Fire I Can Relate To

(Ignore that tired old rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition. I have learned to.)

Lots of fires around town lately. Fires are high on the radio news editors’ list of events worth reporting. Even the smallest of fires is newsworthy. I know this because fires are not simply reported: they are actually held to account and there are standard measures.

• How many dwellings and businesses destroyed?
• How many left homeless?
• How high the flames, into the air?
• From what distance could the clouds of smoke be seen?

These are key indicators of a fire’s worth. These measurements give us context.

This morning I heard from the radio newsreader about a fire that had been extinguished by the building sprinkler system before the fire fighters arrived.  Nothing was destroyed and no one was left homeless. You’d think this a failure as fires go but think again. There is one more standard measure and it is the most important of all.  This particular fire squeaked into the news based on the estimate of the damage caused: $10,000.

I have no proof but I would guess that the threshold for fire/radio reportability is $10,000.  I bet a lot of fires get rounded up to $10,000. I get this. $10,000 is something most of us can relate to.

$10,000 is about what it will cost to do the deck and landscaping. $10,000 will pay for the out-of-country medical procedure. $10,000 is all you’re going to get for that car even though you paid more than twice that only two years ago.  Man, an extra $10,000 would make a big difference right now.  $10,000 is more than you’ll ever see in one place in your entire life.

A fire also comes with sure-fire primordial visuals.  It is hard to conjure a mental image to go with of a lot of the radio news stories but a fire is great. I know what it looks like and they always tell me what it is worth.

I can be hard to watch with, unscented

I think my kids get it.  I think they understand that critical television-watching is a difficult obligation.  I think they appreciate it when I point out that three tiny translucent green jelly ninjas on an animated Indiana Jones mission to whack the fleas from your dog’s fur is not equal to thoughtful input to the flea collar purchase decision.

What I am trying to do to these impressionable young minds is inure them to the inanity. “Don’t fall for it,” I say. I want them to be offended by the insulting stupidity of more than half of what they see for not less than 10 of every 30 minutes spent in front of the television.  That means I can be hard to watch with but I am hopeful that the kids have been hardened just a little more each time I jolt them out of the trance to explain that most people don’t go around the house snorting things that they already know to smell really bad, and, therefore, most people don’t need the products that people who do that kind of thing might need. And don’t be one of them.

Who could have guessed that by the time the species had figured out how to combine nuclear fusion, natural disasters, and factory food production techniques into a kind of wide area poison delivery system, we would also be spending, annually, more than 1 billion of our increasingly worthless dollars (and yen) on air freshener in a spray bottle.

We don’t allow it in my house. All flavors of that shit are nauseating. My wife says that watching TV with me is nauseating. She hasn’t attempted to Febreeze me while we’re watching TV but you can see where I am going with this.

I wonder how the stuff is selling in Japan. I expect that rotting radioactive spinach smells pretty bad.

Continue the ongoing process of getting there

The news was that ‘The Y’ had decided to withdraw financial support for a new facility to which it had long ago made a promise and a fairly firm promise, so far as I can tell from what I heard… I guess.

The interview was with a spokesperson of The Y, someone right up there.  The story was sussable only by picking through the interviewer’s mumbled attempts to give no offense and also by giving careful scrutiny to the interviewee’s determined effort to reveal nothing that might be mistaken for a fact.  The story was simply that The Y doesn’t have the money to put into every project it had hoped and had to chop somewhere.   (Why The Y hasn’t enough money wasn’t discussed.   If you won’t admit that you’re a little short this month, you sure don’t need to explain how you go that way.)

But never mind the story.  Let’s talk about what it helps to illustrate, something I have decided to call a Fact Avoidance Disorder (FAD).  I am working on a really complicated construct that should see FAD included in the DSM on the next revision, or the one after that (or later even, because it’s the process that matters, as you shall learn.)

