Bad Timing

Monday, January 30, 2012 by Dick.

Have you ever noticed?

Here in South Puffin I would generally watch “Local 10 News at 6″ except Local 10 News at 6 doesn’t start at 6. The little flag in the corner of the screen includes a clock that tells us it is 5:59 or even 5:58 when anchor Laurie Jennings says, “The 6 o’clock news starts now!”

WPLG in South Florida, home of Local 10, isn’t the only offender. Have you ever noticed that CBS even named its flagship news magazine for a stopwatch but every time Andy Rooney wasn’t available to fill his time slot, 60 Minutes would run about 52. Now that Mr. Rooney kvetches on an entirely different channel, 60 Minutes consistently stops at 52 and fills the remaining 8 with commercials plus 7 seconds of Scott Pelley reminding us to join him next week for all 60.

And we’ve all experienced the spate of prime time shows that started a minute early or ended a couple of minutes after the hour, just to mess with programmers on the other networks.

It messes with our recorders, too.

I don’t like missing the first minute or two of meteorologist Trent Aric’s tropical forecast when it leads the local newscast. I hate missing that last minute of House or Harry’s Law when Fox or NBC inches the clock ahead.

There is nothing more important in broadcast than the clock on the wall. Nothing. Not the Costa Concordia lawsuit. Not Lindsay Lohan’s probation status. Not even the anchor’s hairdo.

My friend Dave Kimel taught me that at WWSR when we talked about public service advertising. “Emerson [Lynn, publisher of the St. Albans Messenger] can always add another page to the newspaper,” Mr. Kimel said. “But we can never, ever add another minute in the day.”

I know that Mr. Kimel and I can tell time. I wonder why ABC et al can’t?

Posted in Quirks, Media, Random Access | 5 Comments »

Thor’s Trials & Tribulations

Thursday, September 22, 2011 by Dick.

I generally watch the local news on WPTZ when I’m in North Puffin; I like the coverage, the weather reportage, the broadcast team, and the editorial stance.

I don’t like the way they play network programming promos as news, as in “Our next news story is what’s on the t00b tonight.” I don’t care if they think they have to because “other stations do it.”

A teevee show ain’t news.

Posted in Media, Dick's Dumps | 2 Comments »

Persembe Peeve

Thursday, August 25, 2011 by Dick.

I hate it when a reporter lies to me. Hate it.

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson wrote, “America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000.”

Harold Meyerson knows better.
Anybody with access to a search engine knows better.

The “Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010″ enacted a two point payroll tax cut in your SOCIAL SECURITY withholding rate (it went from 6.2% to 4.2% of wages paid). According to the IRS, this “reduced Social Security withholding will have no effect on the employee’s future Social Security benefits.”

But it certainly has an effect on the country’s future Social Security viability.

See, this is politics at its worst. Mr. Obama sees a huge pot of money (the Social Security Trust Fund) he can use now, so he wants it at the expense of We the Overtaxed People who have to pay it back after we boot his skinny butt out of office. Just like the ballooning National Debt.

And Mr. Meyerson knows that.

Mr. Meyerson’s piece foments the very class warfare he pretends to abhor. The Washington Post should be ashamed.

Posted in Media, Dick's Dumps | 7 Comments »

Premte Peeves

Thursday, June 2, 2011 by Dick.

I like a good fish story.

We have 2.7 English language radio stations here in South Puffin. One has awakened me for years with a program called the Morning Mix. I like it because Anne O’Bannon and Josh Mothner have assembled a cohort of interesting people to talk with. My mornings have each had an hour of newsy chat about the schools, the community theater, real estate, politics, law enforcement, road repair, and even water sports.

The Morning Mix has changed.

CJ Geotis, a “life-long fisherman who followed his dream to live in the Florida Keys” is a business consultant, fishing columnist, and now radio host. He has hosted the morning show for a while now with fish after fish after fish story. And his show seems to go on all morning long.

I like CJ; I miss the variation of the Mix.

