Photo: Rosalind O’Connor/NBC

After three Saturday Night Live hosting gigs in the early aughts, Jack Black hasn’t appeared in almost 20 years. So it was a delight to see him back on the show again, this time promoting A Minecraft Movie and the upcoming Anaconda installment. He’s a seasoned pro who can reliably churn out laughs (or at least warm grins) whenever he’s on camera, and I felt like I could relax watching him after Mikey Madison’s wobbly debut last week.

Sure, Black had some flubs here and there, and he couldn’t always take his eyes away from the cue cards for very long. But he was always onbringing a level of energy to the show that proved infectious to his oft-breaking castmates. Just look at the sheer joy on Heidi Gardner’s face as she rocked the tambourine in the background near the close of Black’s monologue performance running through his biggest movies of the last 20 years. Who cares if many of those movies weren’t good? (I would’ve preferred a Bernie shout-out, but I get it.)

It makes sense that Black’s pipes would be heavily utilized throughout the night, from that “Back Again” song to his silk-pajamaed duet with Sarah Sherman about “makin’ lurv.” (What makes the latter work is the physical comedy of their herky-jerky flying, especially when Bowen Yang enters as their third and clings to Black’s legs.) And during Big Ricky and the Minnows’ I’m potluck performance of “Free Fallin’,” a one-joke skit about an overabundance of bass guitarists, he makes for a more than capable Tom Petty stand-in while undercutting his chill vibe with an increasing frustration at the musical imbalance. Affability was also a big theme throughout the episode for the host, who brought his signature intensity when needed but played it earnestly when the characters required it.

Here are the highlights:

Black plays Gene, a contestant on a dating show where the bachelorette (Chloe Fineman) isn’t supposed to know anything about the three dudes’ physical appearances. But host Todd Bruff (Andrew Dismukes) can’t help telling her that the sweet, well-meaning Gene is clearly dressed as Indiana Jones, including a whip and “adventure hat.” Part of me felt slightly let down when I realized there wouldn’t be much more to the skit than Black and Dismukes’s debate about whether or not the Indiana Jones get-up is intentional, but it makes for some pretty funny moments, especially when Gene slips up and mentions a fact he shouldn’t know about Indiana’s origin story. And the appearance of Bowen Yang as a new contestant dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow makes for a good-enough final beat to end on.

When the name of the fake product Alon is funny, we’re usually in for a good time. And crossing over Flamin’ Hot Cheetos with hemorrhoid cream is just good stuff, especially with the care taken to the graphics to show the “total eruption” that would result. Black is the ideal guy for the job here, screaming in agony while applying the nightmare product, and using Chester Cheetah as the alarmed straight man is inspired.

Creating a solid comedy song often means pairing the right content with the right form, and in this case that means a reggae song sung by Jamaican locals (Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim) about goth American kids on vacation with their families. Black appears unexpectedly as My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way in a new version of the opening verse of “Welcome to the Black Parade” (and outfitted as Way in the music video), which means a lot to me personally.

This week’s Update featured some of the better one-liners of the night, arguably peaking early on when Colin Jost acknowledged Morgan Wallen’s abrupt departure at Goodnight last week. But the Trump skewering was good and tough this time around, like Michael Che’s joke that “The US has been plundered and raped by other countries … and Trump will not stand for plundering.” I also appreciated the flashback to Russell Brand introducing Chris Brown as a musical guest, with Jost’s remark, “We really knew how to pair ’em up.”

Far and away the highlight, though, was Nwodim practicing an apolitical stand-up comedy set for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The humor comes not so much from watching her stick to food jokes as it does from her confusing, apparently over-50 “Miss Eggy” stand-up persona, which had everyone in the studio cracking up, including the Update anchors — and led to a great unexpected moment when the audience contributed a loud “shit!” to follow her “men ain’t what?” call. For someone who doesn’t always get her due on this show, it’s a welcome star-making turn.

