No News is Good News
by Scott Hardie on September 29, 2006
Yesterday I spent eight hours in a hospital waiting room in Tampa while my mother underwent surgery for a torn rotator cuff. She's recovering well, but the harm inflicted on me by eight hours of cable news has yet to wear off. It happened to be Fox News Channel, but that's irrelevant; all news is boring when you're in the hospital and are stuck watching it at length, because the newscasters only repeat over and over the breathless update that they have nothing more to report and here are the things they don't know yet. When I had surgery in high school, it was the same day a local school bus was hit by a train and five kids were killed, and every station devoted itself to daylong coverage of the very-slowly-unfolding news story. With all due respect to the families of the deceased, it was one of the most boring days of my life. Yesterday FNC covered only four stories (I counted) for the entire eight hours: A) Hostage crisis in a Colorado school, B) Terrell Owens did or didn't attempt suicide, C) Democrats are mean for leaking a classified report about terrorism, and D) the Dow Jones almost broke a record but didn't. The anchors had precious few details about each of these events and repeated them hundreds of times, as well as repeating over and over again what they didn't yet know. It was enough to make me want to sign up for a lobotomy in the next room.
Ok, sorry Mike, I can't resist one dig at Fox News: While an analyst was interviewed about the classified document leak, he slipped in a criticism of Bill Clinton for picking on his own Fox News interviewer the previous weekend, and said Fox News is a "whipping boy" for the Democratic Party. Yes, that's right, poor defenseless Fox News would never dare cast aspersions on a Democratic politician, because criticism of our elected officials would be unpatriotic and would cheapen the public discourse for mere entertainment value, and those big nasty Democrats enjoy kicking innocent Fox News around for laughs while their day job running the country doesn't keep them busy. Yeah.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
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Kelly and I wed on March 15, an event that we've been looking forward to for a very long time. Despite keeping the wedding modest and casual, it still involved a great deal of planning and anxiety, occupying my attention for the last few months. (Kelly was in charge of her outfit; I planned everything else, with her approval at each stage.) Go »Hello Stupid
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Victim's cell phone is stolen on subway. Thief takes photos of his own wife, family, dog, and home. Cell phone automatically uploads them to victim's Flickr account. Go »Haute cuisine
Today I came across this photo gallery of independent restaurants around our area. Some of them we've enjoyed, like GooCon favorite The Lobster Pot, and others are ones we just haven't gotten around to yet. As pretty as the food looks, I find myself looking at the dining rooms and noticing how many of them look decorated for private parties. Go »Nooooooooooodge
You know what would be nice? If Google, one of the most web-savvy companies in existence, could manage to remember my goddamn user settings for more than 48 hours. I'm getting really sick of discovering them reset to defaults and having to change them all over again. Go »
