very easy for social institutions to do it. So I think, ironically, our high level of government involvement in marriage has contributed to its decline as an institution. You are listening to Molly Hemingway, Be Wise, and Peter Robinson, Be Plotting on the Ricochet podcast. And we are now joined by our friend,

Molly's and mine, Phil Terzian, the books editor, literary editor of the Weekly Standard, and a man about town in Washington, D.C., known not only for his crystalline prose, but also for his beagling. Phil, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'm glad to know that my reputation is upholding. Phil, the Washington Post was sold this past week for $250 million, more money than I have, but a piddling sum by comparison with what that institution would have been about, the value of that institution even five or six years ago, let alone ten years ago, to Jeff Bezos, a high-tech billionaire, the founder of Amazon.

And Phil Terzian's reaction is somehow or other, you did not seem to be joining Bob Woodward in his sentiment, which was, to quote Woodward, it's sad. Was it sad, Phil? Well, I think it's probably sad for the editorial staff of the Washington Post, because they're now under a period of uncertainty. But I think for the people of Washington, and for newspapers in general, it's probably very good news because uh... clearly two hundred fifty million dollars is uh... pocket money to jeff bezos and he's clearly bought the

post as a kind of project i don't think is fortune is going to rise or fall on the fortunes of the post unlike say the graham family which really was staring oblivion in the face so will be interesting to see what, if anything, he does. And if anyone can figure out a way to make newspapers profitable in the current age, he might be the one. The question, of course, is who he consults about how to go about doing that. And what's your guess?

Well, I don't know. My fear is that he's going to go to all the usual suspects and they will advise him to... Well, if I can just step back one inch. It's been very amusing the last couple of days because a number of writers of the Washington Post have written these kind of amusingly passive-aggressive columns about the sale. I mean, one of the great love affairs in American journalism has been between the Washington Post and the Washington Post, and so they've been these incessant tributes to themselves and to the Graham family and to the wonderful things they and their colleagues have done over the years. But there's also this not

so subtly veiled hint that if Jeff Bezos, who knows absolutely nothing about the newspaper business as opposed to ourselves, does anything differently from what the Grams did. He's going to pay a steep price. Although what that price is, aside from earning the contempt of Washington Post columnists, it's not clear. But as you know, there's this kind of mythology in newsrooms that the business side and the editorial side are separate and unequal. And the only thing the business side does is avoid making eye contact with the newsroom and signing the checks for the people who write for the newspapers. Other than that, they should have nothing to do with managing the newspaper. And in a business, that they have readers and buyers

for whom they seem to have a kind of contempt. And so it'll be interesting to see what, you know, an imaginative retailer can do looking at that phenomenon. And what do you think is the best case scenario here? Well, I think... FBD stands for support. We support businesses and communities across Ireland. Visit your local branch to talk to your FBD insurance team and see how we can support your business. FBD Insurance. Support. It's what we do.

FBD Insurance Group Limited, trading as FBD Insurance, is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The best case scenario is, I mean, I guess I have a kind of contrarian view. I don't think the Washington Post is all that great a newspaper. I mean, in terms of cultural coverage, the New York Times, although I ran rave about it, it's still a sort of serious institution. The Post never was. The other problem the Post has is that because of its kind of newsroom-centric view, it's not really a metropolitan newspaper. It covers certain neighborhoods of the people in greater Washington who actually purchased the Washington Post don't live in Washington. They live in Virginia and Maryland, the outer suburbs, which are treated with utter contempt by the Post,

their flyover country as far as the newsroom is concerned. And, of course, their treatment of the District of Columbia is very, very politically correct and very tentative, and there are all sorts of things going on in district government, where their notion of speaking truth to power somehow flies out the window. Phil, here's the theory. I put this to you for your correction and comment. We've been hearing a lot since the sale of the Post and the week before that, the sale for $70 million of the Boston Globe to John Henry, the billionaire hedge fund manager who owns the Boston Red Sox. I have a feeling if the people of Boston – if John Henry said to the people of Boston,

by the way, I've had a rough year, I've got to choose. Should I keep the Red Socks or the Globe? We know which way that vote would go, don't we? In any event, so newspapers across the country, here's what's in the back of my mind. If you look at the top 10 circulation newspapers in the United States over the last decade, the Wall Street Journal has ticked slightly, very slightly. It's less than a percentage point, but it's ticked slightly up in circulation while all nine of the other ten have drifted down, including the New York Times and including, of course, the Washington Post. So my theory is something like – and we hear about the business model, collapse of the business model. The old business model was if you were a monopoly newspaper, effectively a monopoly newspaper, classify – all kinds of advertising had no place to go but you. And what you could do with your monopoly since the money would come in almost no matter what, was indulge yourself.