At the heart of FAD and of my model is the emerging if not already dominant human preference for the process over the goal.  Whereas getting there used to be only half the fun, it seems that it is now all of the fun or ,at least, there is no fun in arriving, nor being there.  To prove this, I hold up an increasingly evident expressive language disorder which I  have decided to call NFEV for never-fucking-ending-verbs.

NFEV expressive language disorder is perfectly exemplified by the completely whack sentences that The Y’s up-there spokesperson offered as fact-free responses to the CBC’s meek enquiries.  To wit, we did not hear that The Y is out of cash and therefore out of the deal.  What we heard (inhale) is that The Y has an ongoing commitment to continue to proceed with the process of planning in partnership with the muted trumpet plaints like the adult voices in It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  Wah.  Wah.  Wa-a-a-h.  (And exhale)

FAD manifests in NFEV and you never have to ask “Are we there yet?”

If getting there is not merely half but actually all the fun, then you don’t have to worry about never getting there.  Nor should you worry about running out of money because you can still and you rightly should remain forever committed to continuing to proceed with the process… on a go-foward basis.

I know a pleasant fellow who often promises his audience “the ability to be able to” something, anything.  What we have here, then, is a variation on FAD that places the onus for continuing to proceed (wah-wah-waaah) on the audience members and artfully avoids any responsiblity to actually do something, anything (i.e., for getting there, in the figurative sense.)  The variation is RAD: responsibilty avoidance disorder.

I’m still working on all of this but so far, I like the way this is coming along.  I hope it never ends.

So I did

I need a break from the “I wanted to…” crap.

According to your email, you wanted to welcome me (to yet another goofy and very very hard to figure out service that I signed up for with the highest of hopes.)  Some of you wanted to let me know about (an upcoming webinar for simpletons, though I have never attended one, ever, and I am not interested in the least.)  You wanted to this and you wanted to that.

Sometimes you say you just wanted to do whatever it is or was that you wanted to do and I don’t know if you mean just lately or if you mean to diminish the significance of what you wanted to do.

The implied apology is what irritates me most.  “Sorry for sticking my butt in your face but I just wanted to…”  You’re not sorry.  The VP Marketing is not sorry.  The shareholders are not sorry.  What you wanted was to push a little harder.  Huhn.  Again.  Huhn.

I don’t care what you wanted.  That’s not why I gave you my email address.  All marketers with the notable exception of me are too young to understand this: you show absolutely no respect and worse, you think that if you have tricked me then you have succeeded.  Its shameful.

Here’s what I want.  I want a straight up thank you, first, followed by simple instructions on what to do next.  And what to do next had better be dead simple or I will abandon your junky service as swiftly as I have abandonned all the others.

Ah, but that’s another one of my pie-in-the-sky wishes.  Simple has fallen out of favor.  In fact, an entire generation has been trained to believe that dropping their drawers may be complicated and time consuming, but it is somehow worth the frustrating effort.  It isn’t.  Where is the reward for sharing all of my personal information with every marketer on teh planet?  It freaks me out that so many millions of drawer-droppers flock daily to the Facehead, which is as impenetrably goofy a service as I have ever come across.  The goofiest.  And devoid of value to all but the marketers.

Today, I saw a post (or poke or pimple or whatever it is called) on my Hairbook page (or wall or whatever it is called.)  The writer coughed up a fur ball that said he was simply loving his solar-powered watch.   Utter vendor-sponsored crap, of course, and the guy looks a perfect ass for saying it but what frightens me is not that this lame lame lame imitation of authenticity found its way into the open.  What frightens me is that hundreds of solar-powered watches have since been sold on the strength of his paid-up protestation.

I just wanted to gag.

Heidi Linkletter

Last night I watched a latter-day rip-off of or homage to Art Linkletter (via Bill Cosby) and Kids Say The Darndest Things.   Actually, I only watched a few minutes of it.  Didn’t need to watch much more.  Nothing much happens, which makes it a lot like an ordinary life, but from the next room I could hear my 12 year old son and my older-than-that wife, his mother, laugh hard, laugh out loud, more than once.

