Thursday, January 26, 2012

Low Hanging Fruit

There are days that trying to be positive and upbeat and some kind of a happy idiot is just harder than it needs to be. All that Hooked on Phonics stuff later and I have a dickens of a time assembling a sentence; and gathering my thoughts can seem more like shepherding cats.

I had every intention of offering some clever and pithy observations on the retirement of Jorge Posada and the end of a Pinstripe Era, and I’m pretty confident I shall do just that real soon, but not today. On the way to here I fell over my current favorite useless mass of flesh on the planet, Kim Kardashian, who has had an even busier week than Mitt Romney’s tax accountant.

Tangent: I don’t understand the smiley-face talk shows on television weekday mornings usually after ‘news’ programs that look and smell an awful lot like the gabfests that are on to get us to noon news, soap operas and afternoon happy talk shows. Dear TV guys: when you don’t have anything to say, just sign off and go to black. I never disliked shows like “Regis & Kelly” or whatever permutation it is now; I just don’t care about them.

They are a platform that requires pap and pablum to remain on air. We already have the 24/7 news outlets getting lost in the tall grass, and if you don’t think so try to watch an hour of MSNBC or Faux Gnus not that CNN is all that much better. Talk is cheap goes the adage and in terms of production costs, talk is cheapest. We don’t have to budget a bunch ‘o’ bucks to host a lot of talking heads and they don’t get paid by the word.

Celebrities, which is what poor, little naive heart-broken Kim is (just ask her), aren’t a whole lot more expensive. They exist for no reason on earth that anyone has figured out-perhaps they always existed and we’ve gotten so stupid from the TV that’s built on them that we simply cannot remember what life was like before and without them. The Lindsays, Parises, Nicoles by the bushel and Jessicas by the freight car, plus a small city of people whose names we don’t remember because they themselves are so forgettable could well be an optical illusion since when you stare hard they do seem to disappear.

These folks have no visible means of support or even a reason for being. They’re passengers on a Streetcar Named Desire who’ve missed their stop, relying on the kindness of strangers, and that kindness grows stranger with every passing day.
-bill kenny

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