Who Is This For?

Yesterday was the first day of summer.  Yes, I know that it used to be that today was the first day of summer.  I don't know when and why it changed, but I'm not a fan.  I like consistency.  Most consistency.  Certain sorts of consistent things I do not like.  Some of those things would include the sorts of stories that a lot of news outlets feel the need to be carrying when the temperature outside begins to increase.  That's right.  Stories about the heat AND what you need to do when it gets warmer.  Good Lord, who are those stories for? 

The thing I hate the most about the heat is when it reaches at least 100 degrees.  That's when the media damn near wets its collective self because it gets to report that the temperature is now in "triple digits".  You can't go an hour without hearing "triple digits" in one form or another.  It's just ridiculous.  Is 100 degrees much different from 99 degrees?  No.  It's not.  But just because you have to add an extra number, its reported as if you might burst into a ball of flames should you come in contact with heat that is in "triple digits".  Call me when we hit quadruple digits.  Now THAT would get my attention. 

Seriously though, who on earth are these broadcasts about tips to "deal with" elevated temperatures actually for?  Stay inside.  Drink lots of water.  Use a fan.  Who in the hell is that for?  Is there anyone out there who actually stays tuned to such banality and when it's over, thinks to themselves, "Well, that was really helpful.  I certainly am glad that they did that because otherwise, I would have had no clue as to what to do when it gets warm outside.  After all, it is four degrees warmer than it was last week.  I have no idea what I should do."  Who's perking up in their chair when they tease this feature?  Who is turning up the volume?  Who is making sure that everyone in the room stops talking so that they can fully absorb this valuable information about to be beset upon them by the sage-like newscasters?  Anyone?  Anyone? 

I have somehow managed for my entire life to make it to where I am now without anyone telling me, "Hey, you know, it's really hot outside, so here are a few things that you should do."  I'm serious!  And it's on almost every newscast.  It's astounding.  There can't be anyone that that is for, is there?  Who are you programmers at these media outlets who think that this is good idea?  I notice that you don't do something similar when it rains.  ("It's raining today.  That means water is falling from the sky.  If you just walk outside, you're going to get wet.  Here's Bob with some helpful tips on how to not get wet when it rains.  Bob...")  Why do they do it when it gets slightly warmer?  I don't know and I don't get it, but I wish they'd stop.  Now.

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Winging It

Some things are just inexplicable. UFOs. Snuggies. Leg warmers. Geometry. All impossible to explain. We can now add to that list the on-air comments of a one Ernie Anastos, news anchor at Fox 5 News in New York. I don't know why he said it. I don't know what it means. I don't know why he said it. I don't know why he said it.

Here's the scoop: A couple of nights ago, the Fox5 people were doing their regular news broadcast. The weather guy, a one Nick Gregory, had just finished up with his weather forecast. Nothing spectacular, but then again, he's a weather guy. Who even listens to these guys? You could have NO experience in weather-guy-ing and go to work every day to do that job and get it right at least half of the time. You pay attention to what it's like outside on your way into work and you just sort of use what the weather is like at that moment as a starting point and you'll do just fine. But I digress.

Nick finishes with the weather and turns the newscast back over to Ernie Anastos and his co-anchor, a one very attractive Dari Alexander. It's at that point that an oddly giddy Anastos tells Nick, "It takes a tough man to make a tender forecast, Nick." Um, OK. I....guess. Wait. What the what now?

I wasn't the only one confused by that. It had Nick a bit befuddled as well, which is why he replied, "I guess that's me." What else would you say, really? You're doing a live newscast, so it's not like you can just ask him, "What the hell are you talking about, dude?" No, that won't work. He did the right thing by just agreeing with Ernie's comment. I think. After what came next, it's hard to say, really.

As Nick is just sort of chuckling after his answer and Ernie is in full giggle mode, Ernie says this (which is as inexplicable as the things I mentioned at the beginning and it is also so far out in left field, you can't even see left field any more. Left field is a dot to you!): "Keep f***ing that chicken." Wait. Wait. WAIT!! WHAT?!?!

