the beats of the weekend

3. How could SNL miss such an easy target? There are so many Maddow-esque things that make Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow. The crooked smile, the sarcastic paraphrasing, and the amazed 'are you for fucking real?' laugh she reserves special for her conservative guests. So why did SNL only focus on the fact that she's gay? (To be fair, they got the crooked smile down.) The skit just featured an ultra-coifed 'Blagojevich' making violent homophobic references. And is it just me, but is this whole meta NBC promotional thing going a little too far? A comment on the Huffington Post story made an excellent point:

"This is pathetic. NBC is using SNL 'spoofs' just as a way to promote their shows. In just a few weeks, they've done Olbermann, Maddow and Today show. I didn't think the ones last night were very funny, mainly because I never saw those shows and didn't 'get it.'"

I think that running 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip simultaneously on NBC keeps them squarely in 'overkill' territory.

2. Obama totally ate some chili. The New York Times reports that

"The President-elect took up the offer to drop in for a bite, but declined the offer to eat on the house; he paid for his and the mayor’s food with a $20 bill and told the cashier to keep the change."

To me that seems to be one notch up from telling your pizza delivery guy to "brush regularly," but I'm just an angry former-food service employee.

and finally,

1. The New York Times dismisses ultra-white supremacist tendencies as "racial tension." Of the current competition over who will run the RNC (two candidates are black), the New York Times acknowledges that

"Racial strains have emerged in the contest. Katon Dawson, the South Carolina Republican chairman, quit his membership in an all-white country club soon before he joined the race. And another candidate, Chip Saltsman, the Tennessee party chairman, was roundly criticized for distributing a holiday CD to party members that included a parody song called 'Barack the Magic Negro.'"

Two blacks? Two racists? Uh oh!(Plays theme from 'The Odd Couple.')