Ground fog, misty and warm this early Thursday morning along California’s northern coast, a way-direct contrast to the frigid, icebox temperatures back east.
My youngest daughter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, told me last night over the phone it was ONE DEGREE outside.
And that’s just pure crazy.
Also nuts is being offline and depending on the TV for news — a landscape so empty and cold it feels like the plains of Minnesota.
After my laptop was jacked last Friday, I spent four days (“four days!”) trying to find out what’s going on via the TeeVee, but as been said before, it’s just a vast wasteland.
(Illustration found here).
After awhile, it’s taken for granted the Internet. There’s such a diverse and ever-changing news cycle online that I forget that a shitload of folks still make due with what’s coming off the TV and really don’t have any means to go beyond the squeak of those few news outlets, especially for the ‘fair and unbalanced’ Fox News nit-twits.
And it’s scary.
CBS reporter Lara Logan told Jon Stewart nearly five years ago: If I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States — I’d just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts.
Unfortunately, Logan became a news-maker herself.
She’s right, however, on the point of being in a vacuum with national television as it be right now — the media is really to blame in great part for the bullshit in this country. The old ‘He said, She said’ crap don’t cut the crap any more due to the fact that one side is purely lying.
Regular US people are pretty sick of both Congress and TV news — last year Gallup reported just 21 percent of Americans expressed any kind of good confidence with TV news and why?
Just part of the trend: It is not clear precisely why Americans soured so much on television news this year compared with last. Americans’ negativity likely reflects the continuation of a broader trend that appeared to enjoy only a brief respite last year. Americans have grown more negative about the media in recent years, as they have about many other U.S. institutions and the direction of the country in general.
And our elected leaders?
Way-down there: Root canals, head lice, cockroaches, Donald Trump, Ghengis Khan, Nickelback–they’re all terrible things, but in the eyes of Americans, none of those things is worse than the United States Congress.
Anyway, I’m glad to be back surfing through the ether, and since I’ve gotten an external mouse to work the controls, my starship laptop can easily coast between the shoals and high waves of the trillions and trillions of bullshit percolating on the InterWebs.
Of course, that’s still a way-whole-lot better than the suffocating nothingness spit up by the TV.