And the newsroom could be liberal and you could flatter yourselves to think that you were high-minded, which is sort of in the back of every liberal's thinking. And the newsroom could become as incestuous as it wanted. Classified advertising now have out endless other outlets and suddenly either you sell news that people find useful and interesting for example the wall street journal which services the business market specifically and as best i can tell beautifully or you find your circulation collapsing that is to say my theory i'm not even making an argument I'm putting up a theory here for you to comment on, is that it's not the news business model that's collapsed. It's the model of the monopoly newspaper, which uses its monopoly to support a liberal and incestuous

newsroom. That's the model that has collapsed. Phil? Well, that's absolutely correct. And I'll give you an example. 35 years ago, the Washington Post was on a buying spree, and they bought the Trenton Times. And the Trenton Times, they sent one of their famous editors, Richard Harwood, up to be the editor, and he came up with an army of 24-year-olds from the Post Newsroom, and they did what you would expect them to do. They got rid of all the uninteresting, boring, stupid stuff that offended them, like obituaries and wedding announcements and school board stories, and got rid of them. And you can imagine what happened. There was a giveaway shopping center publication called the Trentonian, which suddenly exploded on the market. And the Trenton Times very nearly went out of business as a consequence. So you're absolutely right. I mean, the pleasures of owning a monopoly newspaper, which were enjoyed by most newspapers

in America up until a few years ago, are now gone. And you have to contend with the fact that you are competing with customers, not speaking to your brother-in-law or angling for a Pulitzer or the other motives that usually generate stories in the Post. Now, when Woodward was on... Sorry, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Well, when Bob Woodward was interviewed the other day, the same day as the sale, what was that, three days ago now, No, I'm sorry. work out just fine because what we do is so valuable, but it's also expensive. And we spend roughly, we, the Washington Post, spend about $100 million a year on our reporting. I don't know quite what that figure means.

Maybe that's everybody's – that's the total payroll over a year. I don't know. But that's the figure he used. That's the parties where they hear what everybody in Washington says and regurgitate it. That's right. It's $20 million in salaries and $80 million in expense accounts. In any event, he said we spent $100 million a year on reporting. Imagine what would happen if we doubled that or if we tripled it.

$200 million a year on reporting, $300 million a year on reporting, and Mr. Bezos could make that possible. Well, I don't know if you were Jeff Bezos or his accountants. But so follow – is he on to something there? Deeper reporting? No, no. That would be the contemporary equivalent of Charles Foster Kane building an opera house in order for his wife to put on a program. That would be a disastrous business model for any newspaper.

Speaking of all this, what I'm most curious about is Sally Quinn. What is her future going to be like at the paper? Who's Sally Quinn? Somebody fill us in on Sally Quinn has a past that anyone can either – that is of any value or interest. I mean everybody knows why and how Sally Quinn became prominent in the Washington Post. Actually, maybe you can back home to recover. in those days was an attractive blonde, and she decided, well, maybe she should try working at the Washington Post. So she went into the Post building and caught the eye of editor Benjamin Bradley, who's famous for his taste in such things, and he said, do you want to work here at the Washington

Post? And she said, well, I would, but I have no experience, to which Benjamin Bradley responded, well, nobody's perfect. And so she was hired as a reporter in the style section, where her 6, 8, 10, 12, sometimes 16 or 18-part series on Cuba or what have you would run in the newspaper, leading to a famous Washington story of the seven most feared words in the newspaper, leading to a famous Washington story of the seven most feared words in the Washington Post, which were first in a series by Sally Quinn. Anyway, in her later years, she's transmogrified into a kind of social arbiter and hostess

in Washington, and writes occasionally about kind of fluffy subjects. And she started – She contributes to a religion blog on the Post website. She started the religion section. I'm sorry? She started the religion section even though she concedes that she's not a believer. But she just thought it was kind of interesting. And that is the perfect description of that religion section on the site.

So, Phil, in the 19 – what year was it that the Watergate movie came out in with Robert Redford playing – who was it? Robert Redford played Woodward. And who played Bernstein? I can't recall now. But it was – Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman. Exactly. So the model journalists at the Washington Post were Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. And I can still remember, it's still worth

watching, actually, even though it's nonsense from beginning to end. We now know they didn't really break the story, so on and so forth. 1976 was the movie. But that caught the eye of a generation of students who looked at that movie and said, wow, journalism looks pretty cool. Question, what kinds of people will the new world of journalism attract as reporters? Who's going to think journalism is cool anymore? Well, it hasn't attracted i mean i i remember even at the time uh that that there were stories about how journalism there was an influx of young people coming into journalism because they

were inspired by woodward and bernstein i remember my i mean i wasn't all that old myself at the time i remember my heart sinking about that and we've we're now sort of slowly climbing out of the dominance of that baby boom generation. But journalism like that, I mean, all the president's men was 35 years ago. You wouldn't know it from reading the Washington Post, but the Watergate break-in was 41 years ago. It's as if at the time of the Watergate break-in, they were still living on some story they'd done in 1931. So young people today, I don't think, have even seen all the president's men. So in that sense, as always, I think the passing of my generation, the baby boom generation, might be cause for some modest hope.

Because you don't go into journalism because you think it's cool. You go into journalism for other reasons. What other reasons, Phil? And the Post was the worst kind of example of glamorizing journalism for all the wrong reasons. What are the right reasons? I mean, seriously, some kids, you've got these kids, you've got interns at the Weekly Standard every single year, bright young college students.

If you were to take one aside and tell that student the truth about journalism, what would you say? If you want to be a journalist, here's what you need to know. I would say that you go into journalism for two reasons at best. One is you love language. You like to write. You like to read. You have been a newspaper or a whatever reader all of your life,

and you're interested in the world around you, whether it's the news or whether it's politics or ideas or local government or whatever. And secondly, you recognize that you're entering not a profession, but a trade, a business, a craft, a calling. It's like being a poet. It's something that you want to do because you can well imagine doing it without payment. And what the business you're in is writing about things that are interesting to people who are willing to part with a dollar or a dollar and a quarter to read what you've written. And so that, it seems to me, that eliminates a certain amount of the self-indulgence that newspapers, that the Post have enjoyed because of their wealth.