Yep, that's what he said. "Keep f***ing that chicken." Why he said that is anyone's guess. There wasn't anything in the weather forecast about chickens as far as I could tell. But even if there was I'm not thinking that there would have been anything in there about doing that with the chickens! Don't get me wrong, that would absolutely be news! But I hardly think that the weather forecast would be an appropriate place to bring it up.

Did he mean to say "plucking"? "Keep plucking that chicken." I don't know what he meant. I still don't know why he was talking about chickens in the first place. Now granted, this is the same guy who attempted to give a website address on the air a little while ago and instead of saying "MyFoxNY-dot-com" he instead said, "MyFoxNY-dot-cock." Ah, the ol' dot-cock. Remember the dot-cock crash? That was something! All of those dot-cocks just crashing to earth. Terrible. Just terrible.

The best part of this whole thing is the reaction from Dari Alexander. The look on her face does not change after he says that. She just keep right on staring with her eyes opened as far as they will go. And who can blame her?

The only indication as to what he was talking about (but still no indication as to why he was talking about it) comes from the folks over there at the Sydney Morning Herald. They speculate that "... he was referencing the American "father" of chicken, Frank Perdue." (There is a chicken father? I did not know that.) Those down under go on to say "Perdue, who died in 2005, simultaneously revolutionised the poultry and advertising industries in the 1970s when he fronted his own commercials, ending each one with the phrase "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken". OK, then. That would seem like that's what he was talking about. But WHY in the hell was he talking about it?! No one seems to know.

I'm just a little bit concerned, however, about Nick's reply to Ernie's direction or suggestion that he continue to have interspecial relations with a yet unnamed and unseen flightless fowl. For Nick to say, "OK, I'll do that." could really lead one to question how he leads his life, but only if we weren't too busy already questioning how Ernie leads his.

The bizarre video is below. Any knowledge as to why the chicken talk in the first place is greatly welcomed and much appreciated.

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His Shirt Was White

I can go on and on (and I have) about how the media sucks. But this is not a case of the media sucking. This is a case of the media lying. And just because something isn't said out loud it doesn't mean that it is not a lie. IN the case of the media, if you are "reporting" and you are editing, altering, omitting or in any other fashion misrepresenting the facts of anything, then you are lying. And the folks over there at MSNBC are reprehensible "journalists" and liars. (Please note that "liars" is not in quotes.)

The other day a one MSNBC newshole, Contessa Brewer, was doing a story with her cohorts, a one Dylan Ratigan and a one Toure. (That's his name. Toure. That's it. Like Prince. Or Cher. Only he's on MSNBC. What does that tell you? We're doomed, that is correct.) It started out going in one direction and ended up in a completely different direction. Perhaps all of the misdirecting was due to someone having their head up their arse. (Quite difficult to accurately navigate from that position I'm told.) I thought it was going to be on the Second Amendment issue, as there have been folks showing up to places where President Barry is speaking and
they have had guns in holsters strapped to their legs or strapped over their shoulders. My first thought upon hearing this was that the folks who were toting arms were way out of line. Upon further consideration, I realized that we can't just trample all over the Constitution of this fine land because something makes us a little uncomfortable or uneasy. I'm a huge fan of the right to bear arms (and to arm bears). Regardless, I thought it was going to be about that.

Turns out, it wasn't about that AT ALL. Here's what Contessa Brewer opened with: "Yesterday...A man at a pro-health care reform rally just outside, wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip....And if the scene looks familiar, that’s because it should, last week a guy stood outside Obama’s health care town hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with a gun strapped to his leg and police arrested a 62-year-old before that New Hampshire event for carrying unlicensed loaded gun. And the reason we’re talking about this, a lot of talk here, Dylan, because people feel like, yes, there are Second Amendment rights for sure but also there are questions about whether this has racial overtones. I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists or to their legs."

