Craig's Blog

A Company of Soldiers

PBS will be airing what is being billed as an important documentary on the Iraq war seen through a group of US soldiers. It's a Frontline show, whose journalism I find to be well done. Anyway since this is a real life, gritty realization of the kind of shit our soldiers go through to police the cities in the Sunni triangle, there is a fair amount of curse words uttered. Since everyone is afraid of the big bad wolf, FCC, Frontline has an editted version where the cursing is editted out. This is to be distributed to the more “conservative“ areas of the country or where the Parents Television Council (PTC) will be watching. This group should of course be nuked but since private citizens are not allowed to nuke each other we have to deal with these assholes. According to this article the number of FCC complaints hovered around 350 a year until the PTC figured out to manipulate the system. In 2003 there were 240,000 complaints, of which 99.8% of them were from these nazis. So is this democracy? A pinhead small minority is dictating to us what we can and can't view? I looked at the PTC website and I can't believe the content. They actually have streaming video available to ANYONE regardless of age of what they consider the worst tv clips of the week. Un-fricking-believable! What a bunch of hypocrites! In any case this is show about war, where people die and are maimed in real life, it's rough and it's real. Anyone offended by cursing will probably not be watching this, nor do I expect children to sit down and watch a news program about war. It's a relative thing folks, not absolute you ninnys. You know the ironic thing here is that Americans claim to love tv reality shows, yet apparently some of them don't really care to watch real reality. What does that say about us?

Grammys

Every year I usually make fun of the Grammy awards, since the judges were so out of touch with the real music scene it was laughable. I've heard rumors that they were attempting to change their ways and get with it before the MTV awards eclipsed them as the big musical award show of the year. I watched this year and was pleasantly surprised. It was a lot of fun watching it, they had some great acts performing and the bands awarded seemed reasonable to me. There's not too many places where you could have Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, Allman Brothers and Lynard Skynard do a medly of classic southern rock hits and then after the commercial break have Queen Latifa do a jazz number. Or have Mellisa Etherridge do a breathtaking rendition of Janis Joplin's Piece of my Heart and then have Usher and James Brown sing and dance together. Then have Green Day perform their popular punk rock hit American Idiot. Wow. I've said it in this blog before but why the hell can't we have radio stations that have this much diversity?

Mardi Gras/Cell phones/Over consumption

Mardi Gras is upon us again. I'm going with Annette tommorow for the big parade. Meeting her sister, fiance, other friends there. I always find it strange that St.Louis gets weird once a year for this event. Transvestites, costumes, tons of music. Its like you're in a different town for a day. I probably won't stay the whole day, let Annette catch a ride back with her sister, but I do like being immersed in the craziness for awhile. The charm kind of wears off after awhile though, sort of like, what's with all these freaks! haha. I should have acted and got my new cell phone plan this week, my new phone will have a camera in it <wink><wink><nudge><nudge>. Another item I don't plan on using though other than when some girl shakes her ta ta's at me. Just give me a phone that works 99.9% of the time, good reception and long battery life. No games, no ringtones, no camera, no email, no web browser, just a plain vanilla phone that has solid basics. They don't exist, I looked all last month. Bullshit. Sort of like asking for a new home with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a garage. Can't happen, you have to buy 4 bedrooms, 3 car garage, 2 stories, 3 baths, skylights, atriums, vaulted ceilings, oversized kitchen, bay windows, etc. Why do companies have to go after such huge margins on products these days? Big money, no whammys. Welcome to the USA.

Free books - looking for a good home

Well I had some old science books that I was going to pitch and decided against it since Chris would lecture me if he found out. So I packed them up and sent them off to him. Before I did however I entered them in my bookcrossing.com bookshelf. Basically it's a website where you enter your book and it gives you a url to write in the front cover of the book. Then you drop your book off somewhere random and hopefully whoever picks it up will report back on the website that they picked it up. Sort of leave a cookie crumb trail of your free book. Anyway the post office tore the package and lost the books somewhere between here and there. The books seemed to be controlled by fate. Let's hope that my lost books will find a home somewhere. At least there's a chance that I'll be notified.

NHL

In the latest hockey news, it seems the NHL owners and players are still trying to come to an agreement. Most likely the season will get cancelled this weekend to take advantage of the Super Bowl coverage, making the announcement minor in comparison. Apparently the owners and players met from 1 pm to 11 pm and didn't resolve anything. How can you meet for 10 freaking hours and not come to any agreement?!? Who are these people? Morons? Who sits at a table for 10 hours and talk about basically 2 or 3 items of contention and not come up with anything? I've heard tortures that are less painful! I'm no expert on player expectations but I don't understand why they don't look at the NFL and NBA and their salary caps and realize, hey it really does work. The league and teams aren't always on the edge of bankruptcy, players are paid well, balanced competition and those leagues have a high standing in the fan's hearts. Am I missing something here? Actually I haven't missed hockey at all and I'm afraid neither has anyone else. Which is the real killer. You always have your hard core fans who will come back no matter what. It's that middle tier fan that is in danger of losing interest in hockey and could banish hockey to the same status as soccer is in this country, an oddball sport that the rest of the world loves but we just don't get unless little Mikey is playing in it this weekend.

Entropy violators

I constantly get emails at work notifying me of company policies, news, events, blood drives, servers going down, etc. But sometimes I just gotta scratch my head and wonder what the f*ck were they thinking. Case in point. Awhile back we got this email from somebody at the office across the street claiming they found a smashed radar detector in the parking lot and wanted to know if anyone would claim it. Now I work at a very large company in St.Louis that has several offices and many parking lots in the area. The next day this person sends out another email informing us that nobody has claimed the smashed radar detector yet. Ok that lit a fire under me. I decided people like this need to arrested and charged with a new crime, entropy violation. Their punishment? Well I think they need to painted with blackbody paint and set in an unlit room for 24 hours until such time as the entropy they stole is reestablished in this locality. Afterwards they must apologize to all of us for ripping off another tick on the great entropy clock.

Diamond cam

Ok I found this article on CNN about Fox installing tiny eraserhead sized cameras on the football field in time for the superbowl this Sunday. Similar to the “Diamond Cam“ they had during the baseball playoffs. Please tell me who wants to see an ant's viewpoint of homeplate? Much less the 20 yard line? Am I missing something here? Are people becoming braindead to the marketing fools at big TV stations like Fox? Is this the best that Fox can come up with this year? Hey everybody, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.