This one is also based around a silly but amusing concept: When the Greeks put on their “first play” in 500 BC, people in the audience took it literally, not understanding that they weren’t being spoken to directly. Black co-stars with Day, Dismukes, and Fineman as the befuddled audience members, loudly chiming in from the front row after every line to reply. The sketch goes on a bit long without taking any particularly unexpected or clever directions, but I liked the outraged reactions to the transparently fake stage murder.

• Another week, another appearance by Mike Myers as Elon Musk in the cold openthis time present at the Rose Garden to hear Trump’s tariff plan and “MAGDA” (“Make America Great Depression Again”) agenda. The idea of ​​a new self-vandalizing model of Tesla with “self-smashing headlights, self-slashing tires, and AI-powered graffiti” doesn’t feel far off from a stunt Musk might actually pull to show how in-on-the-joke he apparently is, and “swastikas made out of penises” really does encapsulate his sense of humor.

• The sketch about one uppers doesn’t really go anywhere new after establishing the basic “humble brag followed by eagle sound cue” pattern, but Black gives good face, neither does Yang.

• Very little Ashley Padilla in this one, and Devon Walker is nowhere to be seen!

• I don’t have much to say about Elton John and Brandi Carlile, but I enjoyed the performances, especially Carlile’s voice in the second song, the title track from their album. Carlile was also brought in for the making-lurv sketch as a fourth to Sarah Sherman and Black’s relationship.

• “A ballet dancer set a new world record for the longest distance covered while performing a split on two moving ATVs, which also inspired the new TV show, Vagina 911.“

• Not sure about the ICE joke, less because it “went there” than because it’s just pretty lazy, especially compared to some of the other topical humor here.

• I could use less of Marcello Hernández breaking, but I did laugh at his delivery of “We’re gonna live happily ever after, baby, like Romeo and Juliet … I assume.”

• “You think Tom Petty is liking this?” “I love swimming.”

• The other part of the bass skit that made me laugh is Yang coming in with a keyboard, only to reveal it as a guitar case carrying yet another bass.

• The Times Square Kiss skit, based on the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo, was a bit of a dud for me, repeatedly hitting the same note about Black’s jealousy of the various men kissing his nurse girlfriend (Gardner). But I understand where he’s coming from in wanting four hot dogs.

Sondheim in his Connecticut home.
Photo: Daniel Dorsa/The New York Times/Redux

Stephen Sondheim was a city boy, a born Upper West Sider who in 1960 bought a townhome on 49th Street with the profits of Gypsythen lived there for the rest of his life — mostly. He also had a country escape, a retreat in Roxbury, Connecticut, that saw more use as he got older. He bought that house in 1980 on the advice of Peter Wooster, the designer friend who knew the area and eventually settled in the property’s carriage house. The composer was there off and on — including on the fateful weekend in 1995 when there was a fire swept through the townhouse (thankfully sparing his manuscripts, but killing his dog). Neighbors in the Turtle Bay garden district remember that he was rarely in town after the pandemic hit.

Sondheim died in 2021, his townhouse went into contract a few weeks agoand now his sprawling three-bedroom Connecticut compound is on the market for $3.25 million. The 1792 home was restored in a way that stripped it down to its essence: A vaulted ceiling in the main, open living area exposes wood beams. A sunny, glassed-in porch retains old stone flooring. Wide plank floors give the place character and spunk — especially in a brainy little wood-walled office, where two guitars sit by a radiator. There’s a library with a rolling ladder, and shelves and drawers that look designed to have held his archive. Then there’s a sunroom with windows on three sides, which now pour light onto a grand piano. Around the room are cubbyholes that likely held sheet music, and behind it is the chaise where one can assume Sondheim wrote, which he customarily did lying down.

Where there’s wall space, there are signed cast posters, translated show posters, and just plain theater posters. They even show up at the foot of a bed as though, in the place where Sondheim fled to escape the action, he also needed to be reminded of what he’d done.

Behind the piano is a chaise. Sondheim preferred to write lying down.
Photo: Coldwell Banker Realty

The home dates back to 1792, according to the listing.
Photo: Klemm Real Estate

Photo: Klemm Real Estate

The Indian Reserve Bank is making progress in restoring a large part of its gold reserves stored abroad, in a move aimed at strengthening control over the country’s strategic assets, after Russia’s foreign reserves ended its invasion of Ukraine, according to Bloomberg.