Um, what now? I'm sorry, I mean, WTF?!

Racial overtones?! Racial? Overtones?! So just because there was a white guy carrying a gun outside of where Obama was speaking, THAT implies that there are "racial overtones" to the story? What?

What's that?

Who wasn't?

Who wasn't white? The guy with the gun? Well, that wouldn't make any sense! How could the guy with the gun not be white?! She specifically mentioned that particular guy. And though she didn't say he was a white guy, when she got to her shpiel about the "racial overtones" she didn't NEED to! Everyone thought that the reason that there were "racial overtones" is because she told us that there was a white guy wearing a gun at a town hall meeting where the half-white president was speaking. How can he NOT be white?!

Oh. Well....his shirt was white.

What. The. Hell.

Not only did the trio of false reporting idiots fail to make the viewers aware of the fact that the man with the rifle slung over his arm was a black guy, they also failed to make the viewers consciously aware that they had edited the tape of this particular individual so that you could not tell that he was black.

Now, just because you can't tell that he's black doesn't mean that you wouldn't have been able to tell if he were white, either. IN what I would assume was the only unintentional part of the editing process, you do see the arm of a white guy in such a fashion that you don't consciously think about it, but the arm kind of looks like it could go to the guy with the guy. But that wasn't intentional. I'm positive of it. What WAS intentional was to take the footage which clearly shows that this was a black guy and edit it so that you couldn't tell what the race of the person was and so that newshole Contessa Brewer and her faithful sidekicks, Dylan and Toure, can make this issue about race instead of the Second Amendment. Nice job, newsholes.

What was the purpose in that? Why did they feel the need to MAKE it about race? WHY couldn't it be about the Second Amendment? Was Toure not up on his pop-culture 2nd Amendment references? I've never even heard of that guy until I learned of this atrocity, but he angers me. It wasn't enough for him to back up newshole Contessa Brewer and her reasoning that people were bringing guns to places where President Barry was speaking was because they were angry that there was a black President. No, he had to go just a bit more and suggest that:
"I’m not going to be surprised if we see somebody get a chance and take a chance and really try to hurt him or really-You know, and I mean it’s up to the Secret Service to make sure that it doesn’t actually become history, but, you know, I think we’re going to see somebody, you know, some sort of Squeaky Fromme, some sort of Mark Hinckley figure, because there’s so much anger in the country about him, about what’s going on with government."

:::: sigh :::: (He's pretty skinny looking. I think I could take him.)

First of all, it's John Hinckley. Perhaps he was thinking of Mark David Chapman, the tool who gunned down John Lennon. John Hinckley was the one who shot President Reagan. Squeaky Fromme was a delusional follower of Charles Manson. Is he suggesting that another Helter Skelter awaits us, but this time, at the White House? (Yes, I know she tried to shoot President Ford.) In all of these cases however, there is a common theme. The first one being that they are idiotic comparisons to what is being talked about. The second one is that I don't believe that any of those people had a valid permit for their weapon. But really, neither one of those is the point. The point is that IT'S NOT THE SAME!


Contessa the Newshole EVEN specifically made it a point to make this story about race by asking Toure "...do you think if Barack Obama were white, though...let’s say if it were Bill Clinton – you would not see people showing up with weapons strapped to their legs?" (Does Hillary count for the evaluation of that question? I'm quite certain that after MonicaGate, she probably DID have something strapped to her leg for a while. She probably strapped something to Bill's leg as well, but I don't think it was a gun.) His eventual reply, after Dylan suggested that it was unknowable, was "...that’s hard to say. It is unknowable. But you do see a rise in hate group activity throughout the country."

Oh. My. God.

In a state where you CAN carry a gun out in the open like that, if you have a permit, how does that constitute "hate group activity"? How does that NOT constitute exercising your rights under the Second Amendment? How? Where did they find this guy? 1961?I have no idea what the point of this stunt was, other than to ignore, disregard and blatantly dismiss every single rule of reporting that there could be in order to fabricate (yes, LIE) a story to fit a particular narrative that you have in mind. They simply created their own truths by taking the truth and making it into a lie.

