So, instead of the TV in roomie's bedroom cutting on at 0600 with the blaring noise of the local TV weatherdude cranked up to 11, it was organ music. Crap. Check the other networks... same thing.
CNN? Yup. Well, certainly CNN Headline News won't... nope, they're covering it too. Of course FOX is. And MSNBC is Leaning Royalward. Even The Weather Channel is discussing the forecast over Westminster Abbey.
Sweet Buddha on a bicycle, what is this? "One small step for a groom; one giant leap for all bridekind?"
I left the TV on CSPAN, which thankfully couldn't find an angle on the wedding and was re-airing old congressional committee footage, and went to make coffee.
Tam! You are totally going to miss the Feeding of the Crocs!
ReplyDelete-Joe in PNG
Glad to drive truck everyday in pa md and de,and for my ipod most of all! I drown it all out,regularly....
ReplyDeleteCIII
Just a small family affair ensuring future generations their souvenir plates.
ReplyDeleteMy wife observed to me that the media treat the Euro-Royals this because that's their preferred method of treating any inhabitant of the White House with a "D" after their name. They're just waiting for the rest of the US to follow suit.
ReplyDelete@ Blackwing, reading your comment I immediately had this image if Mrs. O in a Veruca Salt tantrum...
ReplyDelete"I want a royal procession! I want it now!"
:)
I'll assume Miss Party Pooper you did not dump a magazine or two for Royal Wedding Happy Time.
ReplyDeleteGerry
I'm boggled that anyone even bothers to switch the teevee on, or owns one.
ReplyDeleteIf I want to see a TV show, I buy it on dvd (the best stuff is old anyway), or fire up a bitorrent client..
Yes, I was all smugly superior that way for many years.
ReplyDeleteI still don't own one.
My roommate does, though.
You may find this hard to grasp as an apparently professional student, but some people have these things called "jobs", some of which require access to, in some shape or another, a television set.
I've been ignoring the news about this, too - in fact, I didn't even realize it was scheduled for this morning until I saw it plastered all over the interwebs when I logged in today - but I do have to give Flt Lt Wales proper credit for this:
ReplyDelete"Britain’s future King will walk down the aisle wearing his bright red tunic from his honorary position as colonel of the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army which has spent the last six months deployed in Afghanistan, where three of their members were killed in action. [...] However, St James’s Palace officials confirmed that William had instead taken the step of using his highest ranking uniform, partially to honor those servicemen who lost their lives in combat."
Dislike of monarchy aside, I do admire the determination of both he and his brother to actually serve in the military, and their desire to actually serve in combat like their fellows, rather than sit back and rack up the commissions based on their inherited positions like they could. They both got gypped when Harry's service in Afghanistan was exposed. Prince William's decision to go in to SAR rather than give up on the idea of active service speaks well of his character, and makes me think he could actually end up being worthy of his title.
Bread and circuses... and I think Blackwing's wife pretty much wins.
ReplyDeleteemdfl
Sweet Buddha on a bicycle, what is this? "One small step for a groom; one giant leap for all bridekind?"
ReplyDeleteThe radio played an ad for a local gun show. Then ran a clip of the bride and groom exchanging vows.
This was on the country station. The whipsaw sure 'nuff woke me right up.
@Tam
ReplyDeleteI have a pretty good imagination, in addition to having worked* for quite a time after high school before I enrolled at a university.
But I can't imagine what kind of job involves watching TV. Something ad-related? Unless you meant stuff like security guards watching CCTV.
Almost all the information that's on TV can be found elsewhere..
*IT. Looking back, I'm glad I managed to get fired though(being rude, no less). The money was good, promised to be spectacular in a decade, but it was like working for extortionists. Morally speaking, there was no risk of getting shot or kneecapped for fucking up.
Better to like one's work and be okay with it than to pull the equivalent of $300K yearly, but have little free time and a lot of regrets.
I don't mind at all that the royalty anachronism still exists today. I'm amused at all the childish excitement exhibited by those with no skin in the game.
ReplyDeleteTV? Last I saw, the "off" switch works. I like to watch college football. If God's not a Longhorn, why are sunsets burnt orange? I like to watch car racing. I drove race cars for twenty-five years.
What somebody else dislikes is totally irrelevant to my life. I give about as much credence to the anti-TV people as I would to the political views of our so-dearly-beloved TOTUS.
Giggle-snort.
I blame Disney. Every four-year-old girl's birthday party I've attended recently has featured the "Disney Princesses" themed paper products.
ReplyDeleteYeah, same thing happened to me this morning. I ended up watching a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" repeat on the Chiller Channel.
ReplyDeleteI watch the local TV EyeWash news at oh-dark-thirty in the morning for a couple of specific purposes:
ReplyDelete- Local traffic report (is my commute a parking lot?)
- Local weather report, right after the traffic (do I ride the bike today, or will it snow?)
- Local murders...because a dead body is the only violent crime that gets reported any more
So when I turned on the tube this morning, it was only a minor pisser to see nothing but Royal Arse-Kissing run in the local news slot. Flipped to the Weather Channel for the local radar, then checked the traffic camera web site to look for any back-ups. Didn't hear any shootings and not too many sirens during the night, so I assume the carnage was minimal.
Thanks to the internet, the lame-stream can no longer control the flow of actual facts and data. It just requires a little bit of discernment on the part of the user to figure out what's information, and what's propaganda.
