And that's the way it is.

The CBS retrospective on Walter Cronkite combined the best and the worst. Cronkite as the best, and the worst which is television news today. I wonder if Cronkite cringed as much as the rest of us do when Katie Couric mouths her oily platitudinous reductions.

The best was also the footage, and the worst was the endless narrating of how wonderful he was. Wouldn't a solid hour of nothing but clips be so much more a tribute?

Like all news junkie 50-somethings, I remember Walter Cronkite ... and given that I lived in Canada until the very tail end of his career as anchor to the nation, that's saying something. But I have to admit that the news he covered made more of an impression than he did. That's the way it should be. No Ashley Banfields, no Anderson Coopers, no Keith Olbermanns ... and certainly none of those babbling babboons on Fox ... No. News tells itself; the reporter's genius is in letting it do that.

The man led an amazing life. One of the greats.

This is the time of year when my entire life becomes focused upon the production of the course catalog for the Major Research University where I sharpen red pencils for wages. This year, we are not printing the thing, and the changes we made last year have created a production schedule that is vastly less stressful than every before. But still bloody stressful. So my posts may be a little reserved for another couple of weeks ... notwithstanding that I have a burning desire to answer the uninformed, narrow-minded, historically ignorant and bigoted nonsense of LZ Granderson on CNN. As I watched the Cronkite piece on CBS, I thought of combining the two. If I can get a solid day's work in on the course catalog tomorrow, I may devote a few hours to this pursuit tomorrow evening.

And I want to add, for those of my readers who follow my photography, that I am hanging on my own petard. I upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture in the middle of the busiest work period of my year ... and I can't find anything, my tags don't work, and the photos are like sand in my fingers. Give me a week or two.