I'm not one to go around and suggest that folks boycott something. Do you know how many successful boycotts of things there has actually been? Ever? Not many. The Montgomery bus boycott is the only one that comes to mind at the moment. Calls for a boycott are generally useless. (Most people have the attention span of a gnat is why they're not more successful.) And I'm not usually one to go around advocating for people to be fired. These folks and anyone else who was involved in the production of that segment should be fired.

This isn't a "I don't like what they said" issue. They're not Don Imus (who, by the way, shouldn't have been fired. He shouldn't have said what he said, but he shouldn't have been fired.). They lied. They purposefully and willfully misled the viewer into believing something that wasn't true AT ALL. It's more than just irresponsible journalism. It's rogue reporting. The media is supposed to be neutral. They are supposed to be presenting the facts without a slant so that people can know what's going on without having to sort through someone's opinion to get to what the issue is about. For some reason, Contessa Brewer and Toure (poor Dylan pretty much just sat there, but it's not like he wasn't aware of the situation) wanted to make the issue of people bringing LEGAL firearms to a public event an issue about racism. Personally, I'd like to know why. I'd like to know why they felt that it was imperative that they not only go that direction with the issue, but do so in a deceptive manner. I'd like to know the answer the that and then I'd love it if they were fired.

Look, when you hire someone for your business, you want to make sure that the person you have in whatever position can do the job. If they can't do the job, are you going to keep them at your business? I don't think that's likely. What if they were lying to you while doing their job? Would you keep them then? I think that's even less likely. Contessa Brewer and the Newsholes (which isn't that bad of a name for a band)cannot do the job that they were hired to do AND they lied to us. If they can't do the job, which they obviously can't, they should be fired.

And if I thought that was going to actually happen, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it until it did happen. But I don't think that's the case. The good folks over there at Politico contacted MSNBC about this issue and they responded that the claim was "utterly ridiculous" and that "Contessa was speaking generally and not about that specific person with the automatic weapon." Yeah. That's why the cropped footage. That's why the not mentioning that there were black people with weapons also. That's why not mentioning that the guy with the gun strapped to his side shown in the cropped footage was black. That's why only mentioning that white people were coming to these public meetings wearing firearms. Yeah, she was speaking generally.

The footage of Contessa and the Newsholes is below. And it frustrates the hell out of me.

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This is Not the Way it is

So with the passing of Walter Cronkite at age 92 due to being 92, I felt the need to go back and look through some of the more interesting or captivating moments during his career. And as I was watching YouTube clips, the difference between news now and news when it was just news (and not just something to occupy our time online when we're not looking at porn) is amazing to me. Granted, I think present news coverage is far from neutral reporting and often misses the point because reporters don't know how to be reporters (but they DO know how to stand there and look all pretty. And I'm not knocking that! We like 'em pretty. Makes us pay closer attention to them when they have a lovely set of...eyes.), so I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm being neutral, but I'm not a reporter. I just call 'em as I see 'em.

It's not even just the style of reporting as it also is the content of the reporting if you were to compare the two eras. Here's an example. Here we have a super-smart scientist guy explaining to the media at a news conference what the problem is over at Three Mile Island on March 30, 1979. He draws us this informative graphic so that we can better grasp the concept of how a build up of nuclear gases inside of a reactor is bad. Behold!

Huh. OK, well, good thing he was talking at the same time, right? Or maybe it's just really such a simple concept that not much more than that was needed. Hard to say, but let's compare it with this graphic from 1994 which shows us a 4 year timeline of the top three finishers in the figure skating event at the Olympics in Lillehammer. Behold!

Good Lord. Shouldn't the figure skating thing be a case of 'less is more'? We get all of that for figure skating, but we only needed a rudimentary line drawing for Three Mile Island? I'm not so sure I'd call this progress, really.

