The Saturday List - November 29, 2025
What I'm Watching, Reading, Listening to, and Rediscovering
Hope it’s a great Thanksgiving weekend! Here’s what’s on the list this week:
Watching: Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much
Yesterday, I was at the gym and, because it was Friday and mid-morning, The Price Is Right was on. Aside from wanting to do the math after a contestant came this close to winning an Audi on the “Three Strikes” game — wait, you put 5 numbers in a bag and 3 “strikes” and somehow the odds keep being worse for you with each passing moment but she had 4 of the five numbers in the correct order!!! — it got me thinking about the curious situation of Ted Slauson.
A fun spend of 72 minutes of your time, it’s a throwback to the glory days of “Mom, I’m sick” leading to the best hour of your day as you recovered on the couch while Bob Barker entertained you.
But it’s also wickedly entertaining: Ted was a walking Excel spreadsheet and…I’ve already said…too much.
Perfect Bid…is available on Xumo for free and Amazon Prime Video, as well as some other channels.
Reading: An Explanation of The English Language’s Order of Adjectives
An article in The Guardian from 2016 (!) by Tim Dowling summarizes a fact that we native English speakers have internalized long ago:
The general premise — which went viral nearly a decade ago thanks to a tweet from the NYT’s Matthew Anderson — can be found along with some others in the book The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth.
Listening To: Bar Italia, Dave’s New ‘It Band’
They have… well, I think they’re the new “It Band.”
It’s a fun musical formula, too, from Bar Italia: three singers get featured, with Nina Cristante taking the lead but shuffling the microphone back and forth with bandmates Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi.
Here’s “Rooster.” One of the goofiest performance videos you’ll ever see.
Here’s “Fundraiser.”
If you’re like me, you’re kicking yourself for missing this band when they were in town.
Enjoy their website, where you have to click on the eyes to continue.
Rediscovering: Dave’s Post on Price’s Law
It’s been 18 months since I wrote this (appeared here on Substack, and also on my Area 224 blog), but I thought this might be a good time for a review.
I used to work at an organization that had roughly 30 people. A colleague would say “there’s nowhere to hide: you have to be productive.” It was true, and those who weren’t effective were soon found out.
But the larger the place, the less obvious it can be: it’s not enough to look busy or be at your desk — or, if you’re in a hybrid organization, getting your “badge swipes” in — but it’s a really REALLY good idea to have numbers after your name.
That’s all for this week…See you in December!