Tag Archives: News

Obsession…

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We Americans have a problem with obsessions. I’m not talking about the good kind of obsessions like washing your hands three times an hour or making sure you have on clean underwear before leaving the house. I’m talking mostly about the kind of “news” and current events that we obsess over. Since one of the major news channels is almost constantly running as background noise at the Rental Casa de Jeff, I feel that I’m completely justified in wondering WTF our national obsession is with the currently unfolding trial of George Zimmerman.

It’s not like homicide is particularly unusual in our society. I don’t want to imply that homicide is common, but with major cities regularly racking up triple digit body counts every year I’m having a bit of a problem figuring out why we decided to single out just once of them for the magnifying glass treatment. The incident involving Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin wasn’t the most deadly, it certainly wasn’t the most unique, or even the most dramatic or high profile. All I’m saying is George is no OJ.

Still, to see the minute by minute coverage on ever news channel seemingly all the time leaves me wondering why anyone other than those immediately impacted by the case really care? Why don’t we collectively show that same level of concern or outrage about every homicide? Why aren’t we more concerned about the ones that took place within 20 miles of our own homes that we’ll probably never hear about? It’s obviously selling advertising for the networks, so maybe I’m the one that just doesn’t get the “so what” of Zimmerman’s trial.

With Egypt imploding, NSA listening in on your calls and reading your email, a national debt continuing to pile higher and deeper, and the regular ephemera of everyday life, I have enough to obsess over without including a trial taking place 921 miles away that impacts my life in no actual way.

P.S. If there’s anyone out there reading this who happens to thinks a jury verdict is a reason to hold a riot in the streets, stop reading this blog now. Seriously. Go away. There is no room for you here.

Apparently I missed it…

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Once upon a time a natural disaster couldn’t happen anywhere in the country and escape my notice. A wildfire in Southern California or a Missouri River flood were the high sign that the overtime spigot was about to be cranked wide open. Of course I’ve been out of that game for a while now… and while I don’t miss the late night calls to pack up and be ready to fly away on short notice, I definitely miss the OT.

More than that, I think I might actually miss what’s going on around me. Through a combination of watching Mad Men on demand and running some random sitcoms as background noise last night, listening to commercial-free online radio through AppleTV, and not checking in with the news sites before bed, I didn’t even know that the entire state of Oklahoma had apparently been wiped off the map until I cranked on Channel 13 for my morning dose of local news. That’s a tough confession to make for a guy who prides himself on having a pretty good grip on what’s happening in the world.

I’m not going to get drug into a philosophical discussion about it, but for good or ill, it seems that I’ve more or less stopped paying attention to the news. Maybe I just lost interest. Maybe I’ll come back around at some point, but just now, I’m surprisingly ok with being in the dark about things. Then again, maybe I’ve only got so much bandwidth to deal with news and current events and I’m just prioritizing what makes it through to my frontal lobe… apparently even my subconscious wants the world to stay off my proverbial lawn.

On Boston…

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Boston, the cradle of the American revolutionary spirit was attacked this afternoon by nameless, faceless cowards. Brave Bostonians did not cower under the cannon fire of the worlds most powerful empire and I have the greatest faith that they will not cower in the face of these craven assaults. My thoughts are with the good people of Boston tonight where the spirit of America is again tested by those who would do us harm.

Take Out the Trash Day…

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In an episode of the West Wing, Josh and Donna have a conversation about why Friday is called “Take Out the Trash Day.” To boil it down, Friday is the day that the week’s bad news stories get released to the media. That’s mostly because except for a few hard core news junkies, people don’t tend to pay much attention to the news over the weekend. What little attention a bad story gets in the weekend press is swallowed whole by the new cycle before anyone logs in to the Washington Post on Monday morning.

While the chances of breaking a national scandal wide open here by yours truly is pretty slim, blogging faces much the same hazard as most other kinds of media – namely that Friday and Saturday tend to be low-volume events. It generally means what you’re reading on those days isn’t exactly “A” level material. When you throw in the fact that it’s a fair size portion of the country will be acknowledging Easter this Sunday, the viewership statistics drop right through the floor. Apparently, people spend Easter doing something other than tending to status updates on Facebook and catching up on the blogs they follow – to each their own, I suppose.

