Now, I don’t want to alienate any of the people in my audience who have chosen the Criminal Lifestyle, but I’ve had a thought formulate over the last year or so. It goes something along the lines of this: If you’ve done a crime, let us say you’ve robbed a bank for example, and you get arrested and put on trial for this and you plead “not guilty” and try to fight the charges. If you do that, I think you’re a bit of a jerk.

Now, the argument could be made that you’re already a jerk because you robbed the bank. Sure. Fair enough. But if you get caught and you did it, trying to get out of it by wasting the court’s time adds to your jerkhood. I’m all for trials to ensure that innocent people don’t get put in jail, but come on, you know you did it. You were there. And sure, you don’t want to go to prison. Who would? But that’s no reason to lie. Quit being so selfish! You were being selfish when you robbed that bank and look where that got you!

So maybe there should be an additional charge for people who are guilty but plead not guilty. Like, in addition to the robbery charges you get another year added to your sentence for wasting everybody’s time. Except that would probably just make things harder for people who actually are not guilty but they can’t prove it, so that’s no good. Man. Criminals are jerks.

Hey, you know something I find annoying? Music videos where the singer is standing there or sitting in a car or something and he’s looking right at the camera and he is ostensibly singing the lyrics, but his face is not showing the emotion of the lyrics? It’s like he’s just talking the lyrics? I think it may be some kind of attempt at being casual or something, but if you aren’t showing the emotion that the lyrics are trying to convey, just get out of the video and show me some cool visuals. Actually, I’ll take cool visuals over showing the singer pretty much every time.

Remember that, people who make music videos.

Not that I actually bother to watch very many music videos…

So, I lost my cable channels. I mean, I’ve not been paying for cable for years, but for some reason instead of getting the basic channels one is supposed to get, I was getting an eclectic mix of networks with no rhyme or reason.

I was getting TVTropolis, which was good for getting sitcom reruns, something everybody should enjoy at least now and then. I was getting A&E, and though it was no longer the A&E I remembered from my youth with documentaries and stuff, I watched the occasional crime show or really censored episodes of the Sopranos on occasion. I had Spike, which is a monstrously stupid channel from what I could see, but they had Star Wars on, pretty much nonstop. PBS had some science programs worth watching, but mostly I just watched kids shows like Effing Super Why. Also, there was an informercial channel which could amuse if you were in the right mood and maybe one or two sports channels that I pretty much never watched.

Basically, I was getting enough channels to flip around a little bit before I realized how much television sucked and would move on to something else. But now I only get the three basic Canadian channels or whatever. Now realizing that there is nothing on happens faster than ever before.

I may not watch all that much television, but unlike some I don’t lambast the entire medium. There are things I appreciate about it. In a way even watching it alone seems more like a social activity than watching DVDs or downloading episodes of things. It seems less canned on television somehow. I suppose that is, in part, because of the unfortunate presence of commercials which, though annoying, are at least a sign of companies trying to keep you up to date on their activities. Also, much more positive than commercials, is the fact that you can get breaking news interruptions. If I’m watching a rented movie and the Queen sets herself on fire and then declares war on the Vatican and then has a swordfight with the Pope, I’m gonna miss the whole thing, but if I’m watching most television networks you’d think they’d interrupt programming to say “Holy Shit, check this out!”

When I watch programs online, such as the Daily Show and Colbert, I guess I get the ads (the annoying one of the connections to the outside world) but even then I lack the other thing I like about the medium of television. Sometimes I am definitely in the mood to say “Okay, TV, let’s see what you’ve got for me.” Sometimes I might find something worth watching. An episode of some show I didn’t know existed, or an old one I had forgotten or some movie from the eighties, who knows? As far as I am aware there is no way for me to just “flip around” on the Internet.

I mean, YouTube comes close to that level of flip-aroundedness, but… It has also somehow succeeded in having more garbage than television. Go figure.

The Archie comic strip seems to devote more time to the teachers eating in the cafeteria than it does to the students eating in the cafeteria. Is it strange that they do that, or is it strange that I noticed?

Haiku!

I did a haiku
in my last post on this site.
Here is another.

Also, I would like to rebut against a study I heard on the radio a week ago. They said that people who shaved regularly were more likely to be happy and say that they were living their dreams, with the implication being that shaving regularly was in part the cause for that happiness. I would say that maybe, just maybe, they have it backwards and that people who are living their dreams are more likely to shave. Just my opinion as someone who does not shave regularly and is, you can be sure, not living his dreams.

Also, what the chunks kind of study is that?

So there’s those new high-tech scanners that make a 3-D image of your naked body, right? I guess they’re coming to the local airport right now so I’m seeing discussion in the papers of whether such an invasion to personal privacy is worth it for that security. It sometimes seems like I am supposed to hold the opposite view considering all my other beliefs, but I really don’t consider those scanners all that bad. Sometimes I think that people are a little too reactionary when it comes to “Orwellian” stuff like this. In 1984 the fact that Big Brother Is Watching seemed much less evil to me than the fact that Big Brother was lying to the populace and suppressing thought and actively manipulating minds and torturing and all that. Now I’m not saying that the government should be tapping everyone’s phones and have flying cameras peering into their windows, but being scanned before you get on a plane does seem perfectly reasonable to me. I guess people consider this one of those situations where we’re on the slope and in danger of falling further, but it just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

The only compelling argument against it I’ve seen is the people who say it wouldn’t really make things that much safer. But even then as someone who has been patted down and had his bags searched and all that, I’ll take the scans just for the expediency it seems to offer against our current system that also doesn’t work.

Of course, as always, my preferred method of making air travel safer would be to try to make a world where people don’t see blowing other people up as preferable to the lives they have to live. But that might be a bit more work.