Vince started this thread here, and I started commenting so much I became a post of it's own here.

I throw a whole-hearted "I Agree" about the state of news today. In my simplistic mind, news should be something that has the potential to directly affect me, my family, my neighborhood, my state, my country, or my world. You probably would make a category for special interest news (science, technology, business, cooking, etc) Each news cast, be it local or national, would cover the appropriate news items.

I now find my watching news casts spotlighting what is news and what isn't.

• Murder of 2 babies in downtown apartment, not news.
  
• Julie Roberts gives birth to twins, not news.
  
• Ken Jennings losing on Jeopardy (personally interesting, not news).
  
• New speed bumps being installed in my community, News!!!
  
• Baby seat being recalled for faulty restraint. News!!!
  
• SpaceShipOne makes secdond trip into orbit, Special Interest News.
  

Obviously my news cast would be insanely boring by contemporary standards, but it would contain actual news, not sensationalism.

It's disturbing how little news actually makes it into the nightly news reports. Even NPR, which is far beyond the reporting standards of local news and better than national news, has it's fair share of non-news. They certainly reports on murder and strife, they just make sure it is happening in such remote locations as Iraq and Sudan, and that the newscast involvs the term terrorist.

Now I'm off the watch more of my Benny Hill DVD's. This will cure any newscast related blues.

Update : I found this definition of News on Dictionary.com

News
pl.n (used with a sing. verb)

1. • 
     Information about recent events or happenings, especially as reported by newspapers, periodicals, radio, or television.
     
   • A presentation of such information, as in a newspaper or on a newscast.
2. New information of any kind: The requirement was news to him.
3. Newsworthy material: “a public figure on a scale unimaginable in America; whatever he did was news” (James Atlas).
   

This strikes me as an almost circular definition. If I ask 'What is news?' The answer turns out to be 'Whatever is reported in the news.' Not a satisfying answer.

I had an amazing day today. It's one of those days that makes you look both ways before crossing the street because you know, just know, that karma must be repaid for your good fortune. Here's how my magic day went down.

It started with my morning walk from the remote parking lot. It was a cool morning, traffic was light, and I read a few pages in teh third book of the Chronicles of Narnia series. Nothing remarkable here, but nice. I ended up parking in the metered parking lot close to the office/library as I was running a bit late and we had a staff meeting that was mandatory. By the end of my walk, I was thirsty and wanted a soda. I didn't have my bladder buster, so instead I went to the vending machines for a can of soda. I put my 60 cents in the machine, pressed the button, and was presented with a loud crash and a can of soda. Followed by another, and another, and another, and another. It keeps going on for 12 cans. The friendly machine decided to dump a 12-pack of ice cold soda for my refreshment. I was happy at my good fortune, and remarked so to myself as I loaded up my backpack with cold cans. My laptop appreciated the extra cold environment for a few minutes as well.

Turns out I didn't need to spend the extra money on meter parking as the staff meeting as canceled for whatever reason. This gave me an extra 40 minutes to do other work. I decided to pick up a building block from the Blackboard catalog and begin porting it to Oracle. This is something I had never done before, and made some really great progress on it. By the end of the day, I had my angry musing going, and had not only ported it successfully, but identified 4 bugs and fixed them. This building block is ready to be demonstrated on Monday wne we can determine what to do with it, keep going and finish it or drop it.

I was so productive today that I managed to find time to dig up some information on a cult song in the department,
Manah-Manah. I discovered this song and it's accompianing video clip from an old Muppet show episode over a year ago, passed the video around, and it was a hit with the crew. Every so often one of us will start whistling the tune and we all chuckle at the memory.

I was searching for Sesame Street songs using a new tool I purchased called Acquisition, which is a P2P music stealing tool. Along with a bunch of great songs like Put Down The Duckie and Do De Rubber Duck, I found a copy of the muppet version of Manah-Manah, and a punk cover of the song. This was new, and it was great. I quickly shared it with the group, and we had another great laugh about it.

This got me searching for more versions of the song. I tried a few variations on the spelling of the song, and came up with more great versions, but I wanted to find out the actual spelling, so I turned to google. A few false hits later, and I found out that the originator of the song was not the Muppets, but a Swedish composer Piero Umiliani, who wrote the original version as part of a soundtrack for a softcore porn documentary, "Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso".