Then I watched some footage on YouTube of when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and it's a little chaotic as you can imagine. The poor reporter, a one Bob Huffaker, is completely shocked. He doesn't know what to do, what to say. "The shots were fired by a man wearing a black hat, a brown coat, a man that everyone down here thought was a Secret Service agent." (Doesn't sound very "secret" to me, but I'm going to cut you a break being as how you've just see a Presidential assassin gunned down right in front of you.) But it's when the ambulance shows up and everyone is scrambling to get out of the way and poor Bob looks at the camera with a look on his face that just says, "WTF just happened here?" It's as hilarious as it is extremely telling. Behold!

Meanwhile, the press folks are trying to do their reporting and they're all being fairly cordial to one another, trying to stay out of each other's shots and what not. You've got people gently tapping on other's backs to get them to move or asking them to get down and out of the shot. All of that is in stark contrast to how reporters and cameramen behave at news events today. They'll trample each other and stand on the dead body if they think that it will get them a better shot. But not then. Here's the cop (they call him Pat) who is supposed to keep the crowd back so that they can get Oswald in the ambulance. He's crouching down so that the news cameras can get a better shot. You can hear the news guys saying, "Pat! Pat, can you get down a little?"

And I saw this and just about flipped.

There's Pat the Cop and the guy next to him is trying to keep him out of the camera's view. Look at where the other guy's hand is! It could SO just take Pat's gun right there. You would NEVER see anything like that today. (In his defense, poor Pat the Cop looked almost as shaken up as Bob the Reporter. Then again, I'm just assuming that Pat is a cop and not some security guard that was hired for the day.)

Poor Bob the Reporter keeps trying to do his job in the midst of all of this. As they're waiting for ol' Oswald to be wheeled out for the futile ride to the hospital, Bob mentions that "The only word so far is that the shot came from a man wearing a black hat and a coat." Well, that narrows it down, doesn't it? Have you looked at the guy with his hand on Pat the Cop? I think he has a black hat and a coat. Maybe it was him! Eh, maybe not.

Meanwhile, when they do get Oswald in the ambulance, they wheel him out on a stretcher and he's kind of falling off on one side and there are many great camera angles of this scene. So it was perfectly OK then, but today, a photo like that of someone dying or someone that has been shot (someone fairly well known, of course) would have all of the tabloids scrambling to see if they could bid the highest for it. Back then? Evening news footage! Assassin guy half falling off a gurney! Not a big deal AND free! Huh. Go figure.

I find how we did things back then kind of odd. For some reason, we thought it was a fine idea to have a perp walk where we trot out the accused and display his weaponry of choice for all the world to see. Then again, we also thought it was a fine idea to have our President driving around in a convertible in the middle of the day. Well, at least we learn from our mistakes every now and then.

Then there was the way that things were described. To say that they were brief is an understatement. We have these words of wisdom after the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"They have issued an all points bulletin for a well-dressed white man seen running from the scene." Yeah, that really narrows it down quite a bit.

"They rushed the 39-year old Negro leader to a hospital where he died of a bullet wound..." The "Negro leader"? You know, that just SOUNDS bad. Just that is SOUNDED bad, couldn't folks have figured out earlier that it WAS bad?

"Police said they found a high powered hunting rifle about a block from the hotel but it was not immediately identified as the murder weapon." No, because high powered hunting rifles are constantly being strewn about town! It's a mess! No one ever picks up their high powered hunting rifles when they're done assassinating people. Nope, they just leave them lying there, cluttering up the neighborhood! The nerve!

I'm not even going to pretend to wax all poetic about Walter Cronkite dying, as I can vaguely remember my Dad watching him do the news on TV. (It was long before I grew to be as cynical as I am. Well, probably not TOO long. I like to get a head start on things.) He was 92. Seems to me like he had one hell of a run. But he hasn't done the news on a nightly basis since 1981, meaning that he has been off of the air longer than he was on it. You'd think that those who make their craptastic attempts at journalism these days would sit up and take notice of what it was that Walter Cronkite did and how he did it. But I doubt that the majority of them can even see the relevance in how he did his job and how he became the most trusted man in America. Besides, who cares about being trusted as long as you're getting paid? And THAT'S the way it is.