Don’t worry though, I’ll be right here posting my regular updates throughout the weekend, like some kind of evil, godless heathen. It’s ok, you can thank me later. I hope you didn’t mind this little bit of inside baseball discussion. It’s Friday after all and it only seemed fitting in celebration of Take Out the Trash Day.

Voyeuristic tendencies…

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As a kid in Western Maryland, I was no stranger to a heavy duty snowfall. In the winter of 1996 I seem to vaguely remember a storm dropped around three feet of the stuff that closed schools for a week and let me drive my 4-wheeler all over town for shits and grins. What I don’t remember is any television station shifting to wall-to-wall coverage of frozen precipitation falling from the skies for the duration of the storm. Which leads me to wonder, in my most curmudgeonly way, is that a new thing that they’re doing? We barely had CNN back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And honestly, I think widely available cable television had only been ‘down the Crick’ for less than a decade. Maybe they did cover it and I was too busy playing in the snow to notice it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we just didn’t make such a big deal out of it.

It’s snowing. We know more or less when it’s going to end. When it does, there will be plows and shoveling and life will get back to some semblance of normal in about 24 hours. I’m not sure what else you really need to know when you can look out your window and be at least as well informed as the local weather guy. I guess I’m just missing the part where it’s really a national Big Deal. Unless it’s about driving up ratings by appealing to America’s insatiable voyeuristic tendencies. In that case, I understand completely.

What Annoys Jeff This Week?

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If I were to list the things that really got my goat this week, there’s a pretty good chance that I’d still be typing when it was time to start on next week’s edition. So without any further introduction let’s get right into it…

1. Cold. Or more specifically cold in the office. Or even more specifically, cold air being blown out of the air handler directly over my head and rolling down the back of my neck. Even protected as they are, ever muscle from the back of my head to my lower back feels like someone spent the last two days twisting them into knots. Thank God it was only on the 40s and 50s outside. If I walk in some morning in January and find the cold air venting, just go ahead and put me out on annual leave, because I’ll be going back to the house. When I lived in Memphis, I use to think I’d enjoy fall and winter in a more northerly clime. Clearly I was wrong. What I really want is Baltimore with Miami’s weather.

2. Warped time. It’s Thursday. I know this because both Outlook and my iPhone tell me. It has still felt like Tuesday all blessed day long. And since the only thing more annoying than feeling like Tuesday is feeling like Monday, it comes in above the cut line this week.

3. News exhaustion. I don’t say it very often, but I think I’m overloaded on the news. From Sandy to the election to random feeds that show up in my Twitter stream… At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to shut it all down for a few days. I just hope I can manage to stay focused through next Tuesday… ‘cause this one’s gonna be good.

Inside the margins…

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It feels like it happened back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but there was a time that I was an aspiring political scientist. The research methods class we had to take for the major spent what felt like an inordinate amount of time talking about polling, bias, and sampling error. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time and I remember learning that most reputable polls have a margin of error “sweet spot” of +/- 2-4%.

Since I tend to watch and listen to more news than the average Nielson family, I’ve been noticing something slightly disturbing about the polls that both sides are using to claim imminent victory – some of them have a margin of error of +/- 9-12%. That doesn’t seem like a big deal… unless you’re locked in a race where the candidates are consistently within a handful of percentage points of one another. One of the polls I saw Sunday night had the presidential candidates within five percentage points of one another, but had a margin of error of 11%. Sure that was in the fine print and no one is really supposed to pay attention to that kind of thing, but there it was right at the bottom of the chart. 11%. In case you’re having trouble keeping up, just know that 11% allows for a polling error big enough to drive a train through.