But it also teaches the fundamentals about why newspapers and news organs exist, either in print or on the Internet. to journalism for professional reasons, even though you're not entering a profession, rather than political reasons, namely speaking truth to power or comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and blah, blah, blah, I think you'd enjoy a greater measure of success. And the newspapers would be a lot better and people would actually buy them. Phil, while you're being profound, and you are, I loved that answer. One last question before we let you go. Are you of the view that journalism really, to be good, has to exist in print? That we're moving into a world that just won't be as satisfying for people who love the language,

the world of online? Well, I think it's too early to tell. I think it's possible that that will happen, but that it's so novel and so unfamiliar. I mean, it dawned on me the other day, I mean, believe it or not, we occasionally make typographical errors and so on in the weekly standard. And I now have the luxury of telling people,

I can't repair it in the magazine because it's already been printed and it's not going to be printed again, but I can fix it online and there it will be correct for all of eternity. So, you know, a century from now, people may look back pityingly at us who cling to print as the only truly acceptable medium. And maybe that's only because that's what we're used to. But in fact, immortality from here on out is going to be electronic rather than on the printed page. I say that as one who was very happy to have published an actual book with pages and binding and so on.

But I think it's way too early in the process to know, and I think it's just a matter of what you and I have known all our lives and has been known for generations and is clearly in transition in an unfamiliar and somewhat hard to imagine that the electronic world will supplant the world we know. That doesn't mean that people won't still buy books, that they won't still stare in awe at leather-bound libraries and things like that, but it's a new...

FBD doesn't stand for friendly business, ducks. Or for the freelance beatbox department. FBD stands for support. We support businesses and communities across Ireland. Visit your local branch to talk to your FBD insurance team and see how we can support your business. FBD Insurance. Support. It's what we do. FBD Insurance Group Limited. Trading as FBD Insurance is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

It's a new world and I think you can derive as much satisfaction from good writing on the internet now as you can from print. Phil Terzian, literary editor of the Weekly Standard and a wise man.

Phil, thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for joining us, Phil. Bye, Molly. Goodbye. So what do you make of that, Molly? The reason to go into journalism is because you love language, find the world interesting, and think of yourself as a craftsman. Well, it's interesting because I am in journalism and my background is in math and I always envy those people who have that love of language,

but I largely agree with it. I'll add that I like to look at it vocationally. I'm not here to change the world. I'm not here to, I'm not a radical in my approach. I think of it more as I'm able to serve my fellow man by just writing things that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. I get to go to events and describe what happened. I get to ask people questions that anybody would love to ask if they were there. And I don't think of this as a particularly noble situation. It's just a wonderful job, and it really is just a job. Anyone can do it. Anyone

can learn how to write. And anyone, if I can learn how to write, anyone can learn how to write. And I think that I totally agree with what he's saying about having the right understanding of what your job is leads to much better journalism. And you don't feel that you're doing something so important that it's the duty of a rich billionaire somewhere or other to subsidize it. Not at all. And I don't even understand why newspapers think that you need a college degree, much less a journalism degree or journalism grad school in order to do any of this.

Again, it's just, we all tell stories in our day-to-day lives and just putting them down is natural and easy. It is a fun job though. I really, I'm glad that people are still paying for it. Lord Beaverbrook, one of the great British press barons of the last century, actually the first two thirds of the last century, is famous for having remarked that the only skills needed for journalists were typing shorthorthand, and a low, rat-like cunning. I often reflect that now with word processors and computers, the typing and shorthand are no longer necessary. All right. So you are now – you are listening.

I go back to my plotting self. If James were here, this would sizzle, this right reminder that people who are listening to Ricochet Podcast number 178, this is Peter Robinson. James Lilacs is on vacation. Rob Long is on the National Review cruise. So you've got me. But you've also got Molly Hemingway. Molly, you said you started in math and now you're a writer. How did that happen?

Oh, I don't know. I really thought I wanted to teach economics and I largely did but wanted to do that. Where did you teach? You taught in high school for a time? No, I thought that when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an econ professor. So I all through college and started grad school. That's what I thought I wanted. And then I realized much too late, you know,

you should figure these things out early, that that was not a good match for me. Oddly enough, I thought academia was very political, more political than politics or anything that you normally think of as political. And I noticed that all of my friends were writers and that they loved what they did. And so it took me a few years to screw up the courage, but I got it and I just jumped in. And I loved it. I always loved newspapers, even to the extent that I delivered newspapers when I was in college,

which is a side of things that you can't even imagine, that 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. shift of driving around country roads in Colorado throwing newspapers out the window. And I just loved every aspect of the industry. So I finally made the jump and I loved it. Molly, you write so brightly with such energy. I find it really, and I mean, truly, it's a puzzle to me. You mean to say that as you were going through high school and college, nobody said to

you, gee, this is a talent. You really ought to spend some time developing it. Nobody said that to you? I was doing journalism in high school. I was the editor of the yearbook. I'd been involved in journalism the whole time, but for some reason, I didn't figure out that that meant I should probably go into that line of work. I'm a slow learner, apparently. Oh, I see. Okay. Now, let me ask you, before we go to our next guest, I want to follow up. Phil's, you can tell listening to Phil, he's a little uneasy I think about the online world. But he's not terribly pessimistic about it. We're going through a transition. It will be all right.

Let me ask you as a mom. Do you worry that images are supplanting text for children? Do you have to take special effort to make sure your kids read instead of spending all their time on front of the iPad watching, I don't know what, SpongeBob SquarePants or video? How do you feel about this as a mom? Yeah, I'm kind of radical on this. We send our children to a classical school where they emphasize everything from like handwriting to memorization. And we do not watch any live television. Actually, recently, I was with my children in St. Louis, and they were with cousins. And they were watching Fox News, apparently. And so that, no, that no, we don't watch any live television like this. That night, my daughter, who's five, said, who is Anthony Weiner?

Oh, no. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And she asked some more questions about it. Why was he sending messages to women? And then she asked me why that train was going around the curve so fast. You remember the Spanish train? Sure, of course. And I was livid because we have got to be so powerful for a five-year-old's brain.

And I understand that I can't protect her from all of this, but I realize that the way we're doing things is quite different than the way a lot of families have what they allow in terms of images that their children see. So we don't do – our children are not – I work on a computer in front of them. They're allowed to be on the computer to write notes to their dad or something like that. But we really limit their screen time. Well, when do you and Mark watch Justified? So all your television viewing takes place after the kids are asleep. And they do watch. They have their own cartoons and whatnot, Phineas and Ferb.

But, yeah, we watch later. I see. Okay. All right. So your view on that is very pronounced. Keep the images away from the kids until when? I'm just more annoyed by the way that when we go out to dinner or something, we see that there are entire families that are all working on their phones or iPads, or they have their kids be quiet by having them on an iPad. I recognize that this will shut your child up, and I have been known

to use iPads on airline travel. But just this idea that it should be normal, everyday behavior instead of learning how to converse or whatnot, I just don't want to have children like that. Now, did you think about homeschooling, or would that just be impossible? Both of you work, so that's difficult, I guess. Yeah, no, if we didn't have our wonderful classical Lutheran school, I am sure that I would be homeschooling. And I'm so thankful that we have that school because I would hate homeschooling. I respect people who do it, and I would do it if I was forced into it. But thank God we have the good school to send them to. So, another question, classical Lutheran, I just don't know what that means. Oh, well, so it's a Lutheran school. You've got that part down. And then the classical is just

the pedagogical approach where you train in the classical style, the trivium. Oh, really? So classical does mean as in classics, as in ancient classics. All right, go ahead. So my daughter can count to 50 in Latin. She's five. Wow. She knows all of her colors in Latin.

She memorizes poems and scripture passages and whatnot. And my husband and I are very envious of the education she's receiving. Wow, absolutely fantastic. Wow. Okay, so now I have one more question for you. Now that we talked about Lutheranism. In any event, flying back from Rio, World Youth Day in Rio, Pope Francis made this comment about gay priests. Who am I to judge? And we now know or we found out within 24 or 48 hours that the report which people like me read in the New York Times, which presented this as a radical departure from Catholic teaching, was just wrong. And the reporters who listened to him in the airplane knew it was wrong,

because if you looked at the entire transcript, the Pope was very careful to lay out Catholic teaching and explain that homosexual acts are sinful. The impulse may, you may or may not be born with it, but temptations in themselves are not sinful. The act is sinful. The catechism teaches this. However, if a priest is homosexual and chaste, that is to say he's not acting out on his sexual impulses, for that matter, of course, priests who are heterosexual are meant to be celibate as well. Then who am I to judge? Okay. But what's so interested me was that my Lutheran friend, Molly, who is not casually Lutheran, but insistently Lutheran, sprang to the Pope's defense. And in post after post after post on Ricochet, you were saying, no, read the transcript, get the facts right. And you were sticking up for the Pope in Rome. How come? Well, it's really sticking up for the Pope in Rome.

Well, it's really more that I'm a media critic, so I'm so accustomed to the media messing up how they cover religion news that if you ever want a perfect example of it, just watch what the media say for anything coming out of the Vatican. They always get it wrong. And so I thought it was actually newsworthy what he was saying. In fact, there were many newsworthy things having nothing to do with gay sex. But yeah, you can just almost bank on it that they're going to get it wrong. And I was shown to be right by a full reading of the transcript. So the media mess up this pope. They want him to be a certain thing, and so they try and make him that way.

And they miss out on the tradition, the lengthy Christian tradition that he's referring to. But I'm sure it'll get worse in the years to come, so you can look forward to that. You're listening to Ricochet Podcast number, what number is this? Ricochet Podcast number 178. Rob Long and James Lilacs are cruising with National Review. You've got Peter Robinson and Molly Hemingway and our guest, Dan McLaughlin, who writes the Baseball Crank blog, a man who writes

beautifully about baseball. My hat's off to Dan McLaughlin. And in his, should he have spare time, he's a practicing lawyer. And Dan has just written a fascinating post, 73 rules for running for president as a Republican. Dan, welcome. Thank you. Dan, rule number three, if you don't like Republican voters, don't run. So right there, the third rule made me think, oh, is this not so much rules for prospective candidates as a very light and amusing explanation of why Mitt Romney should never run in the first place. Dan? Yeah, and a lot of people have asked me about that one, and whether it's really the John Huntsman rule, which in some ways it is.

