Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Pot, Breasts, Sex and Disaster

Watching the news Tuesday seemed very strange, surreal and jarring. A veritable cornucopia of chaos assaulting my news junkie senses.

Medical marijuana seems like a big story. There are votes scheduled in Los Angeles and several other states to legalize pot for medicinal purposes.
This story ran next to the controversial recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force that women under 50 do not need routine mammograms and that breast self-exams are mostly ineffective.

At least if a woman gets breast cancer and lives in the right place, she'll be able to blaze up a doobie to ease the pain.

The Fort Hood shooter is still in the news. Today's stories focused on internal probes being undertaken by the Army and the Department of Defense to figure out how the shooter, a Islamic extremist and Army Psychiatrist "slipped through the cracks." This came on the same day the Army reported that suicides for the year will break last year's terribly sad record.

Note to TV people: Just because both stories have the word "Army" in them doesn't make them linked. Even if they do make your show "flow."

Note to Army and Air Force people: Pull your help wanted ads for psychiatrists for for a while. I'm nowhere near Fort Hood. How tasteless must they appear to those close to that tragedy?

Plenty of Sarah Palin today. She willingly walks into television studios to bathe in the media spotlight while bashing said media for coverage that she claims is unfair, sexist and mean.

She is like the relative who comes over for Thanksgiving and does nothing but bitch about the food you serve. It didn't look like Oprah held a gun to her head.

She chose to do this. She could stop.

My favorite story of the day was that the NFL fined the 84-year old owner of the Tennessee Titans $250K for flipping off the crowd at the Titans game versus the Buffalo Bills. Of course, it was captured on mobile video.


If he owns the team, clearly the family has enough money to keep gramps on his meds. What does he do when he gets bad pudding at the home? What I don't get is that both teams are 3-6 this year. Why was Bud flipping off the Buffalo fans? That the team they root for is as mediocre as the team he owns?

So what does all this mean? All these disparate stories bombarding all of us, all day every day?

I'm not sure, but I would love to hear what people think. How do you set your personal filter for all these crazy stories?

After absorbing all of this, I now understand the romance of thinking the world will end in 2012.

Fake disasters are much easier to deal with than the real ones.

Bill Salvin

No comments:

Post a Comment