So what’s my point? Absolutely nothing, other than with 40-odd days to go this election is way, way too close to call. Well, that and the fact that just because you see something on television doesn’t make it true. Before you decide to accept something the news readers tell you, don’t forget to check their sources and do a little of your own research. You’d be surprised what you can find out without going to too much trouble… and really that’s not too much to expect when we’re electing a leader of the free world.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Intersection Panhandlers. I’ve seen the five of you working the same intersection for 14 months… but only when the weather is agreeable. I’ve seen you getting bottles of water, soda, and bags of chips out of the truck that cost more than mine did on more than one occasion. I’ve even watched you swap signs, thinking that maybe you’d have better luck as a homeless vet than an unemployed single father. While I appreciate your ability to find a niche and milk it for all its worth, the next time you’re tempted to step off the curb in front of me just as the light’s turning green, try to keep in mind that while your family might appreciate the insurance settlement, you’ll be too flat and squishy to enjoy it.

2. Congressman Todd Akin. You, sir, are an asshat. Your lack of knowledge of basic health science and general lack of tact are inconsistent with your elected position in government. There are plenty of ways to espouse wackadoodle positions without sounding like a giant douche on national television. It’s probably best if you STFU and start making plans for your new career as a former Member of Congress, unless, of course, the fine people of the State of Missouri go ahead and elect you anyway… in which case they’ll get exactly the kind of senator they deserve.

3. The Prince’s New Clothes. Harry went to Vegas, got naked, and was dumb enough to let it get captured on “film.” I get that he’s a HRH and all, but can anyone that’s ever spent a weekend in Vegas say that they’d want some of the less noble moments of their trip preserved for posterity and flashed around the globe as an alleged bit of news. Like so many pop culture “scandles,” maybe I just miss the so what of it all. The guy’s in Vegas, he’s having a good time, no one got hurt, and I say God bless… but I don’t really need to see the pictures.

Occupy What?

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I’ve always loved a good protest. Mostly because I enjoy both pointing and laughing. Even so, I was delighted to see the particularly dismal turnout for the “General Strike” called by our friends at Occupy. In case anyone out there missed it, yesterday was May 1st, also known as International Workers’ Day. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, it was marked my parades and rallies in Red Square. If you’re a kid of the 80s, you’ve got to remember the footage of smiling, waving Soviet strongmen standing atop Lenin’s tomb watching the cream of the Red Army passing in review. You could always depend on the USSR to put on a good show. Their dependability is something I’ve come to miss in an international adversary as of late, but I digress.

Occupy Wall Street was a media darling last Fall. They were going to change the world and now they’re barely a whisper. It’s got to be hard for a movement when even their own spokesmen can’t really identify what they’re for and against, or even really what they’re doing other than causing problems for working stiffs like cops and small business owners unfortunate enough to be in the areas they’ve decided to “occupy.”

So it seems their call to action went largely unheeded by rest of us who celebrated International Workers’ Day by, you know, going to work and earning our pay for the day. Now that’s something worth celebrating. Happy belated IWD, Comrades.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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After a brief hiatus due to Thanksgiving induced laziness, What Annoys Jeff this Week is back by popular demand. As always, here they are in no particular order:

Lame news headlines. In the age of digital media, I get that what qualifies as news might not now be on the same journalistic level as was expected in the heyday of newspapers and network news broadcasts. But really, a banner headline screaming “THANKSGIVING TRAVELERS HEAD HOME” seems like one of those things that should pretty much be expected the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I mean was anyone expecting large numbers of people to go away for Thanksgiving and never come back. I’m not asking for much, just a little journalistic perspective and common sense. Oh yeah, I guess I am asking for too much. Never mind then. Carry on.

Shouting. Yelling across a room full of cubicles to ask a question is not a substitute for the old fashioned intercom system. Actually, it’s not a substitute for anything. We have phones, email, and instant messaging at our desks. In a pinch, we could even walk the 20 feet to ask a question if we really had to, so wall to wall shouting is really unnecessary. Especially at 7:45AM. Maybe I’ll start wrapping notes around small rocks and winging them in the general direction of people when I need to get information to them. That would be at least as effective and much more entertaining.

The Internet. The internet really should be a privilege and not a right. I’m all in favor of people having a difference of opinion on important issues. That’s good. That’s healthy. But only when it’s an informed opinion. When it’s not, well, you’re just left with a large group of incoherently rambling lunatics whose only justification for anything is “that’s just what I think.” While that might be good enough for Jesus and you mother to keep loving you, the rest of us think you’re an asshat.