My personal feeling is that if the local news stations wish to stay relevent, they'll cover only local news, and do it without their enormous liberal-shithead bias, since they could actually excell at that if they so chose. As it is, they're being rendered irrelevent due to the ubiquity of small video cameras, and the availability of information 24/7 through other conduits.
The British royalty itself I couldn't care less about. It's the fawning by the lame-stream over it that's irritating. I think my wife's take on it is pretty accurate, too. Just warming us up for the hereditary presidency.
The hoopla over this wedding just leaves me thinking, "Didn't we fight a war with these guys specifically to get away from royalty?" Isn't that one of the major founding points of this country? Why are Americans so interested? If anything, that's un-American.
ReplyDeleteBlackwing1,
ReplyDelete"My personal feeling is that if the local news stations wish to stay relevent, they'll cover only local news, and do it without their enormous liberal-shithead bias, since they could actually excell at that if they so chose."
I just thought that bore repeating. :)
@Desertrat
ReplyDeleteTV massively distorts the worldview of a lot of people.
I've seen evidence suggesting that people are more afraid of being the victim of crime today than they were forty years ago.. when crime was much higher. All because murders and mayhem boost ratings.
There's an off switch, but why'd people turn off something that's both bad for their mind(a multi year study among 60-something people found that people who watched the most TV experienced the greatest loss of intellectual ability.. in contrast to those who played board games, read a lot, etc) and pleasant.
I mean, it's bloody obvious people in most developed countries shorten their lives by overeating, yet they still do so. Doesn't matter to them that healthcare for the obese costs on average $30K more, or that they are going to die earlier.
Wall to wall coverage of social events may serve as an indicator that nothing major blew up or fell down recently. To the extent that I care, or believe the mediaites, I don't mind so much anymore.
ReplyDeleteI used to have a job where I was paid to watch TV on purpose and was smugly superior for that because we were developing the thing that let people not-watch what they didn't want-to and see what-else was on when they did - we were building the interactive on-screen guide.
ReplyDeleteThe smug zero-history internet yout's-people came along with no memory and thought they had done it already with a spreadsheet in a dfream or something - but they didn't know how TV works or about the vertical blanking interval that was an internet of its own, or have satellites out in space bouncing signals - or have the patents.
I have the patents. They're worthless but what the hell, the wall has some decor with pictures and arrows and stuff.
Some people still don't *get* what TV is, and have all sorts of theories about it... Cultural and stuff even, academic sounding stuff.
Chart Attack has a list of Ten Great Anti-Monarchy Songs.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.chartattack.com/features/2011/apr/28/ten-great-anti-monarchy-songs-to-capitalize-on-royal-wedding-fever
Not surprisingly, the artists all seem to be Subjects, not Citizens.
Oddly, though, Cart Attack seems to be a Subject (Canadian) product.
@Dirtcrashr...
ReplyDeleteTv, DVD player and other similar interfaces suck goat balls. I don't think I've ever come across one I've liked. So you say you had a hand in few? Great job!
BTW..
Philo Farnsworth wasn't impressed with TV programming, and until he saw the moon landing, he reportedly wasn't sure whether it's really good for something.
Internet of it's own? Really? I though the fundamental improvement internet brought is that you can also post stuff to it, not just get stuff from it... and I'm quite unaware of any TV set ever having some sort of long range broadcast function.
I have a vague suspicion that before the internet, people had to, like send their shit through telegraph(slighty better than pigeons), teletypes(wireless or not), faxes, modems or even actual mail. Must've been a major drag on all things..
You've officially become even more boring than TeeVee.
ReplyDeleteSo, where's my 'certified bore' t-shirt?
ReplyDeleteYou know I could use one..
Or if no t-shirt, gimme an IP ban. I collect those.
ReplyDeleteI'm particularily proud of the one I got from a certain sentimental, overly cultured* US writer. For suggesting, among other things, that anyone who fails to see that there is a housing bubble going on when shown the Shiller graph has his head stuck up his ass.
*guy has probably read more shakespeare than has ever been written, judging from his writings.
Killjoy. You probably don't watch "Jersey Shore" either. Oops, was I being sarcastic? Sorry.
ReplyDeleteCharles Pergiel,
ReplyDeleteYou can imagine how appalled I was when I started seeing references to someone named "Snookie" in conjunction with the topic of books, and consulted the Google to find out who this person was...
Out of sight out of mind and it's all a noise-machine.
ReplyDeleteIf watching a program when it's broadcast makes you an idiot, and watching that same program on DVD makes you smart, then what about watching it on Tivo?
ReplyDeleteJoe in PNG,
ReplyDeleteLLOL!
Tivo licensed from us. :-)
ReplyDeleteAw, Tam's all bent out of shape 'cause William is off the market now...
ReplyDelete(runs for the bunker)
Two billion people around the world watched the royal wedding on TV.
ReplyDeleteNot exactly a minor media event, even if anti-monarchists are agin it all.
I wanted to hear the music. Good hymns, the John Rutter was, well, late John Rutter and the "Ubi Caritas" is probably going to end up on the choral competition list for the next few years. Dang but it sounds hard! And "Crown Imperial" is just a majestic piece, even without it's connections to the RAF.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
@Außenseiter
ReplyDeleteMy ex-wife, who worked for the city schools, had two choices: have cable, or go in to every school board meeting. Flipping it on from home was a far more appealing option.
Oh, and regarding the wedding, every woman in the office came in late that day, and a few would get excited all day long if it was mentioned at all.
ReplyDeleteThe women at church this morning were even worse about it.