Category: History

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Spending time off the net

I just got done spending about 10 days without Internet or cable service. I did have the usual withdrawal symptoms but eventually made due by trying to find things to occupy my time. I wrote some stuff out about what I did. It is a bit long so I may post it in parts.

1. Watched the regular television networks. My ISP is also my cable company so I had no cable TV and I usually read my newspaper online. I borrowed a Digital TV converter and tried that out on my set. Digital TV is almost as bad as the old school rabbit ears when you use to have use aluminum foil to get any signal. I would set the antenna and sit down and the picture would mess up. I would stand back up and reach for the antenna and the picture would be fine then sit back down and the picture would cut in and out again. Very aggravating. The picture quality is great – no snow at least and it got me thinking I might cancel my cable TV altogether and just use the Internet and the converter box to watch TV. I was looking at the selection of my cable company and found out that although I had the top digital package, 90% of the channels I watch are on the cheaper standard service. Of course…. lol….

Channel 4 and Channel 6 have extra programing on their 2nd digital channels. I would graze them when I had cable but really got a chance to watch them these past 12 days. WCMH has RTV which shows old TV shows – really old like 30 years or more. Seeing supposed cowboys of the 1850’s with pastel colored clothes was funny on some show about Texas Rangers filmed in the 1960’s titled “Laredo”. They also have my favorite “Emergency!” and “Kojak”.

Channel 6 has My Network TV and also shows “THIS” which plays old movie of the weeks from the early 1980’s. I like these because some are not that good but fun to see some actors before they got famous. One was about a biker club reunion called “Return of the Rebels” that starred Don Murray and Barbara Eden but had a fresh faced Patrick Swayze playing a bad guy. Another movie was about skateboarders called “Thrashin'” which starred Josh Brolin after he had been in “The Goonies”.

2. Got to watch the 6:30 PM network news broadcasts for the first time in years and I remember why I don’t watch them. CBS sounded boring but the others seemed to lack news. I am so use to the detail that some cable channels go into on some topics or the stuff I can read on the Internet. Other than catching the noon or 6 PM local news there isn’t any news available on the networks. That was hard to deal with – guess I am hooked on 24/7 news cycles. The funniest bit was during the NBC Nightly News from Pittsburgh due to the G20 Summit and someone with a megaphone was protesting Brian Williams live on the air. There was one point when his audio was not there and you could hear megaphone guy shouting “They’re lying to you!!!” clear as day… HA! Great TV….. When Williams signed off for the evening he signed off for the guy with the megaphone too.

3. Watched the premiers of a lot of network programing for the fall season. “How I met your mother” seemed a bit flat but “Big Bang Theory” was extra hilarious. I didn’t care for “Mercy” – or rather Grey’s Anatomy on NBC. I did like “The Good Wife”. I really didn’t like “Accidentally on Purpose” – I just don’t think unplanned pregnancy between two unmarried people is funny. The issue is too serious for a comedy series. The movie “Knocked Up” did the same topic but there was some pathos and heart to it. “Accidentally…” has no heart….. knowing me it will probably be the next “Cheers” and be on for 10 years. Hope not.

“NCIS” and “NCIS LA” were pretty good and didn’t seem to miss a beat from last season. “Law & Order SVU” was okay. “Modern Family” was funny and looks good. “Flash Forward” seemed interesting and right now less esoteric than “Lost” did but we will see.

“Gary Unmarried” was good but I miss Gary’s buddy and his girlfriend from last season. “The New Adventures of Old Christine” was very funny but they ripped off a bit of Seinfeld with the airplane trip. I just don’t care for Elaine when she gets bitchy.

I still don’t like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” but “Community” seemed okay but the previews seemed funnier than the actual show. “Brothers” was another I didn’t care for and I skipped the other Fox shows because the canceled “The Sarah Conner Chronicles”.

Another season of “Survivor” that doesn’t interest me but “Amazing Race” was amazing again.

“Weekend Update Thursday” was funny but I worry they are using their best material before a Saturday show. The Joe Wilson fake out skit was one of the best of the year so far.

I totally ignored the crappy dancing shows and fat people shows including Jay Leno.

I was really hoping Jay Leno would do a show like the old Dean Martin Show with a mix of sketches and singing and dancing but what we got was his Tonight Show without that title. – Bleh!

Of course Conan O’Brien isn’t helping himself on his “Tonight Show”. It still seems he is holding back from doing the goofy stuff I loved that Jimmy Falon is doing on his show now. What is it about 11:30 that makes grown adults stiffen up? David Letterman did the same thing when he moved to CBS. If grandma and grandpa don’t like edgy goofiness then they should go to bed.

