BLOG TO COMM

THE LATEST IN A LONG LINE OF BLOG TO COMM FLUFF FILLER POSTS---THE BEST OF 2007 SO FAR (ramble-on edition)

Don't worry lads and lasses, true there are some exciting and perhaps even life-affirming posts heading your way within the week (including my long-awaited by Bill Shute review of Brad Kohler's tome for our times ENERGY FOOLS THE MAGICIAN!), but for today I thought I'd just waste a little precious blog-space (and at the same time not disappoint any of you long-time BLOG TO COMM tuner-inners) by listing some of my fave-rave moments from the current year (or maybe even last few 'uns at it!) which is just barely one-fourth over so you KNOW this one's nothing more or less than a time killer imposed on myself in order to meet a weekend deadline! Consider it what you will (modern-day equiv. of one of Sydney Harris' "A Columnist's Thoughts At Large" pieces w/o the sappy liberal bent), though given my at-times blowhardy and long-winded nature I still hope to out-do what that pathetic wreck did in his entire career of McGovern-esque moosh! (For those of you who forget, and I explained it on the blog a few years back, Harris was a particularly touchy-feely columnist of English extraction who I guess could be considered the Christopher Hitchens of the sixties/seventies, only instead of being stuck in the acerbic seething-hatred-of-all-things-decent present day he was more or less ensconced in the Phil Donahue sense of heartbleed post-Kennedy sixties/seventies liberalism that one still sees even this far down the line when pandering politicians wanna get out the aging ethnic vote by appealing to their worse instincts. Of course, the real question of the day is why does the United States allow such rotten anti-Amerigan hateschpielers like Hitchens and annoying/cloying artsy/craftsy furriners like Harris into this country in the first place??? You'd think that somehow This Nation of Ours would be smart enough to bar these insidious elements from our shores while allowing the likes of Third Wayers, Front National Le Pen followers and other beneficial immigrant-types over here! Oh I forgot...at least those people are too smart to leave their land of birth which is why Europe is always exporting their rotten intellectual fruit [while importing their own hate-screeders who are leading to that continent's sad demise!] while we're supposedly not looking!)

BEST TEE-VEE SHOW (at least airing somewhere at this time): THE MUNSTERS!!! Don't get to watch much tee-vee as I used to ever since getting a dish hookup, but I try to be front and center for this mid-six-oh classic as often as I can. Even beats noted competitor THE ADDAMS FAMILY although the Gomez/Morticia sex angle was certainly hot stuff for forty-plus year-old sitcom fare! Also tops...LEAVE IT TO BEAVER though that one seems to jump across the schedule unexpectedly for no particular reason.

WORST TEE-VEE SHOW: Toss-up between MURPHY BROWN reruns on Nick at Night (I guess it's time for early-nineties nostalgia, which come to think of it sounds even worse than eighties nostalgia!) and these Bill Moyers specials that occasionally pop-up on PBS (I sometimes see the guy while channel-surfing and out of morbid curiousity watch a few minutes before my stomach begins the flip-flops...smug Great Society nostalgia will do that to a fella!). While I'm at it...WORST TREND ON BROADCAST TEE-VEE: the sudden lack of quality junk rerun programming on PBS! For awhile PBS was more'n eager to run old programming from BURNS AND ALLEN and BEST OF GROUCHO to even ALFRED HITCHCOCK or LOST IN SPACE depending on which stations your rabbit ears were able to pick up! Heck, I remember back in the eighties and nineties when channel 16 in Pittsburgh was running a whole slew of classic fifties/sixties wonders mixed in with the old movies and Britcom imports making them, as Wikipedia said in their entry almost like another independent station of the good ol' classic kind! (And I remember Kohler's letter to me about a decade back in which he, in typically Pittsburgh-minded glee, mentioned that THE HONEYMOONERS were returning to channel 16 after a forty-year gap...y'see, before becoming hitched up with PBS as a "sister station" to VHF biggie WQED channel 13, 16 was actually a CBS station which really does seem strange as far as television history and afflilation changes go!) But no more...and frankly, I thought it was great seeing those old JACK BENNY PROGRAMs complete with the Lucky Strike commercials which were excised on second run because frankly we can't have of those being aired, especially on educational tee-vee!