Posted in Media, Dick's Dumps | 3 Comments »

Making Friends, Part I

Monday, May 2, 2011 by Dick.

Two weeks ago in Boston, Geoffrey Mutai ran the fastest marathon ever with a time of 2:03:02. He blew by the standing world-best time by 57 seconds.

I don’t know if Mr. Mutai spends much time on Facebook but Sarah Greene of St. Albans does.

Ms. Greene also ran the Boston Marathon. She used Boston to kick off her goal to raise funds for the American Stroke Association by running a marathon in each of the 50 states. She ran her first, the VT City Marathon, a couple of years ago as a member of the ASA’s Train to End Stroke in honor of her grandmother. Her Gram had suffered a massive, debilitating stroke that left long-lasting physical and cognitive deficits.

Ms. Greene is using the Facebook to get in touch with friends to coordinate her marathons, have some peeps to come to cheer and support the cause, and to find place to stay on her journey.

Making friends.

“We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world,” an insurrectionist said in Cairo.

Social media. It is our source for news. It foments revolutions. It is our source for lovers. It advertises brands. And it is the place the friends of our friends hang out.

Of the 32.7 hours per week Americans spend online, 22% is spent on social networks. That’s all? Twitter averages about 40 million tweets per day. (I did find the multi-tasking statistic fascinating: 57% of Americans watch TV and surf the Internet simultaneously.)

People meet on the ‘net all the time. They
get together, go out, have dinner, then,
you know — horrible axe murder.

Back in the Stone Age, when Usenet was the only “social network,” I met axe murderers I could never have discovered any other way.

Usenet is one of the original online systems. It started in 1980 at the University of North Carolina and at Duke more than a decade before the World Wide Web. People post “articles” that spread to groups on Internet servers around the world. Unlike the restricted friends lists in many social networks today, anyone can read and post to most newsgroups.

One writer I met on a newsgroup and later in real life was born in the former Yugoslavia, grew up in Africa, and was living in New Zealand in the time before she moved to the States to marry another writer in South Florida. They now live in Washington state. As it turns out, I’ve met a lot of reprobates at one time or another. My closest friend, Elizabeth “Liza” Arden, lives in the southwest. Peeps from Georgia and Michigan, a cop on Lon Guyland, a game developer from England, and a medical examiner from Maryland all showed up at a party in Pennsylvania. I met a Canadian who taught at UIC but has retired to Tucson on one of my trips to Arizona.

That leaves the virtual friends like the good Quaker girl from Wisconsin, a seismologist who returned the other day from Haiti, the ESL teacher in Korea, a musician in England, the Chicago nurse who emigrated to Israel, a whole raft of fruits and nuts and engineers and ordinary folk in California and Florida, a homeless man in Texas, a woman in Germany, and even a fellow in southern Vermont. And those are just some of the people I like.

So, Dick wondered, is Facebook the equal of Usenet for meeting new people? Will Sarah Greene succeed in her marathon quest for contributors and supporters?

Stay tuned.

Posted in Society, Politics & News, Media, Random Access | 3 Comments »

No Slimy Sex

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 by Dick.

If NPR wants continued support, they need to make it easier, not harder, to listen. I tried to download a couple of my favorite programs this week, Car Talk and Wait Wait. Their download links didn’t work. On to Fresh Air. Terry Gross had a couple of goodies last week. Under the Sea, Sex Is Slimy Business and How The ‘Pox’ Epidemic Changed Vaccination Rules.

The Fresh Air download link took me to the (very slow) NPR Media Player which showed what I listened to last week. Back to Fresh Air. Click again. Now Slimy Sex started playing but the download link was missing.

I don’t want to listen on my computer. I particularly don’t want to listen on my computer right now. I also don’t want every episode clogging my (limited) iPod. I want to Click Here, download the interview, and listen tomorrow or the next day or next week when I’m driving or walking or doing something that is conducive to spending my time listening to their show.

If NPR can’t get something that simple to work, maybe the Repugs are right.

Posted in Extras!, Politics & News, Media | 6 Comments »