Tag Archives: TV

Super(star) Bowl

8 Feb

While watching the Superbowl, my friend Rebecca and I discovered that what went came out of the TV speakers as

went into our ears as

Lessons from New Jersey.

4 Dec

Jokes about New Jersey (“What Exit?”), like jokes about Wisconsin (“Cheese & Beer & Snow“), are easy to come by.

I’ve spent my first two and past 12 years in Wisconsin, but my mother was raised in New Jersey, and I still return (not as often as I’d like) to visit my cousins and friends who live there. I’ve enjoyed a few summer weeks on the Jersey Shore, as well as on Wisconsin’s middle-coast cheddarized version thereof. Perhaps that’s why I want to point out one or two more deep connections between what appear on the surface to be culturally distant states. Or a third:

This week, the entire country had a chance to learn “The lessons of Jersey Shore“ (courtesy of Fourfour‘s precision brand of hilaro-snark).

Next week, I hope New Jersey will teach us in Wisconsin one more lesson. New Jersey Peeps: Contact your legislators today!

There’s no harm in making fun of either state. But this time I hope New Jersey gets the last laugh.

Update (12/7/8) : via Joe. My. God. “Victory In New Jersey! Marriage Vote In Full Senate Slated For Thursday”

Vanilla.

2 Dec

I was angry when Ralston-Purina, focusing their energies on the chocolate chip flavor, stopped production of vanilla Cookie Crisp. I was nine years old. I wrote them a letter.

And so began my political activism, and relative indifference toward chocolate.

The Pennsylvania “Debate”

16 Apr

I couldn’t stomach it the first time through in real time, but I just finished watching the debate online. It was more of the same from Clinton, who benefited from the first 40 minutes of the debate being devoid of substance. ABC/Disney and the Clinton Clan have a lot to gain from each others’ success, but I didn’t think they’d be so obvious, launching scary-sounding but baseless non-issue after non-issue at Obama. I thought Charlie Gibson was an awful questioner. Stephanopoulos wasn’t as bad, but I still expected more from the man who helped propel the first (and at the time more Obama-like) Clinton into office in 1992. As I predicted in yesterday’s post, the establishment will surely tremble before they crumble.

I don’t feel like dignifying the non-issue-based attacks on Obama with a response. Frankly, it saddens more than disgusts me to watch the Clintons so quickly embrace the tactics of their former political rivals as they’ve assumed their prime placement on the establishment’s mantle. Josh Marshall (TPM) puts it well:

And seeing Hillary go on about how Obama has contempt for folks in small town America, how he’s elitist, well … no, it’s not because I think she’s either. I never have. But after seeing her hit unfairly with just the same stuff for years, it just encapsulates the last three-plus months of her campaign which I can only describe as a furious descent into nonsense and self-parody. Part of it makes me want to cry. But at this point all I can really do is laugh.

I don’t really want to speculate how this will be spun on the morning “news” shows. I will, however, leave you with a post-debate linkroll.

• Hillary regrettably followed this advice.

• Obama takes the high road on cookie baking.

• Hillary lied because she was tired? Let’s hope she’s not tired at 3am.

• The Weather Underground? Really? Please.

• “Editor & Publisher” sums up the ABC/Disney moderators’ performance here, mentioning the debate audience’s booing of Charles Gibson. Let’s hope the voters outside the auditorium do the same. Hey, I’m a Packer fan. We don’t boo the refs when we lose a round. We only boo them when they stand in the way of a good, fair, spirited game.

• From Sam Boyd at The American Prospect’s “Tapped”:

“THESE QUESTIONS ARE A DISGRACE.

A woman asks if Obama “believes in the American flag” because he doesn’t wear a flag pin.

Charlie Gibson says that questions about the flag are “all over the internet” — along with Pamela Anderson’s sex tape, cats with bad grammar, and Rick Astley. Journalism at it’s finest.”

Update: 4/17/08:

• Althouse, this morning, sees no reason to remove her tongue from its usual position in her cheek: summarizing the largest strand of complaints about the debate in the overnight blogosphere:

“It was bad of ABC to trouble Obama with questions about his attitudes and character instead of offering him opportunities to expound policy.”

