Jigsaw 20, Series 3, Report No.1

The projected rematch of this jigsaw was started a couple of days or so after the ending of the first. Not quite as fast a start as on that occasion, with the snap above recording all there was after the first day's effort.

While turning to the NYT for the first time for a bit, I turned up the piece at reference 2 which pulls off the trick of being funny and tragic at the same time. A taster: '... “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Musk posted on X on Friday ... Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government...'. 

I now know (from elsewhere) that Musk (at 53) has quite a lot of children and has had several wives.

[TV producers need to squeeze a certain number of commercial breaks into each broadcast.Credit...Caroline Gutman for The New York Times]

And if you are not into 'Big Trump Little Trump', there is always NFL at reference 3. I now know that there might be 20 30 second advertisement breaks in a three hour game, breaks which the production team tries to fit into natural breaks in the play - of which NFL offers plenty - there also being talk of breaks of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Prices for which advertisements can rise up to $8 million. I don't watch sport at all, but my understanding is that we do things rather differently. 

And while we may not interrupt the game in this way,  I think we do allow 15 minutes advertisements to the hour on commercial television, the sort which I might have watched of an evening before the arrival of our smart television - which is a lot more than 10 minutes in three hours. On the other hand, I do remember from our visit to Canada that the frequency of advertisement breaks made regular television nearly unwatchable. Maybe regular television is not the same as football. Maybe I am missing something.

While I read here that the NFL people are very sensitive about annoying the watching & ultimately paying public: they have to strike a balance.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/jigsaw-19-series-3-report-no4.html.

Reference 2: Musk’s Lost Boys and Trump’s Mean Girls - Maureen Dowd, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 3: During N.F.L. Games, Going to Commercial Requires Its Own Playbook: TV advertising is the lifeblood of the league, but knowing when to pause the games is a task undertaken by N.F.L. executives, network producers and on-field officials - Ken Belson, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 4: https://www.carolinegutman.com/#1. The source of the study in green above. Google Image Search says some kind of Echium, which seems reasonable enough. A junior member of the giant version we first came across at Ventnor Botanic Garden on the Isle of Wight, for which see reference 5 below. I had not realised that there were so many of them. Just about visible in Zomlefer, among the borages. But Bentham & Hooker have rather more time and space for them, at least for the ones that you get here wild in the UK.

Reference 5: https://www.botanic.co.uk/.

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