Present Right Now

One of the things that I have adopted (or has adopted me) since getting married are some of my wife's friends that I never really met before: Matt Lauer, Savannah Guthrie,  Natalie Morales, Al Roker, Willie Geist, Carson Daly (we were already buddies from MTV and his talk show), Tamron Hall, and, I get a sickly feeling admitting this, Hoda Kotb and Kathy Lee Gifford (but it's only sometimes though, ya know, when I'm hanging with everybody else and they show up and I just kind of linger around for a few minutes after everyone else leaves, because, ya know, they're more like acquaintances really...ummm...) Photo credit: http://www.today.com/ Yes. The Today Show has become part of my morning ritual. I show up for the news and end up staying for the fun. I mean come on, they're just such a great, jovial group of goobers to start your day with, ya know?  Anyway, the reason I'm writing this confession is to highlight the 2014 Today Show Yearender vid

I saw Christopher Nolan's new mind-bender,  Interstellar , a few weeks ago, and although it ranks lower for me on the  overall list of Nolan's films , I still found it very engaging in all of its cosmic glory. As the movie zips through much of the Earth stuff so it can to get to the space stuff (often sacrificing character development in the process), we are progressively shown that this space journey,  akin to  2001: A Space Odyssey , has a singular dominant theme beyond all of the visual grandiosity: Love. In a decisive moment in the movie, Brand, played by Anne Hathaway, declares, "Love is the one thing that transcends time and space." The transcendent bonds of love portrayed in  Interstellar  surface in multiple ways, but the most prominent connection is shown in the familial context, specifically between father (Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey) and daughter (Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain at different ages). What was interestin