In recent days, we here in the newsroom at “The Topline” have had to face an inconvenient truth. Or two.

(No, not that one from Al Gore’s extended relevance phase of his cinematic career by turning a long PowerPoint presentation into a full-length film,)

Our revelation is that we may have, from time to time, made light of the intensity of the problem popularly known as "writer’s block." Perhaps we were a tad too dismissive of the nature of the comments from some authors--who have used terms like “daunting" and “scary.” As well as others with a more dramatic flair, who countered with evocative, extreme words like “crippling” and “debilitating.” 

You know, those words you’d expect to see in the arts section of The New York Times.

The thing is, that we may have been—again, only on a few occasions—truly dismissive, leaning towards the incredulous end of whatever scale might measure levels of skepticism. And it turns out that we may have been slightly misguided on the topic.

Put perhaps, more simply: Karma is indeed...a bitch.

We do have some justification for appearing to run into some "difficulties of inspiration”, as the scholars might put it. Last week, we were dealing with the first (and hopefully last) truly miserable cold of the winter season. Yes, we know it isn’t officially winter until the 21st. Still, when your local TV meteorologist displays the current temperature, and it features a minus followed by two digits, that means it is as cold as that “b” word we just casually used in the last paragraph. So in our book, winter has definitely arrived, checked in, and is already having a drink at the bar.

A cold one, naturally.

That reminds us that we really want to go back through our notes and find the info for that irate viewer who called the newsroom we were working in years ago and berated us for a solid half-hour over their firm conviction that the “wind chill” number we were reporting during our weathercasts was, and we quote:

“Some completely random bullshit concocted by the climate-denying, so-called “scientists" you got working over there at the f——’n television station."

We promise, you could hear the guy (of course, it was a guy) making air quotes into the phone when he spat out the word “scientists."

By the way, the wind chill was in the 20s, and we had the nerve, the audacity, mind you, to say there were “sub-freezing wind chills” in the forecast. Of course, we made this claim during a primetime news promo.

We want to go back and find that viewer and tell him that we now live in a place where “sub-freezing wind chills” would be thought of as “a warming trend."

Alas, we digress.

Our cold, in this case, the actual illness, was the really nasty kind. Bad enough that we lost the ability to speak for a few days and were close to losing the will to ever feel well again. No worries, after a long week, we are finally on the mend and doing better. (Despite some people definitely wishing the total laryngitis thing had gone on a bit longer.)

During our recovery, we sat down to write at one point, and it hit us as LA Chargers Safety Tony Jefferson’s hit on KC Chiefs Wide Receiver Tyquan Thornton this past Sunday. (OK, maybe not quite that hard.)

We were getting over the cold, but we had picked up a giant old case of writer’s block. 

Stared at the blank laptop screens for a few minutes that felt like a whole second half plus overtime. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And yes, it was a little intimidating. So on Saturday, we tried to plug into some football watching, interspersed with some panicked online shopping for a few last-minute gifts. That is when the second major breaking news of the day would shock us back into reality.

We’d already woken to the truly horrific details of what had happened in Australia, where a pair of gunmen opened fire on a crowd gathered for a "Hanukkah On The Beach” celebration by the Jewish Community in Bondi. Fifteen people, including a child, were killed in that nation’s second-deadliest mass shooting. It is worth noting, as some news reports did, that this tragedy comes 29 and a half years after that nation’s deadliest mass shooting. That event occurred in 1996, in the town of Port Arthur, within the state of Tasmania. The massacre of 35 people led to the enactment of some of the strictest gun laws anywhere on Planet Earth. Australia banned shotguns, assault-style weapons, and most semiautomatic rifles.

Details continued to come to the Western Hemisphere as last Saturday progressed. Perhaps, as others may have done, we turned our focus away from the continuing story in Australia because it seemed all too familiar, yet all too distant at the same time. A majority of the news coverage we saw couldn’t resist having a tone that seemed to imply “it can even happen in a place with many more restrictions on people having guns."

By late Saturday afternoon, the first headlines came that there was an active shooter situation on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. While many viewers were likely focused on the hour of pseudo-drama over who would be awarded the Heisman Trophy in New York City, just three hours north, an Ivy League campus was locked down, with a manhunt underway for the gunman who had killed two students and wounded nine others.

Those two developing stories would continue into Sunday. In the afternoon, the news came from the Los Angeles Fire Department of two bodies being discovered at the home of famed Hollywood director Rob Reiner. The LAFD would only confirm minimal details about the two victims and would not name them. In a moment of notable restraint, press outlets only reported that a 78-year-old man and a 70-year-old woman had been found. Even TMZ.com held off on confirming the two victims were indeed Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. (The names were first reported by People.com, at least that we saw in real time.)

By Monday, the story of the dual murders in the Reiner home had continued into another news cycle, with the growing outrage over a bizarre Truth Social posting on Sunday from the account of President Donald Trump. The post stated that the Reiners' deaths were connected in some fashion to the director’s liberal politics and his outspoken opposition to the administration, classified as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” By late Sunday night, Los Angeles Police had arrested Reiner’s 32-year-old son Nick Reiner, who, according to multiple news reports, had a long history of personal issues, including multiple stints in drug rehabilitation and periods of homelessness.

To be clear, there is absolutely no factual evidence that politics of any kind caused this tragedy. The President stood by his comments on social media when asked about them on Monday, though he no longer referenced the earlier “Trump Derangement Syndrome” remark. This, as a growing number of Republican figures were openly criticizing the President’s comments attacking Rob Reiner, in light of his murder and the subsequent arrest of his son for allegedly committing the crime.

And at the time of this writing, now Tuesday morning, there is the blistering commentary of late night hosts ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, CBS’s Stephen Colbert and perhaps most especially NBC’s Seth Meyers, each taking considerable time on their Monday night programs to point out the hypocrisy from the Oval Office, especially in the wake of the recent outcry over any remarks that were critical about conservative figure Charlie Kirk, following the horrific assasination that took his life while speaking on the college campus of Utah State University.

So what was the inconvenient truth of this past weekend?

Over a dozen people died, and nearly fifty more were injured on an Australian beach, seemingly just for being Jewish and practicing their faith.

Then two more people died, and nine more were injured, seemingly for just being on the campus of an Ivy League school and wanting an education.

And finally, two more people died--stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home--seemingly as they were trying to be parents to their very troubled son.

For its part, the news media covered all of this as if it were rational to chronicle these events in a typical fashion.

Because in the final month of 2025, to quote the signoff of the legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite, “that’s the way it is."

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