What can I do better? | Michael Tomasky

Well friends, the time has come to say au revoir for now. Wednesday, i.e. tomorrow, I am off to Puerto Rico for a week. Any of you ever been? We're staying just outside San Juan. Let me know if you have ideas and suggestions. Remember, there's a baby involved.

This is serious vacationing, so no blog posts unless something really huge and cataclysmic happens, like Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark retools and gets good reviews.

Did you see how it was savaged by every Broadway critic in the country, pretty much? Julie Taymor, what's happened? And U2? The most expensive musical ever produced looks like it's going to shutter in a hurry, I guess (although somehow or other, it has already made 66 preview performances even though it just "debuted" Monday night).

One critic liked it:

...this morning on his radio show, The Glenn Beck Program, he started in very passionately on a topic that we've rarely heard him be passionate about before: the theater. Specifically, Broadway's new musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which has been berdevilled with injuries and other problems during its previews. The somewhat surprising part? Beck absolutely loved the show, which has been largely panned by early reviewers. (Technically, no official reviews of Spider-Man are supposed to appear until the show's official opening, which has been moved back twice but is currently slated for Feb. 7.) "This is better than Wicked!" Beck said, referencing the much-lauded Broadway show that was an instant success when it debuted in 2003. "This is much better than Wicked."

Isn't that sweet?

But I really want to end on Bill O'Reilly. Did you notice that in his interview with Obama, he asked: what can I do better? Obama was way too polite, of course, but it was an interesting question.

So I leave you with that thought. What can I do better? I'm actually being serious, kind of.

And hey, wait a minute. While we're at it: what can you do better? What can ErskineColdwell do better? The possibilities are endless really. I suggest a week's worth of penance on the comment thread of this very post. Let's all come up with at least one shortcoming: one comment we posted that we'd like to take back. one intemperate remark we should have sat on for a day, one cross word whose ill-advised escape we permitted.

I'll start. I think I've been going too soft lately on Sarah Palin. Ha. Okay. I'm going to cut back, a little, on the haughty and nasty adjectives. At least for a week. Cheerio.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds