Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Sunday Driver

...of the day is Danica Patrick. On about lap 40 or so of the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at the Talladega super-speedway, 13 cars in front of her started crashing at 200 mph. She did the best job of driving though a "big one" at speed that I have seen since Tony Stewart pulled off the same feat in the Daytona 500 a few years back.

Somebody's gotta post a You Tube vid of that drive from the POV of her in-car camera. I'll put it up here when I find it, but the race is only half over as I write.

#####################################

Race over now. Danica got involved in a late crash, finished 33rd, so her performance earlier in the race was for naught.

##########################################

Danica is still learning to run with NASCAR's best, but no one on the track has better reflexes.

What makes YOU mash the TV "off" button?

Meme time. You're sitting through the Evening News, and your facelifted news babe or nuze hunk introduces a story. You gag, then mash either the "mute" button or the "off" button.

What caused this visceral reaction? Put your TeeVee turn-offs in comments if you don't see 'em here, or "+" mine if you want.

In no particular order:

• Obama doing any Agenda item with the Victim Group which he thinks illustrates it.
• Over-coached kids doing "anti-bullying" PSAs
• "Doug", the Mesothelioma Victim.
• Any Victim who has done more than one "grief on my sleeve" gig.
• The "latest" Big Pharma sales ad you've already seen 39 times.
• Bill O'Reilly with guests screaming at each other.

Other than Evening News:

• Sportz channel show with screaming-at-each-other sportz wallahs
• Any people screaming at each other unless Alfred Hitchcock wrote the script
• Anything with a zombie lurching, EVEN campy old movies.
• Anything with a zombie in it that tries to convince me that zombies are real.
• Anything, particularly zombies, that takes a load of 00 Buck to center of mass and keeps coming.

I would have included "teased news" stories, but if I mashed the button every time one of those came on, I'd never watch any news at all. I'm old enough to remember when news stories were NEVER "teased", the newscasters just read the news and showed the video or still photos which illustrated the stories. Only the production staff knew which order the stories were going to be in.

In the Auld Days, the Beeb (BBC) used to have the best format: they headlined the stories and put them in an on-screen list with the exact time they were to be broadcast. That way you could go to the potty or pour another drink to get you through the dismal parts (and back to the potty), or you could even turn off the TV if you saw nothing on the list which didn't interest you.

Fire up the comments. TeeVee is dismal, and this is your chance to show the world just how dismal that swamp IS.

Fisking Hollywood hypocrisy, Hollywood Style

...with a video.

The rotary-wing contingent over at the League of Extrordinarily Grumpy Majors (I am ronin from that group) has found a video that Hollywood tried to whip Lefty sentiment up with to "make a plan" {to (evidently) seize guns}, all, that is, except the ones in their hyper-violent movies.

You have to stay to the end. It's only 3:25.

The end expresses the point from rage, but if the refusal of the Left to consider changing one of the main causes of gun violence doesn't make you mad, well, Pilgrim, you are taking far too much anti-depressant.

After this fisking video, the naked hypocrisy of Hollywood and the game people gets off the Free Ride Bus.

NPR on Christmas

NPR has a valid purpose: project the Christian culture. They do a very good job of it on Christmas with two liturgical pageants, one fron Temple Square with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and one from Luther College with their excellent symphony orchestra and 470-voice choir, which is really a collection of smaller choirs which sing well together. My favorite sub-choir is the "Norsemen" a male choir composed of mostly baritones. Good stuff, lets me celebrate being a WASP & Christmas at the same time.

On this solemn occasion...

...as I sit here at 0800 on my 69th birthday, contemplating my navel/ my station in life/ the sorry state of world affairs/ the decline and prospective fall of Western Civilization, I was pouring myself a celebratory Mimosa wine cooler, and the gudwife had the morning digi-blatt (TV) open (too lazy to get up and read the real newspaper), and a commercial break ensues on Fox News.

At the break, the current ad for Old Dominion Freight Lines comes on. It's a feel-good ad, designed to show how much trucking impacts our daily lives (so true!) and how much you REALLY want to ship on the sparkling new Old Dominion truck fleet (hmmm. Are they competitive?).

The last three seconds of the ad is intriguing. It shows three operators getting out of their cabs at the truck terminal, having just backed their rigs in. There are two men drivers and one woman driver. The men shake hands, and the woman doesn't.

Get it?

Think about it for a minute.

Get it yet?

OK, I'll 'splain it. This ad is a microcosm of our culture. In the beginning, the ad shows all sort of people in all sorts of occupational costumes, including the woman, driving their Old Dominion trucks (in her case, she's driving in a wedding dress). This is supposed to show that all sorts of people contribute to our grand American life. I get that.

At the end, a drum major in his fancy suit is helping dock one of the big rigs. I get that.

What I didn't get is the fact that while the ad shows the three impeccably-uniformed drivers exiting their rigs at the end of shift and walking towards the terminal, it shows them un-equal. The woman doesn't shake hands.

That bears repeating.

