Why. . .

did they bring back Fuller House?

Why?

Why?

An increase in creepy crimes?

I've come to the conclusion, I think, that something really creepy is going on in society.  Truly creepy.

Now, let me note that I started this post weeks and weeks ago.  So long ago that I can't remember, actually, when I started it.  Sometime in 2016, but I'm not sure when.  I revived it when the creepy story about Brock Turner, the Stamford University student and swimmer who was hardly sentenced for his horrific assault on a young woman following a party came up.  But then I let it sit again and getting back to posting it was inspired by that.  Frankly, that event takes this to such a horrific level that it almost stands to wipe out my point, so I'll start where I was going to start in just a moment.  I most recently returned to this story when a 19 year old man was sentenced in the last couple of days for sexual assault, that crime involving having impregnated a 12 year old girl, when he was 17, in a closet at a home in which he was staying with that girls family. That crime came to light, apparently, through the girl having reported to a physician pregnant and then revealing the story.

That guy got something like two to six years (I forget the exact sentence, but it was something like that).  The prosecutor wanted more.  His defense attorney wanted less on the basis that he was the sole support for his mother and sister.

Hm.

Hardly a day goes by anymore where I don't read of some hideous assault by a man upon a female victim, and frankly usually they're are young women, i.e., teenage girls.  This would be bad enough if I was reading of these events every few months, worse if it was every month, but frankly now its darned near every day.  Yes, almost every day here there's an assault by a male upon some teenage girl, or even girls.  Indeed just this past week there was a story that broke here of a family that had groomed a family friend's daughter for sadomasochistic acts.  Creeps.

Now, that should make it clear, I suppose, that we're sometimes speaking of crimes that may have an element, or not, of consent by the victims.  The  17 year old impregnating a 12 year old apparently did, as they exchanged texts about sex before they engaged in the activity. Looking for trends or commonalities in the crimes, I'd note that one that shows up in more than a few is enticement by drugs or alcohol. But that's far from the rule.  Quite a few are just outright assaults.   The victims report them nearly immediately, quite often, thank goodness, and they perpetrators are arrested quickly, and usually tried and convicted.

Beyond the drugs and alcohol there seems to be little in common save for that the perpetrators are often vagabonds or nearly so, although not always.  Almost all of them are on the bottom end of the economic scale, to say the least, although not all are.  A not un-appreicable number, no matter what a person believes stating this means, are Mexicans. I'm not claiming that all Mexican immigrants are perpetrators of this sort of stuff by any means, but if a person is honest you cannot help but note that the perpetrators who are Mexican who show up in this category here exceed their percentage of the population.  If a person reads between the lines, its usually clear that those who fit that category are actually from Mexico, FWIW, not people of Mexican heritage from the US (and no, I'm not claiming by a long shot that all Mexican men are perpetrators waiting to happen).  Not that this is uniform, indeed several years ago one of the fellows who was enticing young teenagers in this fashion was a local lawyer.

Added to this, I'd note, that hardly a week goes buy in which somebody isn't busted for the illegal downloading of icky photos in the above referenced category, and they aren't usually immigrant Mexicans, I'd note. Again, I'd not be surprised if this happened occasionally, but its freaking constant.

So what's going on?

Something is.

I suppose maybe this sort of stuff (well. . . not the downloading obviously, as you couldn't download anything forty years ago) may have always happened, but it just didn't get reported, or the victims didn't report it.   Maybe, but I doubt it.  There's just way too much of this for this all have to been kept quiet years ago, and frankly the perpetrators are largely in the class that doesn't get much legal slack.  So I think there really is more.

But why?

I've noted before on this site that statistically the amount of violence, including violent crime, is way down in the US.  And killings are certainly quite uncommon here. So are examples of violent physical assault, or mayhem, or things like that. But these sort of creepy crimes have to be way, way up.  I just can't ever recall a prior era in which they showed up in the press nearly daily.  Indeed, in a lot of prior eras here, when we were fairly acclimated to fights going awry, we would have been horrified by something of this nature.

And I think that has to do something with the decline in morals, i.e., the emphasis on personal virtue in regards to your own conduct in this area.

Maybe that's a leap, but I do.

I think our culture, at this point, is so awash in images and projections suggesting that all women are available to any man, that a certain class of men now believes that.  And beyond that, the line of what is acceptable or not, on a societal basis, is now so faded that unless a person has picked up a line from outside of the cultural mainstream its extremely difficult to tell where that line may be.

A look at any of the popular television shows (yes, I know, television is stupid, but maybe its a type of mirror  also) is illuminating in these regards.  A show like, for example, Friends shows the young engaged in constant libertine activity.  The Big Bang Theory is the same way.  The "reality" show Vanderpump Rules depicts a group of people whose morals are so far in the sewer it would take a rotorooter to find them (did we really need to import these people from the UK, seriously?).  A recent pop song celebrates Blurred Lines. Singer who originally made acquired their fame as cute child stars appear naked darned near anywhere they can.  Any sexual act or inclination is celebrated as being normal, irrespective of the evidence.  The examples are nearly endless.

