Until death

I just met Dick Cavett, a former talk show host, on a September episode of Reliable Sources (my Zune has been refusing to play its podcast and so I've got quite behind).

I love old people - generally - in the same way that I generally find men gross: there are some awesome guys, and numerous exceptionally gross women, as there are numerous old people I don't like. Old people aren't in a hurry. They're not desperate to impress. They're not uncomfortably self-conscious. They don't steamroll you with stories, or deafen you with their amusement. They're calmer, more self-assured. Again, I mean all this generally.

Dick Cavett turns 74 this Friday. In the interview I watched, his humour is refreshingly subtle (his jokes require less an LOL and more a smiley), his speech remarkably cool, both in tone and pace, that he makes Howard Kurtz (who is 57) seem like a rash youth. He has sad eyes. When I accessed his Wikipedia profile, I first thought this explained by the loss of his wife of 42 years in 2006, but then read that he has had a long history of depression. He keeps a blog for the New York Times. Between the anecdote with which he concludes his latest post and the joke Wikipedia mentions as Johnny Carson's favourite from Cavett, I'd say humour is a lot louder and dumber today.

Another fascinating find online is the web show @katiecouric, which has been running for over a year now. It's easy to see why Katie Couric is so popular. She is very real and very personable in the interviewer's chair. She poses questions that she personally finds valuable and interesting, she speaks clearly and fluently, makes sure her guests have time to think, styles herself their equal, as opposed to an alienated interrogator or a superior hostess. She divulges at the same time that she elicits. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Couric recalls the month Ellen came out as the time that her husband was diagnosed with colon cancer. She mentions this in passing, involuntarily chokes up, stuns Ellen, but ably carries on with her line of questioning. She didn't mention that she and her daughters would lose him nine months later.