I just turned on the television, which is something I don't normally do except to watch specific things. I was bored, and there was BREAKING NEWS on CNN. I should have known better.

They're talking about this Ramsey girl, which was apparently a big thing once upon a time, though all I can remember of it is the South Park episode. Anyway, they came back from commercials and said they had chilling news. They produced a sketch that a psychic had made back in the day and put it beside a picture of the current suspect. Honestly, I don't think it looked like him except in the sense that they both had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Oh, and they were looking in the same direction.

But the anchor... he said something about it being shocking or mysterious or some drivel like that, and went on to conclude gravely: "Coincidence or not? We'll let you decide."

Maybe I'll trade my TV for an equally sized box of books....

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"It's turtles all the way down."

I get all the news I need from The Daily Show and The Colber Repor. Anything else is superfluous.

Superfluous: that's today's wØrd.

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Here's the side-by-side from the article making the claim.

As you can see, the match is perfect. Except for the chin... And the eyes... And the nose, mouth, cheekbones, eyebrows, ear placement, cowlick hairstyle, lack of sideburns, and adam's apple. But other than that, yeah, they're a spitting image.

Seriously, the resemblance is vague at best. Give the sketch the right moustache, and he'll look just like Hitler. All the "psychic" really matched was that it was a normal weight brunette caucasian male whose chin was narrower than his temples. That matches the vast majority of men on this planet, I think, and the "psychic" already knew half of that info.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

There's a reason why Robert Heinlein referred to the television as the 'idiot box'.

Given the explosive growth of the internet, the monitor is fully qualified to take its place.

Its no different really, courtesy of AOL and Myspace. The capacity for idiots to access the internet has exceeded the ability of intelligent people to contain them. The percentage of quality information versus useless fluff is pretty close between the net and the tube, the only difference is the internet's sheer volume allows for a lot more useful stuff to slip through.

If you think the TV news coverage of the Ramsey case has been headache inducing, avoid MSNBC's website at all costs...

I think I'm going to have to post a tirade at some point about how much I like my TV. Granted, mostly for watching movies, these days, but I have several shows I watch reliably. Like, for example, The Daily Show and the first five or ten minutes of The Colbert Report--last night, they were talking about Pluto again.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

'gree.

The internet provides more opportunities for stupidity to intrude, but the trade-off is more control vs. a TV. I can't stand how all commercials on every channel are at least three times the volume of the show you were watching. At least on the net I can block the majority of commercials (pop-ups, spam, etc.) and there's no volume on most either.

It does seem that sometimes we are trading in a generation of TV-staring zombies in for a generation of monitor-staring ones.

Neil Postman said the best use for a TV is to turn down the sound and use it as a lamp with which to read a book. (Of course, a regular lamp works better.)

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I love made up words, like this the meaning of LIFF

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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ...

When someone says it, do we have to scream real loud, or is that optional?

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

I think I'd get weird looks if I did that. So maybe.

The one I really like is:
Ely(n)
The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Only if you're in the studio audience and have been properly warmed up.

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News is not journalism any more. News is infotainment. The last journalist was David Brinkley. It is very rare to find any news outlet that keeps a firm line between news and editorial. The louded NY Times is editorial from page one, for example. CNN's charter states that they are an instrument for social change, for another example.

A duck will come down from the ceiling and give you $100.

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Please enjoy your trip through this door.

And Fenneman will act quite flustered.

Hooray for Captain Spaulding!

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Trying to guess the meaning here, since having it read aloud very amplified doesn't seem to fit.

Did you mean lauded?

Wasn't NY Times the one with a journalist who admitted to making up the stuff rather than researching?

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.