Craig's Blog

Weather

What is it with local news station and their holy men, their seers or more widely known as - weathermen. Watch the local news and they slowly feed you out a bit of weather news here and there always with the promise.. stay tuned and we'll show the radar, tommorow's forecast, next week's outlook, pollen count, etc. Meanwhile you put up with these talking heads regurgitating “unnewsworthy” items off the teleprompter. Local “news”, now that's a whole blog in itself. I'll leave that one for later. But to keep their viewing audience, who obviously are only interested in the only real local news which is the weather, they tease them with “more weather coming up”. Total bullshit. I refuse to watch local news because of this. And to boot they treat these weathermen as some kind of dieties, like we be lost souls without their knowledge. I got news for you, most of these turds who call themselves metrologists are your future anchormen. This is just a step on the ladder for them. All weather data is gathered from the AMS and the station's local radar image. It's then formatted into colorful displays and animated talk to help sell the weather spot. I dare any local news station to not have a weather spot but instead before the commercial break and for 5 seconds after the break, display these 3 images - local radar image, national radar and the 5 day forecast. Anyone can read a radar map, red means bad, yellow means soccer practice may get cancelled and green means close the kitchen window. Duh!? You don't need a pretty boy with a bunch of meterology titles which can be purchased anywhere (did you know anyone can be member of the American Metrological Society?) to tell us this. I also challenge local news to deliver balanced news. For every murder, fire, car accident, include something positive like a local hero story, interview the family of someone who just recovered from a successful heart operation, interview the lottery winners, play a clip from the most popular local song or movie. Shit there's so much more they could do to make the local news something people would enjoy watching and feel more apart of the city instead of waiting for the fricking weather.

Winnie Cooper

Remember Winnie Cooper from the tv show the Wonder Years? She was Kevin's heartbreaker in the show. I liked the show, good storylines about growing up. I was over catching up on Wil Wheaton's blog and he commented he stays in touch with her and that she's in some lingerie magazine spread. What!? Unfortunately the jpgs are gone from the web site . I checked her web site out and dang she grew into a little hottie and picked up a Math degree from UCLA to boot. Brains and beauty... go figure. Hey anyone out there have those jpgs of her mirrored somewhere, my perverted self would be eternally grateful.

Super Size Me!

Annette and I watched a fascinating documentary last night called Super Size Me. I doubt I'll ever eat McDonalds after that. This guy decided to perform an experiment to only eat McDonalds food for 30 days. He had himself checked out by 3 doctors beforehand, he was in top physical condition, healthy, correct weight, low body fat, etc. The doctors drew blood every week, examined him, weighed him, etc. Three weeks in he was having chest pains, mood swings, felt like crap. His doctors urged him to stop because his liver was failing just like an alcholic's would on a 3 week binge. He gained 27 pounds in 30 days. He said he'd feel depressed or down but once he ate a Big Mac his mood went way up, almost like an addiction. He interviewed people during the month - school kids, people who eat at McDonalds, industry food groups and others. I was shocked what they feed kids at school. We never had a choice, you got a plate of food and that was it. Today they bring in french fries, hamburgers, pizza and get this CANDY and SODA!!! This is in the cafeteria! He filmed kids leaving the checkout with their plates full of fries, Snickers bars and Cokes. What!?!? I did like the song he opened the movie with, Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen. Very appropriate. The stats for this country in comparison to the rest of the world were awful. Fattest country with dropping intelligence. To pull a line from Animal House, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son”.

The Wave

Way back in the 1980's in one of my more boring moments I turned on the tv and flipped on an Afterschool Special. Remember those shows? They were always on between 4-6 pm in the pre-Oprah days. The themes were about teenagers and how they deal with growing up. Most of them were kind of stupid and always tried to pull a tear or two. Lot of kid stars got their start on the show, such as Scott Baio and Kristy McNichol. Anyway I never liked watching them but like I said I was bored and I wasn't in the mood to watch cartoons. The show that day was titled “The Wave” and was based on a true story about a high school teacher who said he could prove to his disbelieving history class that Nazism could flourish in the good ol USA as it did in Germany. So he came up with an experiment where he made himself the supreme leader and picked the unpopular kids to be his loyal followers. Filled their heads with propaganda how they were the chosen ones, gave them special status in class, etc. Well it started turning violent as the popular kids were getting beaten by gangs of these “Nazis”. So he realized he had to end the experiment and decided to have an assembly in the gym reminiscent of the Nazi displays of power in Berlin and Nuremborg. The kids all lined up in perfect lines, eyes fixed on their “leader”. The teacher pulled the curtain aside and up on the screen behind him was a video of Hitler. The kids of course had a breakdown as they realized the learned a tough lesson. It really blew me away afterwards. No country is safe from facist tendencies. I did some looking around for the video. It's a rare one, but I found it here for $28.99. I checked ebay, amazon, half and even my local libary, no dice. I did find a Real version of it that's free to download and view in a postage stamp sized window here. Here's the imdb link too. If anybody has a copy and would be so generous to send me a copy, why you'd make my day :)

Comic strip authors April fools joke?