I do not mean to excuse any of this conduct, as its reprehensible.  But seriously, if you take a society and simply endlessly bathe it in sexual content, and sexual content, and then argue in its courts and solons that any act at all is normal, is going to produce this result.  And it has.

So, the biggest criminal of all turns out, in some ways, to be our current culture itself.  And we end up all being the victims.

Lex Anteinternet: New Year's Resolutions for Other People

So, how did they do?

This past January I published this:

Lex Anteinternet: New Year's Resolutions for Other People: Yeah, I know its rude.  But if you are in the public eye, I guess you are open for public content.  So here's some resolutions for folks who might miss these obvious ones.

 So, let's look and see if they checked in here, read the resolutions, and adopted them.

Congress.  Let's just assume that your audience is intelligent and can follow an intelligent argument.  I bet it can. And after assuming that, whether you are in the left or the right, conduct your public debates that way.  If you can't do that, you ought to not be there.

Hmmm. can't say I grew more impressed with Congress over the year.  They mostly seem just to have sort of checked out, but maybe I just quit paying as much attention to them.  Maybe they weren't paying as much attention, oncoming Presidential election and all. . .

Congressional Judiciary Committees:  Avoid appointments to the bench from Harvard or Yale for the entire year.  Not a single one. Don't we have enough of them already?  There are lawyers from other places.

For that matter, how about not appointing any sitting or retired judges to appellate benches.  Branch out.  You'll be glad you did.

And put a retirement age on the Federal Bench.  These are public jobs for the American public, not jobs for life for one single benighted generation.  Appointments for life no longer make any sense.

Well, I can't say that I paid much attention to appointments this year either.  No big ones seemed to come up.  But I can say that this was not an impressive year for the Federal Judiciary in some ways.  A knowledge of the nature of the law seemed quite lacking.  So, to the extent that this extends out to the judiciary on a Federal national level, it wasn't a good year.

Country Music.  If you aren't actually from the country, please sit this one out or admit you are a "pop artist".  It's different.

And cut out the sap, too, will you?  

Obviously, there was no progress in "Country" music at all.

ISIL  Open your minds up, at least a bit.  And get a calendar and see what century this is.

This may have proven to be the year of the Islamic State.  That's who I'd put on the cover of Time, if I was doing the "Man of the Year".  The Islamic State has been on the rise all year long, and the results have been horrific.

Kim Jong-un.  Kim, you are on your way to being remembered as a complete clown.  You could be remembered as a hero.  Take the bold move, open the borders, and announce that you intend to peacefully reunite North Korea with the South by letting the Republic of Korea take over.

You could go into comfortable retirement in Switzerland within a year, and be a hero for life.  The way you are going, you are going to be remembered as one of the all time biggest doofuses ever.

Kim obviously didn't check in here.

People with the last name Bush or Clinton.  Enough already, the country can function fine without you as President.  Sit this one out, and the next several as well, and surprise people by not running for
President.

And people named Clinton or Bush didn't check in here either.

Barack Obama.  Go outside and see where you live.  You are not a law school professor anymore.  Yapping at people doesn't equate with action, and getting mad and assigning things to the class you can't deal with isn't going to work either.  Quit studying Wilson.  Study Roosevelt, Truman, Reagan, Bush I or Clinton and see how to get some things done.

It seems the President didn't get my reading list.

New York:  Hello New York and things New Yorkish.   We still love you, but you aren't "Number One" anymore, and you haven't been for a really long time.  Just because you pass a bill or collectively think something doesn't make it the up and coming thing, it probably is viewed by the rest of us as stale and a little moldy, which is how we also view New York.  You are going to have to get over yourself.  Your resolution is to have a little humility this year.  Think of yourself as, oh. . . Labrador.

Labrador, New York.  Look it up.

The People's Republic of China.  You can only pretend to be a "people's republic" while ignoring democracy so long. Read the history of your own country, and realize that China's always only a second away from a revolution, and take the next step to open the politics of the country up.  Your excuse for not doing so is long gone.  And stop acting like a 19th Century colonial power too.

Well, no huge reform in China in 2015, but  then its a huge country. 

Pop-Tarts You know who you are, you collection of women famous only for being famous, or for your appearance alone.  Stop acting like your for sale on the street and have a little big of dignity. Spend their year dressing modestly and really shock people. Read a book. Go outdoors with some outdoorsy close on.  Just be something, for goodness sake.

Nope.  They're still at it.

Television.  Hello television, you are stupid.  Get an education and quit broadcasting crap.

