My normal routine on a weekday evening is to sit down to dinner at 7:30, eat steadily for half an hour while making light conversation with Mrs. Derbyshire and such family members or friends as may be present; then, at 8 o’clock, move to the living-room, usually clutching my half-eaten dessert, switch on the TV, and watch Tucker Carlson’s show.
Friday evenings I’m under pressure to get my podcast finished and posted. I don’t let that interfere with my normal routine, though. I have to eat dinner; and, having eaten it, I have to sit still and do something undemanding while my digestive tract grinds through its work. There aren’t many things less demanding than watching TV; so, the eating done and digestion well under way, I watch Tucker before returning to my podcast labors.
I don’t always watch the whole show. If I’m behind with the podcast I cut out at the first commercial break; or later, if Tucker starts
talking about
flying saucers, I
quit right there.
Well, last Friday Tucker started in not with his monologue as usual, but with an interview. The interviewee was
Kanye West.
I knew the name Kanye West because it shows up in
New York Post headlines, attached to stories that I skip right over. I knew he was some kind of celebrity, and I
think I knew that he was showbiz, not sports. That was the sum total of my Kanye West knowledge last Friday evening. I don’t have to engage with celebrity culture, and you can’t make me.
I sat through the first few minutes of the show, but neither Tucker nor West said anything interesting, so I went to my study and recorded some podcast.
Around 8:30 p.m., by which point Tucker has generally finished with his first segment and is halfway through his second, I stopped by the living-room to see what Tucker was covering in that second segment. To my surprise he was still sitting across from Kanye West asking him questions. I watched for a minute or two, again heard nothing interesting, went back to my study.
Apparently Tucker gave over that entire hour to the interview with Kanye West, a thing he very rarely does. Why? West didn’t seem very smart or eloquent. The few minutes I caught of him actually speaking, he was mumbling gibberish. I did some lookups on the internet.
So now I know who Kanye West is. He’s a rapper.