According to the bank’s half-yearly report on foreign currency reserves, the bank returned about 64 tons of gold to the country during the first half of the fiscal year that began last April, raising the percentage of gold mined inside India to more than 65% of the total, which is roughly double the percentage recorded four years ago.

According to the report, the share of gold in the total reserves reached 13.92% by the end of September compared to 11.70% at the end of March, while the total gold owned by the bank rose to 880 tons, of which 576 tons were stored locally, which is a comparable level compared to only 38% of the gold that was stored inside the country in September 2022.

The Reserve Bank of India did not explain the reasons for the change, but economists pointed out that the goal is to hedge against geopolitical risks, and to ensure full control over strategic assets, in order to freeze the Group of Seven, including the United States and the European Union.

واقل گوراف کابور, کیبیر عکسیمین فی بنک آندوس آند (IndusInd Bank) as long as we have the capacity to store it, why don’t we have gold? Many of the central banks are doing this, so it is logical that you keep your gold in your hand in such times of trouble.

During the past four years, the bank returned about 280 tons of gold to Indian lands, in accordance with the policy described by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as a very wise decision to diversify reserves.

Reserves exceed 100 billion dollars

According to the data of the Indian Reserve Bank quoted by Reuters, the Indian gold reserves exceeded 100 billion dollars for the first time, supported by high global prices despite the decline in the central bank’s customers this year.

Data showed that India’s gold reserves rose by 3.6 billion dollars to reach 102.4 billion dollars in the week ending October 10, while total foreign exchange reserves fell by 2.18 billion dollars to 697.8 billion dollars.

And this comes at the time when the Reserve Bank of India seeks to reduce dependence on the US dollar and the assets associated with it, by gradually reducing its holdings of US Treasury bonds, a policy that began before former US President Donald Trump imposed 50% customs duties on India due to its purchase of Russian oil.

India’s foreign currency reserves reached 702.3 billion dollars until October 17, making it the fourth largest reserve in the world, which is enough to cover more than 11 months of imports.

India is the second largest consumer of gold in the world after China, and it relies on imports to meet local demand, because gold is a part of Indian culture, whether it is an investment or a symbol of social status.

We present to you in “Layf Stayal” the Egyptian website comprehensive information on the movement of the planets today and the financial and professional opportunities of each constellation, based on astronomical sources such as “Horoscope”.

کشف محمود عبد الرازق شيكابالا قائد الزمالك في القدم في الفينيل, والرئيس لنادي G عن كواليس

Shikabala said in television statements: “The decision to withdraw was very difficult, and I thought a lot about it, but I felt the need to withdraw, with respect to any limit.”

He added: “There was a time when I was in a contract with Al-Malik, but I decided to stop, because I was afraid that any thing might happen or fail, I was the one who caused it.”

وتعاب: “The last blow of punishment was in front of Biramidz, and it was number 10 and I was wearing number 10, I felt it was a sign from God, and the moment was right.”

واختتم قابلًً: “Alhamdulillah ended my path with victory, we won the cup of Egypt and recorded the last strike, and it was a great favor from our Lord.”

شاركت العنتينة شيماء المغربي محبيها وجمهورها جموعة من صور الجديدة عبر هامة على آنستجرما.

Sheima Al-Maghrabi celebrated her birthday with a charming and attractive look, where she chose a long dress in fiery red, with a distinctive design that reveals her back elegantly, adding to her appearance a touch of elegance and beauty at the same time.

Al-Fistan flows on the ground, which adds to the feeling of freshness and luxury, while the design of Al-Sisht and Al-Raqi makes the whole focus on the color of Al-Fistan and the personality of the people.

According to the “Vogue” site, here is the choice of the red color:

The red color of strength, trust, and attraction, is the symbol of love, celebration, and happiness.

Her choice of this color for her birthday reflects her desire to shine and stand out, as well as her personality, full of positive energy.