Complaints

1:  It was Wednesday afternoon, I was just settling down for a nice drive listening to one of my favorite NPR/MPR programs, Talk of the Nation with the Political Junkie, and he'd just posed his riddle of the week. Usually I have no clue who was the most recent political sobebody to have done some obscure thing, but this time I came up with an answer and was waiting to hear if I was correct.

There was white smoke.

OK, nice for them, new Pope, things are gonna take a while with all the procedures and rituals he has to go through before we see who he is, blah blah balh. But what do they do? Instant cut away to go listen to the BBC.

I have come to hate the BBC news coverage. MPR gives us an hour at 2 PM every weekday. They're awful! Depending on who's doing the interview, they're frequently ignorant, obnoxious, or just plain stupid with their questioning. On many issues I already know more than they do, because, hey, I listen to MPR!

On Wednesday, they filled a whole self-important hour with "we're waiting". "we're excited", "you're excited: tell us why", "let's speculate on who it's going to be", "let's guess how long it's gonna take", "gee, the square is filling up", "how far did you come here from?", "everybody's facing the windows", "we're all still excited", "we're all still waiting", and 28 other versions of "We've got nothing to say."

A whole hour? Really? And these guys are supposed to be so good?

I have several useful buttons. Some on my cell take me right to MPR so I can voice my displeasure with their choice of vapid expectation versus interesting programming, which I did at length. Others on my radio can switch the channel to something more worth listening to, and easily back again to hear if there's any real news yet before away again.



2: I have a counter on this blog, telling me how many hits a particular posting has gotten. My record so far? 567! So while I parked this posting while going to do something else for a while, the blog flips back to that page, and in curiosity I check out the latest two, Adventure Day 1 and Day 2. It's weird. Day 2 has gotten more than twice the hits Day 1 has. What's going on with that, guys?  Who goes right to the middle of the story?



3: Yesterday morning KARE 11 was hyping some upcoming local Irish dancing, so I stuck around to watch a bit. I've been to Riverdance, picked up the VHS tape and watched it later. (Yes, it was years ago.) So you can gather I like the stuff. But KARE didn't impress me this time, no matter how many awards they've gotten in the past. So I whipped out the laptop to offer them some feedback:

"subject: STUDID STUPID STUPID!

Hey guys, I stayed a couple minutes late to watch your Irish dancers this morning. What I got, to my great frustration, for all but 3 seconds, was a bunch of bouncing torsos and half a screen of scrolls. Next time just pop a pack of preschoolers on a trampoline and tell us it's Irish dancing. We won't be able to tell the difference!

Your bottom screen scrolls don't make a difference when it's talking heads you're filming. I don't care how many pages Kim turns over, or who crosses their legs at the knee vs. the ankle. But, in case nobody has figured it out yet, the point of Irish dancing is the FEET!

No awards on this one, guys."