News schmooze: Couric cracked corn, and I don't care

Fact: I missed Katie Couric's big debut on CBS today. Damn. Sure, there's always YouTube, but as a child of Cronkite, I have my standards. My biggest hope is that her makeup artist attended to her collagen'ed lips with care, bringing out anything but the red. Red lipstick does not suit Katie Couric. I think she knows it, too, because she's been sticking with mostly frosty shades ever since that morning a while back, when I'd emerged from the shower only to recoil at the sight of Katie Couric's grossly distorted and clownlike lips, painted up in a shade that can only be described as 'Red Scare.' Sure, everybody knew she'd had a few collagen injections and all, and perhaps her usual makeup artist was out on vacation that week, but regardless - whoever was responsible for that day's job should have been fired on the spot. And I'll never forget my man's reaction, either. "Jesus!" he'd cried out, having been stirred from his drowsy half-state to one of unfiltered, wide-eyed horror, in a matter of seconds. "What'd her plastic surgeon do - give her a lip transplant using a baboon's anus?" He wasn't joking, either. That's what it looked like then, and still has a tendency to look like every once in a while nowadays, too. Here's hoping she stays with the frosty shades, but I still contend that the makeup artist should be pilloried.

Fact: Dan Rather's going to rock HDNet, come October. Thumbs up on their news coverage, by the way. I'm in love.

Fact: I'll be missing my hometown hero and journo giant Bob Schieffer. Terribly. Bob Schieffer is the man, a trusted voice and face. Someone who's seen it all, nature and man at their best and worst, and God bless him, Bob Schieffer's still at the top of his game, the stuff of legend. In 1963, he was the night reporter down at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and had rushed back to work the morning of November 22nd, after his brother rang and woke him up to tell him that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Schieffer was all alone in the newsroom - what with the other reporters in Dallas, natch - when the phone rang and there was a woman on the other end, asking him for a ride to the Dallas police station. When he told her they weren't a taxi service, she told him her son had been arrested in the shooting death of President Kennedy and he asked, "Mmmm, where'd you say you were?" Just the day before, he'd been a bit bummed because he hadn't been assigned to cover any of the President's stops in Fort Worth or Dallas, and here he was now, Mr. Baptism-by-Fire, seated next to Lee Harvey Oswald's mother and wife, and thisclose to interviewing the accused assassin right there in the jail, until a suspicious FBI agent found out he was a reporter and ordered him out of there. Makes Katie's colonoscopy pale in comparison.