And I think Huntsman in particular was the guy who really had a fine record on paper, but just came off to people as not really liking the voters. But I always felt that Romney's problem was a slightly different one, which is that he didn't trust the voters. You know, and a lot of the genesis of this list was, in fact, thinking about Romney, as well as, you know, some of his rivals in the last two races, and the ways that they got the messaging wrong, the strategy wrong of trying to read how it is that you figure out

how Republicans win elections and how you appeal to the people you need to appeal to to do that. Okay, so I'm curious about the reception that you had for this piece. We discussed it at Ricochetchet and people really loved it. I had many favorites, but one of them was about every leak from your campaign should help your campaign. Treat staffers who leak unfavorable things to the press the way you would treat staffers who embezzle your money. Money's easier to replace. This, I love hearing from someone because I'm so fed up with the way that, particularly after the fact,

the way that campaign consultants will trash a candidate or trash some campaign approach. And then it seems that they're rewarded for it. Or in the middle of the campaign, they're trashing a candidate and they keep on getting work. Is this something that really can be stopped? Or, you know, how can a candidate, what should a candidate do to avoid breaking this rule? Well, yeah, and it's the leaking before, you know, while the campaign is still going on, that I just don't know how it is that you work again, you know, in this town after doing that. I mean, some most notorious example that we saw courses that uh... you know the people on the mccain palin

uh... campaign sniping at palin in the press while the election was still going uh... in in these are essentially people who were paid to do nothing but help you win the election uh... you know it's one thing when you have fair uh... senator governor who's endorsed the candidate who's maybe saying some bad things. Okay, they're independent actors. You don't expect 100% loyalty from them, but you're paid staffers, you do.

And, you know, I mean, I know certainly there were some efforts after that campaign to try to smoke out the people who had said bad things about Palin and essentially make them lepers in Eric Erickson's term, Operation Leper. But, you know, at the end of the day, outsiders can only do so much. I think really to get rid of people who are chronically disloyal, it really starts with the people who hire them. The candidates have to pay attention to these sorts of things, have to, I think, you know, be careful about hiring people who seem to have their

own agenda, who seem to be promoting themselves in the press. I mean, I was amazed even that there were, you know, profiles of Stuart Stevens out there during the campaign, you know, that even if it's totally harmless, you know, you shouldn't be working on your own press notices during a campaign. And one thing I have to say is that this is one thing that has positively impressed me about President Obama, because, you know, Republicans have had a particularly chronic problem with this, but the Clintons have had their problems over the years as well with, you know, staffers sniping at them in the press. And Obama has suffered very little of this.

That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, you don't notice it because it's not there, but his team, you know, really— Wait, what if we find out later— There are not a lot of leaks out of him. What if we find out later that's just an extension of the drone program? That's why we don't hear anything? Okay, so number 35. Bad woman. Sorry.

You say, if a debate or interview question is biased or ridiculous, point that out. Voters want to know you can smell a trap. This is such an obvious point and was one of the few things that was enjoyable about the 2012 campaign was watching Newt Gingrich deploy this to great effect. But I also noticed this week we had the RNC chair saying that Republicans wouldn't do debates with NBC. Is that right? Over the Hillary Clinton? Yeah, I think they're threatening to pull the debates from both NBC, which I assume would include MSNBC and CNN. Do you see this sort of as an extension of that rule?

Is that a wise move for a party to make to sort of point out how ridiculous media bias is in a given way? Yeah, to some extent. And it's, I mean, it is something that, you know, the Democrats do a lot of that doesn't get noticed, you know, in terms of working the refs, you know, in terms of doing things like pulling access from reporters who give unfavorable coverage, you know, all the way to the sort of sustained campaign that they conducted against the Gallup poll organization during the campaign. But, you know, I think, and I mentioned this elsewhere in the list, that, you know, Republicans do, and this is one area that is somewhat asymmetrical, because obviously, you know, the media bias, there's a lot of different types of media bias, but overall, Republicans are far more often dealing with unfavorable press coverage. You know, I think you do have to get out there, you do have to show that you're willing to mix it up with unfavorable press coverage you know i think you do have to get out there you do have to show that you're willing to mix it up

uh... unfavorable reporters but it you know he pretty in a primary you can never ever go wrong by uh... tangling with the press and the way to do it really is not by just sort of generalizing and complaining about liberal media the way to do it is to confront it head-on with specific examples, and there's no better time to do that than when it's being put at you directly. You know, I know John McCormick does some wonderful work, which I know, Molly, you're very familiar with,

on pointing out over and over again, you know, all the questions, for example, that get asked to pro-life candidates that never get asked to, you know, Nancy Pelosi and other pro-choice politicians, the flip side to them about, you know, how far will you go in your position on this issue? So, you know, I think Republican voters, one of the things they want to see is, you know, in a primary, is there a candidate who can deal with that, you know, who can stand up there and take that and turn it back around on the press? Hey, Dan, Peter here. Rule number 24, being a consistent conservative will help you more than pandering to nuts on the right. If you can't tell the difference between the two, don't run. Being a consistent conservative. Okay. That opens the big debate that's always going on, sometimes in the forefront, sometimes in the background, but it's always going on.