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Stop Saying That

OK, media folks. It's time to pipe down. It's not like there isn't anything out there to write about. But for some reason, if something is mildly interesting or intriguing once, the media interprets that to mean that the public wants 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, wall to wall, blanket coverage of the topic.

Quite frankly, we don't. It's not so much that we don't want to know about whatever it is. We do. Well, we did. We don't now. Some things become so overhyped and sensationalized that you can't read or listen to anything at all without hearing about it. That's when you get to the stage that I'm at. That would be the "STFU" stage, also known as the "If I have to listen to one more person talk about (blank) one more time, I might just have to punch that person in the face." And that very thought, quite literally, goes through my mind these days whenever I hear any of the following:

~ Twitter

~ Facebook

~ Somali Pirates

~ Torture (This can sometimes include waterboarding, but I just heard that Keith Olbermann offered Sean Hannity $1,000 for every second that he can stand being waterboarded. Now THAT I want to hear about because if there's anyone that deserves to be waterboarded, if for nothing other than just being annoying, it's Sean Hannity.)

~ Susan Boyle

Seriously, pipe down. I'm also quite over a few catch phrases which have worn out their welcome (if we ever welcomed them at all). Those would include:

~ "These troubled economic times."

~ Any comparison to the Great Depression

~ Homes that are "under water". (Since when wereneighborhoods turning into the lost city of Atlantis? Under water? I believe the term is "upside down". Morons.)

~ "It's the economy."

~ "From Wall Street to Main Street." (AAuuggghhh!!! I HATE that saying. And people are STILL saying it. Can you folks not think of anything else? They ARE paying you for that job, correct?

Actually, I'm SO over these catch phrases that I cringe and become nauseous when I hear a newscaster try out a new cliche that they are just hoping will catch on so that they can say it twenty seven times in each story. The one I recently heard uttered on NBC Nightly News? Econocide. Translation: Suicide because of the economy. I believe the reporter (translation: Hot chick with a low cut top and a smokin' hot rack) used it in the following manner: "Some therapists are calling it 'econocide'." No they aren't. They're not. Trust me. They didn't say that. Show me. Show me ONE therapist who calls killing yourself (because you're too big of a puss to tough out a recession) 'econocide'. I cannot imagine they could show me one, let alone one who would admit to it.

Back to the topics that need to be dropped from all news coverage immediately, the coverage of Twitter is out of control. I'm expecting it to start popping up on food labels any day now. ("Doritos! Now with Twitter!" "Frosted Flakes! They're not as GGGRRRRRREEEAT as Twitter!") The amusing part is that the majority of the articles about Twitter center on how people don't know what it is and don't know what to do with it. My question is: If that many people DON'T get it, is it really THAT popular? But what is amazing is how so many people are so narcissistic that they send Tweets about the mundane aspects of their existence with the authentic (mis)assumption that people they don't even know on the other side of the world are just thrilled that they just woke up from a nap and are going to have a Pop-Tart. When Oprah joined Twitter (and send out her first tweet in large, shout-y CAPS), that is the precise moment whenTwitter jumped the shark.

Facebook. Facebook is just a fancy Twitter. (Or maybe it's that Twitter is a plain Facebook. It's one of those.) Facebook has it's own jargon which I find just too damn cutesy to actually use. Oh, I'll use it mockingly when I'm not on Facebook (it helps to have a friend with as much disdain for some of this crap as you have. Then you can mock it together.), but I am unlikely to type on Facebook "Keep in FB touch!" Facebook is highly overrated and highly overpromoted. Facebook claims to have 200,000,000 'users'. And it well might have that many. But how many 'users' actually 'use' Facebook daily? I'm guessing it's no where near the 200,000,000 who have registered with Facebook. After all, only 650,000 voted for or against the new 'Terms of Service'. That's right around 3.25 percent of Facebookers (Facebookians? Facists?) cared enough to vote. Facebook's actual popularity is far below what everyone seems to make it out to be, so pipe down.