This is particularly the case regarding anything billed "Entertainment", or that appears on "TLC".  Enough already.  But it applies to the rests of television as well. Time for some remedial classes.

 If anything, this has gotten worse.

So, all you listed here, get to work.  You need to do your 2015 resolutions in 2016.

Fickle fame

Some recent news items have interestingly portrayed the fickle nature of American fame, and how shallow and vapid it is.  Interesting to watch in progress.

One aspect of American fame is that the same things and personages that raise somebody to fame stand eager to rip them to shreds when they get there.  It'd be easy to say, and potentially correct as well, that having participated in the creation of their image, they are set up for a fall if they don't meet that expectation, but it's a little more than that in my view.

A recent example of that would involve the entire Josh Duggar saga. Now, readers of this blog, and there are darned few, know that I'm not a fan of the Duggars and never have been.  I always thought them a bit odd, or perhaps more than a bit odd, and I've chaffed at the occasional comments that they represent "conservative Christianity".  No they don't, if "conservative" Christianity is meant to include the millions of conservative Christians in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (the majority, fwiw, of Christians on earth), or those conservative Christians in numerous other denominations. No, the Duggars were interesting because they clearly belonged to something akin to a tiny sect, given their dress and lifestyle, and that provided part, but only part, of the fascination.  The remainder of the fascination was based on their just having a big family, something that wasn't unusual in the world until very recently.

Now, the Duggars traded on that fascination and turned it into a television career.  I have a problem with that, although I guess I can't fully blame them. But then, they were perfectly set up to be ripped apart when things went bad, and they did, in a bizarre fashion, mostly due to the icky behavior of Josh Duggar, who turns out to have lived a fairly hypocritical life.

The point isn't to defend him. Registering on a cheaters website is downright icky, in my view (and says a lot about how bizarrely dependant on technology we've become. . . do we need to register to cheat on spouses. . . seriously?).  No, it's just that the same media that made such a big deal out of them, is now ripping them down, and for conduct that it pretty much celebrates in other people (the cheating that is, not the other stuff).

Indeed, it's weird how fickle fame is.  If a public figure of the Duggars type, or a politician, cheats on his spouse, he's pretty much doomed.  Hollywood stars, on the other hand, get a pass and it'll just be passed off as some sort of tragedy for everyone, including the cheater.  Very fickle.

In contrast to this, we  have people who seemingly trade on their good public images for ongoing fame, as they convert their prior lives into one of trouble.  Fame is not only fickle, it's apparently addictive.

We've been given a potential example of that in the story of Bruce Jenner.  Jenner was originally famous for being an Olympic athlete.  Even at that time, fwiw, it seems to me that people speculated on him having same gender attractions, but that's another story.  Later, long after most athletes would be a thing of distant memory, he became famous again for being the second spouse of a family that's become seemingly fasmous for its female members being famous.  Or perhaps appearing on the cover of magazines with very little clothing on.  Now, he has announced as have a gender issue and he's becoming a woman, if a person can changed genders, which our DNA says we may not.

That's been celebrated and he's been announced as some species of hero.  In the meantime, he was involved with a fatal car wreck and will be charged with manslaughter, apparently.  That gets less press.  Odd.

It's particularly odd if we recall that Tiger Woods had a car accident that resulted in endless press attention, in part because he was . . . cheating on his spouse.  

Now, both are athletes, so why does Woods get the negative attention and Jenner does not.  I guess there's the cheating angle again, but Woods never set himself up as a public paragon of virtue (nor did he do the opposite).  Indeed, Woods is a Buddhist and therefore he certainly isn't a Duggaresque figure, although I'll confess I have no idea what the Buddhist position on monogamy is.

For another example, we have the weird story of the constant "look at me" displays by a certain female singer that rose up in the Disney child star factory.  I have problems with that entity in and of itself, but the displays, rather than the bold acts of individualism they're proclaimed to be, are more in the nature of childish spoiled brat displays.  Yet they are both fascinated and gawked at.  A similar meltdown, much less spectacular, has been given to at least one other female actress who ended up in constant trouble with the law, and while on a break from court displayed what she had in the Ossified Freak's journal.  Not so celebrated.  Yet another is just regarded as a pathetic meltdown.  Why is one celebrated and the other pitied?  Who knows.  Perhaps the difference is the degree to which the meltdown is genuine.

Speaking of the Ossified Freak, a young woman who rose to some level of fame as being one of the "girlfriends" of that fellow, which presumably entails certain conduct and to which other titles would have attached in a prior era, went on to marry some sort of athlete and convert that marriage into a television show. Why anyone would care about this sufficiently to watch it is hard to explain.  Following that, that fellow fell into some sort of scandal and now the same female figure is a character on a "boot camp" for troubled marriages.  I'd think that a television camera following you around in these circumstances would be troublesome in and of itself, but there you have it.  But here too, why do we care about this, and why does this sort of weirdness lend itself to a televised following? 

