Those Are The Days

In remembering the late Jean Stapleton, naturally we all got to thinking about All In The Family. Ken Levine (the blogger, TV writer, baseball broadcaster and disc jockey -- not the video game guy) had an interesting take on Edith Bunker:

There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY without Jean Stapleton.... Archie Bunker – played so masterfully by Caroll O’Connor – was the most bigoted, crude character television comedy had ever seen (up until that time). Forget how funny he was. The audience needs some cue to know it’s okay to laugh. Otherwise, they just hate him and that’s that.... He was a man panicked because the only world he knew was changing and he had no idea what his place in it would be...So why did we accept Archie Bunker? Because Edith loved him. Because the person with the kindest heart on the planet knew he wasn’t really hateful, he was just railing. We loved her and if she loved him then he couldn’t be so bad after all.

Then I had a thought about Archie Bunker:  Bigoted, hateful, blaming those he disliked and/or feared for all the wrongs he suffered, feeling like the white man was being squeezed out in favor of those with different coloring or sexual orientation. In the 1970s, he was a figure of comic relief.  In 2013, he'd be elected to Congress.

Arresting Developments

One of the added bonuses (bonii?) that comes from watching the new episodes of Arrested Development on Netflix is that we once more get to hear their their jazzy end theme.

It's music you likely didn't hear when the series ran on Fox almost a decade ago because the network's standard procedure was to box out the end credits in order to promote an upcoming show. I didn't get a chance to hear the end credits theme until I got the DVDs.

But you can be happy in the knowledge that all is not well in Netflix land. It seems Netflix is "out-Foxing" us with the new Arrested, thanks to their new practice of starting the next episode in a new box before the old one (minimized in a much smaller box) has finished playing. If you want to hear the full end theme, and see the full end credits, you have to click on the smaller box playing the credits -- it will then finish playing out the current episode in full screen and allow you to select the next episode you want to watch, or select a different show all together....

...you know, choice, the reason I pay for Netflix in the first place.

Hulu does this now, too, with a variation -- they start playing an episode of a similar TV show before the credits are done on the old one. Just because I watched the latest episode of New Girl does NOT mean I want to watch the latest episode of The Mindy Project. I DO NOT WATCH The Mindy Project, even when I'm watching actual, real-time, un-time-shifted network TV. Or finishing the newest Modern Family doesn't mean I'm ready for the newest The Middle. I DO NOT watch The Middle.

Call me crazy, but I kind of like to watch the programs I WANT to watch WHEN I want to watch them. Which, I thought, is kind of why Hulu and Netflix exist.

They CNN'ed It

Recent popular media is full of new nouns describing someone screwing up.  The Simpsons finished off an episode once with a dictionary entry for "Pull a Homer: to succeed despite idiocy."  On TV's Community, characters regularly refer to the character of Britta, the show's well-meaning idealogue who more often than not makes situations worse -- when something goes wrong, they say it "was Britta'd."  When it comes to news, I'd like to add another: to "CNN it."

I worked at CNN, in the Headline News section, radio division, back when the network was young in the mid-80s.  Even then, CNN had to deal with filling a non-stop programming hole; the problem with 24-hour news is that news isn't  always BREAKING. There are lulls, holding patterns, periods when an investigation is underway and the story really doesn't change. In the old days, CNN would fill with Larry King or Crossfire or other pre-produced shows that would eat up the night and weekend hours when not much happened.  Of course, the flip side of that is that when you commit to Larry King for an hour every night, and the commercial time is sold, POOF!  There goes the flexibility you have to cover a breaking story at 9:24.  And, as Jon Stewart reminded us, Crossfire just added volume to the conservative-liberal shouting match without adding value. 

So now CNN's moved closer to true 24-hour news, no fillers.  Except, of course, for the anchors and reporters who feel they must fill every second.  We now have to choose between the lesser of two evils:  the anchor continually chirping that "we don't know exactly what's happening right now, but there you see the smoke on your screen;"  and the reporter making whatever claim is in the air at the moment, as we saw in Boston, where John King was seen frantically working his iPhone quoting his sources about suspects being arrested, sources who were profoundly wrong.

The 24-hour cycle also seems to play right into that "you saw it here first" thing that competitive news organizations always have.  It's almost like they're saying, "We're always on, always throwing stuff out there, so keep viewing and you're bound to see us stumble into something good!" 

