Thursday, January 28, 2010

Your political future

Mills sets up website in run for governor

It's funny, I must have missed the Courier stories about the candidacies of Dean Martin, Terry Goddard and the other front-runners for actual nomination. But we get the press release from our semi-local gun god verbatim as a news story. I have a feeling we know how this is going to go in everybody's hometown newspaper.

Embattled Obama declares in speech, 'I don't quit'

I've got just one thing to say about this AP story: In eight years of unending public controversy, the Courier never once associated the word "embattled" with George W Bush. Just sayin'.

Editorial: Are Olympics worth the cost?

Regular readers know that I was born without the sports gene and could not care less about the Olympics or any other spectator sports event. As a mediated pastime I consider sports less harmful than, say, eating bugs, but I'd still be happy to see the whole international-combat-via-sports thing dry up and fall off as we humans move through our social adolescence. I wouldn't bother to write an editorial on it, though. It's just not that important.

So when the unnamed Courier editor spends his daily inches to feign a question and opine clumsily that the Olympics are "so, so worth it," I have to laugh. So worth what, exactly? The games have never cost our community one thin dime, and the editor will get them for free on his teevee (albeit amid a relentless commercial assault that would melt my brain). It's just a non-issue.

So we come to the question: why did he write this? Logically all I can come up with is that the editor is so bored with our puny local issues that he's wrapping his brain in the primary opiate of the masses -- television -- and parroting its navel-gazing self-absorption, making its concerns his own.

So the editor offers an unintended public service here, exemplifying the danger in the same way a certain pan of frying eggs did some years ago -- this is your brain on teevee. Just say no.