Great week for BYU football–and I say that without even knowing the results of our Saturday game against Jake Locker and the Wash. Huskies. We’re free of the Mountain West conference, its garbage TV “network,” and the sulfuric stench of commissioner Craig Thompson.
And I just might be done having to Slingbox games from California so I can watch them in NYC.
The best part of the deal is that it cements ESPN as BYU’s best friend for the next 8 years. That is absolutely huge. They’re going to broadcast BYU home games and help with scheduling, and if you know anything about college football, you know that ESPN holds ALL the cards. Really, all of them. ESPN is The House, and BYU gets to play with The House’s money for the next eight years.
USA Today has the details
Granted, it’s the journalist’s job to find the craziest-but-still-believable quote and run it in the story, but this quote from a NYTimes article represents a line of thinking that seems to pop up frequently of late:
Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Florida, because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ,” and Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare.
Which religion is it that teaches people that the all-powerful God of the universe has a strong opinion about U.S. fiscal policy? To the extent that Jesus spoke of money, it was to disabuse his followers of the notion that money is at all important.
Render unto Obama what is Obama’s, and if you don’t like it, try to get more votes together next time around. But how about we let Jesus worry about more important things than the tax rate, shall we?
[Thanks to Jim for the link, and for the line "What ever happened to 'Blessed be the poor'…. I guess I was too busy to notice that there was a rewrite."]
P.S. — One more thought on that article: It seems Glenn Beck is now a victim of The Al Sharpton Paradox. His stature is tied to the preservation of the problems that he is purportedly trying to solve.
Are TV people stupid?
I’m sorry, let me rephrase that question to be more open-ended:
Why are TV people stupid?
I can’t answer the “why,” so I’ll try to address the “how.” Add your own gripes in the comments.
Exhibit A: Loud Commercials are Bad for Everybody
I get why commercials are so much louder than the show I’m watching. Advertisers think a loud commercial will grab my attention–but they’re idiots. For the past six years, if I watched a TV commercial it was because I WASN’T paying enough attention to remember to hit Fast Forward. And maybe some of the messaging in the commercials actually sank in, who knows? DVRs may not have been common six years ago, but they are now. Every viewer in my demographic is equipped with Fast Forward. If a commercial’s best hook for attention-getting is to blare, it’ll not only get skipped, it’ll get skipped by an annoyed viewer. That’s not good for the advertiser or the network (or the viewer). Continue reading →
I should say up front that I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell. I usually can’t make it all the way through his books (they get kind of repetitive after the first 150 pages or so), but his New Yorker articles are great, and I’m currently reading (and enjoying) What the Dog Saw, a collection of his best essays.
Two of the smartest people I know can’t stand him, and hate how popular he is among advertising-type people. Ad people are always trying to have a finger on the pulse of culture and new ideas, and to my friends’ chagrin, when Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point he became a marketer’s darling.
Gladwell’s weaknesses are that his writing tends to be formulaic, he’ll stretch to make facts fit hypotheses, and he puts too much emphasis on creating new buzzwords from old ideas. (All of those things are what endear him to hack marketing strategists–he’s just like them!). John Graham-Cumming posted a funny takedown of Gladwell’s quirks earlier today (“How to Write Like Malcolm Gladwell“).
Continue reading →
Can I just quickly make a sweeping statement about the history of human communication?
Talking sucks.
Seriously, I hate it. You’ve read those futurists’ visions of a dystopian world in which humans are all shut in their basements, connected to other humans only by email? Sounds great to me!
Seriously, lets look at the cons of verbal interaction:
1. No random access recall and no reliable record (what memories you do have of conversations are probably VERY unreliable and one-sided)
2. The timing is all wrong; you’re expected to reply immediately after being spoken to. After which you expect an immediate reply. Terrible way to arrive at thought-out conclusions
Continue reading →
