A Bad Night And A Good Special (Thursday's Show...But Not Really)

Hi everybody. Man, what a crazy world we live in. There will be no review tonight because I did not watch the show. Instead, my normal 360 viewing was preempted by local breaking news of a horrible shooting at a City Council meeting in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. Seven people total were shot by the gunman, five of them fatally. Two of the fatalities were police officers and Kirkwood's mayor was one of the injured. The gunman, who apparently had issues with city officials, was shot dead. Kirkwood has had a rough go of it lately. The suburb made headlines last year or so after Shawn Hornbeck, who had been missing for years, was discovered in now-convicted kidnapper Michael Devlin's apartment. And really, there's nothing more to say about it other than it's pretty scary that where ever you go nowadays someone can just randomly start shooting it up. Some of my local reporters wondered aloud if this will lead to more security at City Council meetings here and around the nation. I guess we'll see.

Switching topics now to 360, I didn't see John King host the show, but I did follow along with some of his live blogging. It's fun how everyone is getting involved. By the time 360's second hour was starting, my local news was kind of peetering out of new information, so I switched over and was pleasantly surprised to see a very cool special. The map table returns! I've been a big fan of the map table ever since the special with Michael Ware on the four wars in Iraq, which I think is one of my favorite 360's ever. (Speaking of Michael Ware, where for art thou? He doesn't write. He doesn't call. A viewer gets worried.) They also pulled out the map table for a discussion about Africa with Jeff Koinange, but I think we're probably never supposed to speak of him again. Ahem. Anyway, tonight we had two of my favorites, Fareed Zakaria and David Gergen, tackling the challenges that the next president will have to deal with. Not the happiest hour, but definitely good television. And I really appreciated Anderson Cooper's point that this generation hasn't been asked to sacrifice. That's always bugged me. They tell us we're in the fight of our lives, but all they want us to do is shop. It's ridiculous.

Finally, with all this new live-blogging going on, I was just thinking, wouldn't it be cool if even more contributers and correspondents could get involved? Not during the show, because that would cause a confusing meltdown, but what if they responded to comments to their blog posts randomly throughout the day? This would be especially cool when it comes to people like Reza Aslan, who has done a couple blog posts recently, but hasn't made it onto the actual show in a little while. If their technology isn't set up to where contributor comments could be randomly posted all day long, they could just set up a live-blogging hour that is not show time. You know, something like: "Check out the blog at 5PM Eastern when Reza Aslan will be here for an hour to live chat about moderate Islam's struggle to find its voice." Or whatever. You get the picture. Anyway, just throwing that out there because I think it could be cool, and more importantly to the bean counters, drive up page views. But however further they take this experiment (if at all), as I said before, it would probably be good to find a way to authenticate the poster with a special font or color, so no one can post as an impostor. Okay, that's enough from me because my two cents is turning into a nickel. I might try to review Friday's show since I missed tonight's. Emphasis on "might." No promises.