The Darwinism continues

I’ll be glad when this, the dullest round of The Show, gets over. The performers don’t get to sing long enough to really show their chops, and we all hope America does the right thing and culls the appropriate members of the herd (that never happens, though, and a really good singer got axed last week while a scary kid survived). Still, most of the softest members of the cast are gone, and — particularly with the women — we’re going to start to lose some really outstanding vocal talent right away, because that’s all that’s left.

The Man rains justice on a knucklehead

If I had to pick my No. 1 Rabid-Frothy Rant of 2006, it’d be this one, in which CNN went into another ‘news’ orbit over a dumbass kid who posted an obviously fake threat against NFL stadiums on a public online message board. Homeland Security got a whiff of it, dutifully told the NFL, and the hype was on.

And now, the knucklehead is in real trouble — the kind of trouble that will get him put in prison unless someone here gets a sense of proportion.

The long march

There are 615 days to Election Day 2008 as of this writing, and I’m not gonna make it. I’m not. With the recent Hillary/Obama snipefest already firing up the vast frothing political mediasphere/blogosphere (a ‘sphere’ that is much more vast than actual public interest), I don’t see how we sustain actual public interest for more than a year and a half.

Actually, we don’t. Public interest is more likely to bloom and fade in cycles as the election season crawls along. There will be some ramping up this fall, as we get close to the early elections and caucuses, and then the election calendar is so compressed that it virtually assures only the best-known/best-funded candidates can win the party contests. We all like to think that actual campaigning matters, but in this compressed primary environment, it’s really going to be all about the TV — particularly ‘paid TV,’ as in ‘campaign ads.’

And then we’ll have a nice, long — and I do mean looooong — lull until the 2008 political conventions.

It will be fascinating to see who emerges from this process. I’m not sure America can take another cheap, divisive, mean-spirited general election. I think it might be what America is going to get.

Pausing and thinking

Perhaps you’ve been following the recent Britney train wreck, or the Anna Nicole Smith disaster, or what’s going on with Lindsey Lohan (still a teen-ager, I believe). Perhaps you feel like you’ve been watching bits of snuff films instead of news coverage. If so, check out this video from a recent monologue by Craig Ferguson, host of CBS’ The Late, Late Show. He ties a pretty good bow around this issue and raises the sorts of questions that need to be raised.