I get her implied point. Politics can indeed be brutal. Still, “questions about his attitudes and character” are one thing, but questioning his patriotism? and name-dropping to imply guilt? In a follow-up question, Hillary herself all but admitted there was no substance to these attacks, but that she intended to play Swiftboat style, if only because that’s how the Republicans roll:

“I know Senator Obama’s a good man and I respect him greatly, but I think that this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.”

Well, fine. We’ll beat back their politics of character assassination after we triumph over hers. Her desperation can hardly be missed. She wasn’t like this when she was ahead:

“I’m not interested in attacking my opponents, I’m interested in attacking the problems of America,” Clinton said. “And I believe we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans. They deserve all the heat we can give them.”

That was then. Now she wants to serve them the Democratic party’s head on a platter. I can’t stop her if she wants to drag her own name into the gutter. Let’s just hope she doesn’t take the rest of us with her.

Finally, from TPMtv: “If you were spared watching it in real time, relive the awfulness of last night’s ABC debate in today’s episode of TPMtv … “

Nail Biting : Cigarette Smoking :: Cable TV : Internet

28 Mar

Part I

Home from college at the end of my first year, I was hanging out in my parents’ yard with a small group of close friends who still lived full-time in the town where I grew up. I’d just come outside after a long shower. Fumbling for a cigarette, I asked Nat for a lighter. Sometimes a gentleman, Nat lit my cigarette for me. Sometimes not a gentleman, he also commented on my “gnarley” fingernails and cuticles, whose long soak in the shower exaggerated the damage done by my teeth.

“Dude,” he asked, “Why chew your nails if you’re gonna smoke cigs?”

I couldn’t answer him. I shrugged, hoping the conversation would quickly turn to making fun of someone else in the group or, just as likely, someone’s mother.

I quit biting my nails that summer. It took me another dozen to quit smoking.

Part II

I stayed home tonight to write; and I’ve successfully alternated between blogging and dissing. I just took a break to heat up some split-pea soup on the stove, which I intended to eat in front of a 10-minute TV news broadcast at the top of the hour. I sat down to eat, discovering only then that the cable was out.

“Dude,” I asked myself, “Why watch cable TV if you’re gonna surf the ‘net?”

Another shot at “news.”

15 Mar

I’m obviously by no means the first to criticize modern news media. Moreover, when I do get my feathers ruffled by it, it’s not because of corporate ownership and the like, which many of my friends are much quicker to criticize. I don’t mind editorializing; in fact, I love it. What I do mind is editorializing disguised as reporting. A friend from the UK once pointed out to me how “you Americans” can’t even report on a natural disaster without editorializing. “Tragic Events Unfolded.” “Terrifying Hurricane.” In other words, proper news should report that the events unfolded, and that the hurricane hit shore; but it should leave the assigning of adjectives to the reader.

Of course, now we’re wired to let them get away with much more. Election headlines disguise even the least rigorous editorializing as news. Take this article. Admittedly, this sort of article exists precisely to keep agents of change at war with themselves, and thus maintain the status quo. Apart from that, I have no journalistic qualm with reporting that X percentage of Y demographic voted for Z. Unfortunately, it always goes further. Once they tell us “why” certain people voted a certain way, they’ve usually gone too far. If 20% of the electorate in a given State claims “race” mattered in choosing a candidate, the article shouldn’t imply 20% of Democrats equals “Democrats divided by race.” And “black voters voted for the black candidate”? The obvious implication is that they voted for him because he’s black. How does this “significant minority” of 20% so easily morph into this blanket statement? It’s more than a little condescending to think “we” know why blacks or anyone else voted for whom they did. Did gays in California and New York vote for Hillary because she’s a lesbian? No, they voted for her because they thought–and for the record I clearly disagree–she’d be best on the issues that mattered to them. We might also wonder what forces motivate the news media to track the “gay vote” in those two states but not others. How does the vote differ from the general population? Christ, people. Logic classes, anyone?