Personal Musings category archive

I’ve been amused and I’ve been bemused.

I’ve certainly been demused. Most of the news these days is demusing.

I’ve even been emused by ejokes.

Why can’t I be cmused?

I’ll have to muse on that.

It’s the persons who don’t vote who should sport stickers.

I like to listen to Old Time Radio (OTR for short).

“Old Time” is really not an accurate label, as it actually refers to a very short period in the 1940s and 1950s, when radio shows were syndicated on vinyl “syndication” disks or, later, on tape and, fortunately, were not copyrighted, as they were considered ephemeral (a few shows from the 1930s survive–a very few). (Maybe I’m showing my age, but when I hear “old time,” I think “centuries ago.”)

Fortunately, there are folks who have worked to make OTR available to us today. You can see my favorite OTR sites over there —-> on the sidebar.

Right now, I’m listening to a dramatization of Penrod by Booth Tarkington, a novel that I read several times when I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, from the NBC University of the Air at The Old Time Radio Theatre.

And it led me to realize that there was a time when commercial AM radio actually contributed positively to the discourse, a time when it was not merely a vehicle for right-wing haters and 24-hour sports talkers.

Reading BS posts from randos on “social” media is in no way research.

I did not know that Cardinal Richelieu invented the table knife.

Thanks to the internet, we now have a vaster wasteland.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Polly Campbell suggests that excessive news consumption is–er–less than desirable.

A snippet (emphasis added):

I rarely watch television news because once I turn it on, it’s harder to turn off the television. And the nature of television news is that the stories are shorter. Sometimes this leaves me with a lot of emotion and few of the facts I need to understand it. So, I read a national and local newspaper. It’s easier to put down when I’m done.

I think she is onto something.

I gave up on broadcast news years ago. I find it superficial, sensational, and simplistic. Heck, I can read more in 10 minutes than a news announcer can read to me in 30.

And, when broadcasters have the choice, they will opt for sensational over sensible and superficial over solid, because these days it’s all about keeping eyeballs glued to the screen.

So I read.

Newspapers, newspaper websites, magazines, some blogs I have found reliable, sometimes even books–material for persons who read.

Also, in the “twenty-four hour news cycle,” there is not twenty-four hours worth of news, so broadcast news fills the gap with drivel talking heads spouting opinions. Opinions may or may not be valid, but they are not news.

(Of course, I fill this blog with my opinions, but I don’t pretend that they are anything more than opinions. Always right and never wrong, of course, but, still, just my opinions.)

I just heard an ad that, were I to fall for buy their product, I would have more time to

binge good reality TV.

An impossibility, for such a thing does not exist.

Aside:

No, I shall not identify the product. But if you are driven to listen to the ad, you can find it in this podcast. The occasional ad may be questionable, but the podcast is excellent.

What I remember most about this date is not so much what happened 21 years ago. I was at work and, well, though we got some updates and the television stayed on in the break room, I had work to do.

No, what I remember most is the silence of the following days, when we stepped out in the smoking area and no longer heard airplanes, either approaching Philadelphia International right across the river from us or making their way to other destinations as higher altitudes.

That silence stays with me.

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We have been watching the old NBC show Emergency on Cozi TV, which is available on our cable.

I remember watching the show when I was a grad student at UVa in Charlottesville and could get only one station, the Richmond NBC affiliate, on my television in my basement apartment in a student slum.

It is hardly the best-acted or best-written show, but I liked it then and I like it now.

I think one reason I like it is that almost all the characters are good guys, who are either trying to help the victims of misfortunes or are, indeed, the victims themselves. And it has frequent doses of humor.

Sure, there is the occasional character who is a jerk, but never a character who is truly a villain.

I’m enjoying seeing it again.

I was listening to a mystery novel and the reader read

The stenographer was busy with his papers . . . .

I must confess, I was mildly surprised that the stenographer was a he, because, when I was a young ‘un, stenographers were assumed to be shes.

We may not be able to shed the prejudices with which we grew up, but we can certainly make ourselves aware of them and thereby liberate ourselves from their blinders.

At the Tampa Bay Times, Stephanie Hayes comments on the lazy, inconsiderate, self-centered jerks who leave shopping carts scattered willy-nilly about parking lots and sidewalks. Honest to Pete, no other place I’ve lived has been so plagued with shopping cart scofflaws, but it sounds as if Tampa Bay area has it bad tool.

She suggests that persons who fail to do such a simple task as return a shopping cart may also be likely to fail at larger duties to the polity. Here’s a bit from her piece:

That relative ease (of returning shopping carts–ed.) is at the core of the Shopping Cart Theory, a viral meme that posits: “The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do.”