The Aerie
Okay, so let me get this straight...
A couple of years ago, advertisers wanted to begin selling condoms on television. The idea met stiff resistance from scandalized Americans who couldn't swallow the notion of condoms being mentioned on prime time TV. Eventually the ads were aired, but only referred to condoms and their uses in the most careful and oblique manner possible.
Now tonight I've got the TV on, and I hear two separate ads, one for Cialis and one for Levitra (both words which, if appearing in my inbound e-mail, automatically sort the letter into the trash). In both advertisements the announcer says very clearly,
"In the event of erections lasting more than four hours seek medical attention immediately."
Uh... Now, excuse me, but doesn't the phrase "Erections lasting more than four hours" scandalize at least as many blue-haired Americans as the word "condom" alone?
Where's the uproar? Where's the furor?
Or is there no furor because it's the misbegotten pharmaceutical industry that wants these ads aired... and they make sure that nobody's protests are heard?
The other day I also heard an advertisement for an antidepressant. The announcer warned in the final disclaimer that one must not cease taking the drug without medical approval, and that doing so could lead to an increased risk of suicide.
Now, waitaminute - when you have a drug that you have to take forever, isn't that an addiction? So why are pharmaceutical firms encouraging people to experiment with addictive drugs? Oh that's right, so that they can make a fortune.
I don't know. All I know is that if you're poor and you sell drugs on the streetcorner you can go to jail for life. But if you're rich and you sell drugs on TV, you can use the phrase "erection lasting more than four hours" with impunity.
Wow. Tons of spam today. Here's what I got:
132 new messages
30 deleted automatically for having obscenities or dollar signs in the subject line.
96 spam that I had to delete from my inbox
5 subscription messages
1 announcement message.
Bleah!
Recently KSTP television came to our neighborhood to do a very special, heartwarming story. One neighbor was very upset, and upbraided the reporter in an e-mail sent to the local mailing list.
|
What I witnessed was not news; it was an attempt by you to
generate some sensational footage at the expense of an unsuspecting mother who expected privacy in her own home.
I watched the setup of your story as the cameraman filmed the woman's car in great detail from every angle as well as her house and door. I watched you stand in your suit and tie behind a tree around the corner from her door and rehearse the ambush beforehand. From what I could hear from the sidewalk, you confronted this woman about $17,000 in unpaid parking fees. More than once you made the statement that this was an issue of interest to the "taxpayers." Of course parking fines and late penalties are not taxes, and they are not payment for a During your exchange with this woman (who was obviously very upset after being blindsided by you and your cameraman at her door) you even made the statement that she owned a "very nice car." You know that her car is an |
There ensued a discussion on the list as to who was right and who was wrong. Several people voiced their disgust at the reporter. Then others spoke up to point out that $17,000 in parking tickets is no sign of wholesome goodness on the part of the subject of the report.
As usual, I find myself in the middle. I think it's helpful to consider that our culture prefers clear-cut right and wrong answers, and what I've read so far seems to be searching for distinct right and wrong parties. However, in this case everybody might be wrong.
If the woman recklessly accrued $17K in parking tickets, she was wrong to do so.
A news reporter ambushing and publicly embarassing this woman for the sake of sensational journalism is also wrong. It's one thing when '60 Minutes' publicly accosts a powerful executive who insulates himself from justice
with high-priced lawyers: it's another to blindside a common citizen for sensationalism's sake.
A more thoughtful story might have explored the woman's situation, and asked how enforcement and collection agencies had let the situation get so far out
of hand. I came away from the story no more enlightened as to how or why this could happen, and with no sense the situation was going to be resolved.
Does this woman (my neighbor) need help? Is she an arrogant scofflaw? Or a confused person overwhelmed by circumstance? Or something else entirely? Is the department of traffic enforcement a bureaucracy that is consuming limited taxpayer funds while failing to do its job to collect on parking tickets? Or have enforcement agents been working diligent personal hours after work trying to find this woman, and KSTP has finally located her?
No such questions were answered. Nothing was accomplished. All I saw was a startled woman unprepared to answer the unsupported accusations of a hungry journalist at her door during sweeps week.
Okay, I admit it, I watched "10.5".
Granted, I was working at the time. I was doing monthly invoices, an exercise in futility wherein I appeal to large soulless corporations to part with a miniscule fraction of their liquid cash in exchange for services already rendered. Futility must slow things down,because this month it took all day to get them finished.
Meanwhile I watched this abysmal movie.
All I can say is Wow. Wowwee-wow. Wow. I mean, this film is ambitious: it is clearly attempting to return to the Richard Chamberlain era of really horrid 1970's disaster movies. No detail was too small to suck: from the still satellite photos that showed moving dust clouds, to the so-called "special effects", to the computer generated actors, this movie was a black hole of quality.
In one exciting special effects blowout, a train is rolling down the tracks, "pursued" by a crack in the earth. Yes, pursued. The crack opens along the rail lines as they twist and turn, and stops immediately upon swallowing the train. The special effects were amazing: the scene where the train
was 'sucked' into the chasm looked so realistic, I thought there really WAS a model train being sucked into a fake-looking crack in a modelling table.
There were apparently actors in this movie, although they must have been standing behind the unconvincing, wooden refugees from the motels surrounding Hollywood. Or possibly the actors were off writing the script, since no trained writer set pen to paper on this project.
By the end of the first half, I was convinced - this movie really WAS as bad as some of the classic awful TV miniseries. Quite an achievement! And tonight, in the finale, a series of puny subterranean nuclear explosions will somehow prevent the studios that made this abomination from submerging beneath the Pacific.
For some reason this doesn't seem like a happy ending.