Michael Medved had a piece where in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago saying, oh, you Republicans who say that we should always nominate the most – if only we could nominate a true conservative, they would sweep the national election. And then Michael Medved went through and said, look, John McCain didn't do badly. And the party tends to nominate moderates rather than the conservative choice. Anyway, look at Mitt Romney. And yet you seem to be saying here, no, no, no, no, be a conservative. So what is that? Is that your personal bias or is that actually objective political advice for how to succeed as a Republican? Well, one of the things I was trying to do with this list is different, perhaps differently than, you know,

than some of my other writings, was to focus on things that are applicable to almost anybody who is running in a Republican primary, whether they're running as a conservative or a moderate. I mean, I think historically speaking, you win elections, primary elections, by running from the center of your party, not the center of the general electorate, but the center of where your party is. And I think the center of gravity of the Republican Party certainly is a conservative position. You know, I mean, I agree with the, I mean, I think Medved is perhaps jousting a little bit of a straw man,

or at least the extreme position. You know, I do think that every candidate who is running for office has to make some compromises with reality. You know, and I do refer to that elsewhere in the list, that there are times when you have to have, you know, you have to trim your sails on a few positions. You have to pick your battles. You have to decide what are the things that are core issues that are core to you, core to your supporters that you won't compromise on. And then there are, you know, smaller wedge issues where maybe you trim your sails a bit. One of the examples that I've used for this recently is the issue of, you know, taking a no exceptions position on abortion.

You know, that ultimately is the position that I would have as a gut-level position of where I would like us to end up. But realistically, you know, an abortion ban without a rape exception is the kind of thing that's not politically viable right now. Dan, specific question. Actually, at least I'll fumble to try to formulate a question. This is on my mind. I had spent some time yesterday with very good friends from Texas. And so here's what's shaping up in Texas.

Rick Perry, who's dominated Texas politics for a little over a decade or a little over a dozen years, has announced he's not going to run for reelection as governor. Everybody assumes, including me, that Rick Perry is going to run again for president. And yet it's also clear, according to my friends from Texas who watch the scene very carefully, that even though there are no other kind of Republicans, but conservative and very conservative. What's the feeling about the two? And the answer was that Ted Cruz had everyone enthusiastic and excited and fired up because, of course, he's the purer conservative not having had to govern. How would Dan apply his 73 rules to those two candidates? Yeah, well, it's an interesting challenge. And it's a challenge that is not just faced by Perry versus Cruz, but also, you know, Paul Ryan versus Scott Walker, Jeff Bush versus Marco Rubio. You know, it's hard to have two candidates from the same power base.

A lot of people could get in each other's way this next time around. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, and look, obviously Perry, you know, Perry does have his share of detractors in Texas simply because he's been in office so long. And as you said, you know, when you're governing and the buck is stopping on your desk for 13 years, you know, enemies accumulate. And that that happened anybody

i mean i think that they did perry improves would take different kind of challenges i mean that the challenge that very faces you know historically speaking republicans attended the lineup for candidates who are more experienced candidates who have run before candidates who are next in line uh... you know and and certainly on paper he's a guy who would be able to go into a primary race with all of those kinds of things in his favor.

His problem, obviously, is that his campaign went so poorly last time from what it should have done, you know, and left a bad impression on a lot of the public that he has to, you know, he has to overcome a barrier that others don't. But I think certainly if you were advising a Perry campaign in 2016, you know, other than trying to get him out on the stump and in front of hostile reporters enough to try to work against the bad image. I think the other big thing that you would do is to, you know, to try to run very much on his record and experience, and in particular, sort of the story of the Texas economy, which

is the advantage that you have when you've governed is that you can run on, you know, you can run on, you know, you can run on results. And, you know, Cruz has done an awful lot as a new senator to change the conversation in Washington. But, you know, really nobody is going to be able to run on a record that was compiled in the Senate while Harry Reid is majority leader because the Senate hasn't done anything in six years. Dan, would you have a kind of bias in favor of governors over legislators in any event? Governors because I have a very. Go ahead. Yeah, I have a very I have a very strong bias in favor of running governors for president over senators. You know, I think the only, I mean, the only way you can win as a senator traditionally

is to run against another senator. That's how Obama beat both Hillary and McCain. I mean, you know, and you can appeal to some extent to the Democrats as a senator if you're a person like Obama or like John F. Kennedy, who's running, you know, as a relatively if you're a person like obama or like john f kennedy who's running you know as a a relatively young candidate without a lot of accomplishments um but i don't think that's why people vote for republicans uh and certainly given how toxic the situation in washington is right now uh and the low approval ratings that obama and the even lower ratings that Congress has, I think the much stronger position for somebody like Perry or Christie or Walker or Jindal is going to be to be running as somebody who's outside of Washington and can say,

you know what, why don't we take a step back from the way things are working in Washington right now and look at how we actually get things done in the states. That's been a winning message many times before, and I think it's more likely to be the better path for Republicans this time around. Dan, your list, which again, I just loved, was so instructive, I think, for voters, even more than for the people running for president, a lot of these things that candidates do, they do because they are rewarded for them by Republican primary voters. I'm wondering if you could write up a list of 73 rules for voting for a Republican president or if there are any that you think are particularly worth paying attention to for voters? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it would have 73 entries on it, but yeah, I mean, I think there are some very important considerations for voters that I've talked about in the past. You know, certainly one of them is the point that I make there on the list that, you know,