BEST TEE-VEE COMMERCIALS: The Geico "Even a Caveman Can Do It" ones where this catch-phrase always seems to hit a particularly raw nerve with a bunch of chic urbanized cavemen who appear on news programs to air their disgust and eat haute cusine while talking to apologetic execs. Not only do these ads make for fine satire during a time when freewheeling "humor" seems limited to George Carlin and Bill Maher making insulting jibes at the same hoi polloi they claim to embrace, but they thankfully they also show the true face of the entire guilt industry which, in shadier moments, has given way to sheet-chasing civil rights (hah!) lawyers and calamity-seeking "anti-defamation" leagues who don't mind dishing out the defamation themselves. A tee-vee pilot is planned, but you know it's gonna suck.

BEST NEW DISQUE OF THE YEAR: THE WEIRDNESS by the Stooges, and if you disagree then you are in the majority! But then again I quit thinking that the majority "made" things right back in high school when some teacher told me this was certainly not the moral way to go (a shocker, but time has proved that said teach was correct!) so for this once let me proudly stand with the minority!

WORST NEW DISQUE OF THE YEAR! Ain't heard anything nearly bad enough to quality, though who knows...the Content Providers may release something before December 31st clocks in thus making a bee-line for the number one spot in no time flat J. "Neo" Marvin asks "What is truth?" My response should be "What is a lame alternative San Francisco-based hack of a musician????" (Ans.-"Got a mirror handy?")

JUSTICE AT ITS BEST!: The acquittal of the Duke Lacrosse team members for kidnapping and rape. It was long-coming, but it's sure good to find out that those three upstanding specimen of manhood were not responsible for the so-called rape, which never did happed thus bursting the bubbles of a lot of the same sheet-chasers mentioned earlier as well as their white lackeys whom you see all over the place who are more concerned with their own perverted views regarding race and society than they are with justice. Of course, like the infamous Tawana Brawley debacle there still are some believers like this dame I heard about who was on THE VIEW (ABC-TV's modern day re-do of the old women's coffee clatch programs of the fifties on down) who said that these players only got away with it THIS TIME as if such occurances were was definitely everyday happenings in rich kid frat houses world wide, and those over-testosteroned athletes were just plum-lucky the good ol' boys got their act together and ruined the reputation of that fine young stripper who made all of those pertinent yet baseless charges! It kinda reminds me of when I was in second grade and my bitch of a teacher punished me hard for something I didn't do, and my parents actually told me that perhaps there was something wrong that I did which I didn't get punished for so more or less this was the get back for that indiscretion! Well, at the time I thought maybe they were right even though I couldn't think of anything I had done that was really deserving of the tongue-lashing and whipping I had receieved which must prove some occult point, though what that point is I do not know and if anyone feels the need to comment on it they know what to do! (Hint...comment box can be retrieved at the bottom of this very post!) ADDITIONAL NOTE: years later I reminded my folks about this and they thought it was a silly thing to tell me so I guess time does heal all squeals.

JUSTICE AT ITS WORST!: the Don Imus "controversy" which I wrote about in length here, which certainly makes me a braver soul'n all of those lefty blog-types who blabbed on in theor inimitable self-righteous garment-rending manner. Not only is this proof that some slurs are worse than others (like, you never will see people like Maher or Hitchens be forced to retract their idiot statements and apologize for the vicious untruths they've spewed!) but it's also safe to say that it's not the actions of Imus (a relatively harmless person on the social/political scene especially when compared to a few of his targets) who is the biggest threat to racial equality but once again the aforementioned shyster lawyers and self-proclaimed "spokesmen" who are setting their cause back at least thirty years with their Tarzan-esque chest-beating forays into utter conjecture and overt stupidity. Come to think of it, weren't racial tensions were at a low lo those three decades back? Maybe not (I don't recall the rebellious rap kultur and lack of self-determination in the black community but then again maybe I was comatose) so I guess I gotta give congrats to the likes of Sharpton, Jackson etc. for taking a problem that was starting to cure itself and finding downright rampant racial strife and class hatred anyways!

WORST GENERAL KULTURAL TREND: The fact that people who believe in birth control and want everyone on this planet (especially the lower echelons of our society) to cut down on their own populations don't use it themselves! Maybe they do, but not enough (I can think of at least two people out there in computerland who should have, as they say, cut the worm at the hole) and although 20th century smart mind G. K. Chesterton once said that the only good thing that comes from birth control is that their supporters are not multiplying themselves I'm sure even he'd be shocked to see that certain postmodern-thought types are in fact reproducing, and any rate that they do so is sure cause for alarm! But really, what I wanna know is, given the guttural and downright decadent/smarm lives these West Coast and Southern Hemisphere hatescreeders lead, are rectal births all that painful?