Well, here's a news tip for you: I don't remember who got it first.  I remember who got it right.

They Picked the Wrong Town

I worked in New Hampshire off and on for ten years. Boston was the "big city," and I used to escape there from time to time.  Still have very good friends who live in the city. I remember the locals being a little hard to warm up to.  They tended to look at people from other parts of the country -- let alone other countries -- as trespassers.

I learned the customs and language (I drove a "Toyoter") partly because I was on the radio and had to relate to the listeners, mostly just to fit in. After awhile, the locals came around and began to treat me like I was born there. (My oldest son actually was born there.)  It probably also helped that, besides being on the radio, I am white and Christian. 

I can see why those Chechnyan brothers might have had trouble fitting in, and why they might have wanted to get back at the those who didn't accept them. And I can see where they thought they could inflict maximum pain on the people they disliked by setting off bombs at the beloved Marathon on Patriots' Day, a very special day in the lives of Bostonians. 

Besides picking the wrong way to deal with their problems, they picked on the wrong city.  One of the reasons New Englanders take awhile to warm to you, one of the reasons it takes awhile to warm to them, is because they are genuinely tough.  Could be the winters.  Could be the ancestry.  Whatever it is, you don't want to cross a New Englander. New Yorkers will spit in your eye, but a Southy will gouge them out.

Eat The Rich

There are three reasons why it's so darned hard to tax the rich in America:

1) The people making the rules are rich.  You know, it's the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."

2) A lot of us are inadvertently "rich."  Example: my wife and I individually make very middle-class salaries, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and just manage to make ends meet.  But, come tax time, when we fill out the 1040 as "Married Filing Jointly,"  LORD!  Combine those salaries and we're suddenly perilously close to making $100,000 a year!  So, no, we don't want to see higher taxes for those making $100,000 a year, because, damn! That's us!

3)  We all secretly, deep down, believe that -- someday -- we, too, will be very very rich.  The big money is right around the corner!  It's what keeps lottery tickets selling and casinos open.  It's why we treat some older relatives nice, even though we can't stand them. It's why immigrants keep coming to America, legally or otherwise.

Me?  I don't need a solid gold bathtub or ownership of a Caribbean island (although I wouldn't refuse the island).  I just want a laptop that won't freeze up every time I try to download a movie.

The Sounds of Coffee

My boss recently got one of those Keurig coffee makers for our office.  He says it will be cheaper and more efficient, and I agree with him on part of that.  We used to make two pots of coffee for the office, one regular, one decaf, on one of those Bunn restaurant drip-with-the-hotplate devices.  Everyone would have their cup and then two half-pots would be left to burn on the hotplates all day, until someone wanted a cup around 3 o'clock.  That person would dump the old, burned coffee and make a new pot to get their one cup and a full pot would be left to burn until it, too, was dumped at 5.  With the K-cups, everone gets one cup of coffee whenever they want, and no pots are left to burn or dump or clean.
Is it cheaper?  Maybe for the office.  The office used to pay for boxes of coffee bags for the drip machines.  Now we all chip in ten bucks each a month for two big boxes of K-cups. (We can go into the problem of the boss buying the machine but not the coffee for it at another time, when cooler heads might prevail.)
But here's what I've noticed while standing in line in the kitchenette waiting for my K-cup of coffee.  Pouring coffee from a pot, you get a wonderful splashing noise as it fills the cup, as if you're putting your cup under a fresh, clear brook of coffee.  When you put your cup under the Keurig machine and press the button, your coffee spits out into your cup like -- well, like someone's peeing in your cup. It's very off-putting.  Just a little something for the engineers to think of when they come up with the Keurig Mark 2 -- some way to pour the coffee into my cup, instead of peeing in it.

Old Wives Tales UPDATE!

Hey, maybe my grandmother had something there.  At least, the part about cuts in the mouth healing faster.  Here's a quote from an article written for the Oral Cancer Foundation:

Saliva, science has revealed, is much more than water. It is packed with proteins that help control the teeming hordes of microbes in our mouths. It is stuffed with substances that make our spit stringy, stop our teeth from dissolving and help heal wounds.

Here's a link to the whole article:

http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/dental/wonders_of_saliva.htm

So thanks, grandma.  It rained on Easter Sunday of 2013, so I'm keeping watch on the next 7.  Just in case.