ideas don't run for president, people do. You can't just fall in love with somebody's platform. You have to consider the character, experience, and accomplishments of the candidate. In particular, if you're trying to figure out and game out both, number one, the question of how likely is this person to actually play well and win in a general election, and number two, how likely are they to actually do the things in office that they're promising to do? I always thought that was one of the biggest weaknesses of Romney. He had such a short record in governance, and nearly all the things that he actually did as governor, he had walked away from by the time he was running in 2008, let alone 2012. And so, you know, a lot of the things

that he said were good things, but they didn't have a lot of credibility. And I actually thought, you know, Huntsman, I was citing before, you know, he had a similar problem in that Republican voters got the sense that he didn't really like conservatives. And so even though he actually had a pretty conservative record and a pretty conservative platform, people just didn't believe it. Right. You know, and I think that I really think that the, you know, while there are some positive things, as I noted in terms of staff loyalty, that you can point to, you know, Obama's record, I think overall, you know, the record of the administration over the last five years is one that suggests that voters should really value experience, and in particular, governing experience.

I think there are really, you know, a number of different types of experience we look for. We almost never elect a president other than George Washington, who has all the kinds of experience we look for, ranging from executive experience, political leadership experience, combat experience, business experience in the private sector. You know, usually most presidents don't check all those boxes, but you've got to have some of it. Dan, before we let you go, Peter here, number 20, just explain this one. Optimism wins. If you're going to be a warrior, be a happy warrior. And I think temperamentally people just tend to gravitate towards candidates who seem positive, who seem optimistic. Reagan, obviously, was the classic example of that.

And it's funny, if you go back and look at Reagan's 1964 Time for Choosing speech, you see a much harder-edged Reagan than the Reagan that we saw by 1980. And part of that was his natural personality coming back to the fore as he got more political experience. But I think traditionally, it's always been the... Peggy Noonan talked in her book some years ago about Reagan being, you know, the face that a baby will smile at and, you know, will make them think of ice cream. Mike Deaver's line. Babies look at pictures of that man and smile. Yeah.

Exactly. And, you know, and I think, I mean, that, for example, I think is going to be a challenge for Christie. Christie's a very charismatic guy. But, you know, he's also a bull in a china shop uh... very often and so he had to be able to balance that show people that uh... said he was there while he's a fighter that he's still fun guy ted cruz yeah i think cruise you know cruz is is certainly somebody who uh... you know

has come out swinging uh... an awful lot in uh... in the senate and and we haven't gotten to see that side of him. You know, I think we saw a little more of it on the stump during the 2012 election, if you were following him during that campaign. But certainly that would be one of his challenges as well. Rand Paul? What about Rand Paul?

That's what I'm curious about, too. Yeah, and I'm certainly not a big fan of running him for president. But, you know, he is a guy who I think personality-wise is much more appealing than his father, who came across, you know, your immediate impression of Ron Paul was, this is kind of a cranky old guy with some crazy opinions, which usually turned out to be an accurate impression of him. And I don't think that Rand Paul, personality-wise, comes off that way. I think he does come off as being a much more kind of laid-back guy, and that works to his benefit.

I have to share that really quickly, that I've told my husband that Rand Paul is what you would get if Ron Paul and a normal person had a baby, you would get Rand Paul. And I think that's exactly what happened. Okay, exactly. As someone who interviewed Rand Paul not too long ago, he's a very smart and impressive person. I don't mean to disagree with the analysis, but he's impressive. I'm a huge fan of Rand Paul's, and I just think it's all the best of normalcy plus Ron Paul. So, Dan, last question.

Of the plausible Republican candidates, name the three that you think best comport with and understand your rules, your 73 rules for running. Oh, I think absolutely my, you know, the three that I think of, I mean, really there are four candidates that I personally would be most likely to support, which would be Jindal, Walker, and, you know, I'm not sure whether my third choice would be either Christie or Rubio, but I really think all four of them are, you know, are guys who get the political messaging, who get some of the strategy. I think Rubio in particular has gotten a lot of grief this year, and some of it deservedly so,

as a guy who's maybe still learning strategically how to manage a message and manage a legislative campaign through the Senate. I think all four of them, actually, if you watch what they're doing this year and next year, you're going to see an awful lot of interesting stuff about how you manage the challenges of governing, and they've each got different challenges. But I certainly think that both Jindal and Walker have shown their ability to really change the facts on the ground and change the situation in their state, you know, neither of which was an overwhelmingly Republican state on a local level when they took over. You know, and Christie obviously is a guy who has gotten an awful lot done in New Jersey and is cruising to what looks like an easy victory in a state that is not safe turf for Republicans. So I would say really all four of them are guys who show the potential

to really grasp all the things that I think you need to do to be able to win a national election. Dan McLaughlin, author of the Baseball Crank blog. Right. So next time, I think we have to talk baseball next time we have Dan on, since that's actually what I wanted to talk about here, but go on. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, so make a prediction. Dodgers? Dodgers look awful good if they can stay healthy. They've got an awful lot of impressive guys, and most people spent, I think, the first third of the season wondering

when they were going to get them all healthy and what the team would look like if they did. So I'd feel pretty good about them. Okay, and now that we've raised the question of baseball, it is mandatory to ask about two remaining teams, because this is still America. Give us what's going to happen to the Yankees and the Red Sox. You know, I have to say, I really still have a hard time believing in these Red Sox. I mean, they were probably never as bad as people thought they were going to be.