The Somali pirate story. It's 2009, right? Argh. And we're talking about pirates on the high seas? (What IS a high sea anyway? Is there a low sea?) Argh! How did this happen? Oh, right. The pirates are from Somali where their quality of life is comparable to that of 250 years ago when pirates were in their glory days. Argh! Actually, you didn't hear much about all of the pirating going on until the US became involve through taking a captain of a shipping vessel hostage. THEN it became a story. And it was pretty cool that the snipers were able to totally take out all three pirates holding the hostage with just three bullets. One for each. Of course then we had to hear from all of the people who thought that the US used unnecessary force and that we should have done something differently. The only comfort I have when I hear statements like that is that perhaps, if those sniper guys need some targets to practice on, they'll have plenty! So yo-ho-ho! Enough with the pirates, matey.

Does the US torture? Nope. Does the US do things to enemy combatants that are not the most pleasant? Yep. But that's not good enough for all of the softheads out there that keep wanting to make 'torture' an issue. Now, in what may be the most glaring instance of irony in the past 100 years, in order to help appease these softheads, the CIA is going to be 'more transparent'. :::blink::: :::blink::: Huh. OK. What could possibly go wrong? We might not torture, but we are certainly not going to not impose uncomfortable measures or circumstances for people that have information that we need. That's how it works. There are a lot of unpleasant things about war and the public is really better off not knowing about them in most instances. It's not because they're hiding anything, it's just because military life and the workings of the military is SO different from civilian life and it's workings that it's very difficult for people to completely wrap their head around the reasons why certain things are done. And it's the softheaded civilians who, because they don't understand the ways of the military, deem that it's torturous and that we're evil. It's not and neither are we. But just know this: The tactics and practices that are currently used in order to coerce information out of prisoners will continue to be used in the future...regardless as to what we're told. Just enjoy your safety and get on with things, will ya?

Susan Boyle. If I have to hear "I dreamed a dream from something gone something...." one more time, I'm going to go all van Gogh on myself and cut off my ears. What I'm totally and completely over is the Monday morning analysis of this woman and people's reaction to her ability to sing like a bushy eyebrowed angel. Nearly all of the conclusions from dissecting this event point toward the public being a superficial, narcissistic bully. Why else would people assume that, just because Susan Boyle wasn't an uberstunning, Victoria's Secret model, that she couldn't sing? I'll tell you why. It's because she was being showcased on 'Britain's Got Talent', that's why. When the tryouts for shows such as that one, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, etc., are aired, what do we see 9 times out of 10? We see the whack jobs who think that they can sing. We see the disheveled, the mentally ill, the questionably functional, all inexplicably overconfident that they are going to be the next American Idol. Yet they're dressed as a chicken and holding a trumpet which then intend to play (thus rendering it incredibly difficult to sing, I would imagine). It's not that we are innately against the plain looking. It's that we've been conditioned to expect disaster during the tryout phases of these shows where the only requirement to try out is that you walk upright 75% of the time.

The Twitter and Facebook stories will be around for a while longer until either Twitter gets sold or Facebook goes public with stock. The pirates and the torture stories will die down soon enough, although the torture topic will come up when a bunch of pictures of said torture are released next month. (That will also do wonders for the moral of the country during these tough economic times!) But just when I though the Susan Boyle phenomenon was waning a bit, what happens? She goes off and gets a bloody makeover! Now I'm going to have to hear about what kind of clothes she was wearing for the next week and a half. Oh, right. Behold! Susan Boyle all made over! Yeah, that's nice and all. It's a definite improvement from before, but it isn't going to make her sing better or worse. It is going to make me get tired of the story rather quickly. Oh, look! I'm over it. Yep. Right then. Done.

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