Awesome ! ! ! As if the song didn't have enough history behind it, we add this juicy tidbit. The soundtrack was re-released and can be bought on Amazon. I found a copy of the original song, and it's incredible. Twinkly synthisizer voice and go-go girls in the backup. It is so incredibly 70's your head will spin.
I managed to find the following versions of the song:
Original go-go
Basso nova(?) lounge
Muppet-ized
Punk
Lazy Rock
Over-produced latin pop
Ska Funk remix

Check em out for yourself.

I took a break in the middle of the day for lunch. Normally I would go to the gym with Dan, but he was out, and I was feeling really good about the day, so I treated myself to lunch at the Marshall Center student union. I bought a slice of pizza, a large diet soda, and a copied of Wired Magazine, and I sat outside and enjoyed all three in the cool sunny afternoon.

Of course, I my euphoric state, I had forgotten that I had parked metered, and had resigned myself to the ticket that was waiting on my windshield. Except that Parking Services forgot as well, and there was not ticket. I fought the law, and I won. Huzzah.

The night capped itself nicely by coming home to dinner with Denise and Mike. I played with my son for an hour before putting him to bed, then watched some mindless sitcom while I reflected on my otherwise perfect day.

I had the misfortune of seeing Christmas with the Kranks this weekend. Everytime I think about it, it gets me mad. Rather than risk kicking something, I'll let Filthy speak for me.

Filthy Review of a bad movie

What's perhaps so amazing is that I was getting more and more worked up as we drove home from the movie. I rarely get worked up over anything. I went into the movie expecting nothing, and was disappointed. I kept waiting for the movie to give me something back, some redeeming quality, but by the time the ham rolled into the street, I gave up and started picking it apart inside my head for the junk that it was.

I tried to be polite and talk with Denise about the movie afterward, but as she kept being nice to the movie with such safe comments like 'I liked it" or 'It was funny', I had to break in with explicit details about how it was not funny, how it was insulting, how it pandered to a very low brow level of comedy(and failed), how it tried to be smart but was not. By the time we were half way home I was speaking in an elevated voice.

It was a bad movie. Avoid it at all cost. Go see the Incredibles a second time in homage to good movies that don't take their audience for granted. I swear to all that is good I needed to watch The Shawshank Redemption when I got home to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth.

The alure of Disney calls to us. We can resist no longer. Today we are taking Michael to meet with Sharon and company at MGM studios. We arrived early, so we took my gimpy ankle around to the Sci Fi diner to make dinner reservations, then gimped over to the Backlot Express to comsume grilled veggies and chili. Yum.

Right now I'm giving my ankle a rest while Sharon tells us about some houses she is looking at in the Kissimmee area. Looking into a 55 and up community adds a bunch of deed restrictions that I'm not personally interested. Given the state of my current house, they'd kick me out in short order. My yard has some weeds, my garage is full of things other than cars, my trash cans reside on the side of the house, I have a collection of garden stones piled up neatly in the front, and some of my outdoor lighting is broken. I like to put up Christmas lights, and rip up my backyard with garden plots of vegetables. I like that one of my neighbors has a yellow house, and another has a green one. My neighborhood has character, and I like it.

Later tonight. Toby volunteered to watch Mike to give Denise and I a night to ourselves. Thus the dinner reservations. We'll take Mike back to the unit around 3, freshen up, and head back to MGM sans child. In addition to dinner, we will visit the Osborn's 5 million Christmas lights, and Denise will try to keep breathing on the Rockin' Rollercoaster.

Happy Thanksgivings, pilgrim. I've been stuck in traffic for better than three hours with the rest of the schmucks that couldn't leave home earlier than today. The worst part is that there was no reason for the slowdown, simple congestion. no accidents, no construction, just a large volume of cars that couldn't get above 20MPH the entire 60 miles from Tampa to Orlando. Thankfully, I had my GameBoy to help with the longer pauses in which I had nothing to do but watch asphault dry. I am thankful for my GameBoy.

Once we arrived at Toby's timeshare in Vistana, just off SR535 in Kissimmee, we had what amounted to a pleasant thanksgivings dinner. In attendance this year was my family, Denise and Mike, Rich and Toby, Stephanie and her 3 kids, and certified Disney freak Aunt Sharon along with Uncle John and kids Mollie and Billy. Dinner was good, the peace was held, I consider this a successful holiday.

We'll probably go to Disney and the outlet malls for holiday shopping, sometime other than Friday. Friday we will avoid the world and spend the day watching the nieces and nephews. If I'm lucky, I'll get to wash Joseph's mouth out with soap.