Heidi Klum is the ‘host’, if that’s the right word for it, and it’s pretty much Linkletter’s gentle show in reprise: in every way unlike anything else on the air these days.  Oh, there are a few of those America’s Funniest Videos videos but without the ‘what an idiot’ subtext.  And there’s no potty mouth.  No insults.  No greedy self-interest.  None of the sad reality crap that viewers and advertisers seem to love so well.   It’s kind and gentle and sometimes funny but not funny at the expense of a minority or a deformity or a lack of judgement.

Low budget, too.  Lower budget, I would guess, than anything else on television.

The big differences between Art Linkletter’s and Heidi Klum’s version of Kids Say The Darnedest Things are:

(1) Heidi Klum,
(2) Heidi Klum behaving like a nitwit partly for the benefit of the kids she ‘interviews’ but primarily for the benefit of everybody who thinks that all supermodels are vacuous ectomorphs with what Mitch Hedberg called “hair with equal shine and bounce.”

I have to tell you, though: you will feel weirdly righteous and cleaner than a spit sink after watching just a few minutes of Seriously Funny Kids hosted by Heidi Klum.   And “you better hurry ’cause it might not last.”

The Guy is a Thin-Skinned Sociopath

And everybody who works for the guy is a  self-serving little toady.

Now, that may seem a sweeping indictment based on flimsy evidence but when the whole creaky chocolate machine is locked away behind double doors from the set of a Kafka/Gilliam nightmare, the guy is taunting me.  Show me some capacity for fair and open discourse and I will retract the invective.

And when the guy threatens to pull the wings off the gadfly, he threatens to stifle debate… the kind of debate that got him his  job, the thin-skinned sociopath.  It smacks of insecurity and petulance.  It’s childish, really.  Wah.  I’m taking my dumptruck and I’m going home.

The chances are better than even that the guy is 180 degrees wrong about so many things… and the gadfly does a fair job of pointing this out.  Why am I not surprised?

The guy MUST be stopped.  Weigh in, please.  We need the gadfly.  http://www.friends.ca/ILoveCBC/fb.php

Reality TV is porn

This topic deserves far more than I can give it but let me give it at least this: Reality TV, or, as Hollywood would have  it, “unscripted” television, is porn.  Reality TV is porn because money is the new nasty sex.  Reality TV is porn because both feature piss-poor actors only half-faking the real thing for a shaky camera in a badly lit bedroom in a basement.  Trad porn caters to prurient interests.  Reality TV caters to envy and greed.  And if you’re a fan of either, or both, you’ll sit through a whole lot of uber-boring “story” to get what you came for.

Reality TV is porn and the proof is in the un-disguised and mercilessly repetitive use of the same simple, stultifying technique in every porn production and in every reality TV production: the money shot.

Do you change the channel, pick up a book, or leave the room just before the goofy expert reveals the price/value/profit/loss on all those pawnshop/garbagepicker/storage locker auction shows?  How about when the whole happy town yells ‘move that bus’ (on cue and without benefit of a script, amazingly) but then it cuts to some quicker picker upper shit before returning and repeating—prithee spare me the numbing repetition of reality TV—repeating the yelling at the bus driver bullshit and then finally they actually move the fucking bus?  Are you still waiting?  Of course you are.

The money shot precipitates an orgasmic release of panting pent-up anticipation.  You get to find out.  Do they like it?  (It’s free.  They better like it, the ungrateful pricks.)  Is it really a three quarter of a million dollar fucking Sheraton table?  (Hey!  I think there’s one like that at Aunt Winnie’s, above the garage.)  Is she gonna say yes to rehab?  (What a fuck up.)  Is the shifty little bastard gonna cop to shooting the other dude for twelve bucks worth of weed?  Can they break him?

Wait for it.  Wait… wait… yes!  Yes!  YES!

Man that was good.  How was it for you?  Smoke?