But, you know, they have played over their head a lot. They've depended a lot on guys like Buchholz playing over their head. I still have a hard time seeing them being the team that goes all the way. The Yankees are just getting really the sense of despair and everything going wrong on them at once that I think they've been kind of long overdue for. You sound very happy about that, Wes. Oh, it's hard to be a Yankees fan. Go ahead.

Well, I am a lifelong Mets fan, is my disclosure. So, you know, living in New York as a Mets fan, you come very much up close with this. One thing I will say, by the way, that's interesting to watch that I've been marking on Twitter is I think we are now three hits away from Ichiro having his 4,000th hit, if you count between the U.S. and Japan, which is, you know, a long story behind that. But, you know, that really is a historic moment. And I don't think he'll make it to 3,000 in Major League Baseball. He's a few hundred away, and he's really fading.

But, you know, 4,000, that's a meaningful milestone, even if the Japanese league isn't quite the same as the major leagues. It also plays a shorter schedule. And remind me, Dan, how long has Ichiro been playing? He actually broke in in, I think, 1992 in Japan when he was 18 years old. And he arrived in the U.S. in 2001. Wow. Dan McLaughlin. We've just proven he really is the author of the Baseball Crank blog and the author recently of

73 Rules for Running for President as a Republican. Dan, thank you for joining us on the Ricochet Podcast. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. Glad to be here. Molly, we're almost finished with Ricochet Podcast number 178. It's been real. But

Blue Yeti is typing me. I realize what James does when he runs this show. It's actually quite complicated. So, Scott, Blue Yeti is typing me saying, no, no, no, closing chat, closing chat. What would you like to chat about, Molly? Mostly, I just want to talk about baseball now, but I'm easily distracted and a huge baseball fan. I really love Dan's writing on the topic. And I am just enjoying the end of the season.

And as a huge Cardinals fan, I'm anxious to see how things finish up. Did you grow up in the Midwest? Why are you a Cardinals fan? My mother raised me to be a Cardinals fan. Ah, it's her. As I am, as I'm raising my daughters and my five-year-old told me recently that her favorite player was Yadier Molina. So I beamed with pride that I have never had when she picked a St. Louis Cardinal as her favorite player was Yadier Molina. So I beamed with pride that I have never had

when she picked a St. Louis Cardinal as her favorite player. How are the Nationals doing this year, by the way? They are horrible. Are they really? They were really supposed to do well. I don't really know what's happened there, but it's sad for the town.

But you don't follow the Nationals? Not. Or the Orioles? Neither one of your local teams? No. Yeah. Okay. All right.

All right. So the Cardinals. That's commendable in all kinds of ways. And are you a baseball fan or – You know, I sort of – I have a brother who's 11 years older than I am. And growing up, he just so dominated his little brothers thinking about – but we grew up in upstate New York. This is why I was prodding down about the Yankees. And we would listen on my brother's transistor radio, little tiny – this is – I'm dating myself.

This is old man stuff. But Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle were such heroes. And so – but as a Yankees fan, you learn to keep your mouth shut, right? Good. My wish. Sorry. I wish. Sorry. I find Yankee fans to be so annoying. I do have to say, there is a local sports story here in D.C. that I can't get over, which is that Slate announced today.

Slate is formerly with the Washington Post company, that online magazine, known for its sports writing. Not. Post company, that online magazine, known for its sports writing, not, but they said that they would no longer use the term Redskins to describe the Washington Redskins, our football team. And I don't really care about the Redskins or whatnot, but literally no one outside of elite media cares about this topic at all or has a problem with this. Polls have been done showing that Native Americans are generally supportive of the term, and most Americans don't think that they should change their name.

But Slate has figured out that's the big issue that they want to fight now is not referring to the Redskins when they rarely write about sports. Unbelievable. Okay. write about sports. Unbelievable. Okay, I won't get... Stanford University and Dartmouth College both did away with what were, in my mind, perfectly

acceptable, honorable mascots, sports mascots. And to me what is dispositive in this whole crazy debate is that the University of North Dakota teams are called the Fighting Sioux. And they're called the Fighting Sioux with the support of the Sioux Indians who live in North Dakota and who in one incident after another, every time it's suggested that the university change the name of its teams, there are Sioux Indians in North Dakota and there are a lot of Sioux in North Dakota who say, no. We like that.

It's like one of the few examples. It's one of the few things in our culture that is not derogatory toward Native Americans. It's an actual point of pride. Tony Kornheiser, who's a local sports columnist, says that they should just keep the name Redskins but change it from referring to Native Americans to referring to red potatoes and change the logo to just a picture of a spud. All right. And on that, Molly, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Tell Mark I said hello. Molly Hemingway, who – give us your religion blog so people can check it.

You're on Ricochet all the time. And where else can people read Molly Hemingway? Also at getreligion.org. And thank you for your able guidance through this hour. I think we survived without James Lilacs, but he will be welcomed back. He will be welcomed back by all our listeners, I'm sure.

And I'm a wreck. Ladies and gentlemen, Ricochet podcast number 178 now comes to a close. Until next week. Sugarbone fairy. Sugarbone fairy. Sugarbone fairy.

I read the news today, oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade And though the news was rather sad Well, I just had to laugh I saw the photograph He blew his mind out in a car He didn't notice that the lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared

They'd seen his face before Nobody was really sure he was from the House of Law I saw a villain today, oh boy The English army had just won the war A crowd of people turned away But I just had to look Having read the book With love to tell you Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup. And looking up, I noticed I was late. Thank you. Bye.