...whether Lorne Michaels has a picture of Someone Very High Up in the NBC Hierarchy having sex with an orangutang.

It's the only explanation I can come up with for this boneheaded move by NBC.

My problem with Up All Night from the start was that it was basically Raising Hope, but with Rich People and their Rich People Problems (I gave up in the middle of an episode where the characters decided that Mommy's sports car was impractical, and were deciding between buying a new four-door and a new SUV. Ugh.)

Which is not to cast aspirations on Raising Hope, by the way. I really like Raising Hope. I don't love it. It doesn't tug my heart the way, say, My Name Is Earl did. But growing up I knew some people who were like the characters on Raising Hope, which kind of gives you a clue about the mix of people I knew in my socioeconomic background. While I don't identify with the Raising Hope gang 100%, I kind of know what it's like when the whole family's gotta live within a tight budget. Raising Hope is my go-to when I need something funny, sad, and sweet and I don't want to think about it too much.

But Up All Night? Infuriated the fuck out of me with it's self-satisfied, smug version of Rich People comedy. Which is too bad, because I love the hell out of Will Arnett, Christina Applegate, and Maya Rudolph. I desperately wanted to like it because these three working together is like having the Dream Team on a comedy.

Now I understand that NBC is fueling a third (count 'em, third) retooling of Up All Night in a desperate attempt to save it.

They're making it multicamera. With "a live studio audience." While upping the episode order from 11 to 16 episodes.

I can't even begin to understand the thought process behind this. Just switching the set-up and the redoing the sets to accommodate a multi-camera is going to cost money. A lot of money for filming just five episodes. What few fans the show has will be alienated. And I'm pretty sure that a change in format isn't going to draw new ones in.

It's mystifying. Utterly mystifying.

But then again, it has been pointed out in the past the NBC seems congenitally unable to say "no" to Lorne Michaels. If Lorne wants it, he gets it.

Meanwhile, Community is still languishing in a hell-ish limbo without even a return date.

• Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve. I repeat: Canada. Has. A. Strategic. Maple. Syrup. Reserve.
• The strategic maple syrup reserve was robbed.
• The maple syrup was smuggled out of the strategic reserve by hiding it in hallowed-out blocks of cocaine.
• The police have managed to recover some of the stolen maple syrup
• The recovered maple syrup is being returned to the strategic reserve under police escort.

But things kept getting worse. The layoffs started, followed by the furloughs. Wondering every six months if you were still going to have a job was bad enough. Wondering every six months if you were still going to have a job while trying to figure out how to make ends meet when you lose a week of pay each quarter. Then the job cuts kept coming. The industry still hasn’t figured itself out.

More striking — it stopped being fun.

The newsrooms I worked in used to be fantastic, vital places. There was an energy to the room, especially when news was breaking. Being a reporter could be, above all else, fun.

That was long gone by 2009. The layoffs, the furloughs, the space cuts, all of it, sucked the life out of the room, out of the industry.

For this, I blame newspaper owners. By their actions, by their slavish devotion to print profit margins at any cost, by their desire to maximize profit while minimizing the quality of the product, by their inability or unwillingness to embrace digital news, they have sucked so much of the soul out of a business I love.

It’s telling that when anyone leaves the business, my first reaction (and that of almost everyone else I know) is “Good move. Smart decision.”

Not all bishops are alike in their pastoral or counseling abilities.

Right. Later bishops treated me with respect. But Mitt was still adored by many people in our ward, especially many who wanted to learn to be in business. He was a great influence in that regard. Some successors even emulated and reflected his style. My family was a bit different, though. It was the 1980s, and I was a divorced single mother—not typical for Mormonism—and I felt that in the Belmont, Massachusetts ward where the Romneys and others lived, my children were not perceived as useful or as having any contribution to make. I considered moving to a different congregation where they would be valued, but was told by my bishop that Mitt (then the stake president) felt my moving away from Belmont would be a disservice to my sons because in the Belmont ward, they had role models for being good Mormon men. My gut told me differently: that if I kept them around Belmont, they would leave the Church because this group made them feel unusual. There were times when I would ask the congregation’s Boy Scout troop leader how my boys were doing, and he would say “pretty good, considering.” And I would ask, “Considering what?” and he said, “Considering they don’t have a father.” This was in the 1980s.

1. Advertising that a fanwork is about a given 'ship, and then using the opportunity to actually bash that ship in the fanwork. The good news? It's the male half of the pair getting bashed, at least.
2. Inserting their "stealth 'ship" as a secondary ship in fanworks that advertise a completely unrelated 'ship. Best of all? There is no indication that said stealth ship is going to  make an appearance or that it's even a secondary 'ship.

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.

But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.

• To the guy who was a straight-D student in high school actively rooting for the Wall Street Occupation protestors to get beaten and tear gassed because "college students are only protesting the banks because the banks gave them loans to go to college" (say what?) — shut up. You didn't go to college because 1) you were too stupid to go, and 2) you stated that college was a waste of money.
  
  
• To the gal who was the straight-C student in high school who is now a middle school teacher and calling the Wall Street Occupation protestors a bunch of spoiled little kids who don't want to pay their bills (really? have you seen the unemployment rate?) — shut up. I know for a fact your mommy and daddy paid 100% for your college education. You fucking bragged about it when you walked into a restaurant where I was waitressing during my senior year in college and snotted how you couldn't believe that my parents weren't paying 100% for my college because I was sooooooo smart (the "so smart" was said with a smirk). Bragging that you're not going to pay shit towards your own kids' college educations is really fucking rich, coming from you. And where the fuck did you learn how to spell? Because that's some seriously bad spelling there. Plus, your grammar sucks, Teach.
  
  
• To my former classmates, most of whom I recognize as not being honor rolls students liking the above two comments: You've got some mighty convenient memories, sports. I remember your entitled, lazy assess in high school. That entitlement is quite a trick, since only one classmate could be classified as rich and the rest of us were most definitely from blue collar families. Weirdly enough, the rich kid who was kind of a prick in high school, is not a prick and seems like a pretty straight-up kind of guy who isn't actively rooting for violence. You, however, are exactly the same spoiled brats I knew in high school whose first instinct was to smash shit if you didn't like it at first glance.