The woman doesn't shake hands. She didn't participate in the friendly, end-of-shift ritual of her co-drivers by shaking hands.

Okay, it's time for YOU, Dear Readers, to expound. Some questions to ponder:

• Since the ad was meant to portray what's right with America (and trucking and especially the Company), does this little slight the woman driver showed take away from that image?
• Since the beginning of the ad showed all sorts of males in working costume, but the one female in a dress which is meant to illustrate traditional subservience in marriage, is THAT appropriate to the ad's message?
• Why was the woman set apart by the two allegorical mechanisms (the wedding dress and the failure to shake hands), when the point of having her in the commercial in the first place was likely done as a PeeCee offering to the Goddess of Equality of the Sexes?

Just sayin'. When the best minds in the ad biz get together and put on a perfectly-filmed ad with this much meaning, and they can't stick to their PeeCee message, do we cheer for the frailty of the whole PeeCee thing, or do we cry for our lost America? 

I might not be...

...a real TeeVee critic, but I know a pig-in-a-poke when I see one.

Does anyone else feel that all the spendy, splashy "talent" shows are merely vehicles for washed-up entertainers (the judges) to have another fifteen minutes?

It's all about the judges now. Few of the promos ever show even past talent which did okay, all they push is the judges and the fancy sets with their swivel seats, etc.

Wotta waste of time!

Thursday Thuds, TeeVee Edition

There's so much wrong with today's TeeVee, that it needs a special Thuds volume to list it all. Not in the mood to pen a whole volume, though, so I will just write a usual five-thud column.

Background. TeeVee is a major part of my life at the moment, because I have suffered some relapses of my back injury, and must sit quietly in a neutral position frequently. So, the old RD sits on his comfy couch, with the right kind of pillows propping me in the right places, with remote (and usually) adult beverage to hand. Just recently, being an Xfinity (fka Comcast Cable) customer, I find I can control everything nicely on the 42" Samsung Smart-TV with my smartphone or tablet, so I do that.

In my home theater, the sounds are amplified by an older, but still good, Dolby 5.1 system, with wall and ceiling speakers and a huge floor-shaking subwoofer, all driven by the last non-digital receiver made, the Pioneer 702. The Samsung TV does a decent job of streaming off of Xfinity's 20mbps Internet service, too.

The Thuds, because after the honorable equipment, honor stops with TeeVee.

Thud the First: TeeVee, of course, is designed to appeal to those who never finished High School. Sure, there are a few exceptions, and I watch all of them. Fox News is designed for High School graduates. I watch that. Jeopardy is designed for thinkers at all levels above the 8th grade, I watch that. I watch some of the Military Channel, mostly for info on advanced weapons systems. I watch a LOT of Sportz, because it shows little of the inanity of the rest of the medium. I watch the occasional travelogue. You can dump the rest of it into the garbage, as far as I'm concerned. The talent shows are entertaining enough, but it's always about the judging, not the contestants or the material/talent they showcase. Why can't they make one without ANY judges, only an MC? Oh, wait! That's a bygone format of the 1950s and everything old is to be reviled, not promoted or reprised with reverence.

Thud the Second: Has to be the Socialist bias of all the news except Fox, and strangely enough, Russia TV, which can present straight news with NO lefty slant (but there is usually a pro-Putin slant). We bloggers are all over the Lefty-Newsy format and content, but even when caught in direct lies (example: the Romnoid "47%" tape, which we now know was heavily edited before presentation as a SCOOP! by Mother Jones News, a lefty TeeVee blog. What it all boils down to, dear readers, is that you write off the TeeVee and print news, and use the Internet blogs for your information, if you have ANY smartz, that is.

Thud the Third: TeeVee thinks we are all victims who want to be led to lawyers. My (absolutely) last resort in conflict resolution would be a lawyer, primarily because I feel that for the most part, they are leeches on our productive society. One of these days, I am going to see Dave, the Mesothelioma Victim's face one time too many and I will have an apoplectic fit and croak on the spot. More than once, I have shut off the TeeVee in disgust after starting to view an ambulance-chaser commercial. There are WAY too many ambulance-chaser commercials, all financed by the hugely corrupt legal system. I suspect that this issue will dog this Republic to it's dying days, which appear to be NOW. Hopefully, in the Second Republic, which I now believe I will live to see, we will finally decide that Free Speech has become, in several respects, a False Icon that we worship to the detriment of our society. Hopefully, there will be a way to stifle the ambulance-chasers.

