Try and ignore your dipping 401(k) and enjoy the wonderful summer weather this weekend. And I'm not going to add to the seriousness at week's end with a heavy column today.
Instead, we'll spend a couple moments reliving a particularly rich week of video from your TV screen screen.
This isn't the Reader's Digest, but I also believe that laughter is the best medicine.
Let's start our giggle-fest with Anderson Cooper's Wednesday night case of the giggles on CNN.
So, does he giggle like a dolphin, or a like a little girl? You can decide after watching the video:
Sticking with the same night on CNN, there was Christine O'Donnell's walk-off from Piers Morgan's show. Hey, it takes the pressure off Piers for his (possible) links to Rupert Murdoch's British phone-hacking scandal.
Call her Lil' Anne: Sticking with cable, there was Anne Hathaway's Tuesday night rap performance channeling Lil' Wayne on Conan O'Brien's TBS show.
Isn't she the cutest little rapper you've ever seen:
One for the local crowd: This week's Paul Ryan boomlet is partly an example of an aggressive media looking for stories as expertly shown Wednesday night by Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's "Daily Show."
The Ryan segment pops up around a minute and 15 seconds into it:
OK, this isn't from a TV show, but it was funny: Fresh from her narrow win over Ron Paul in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, Michele Bachmann was marking the day Elvis Presley died 34 years ago with a surprising message to a South Carolina crowd on Tuesday:
This is why presidential contenders need a staff that can control what they say in front of cameras that record every single gaffe.
Let's close on a serious note: Just to let fans of the Milwaukee radio veteran Larry "The Legend" Johnson know that a memorial gathering is planned at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Schmidt & Bartelt Funeral Home, 10280 N. Port Washington Road, Mequon.
The service follows at 8.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
