I saw Good Night, and Good Luck over the weekend and ever since then, I’ve been craving Scotch and cigarettes.  At the end of the film, Murrow blasts television as an escapist, superficial medium that has failed to live up to its promise as a tool for creating an educated and enlightened citizenry.  He proposes setting aside a few hours a week for current-affairs programming.  I wonder what he would make of today’s television landscape.  Today’s viewers have a wealth of informative and educational programming available to them, if they choose to seek it out.  Most television news reporting, however, is abysmal.  The cable news outlets rarely do a story that runs longer than five minutes.  What passes for “analysis” is a series of disembodied heads reciting the prepared talking points of one side of the debate or the other.  It’s predictable.  It’s boring.  Worse, it breeds the kind of political apathy and disengagement that is rampant in this country. 

 

Maybe we need to allow smoking in the nation’s newsrooms again.  Maybe the type of reporter who smokes three packs a day is the kind of reporter who might fearlessly pursue the stories that need to be told. 

ABC has given the greenlight to a new anthology series, Masters of Science Fiction.  According to the press release, it will adapt classic stories from authors like Asimov and Bradbury into one-hour television episodes.  I’m going to start a pool on how many weeks this series will last before ABC gives it the axe.  Science fiction has never done well on network television and it’s difficult to build an audience around an anthology.  But perhaps it will stick around long enough to give us a decent DVD set.

I had a different blog entry lined up for today, but I came home late tonight, so you’re going to have to settle for this link to an article of mine that’s appearing in this month’s issue of Access Press.  If I can’t shamelessly plug myself in my own blog, where else am I going to do it?

 

I have tickets to Death Cab!  And Franz Ferdinand!  All in the same show!  My friend and I are so going to try and get backstage.  Ben Gibbard simply must know that I’m getting rather impatient for the next Postal Service album. 

I want to give a shout-out to my friend and fellow Fellow Jeannette, who has scored a staff position with the Amy Klobuchar for Senate campaign.  Jeannette will be working tirelessly to ensure that Mark Kennedy‘s career as a Republican tool ends in November.  Minnesota already has one tool in the Senate, and that’s one tool too many.  Good luck to Jeannette and don’t forget about me when you’re running Klobuchar’s Senate office and attending chic cocktail parties in Georgetown. 

Being a cripple does give you an excuse to take the easy way out sometimes.  Take last night’s party, for example.  I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to cook anything, so I simply called up Surdyk’s and told the nice man on the phone what items I wanted on the menu.  Then I called up my sister and nicely asked my sister to pick up a few other things on her way to my place.  Then I supervised my nurse as she straightened up my place before the guests arrived.  My total commitment of resources: a bit of cash and a couple hours of prep time.  Having friends tell you what a great party you threw: priceless.