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Tea Parties – efforts in peasant thinking

In case you missed it several thousand people gathered in Washington on Saturday to protest everything they hate about the current administration. The theme, egged on by their talk radio puppet masters, seemed to be that Washington was stealing money from middle-class Americans and giving it to undeserving people – ie. poor people. Glenn Greenwald writes that such thinking is peasant thinking.

It wasn’t the poor or illegal immigrants who were the beneficiaries of the Wall St. bailout; it was the investment banks which, not even a year later, are wallowing in record profits and bonuses thanks to massive taxpayer-funded welfare. The endlessly expanding (and secret) balance sheet of the Federal Reserve isn’t going to fund midnight basketball programs or health care for Mexican immigrants but is enabling extreme profiteering by the very people who, just a year ago, almost brought the global economic system to full-scale collapse. Our endless wars and always-expanding Surveillance State — fueled by constant fear-mongering campaigns against the Latest Scary Enemy — keep the National Security corporations drowning in profits, paid for by middle-class taxes. And even health-care reform — which supposedly began with anger over extreme insurance company profiteering at the expense of people’s health — will be an enormous boon to that same industry, as tens of millions of people are forced by the Government to become their customers with the central mechanism to control costs (the public option) blocked by that same industry. That’s why those industries are enthusiastically in favor of reform: because, as always, they will benefit massively from it.

If Fox News, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were truly opposed to expanded government power, where were they when George Bush and Dick Cheney were expanding federal power in virtually every realm, driving up the national debt to unprecedented proportions, destroying middle-class economic security in order to benefit the wealthiest, and generally ensuring government intrusion into every aspect of people’s lives? They were supporting it and cheering it on.

Who are the undeserving “others” benefiting from expanded government actions?

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9/11 images were war pornography?

September 11th 2001 was a dark day in American history. That isn’t disputed. What is debated is how the country reacted afterward. I read a blog entry on a website today that bothered me because the writer seemed to be blurring how events turned out rather than what was known that day.

On the website Crooks and Liars, writer Susie Madrak posted an entry titled “Flashback: The Day The Earth Stood Still”.

It was a very personal account of what happened to her on September 11th 2001. I was interested in reading the essay as it matched my feelings that day until I got to the end when she wrote this:

My grown son was staying with me while he looked for a job and was sleeping on the couch when I came home. I flipped on the TV and it woke him up. We watched as they showed the planes crashing into the building, again and again and again.

“Turn it off,” he said after an hour or so. “This is pornography, war pornography. Turn it off.”

So I did.

When we have our limbic brain punched over and over again by horrific images, and those images are then used to justify more horror, there is only one solution: Turn off your TV.

My son was right: The 9/11 images were war pornography, something watched over and over as we stroked ourselves into wargasm.

Flashback: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Those words bothered me because of the way I spent my day that day. I watched the TV coverage all day and into the evening because it just didn’t seem real and I need to see the live coverage to keep driving it home that it happened.

Yes the attacks were used to justify an unneeded war in Iraq – later. On that day in September is was impossible to know how it would turn out. How could someone claim the TV images were being used to manipulate people.

That would be like saying the newsreels showing the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was used to trick us into war.

The war was started by those attacks just as they were in September 2001.

Calling the news images that day “war pornography” is either an after-the-fact colorization of the event or a cold hearted reaction to mass murder.

I hope it is the first and not the former.

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What we really should be looking at since the death of Walter Cronkite

Uncle Walter passed away on Friday and so this weekend the press corp have been celebrating the anchorman who set the standard of what the press is suppose to be. It is ironic that as they celebrate the icon of TV news, current TV news is nothing like what Cronkite stood for or broadcast back in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The current members of the press commented on objective and tough Cronkite was in his reporting. He told us all what we needed to hear and sometimes what we didn’t want to hear. That doesn’t happen today.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com says it better:

Despite that, media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite’s death as though he reflects well on what they do (though probably not nearly as much time as they spent dwelling on the death of Tim Russert, whose sycophantic servitude to Beltway power and “accommodating head waiter”-like, mindless stenography did indeed represent quite accurately what today’s media stars actually do). In fact, within Cronkite’s most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today’s modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.

Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did

Too bad it is all true.

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Weekend Ear Candy: Jackson 5’s “ABC” and Clerks 2

Until I saw it on YouTube I had forgotten about the dance routine in the middle of the film Clerks 2 – the follow up to the cult classic Clerks by Kevin Smith. The song is one of my favorite Jackson 5 songs and the routine in such a recent film is tribute to the Jacksons and Michael.

The first 20 seconds or so isn’t office or family friendly language wise……. just turn down the sound until you see Jay and Silent Bob with the boombox.

Clerks 2 “ABC”

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