Thud the Fourth: Years ago, I would have put TeeVee Preachers next, but they are way down the list now, and don't get a spot on my list of Thuds. Next comes Infomercials. Yes, there is info to be had in infomercials, but after you've seen how the MagiK Boolit works, and you decide you can do without one, why should you have to see this on one of your channels for the next two months? The answer of course, is because the TeeVee management couldn't sell the time to anyone else, so they sell it to the infomercial people. Commercials are a necessary part of TeeVee, they pay the cost of bringing us our choices, and in return, they get a minute (or four, now), every 8 minutes, to sell us something. Why can't I pay a premium to Xfinity to opt out of infomercials and see, say, old movies on those channels? For that matter, why hasn't someone come up with a network TeeVee commercial detector that not only kills off the commercials, but substitutes bandwidth in a queue that you have set up? If I'm watching Dancing with the Stars, and I did, last year, and the commercials come on, why can't my computer whisk me to the NFL channel during commercial breaks? Or the Weather Channel (except it carries less weather and more Discovery channel crapple on it now, so I don't watch it much anymore). Gin up this technology for me, TeeVee techno-whizzes, and I'll watch more TeeVee, but in the meanwhile, the Thud you hear is my boot connecting with your wooden head.

Thud the Fifth: "Reality TeeVee", generally. Generally speaking, "Reality" TeeVee is the worst thing to happen to Television since it was invented in the 1920s. Anything makes the grade in "reality" TeeVee, no matter how stupid, no matter how devoid of value, if it's "reality", some TeeVee manager will pay for it, and some idiot will film itand some channel will show it. In the name of "reality", we get TMZ, we get the Kardashians, we got Octomom, we get all sorts of "hold my beer and watch THIS" video. We need exactly NONE of these items on TeeVee, because they all have a negative impact on the culture, that is to say, they Dumb Us Down. Aren't we dumb enough already?

Thuds that got by: Sportz blatherers, award shows (oscars, etc), Rush Limbaugh (glad he's gone, he never learned how to say it briefly) and his ilk on the Left with THEIR bombast, PeeCee kiddy toons, womyn's victim channels, televangelists, day-long charity appeals, public TeeVee pledge breaks, too many Spanish channels (why are there over 150 of them on Xfinity and ONE, each and only French channel and ONE Russian channel?), fifty percent of local news being CRIME news...EVERYTHING qualifying for "Breaking News" both locally and nationally. A murder in Pawtucket, RI is NOT news in Portland OR, so why should we have to listen to ten minutes of coverage? Ditto a police chase in Shaky-town.

There must be more, but I'm about thudded out.

MSNBC comes through

This blog doesn't give props often to MSNBC, for the obvious reason, but they deserve them for warning us of these new TVs.

Sort of brings back the old nickname for the TV, "one-eyed monster", doesn't it?

H/T to the Country Gal

The small businessman's Evensong

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

I've sold enough to pay for the Keep,

Should I die before I wake,

I pray (why the Hell didn't I finish that bottle of  '03 Ravenswood Sonoma Valley Cabernet)

It's been a good day for WillBoat.

Goodnight Chet, Goodnight Ed, Goodnight, World (and back when those words were uttered on NBC every night, it WAS a Good Night, because USAF General (CinC SAC) Curtis LeMay and his successors saw to it, and stalwart men held the thin nuke line, but it was good enough to keep the USA safe, and still would be (had not Bill Clinton closed out SAC). I was on that thin nuke line late in those days, and I'm proud to have done my part.

"Payola" 2

Most folks are not old enough to remember the original "payola" scandal. The word Payola came from "pay to play" + the maker of the-then most popular jukebox, "Rockola". Aside from home vinyl records (45 and 33 rpm, with still quite a few 78s left over), you listened on (non-stereo) radio, played records (only stereo if you were a rich kid), or dumped quarters into Rockolas to hear music. That was the music I grew up with. In that era, a pay-for-play system (Payola) first started with the jukeboxes (every cafe, restaurant and bar which wanted the under 25-crowd's money had to have a Rockola), then spread to the radio stations. If you were a new musical group starting out and you wanted to actually rise up the charts and sell vinyl, you paid to have your music played. The scandal around the pay-to-play system grew until Congress held hearings, and banned the practice.

Payola tried to make a comeback amongst the gangsta rappers of the '90s, but when they started shooting at each other, it got too visible and that practice stopped.

Now it's back, and in the worst knock of the late Steve Jobs' Apple, Inc, it's all about an I-phone and I-pad app. While you are watching the TeeVee, you have your smartass Apple gadget sitting nearby, with the Viggle app running. It listens to the sound from your speakers, and determines what you are watching, then keeps track of how many minutes you've watched. You are "rewarded" for installing the app and using it, at the rate of two reward "points" for each minute watched. After you have watched 62 hours of TeeVee and used the app to monitor it, you are sent a $5 Burger King certificate.

OK, I promised I won't go all health-nut on you, suffice it to say that those who would get excited about being rewarded with free fast fatfood will be indirectly deciding what the rest of us will watch, and that's a bad, culture-busting (waistline-busting and pall-bearer busting) idea. Just how many Ruben Studdards does the entertainment industry need?

An even worse idea is that the entertainment moguls would allow this system to install itself in their empires. I don't give a fig about "American Idol", because, despite the fact that the yearly winners have mostly had good voices, none of them sing the kind of music I like to hear. None of them.

This new system is Payola all over again, pure and simple, this time a bit different, putting the keys to music success in the hands of the fast fatfood generation, and that's a BAD thing.