Indeed, that sort of public voyeurism may have been at least partially pioneered when it turned out that a really boring married couple, but one that included a former actress known for her portrayal of a girl in a California upper class high school, took that turn when it turned out that the husband was cheating on her.  He didn't get the Duggar treatment, as after all, he's an actor.  But from there on out there were endless episodes of the wife blubbering.  Heck, they both were cheating on other spouses when they started their relationship, so, D'oh!  But apparently not.  Anyhow, why would a person attempt to trade on that misery for fame?

Perhaps the most famous celebrity meltdown of recent years was the sad tale of Michael Jackson, who rose to fame on his music (which I never liked) but who spent his later years sort of freakishly altering himself.  Very odd and sad, but while the press noted his sad decline, the fame had clearly precipitated it.  So, he essentially was on display as a circus star the entire time. Very odd indeed.

Fame, Turning on Fame, Ignorance, and Double Standards

As anyone who has followed my occasional frustrated comments on television here knows, I was not a fan of the Duggars show, Nineteen Kids and Counting.

Indeed, for reasons that I have a hard time defining, there was something about the Duggars that made me uncomfortable.  A lot of people are going to be saying that now, so that's a little late to be claiming that, but it's true.  I couldn't quite define it then, and I can't quite now, but what I think it is, is that to a certain ill informed audience they defined "Christianity", or perhaps "Conservative  Christianity".  They don't.  And I don't think they claimed to, but rather they were sort of presented that way.

In reality, without delving into it too far, theologically they're a member of a minority offshoot of a certain branch of Protestantism, and from their they're actually part of a patriarchal movement within that minority offshoot, which makes them a minority within a minority.  That was probably obvious to anyone who studies such matters, which means that it's not obvious to most people.  Given that, however, it would be no more fair to even state that the Duggars represented the view of Conservative Protestants than it would be to say the Old Believers represent the views of most Russian Orthodox, or that the members of the SSPX represent the views of most Catholics.  Indeed, those statements, although erroneous, would probably be slightly closer to being true, maybe. And because they hold a minority Protestant view, within a minority Protestant view, their views fall very far from the views of many "mainline" Protestants and certainly quite far from the Catholics and the Orthodox.  Now, the Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, etc., know that, but because television is so ignorant, it doesn't necessarily know that.  Therefore, when we hear things like "the Duggar's conservative Christian views", we're really hearing something that's way, way, far off the mark.

Indeed, again, I doubt the Duggar's themselves would disagree with that, and in fact they would seem to fit into a demographic that would question the Christianity of at least certain other Christian Faiths.  I don't know that for sure, but I do note that they engage in missionary work in Central American, which at least raises some questions as that's a field already plowed by prior Christian missionaries, although they're all Catholic.  Usually when a group does that, they tend to do it because they don't regard the other Christian group as valid, although here again I'm supposing.  I've known some Protestant missionaries (and Catholic ones) who were true missionaries, and they spent their lives in some really wild parts of the world, indeed, in some areas that were downright dangerous for somebody of their occupation, which seems real missionary work to me.

Anyhow, all that's a long winded way of saying that part of what has made me uncomfortable about the Duggar's is the way that they've come to represent something that maybe they don't.  I'm a pretty conservative Christian (okay, on some things I'm a pretty liberal Christian . . . and on others I'm a pretty neither liberal or conservative Christian), but I don't feel my daughter has to dress in a peasant dress and I'm a pretty big fan of education.

Indeed, on that latter item, one thing that's bothered me for some time is that the girls in this show, which has massive female following, seem so limited in their options.  They seem pretty smart, but they line them up with potential spouses who just don't seem to quite mach their intellect.  Maybe they do, but they don't seem to.  Indeed, that would seem to be the case for whomever Josh is married to as well, but again I could well be wrong.  It all seems sort of odd.

So, anyhow, one thing that's bothered me is the way their identified as something they really aren't.

And by extension, now people who hate them because they re identified that way, are going to be ripping them apart.

Traditional Christians in recent years have come to regard themselves as under the gun.  Well, actually, some branches of Christianity have felt that way for a long time.  And for good reason, they really are.  It's become unsafe in the public sphere to simply hold certain traditional Christian beliefs, or certain beliefs that are consistent with certain Faiths. That's a shame, but its true.  It's also become safe to attack certain religious beliefs as the PC view of the media holds those beliefs to be out of sync with the times.

In truth, Christianity is always out of sync with the times, and if a person reads the Acts of the Apostles, that's clear. The Apostles knew they were out of sync with the times, and the Fathers of the Church were pretty darned plain that they knew that as well.  So that's not new.  What is a bummer, however, is to see some group, here the Duggars, get tarred and feathered by haters because they are seen to represent something they don't, while in turn the rest of us get tarred and feathered because of what the Duggar patriarchy apparently did, which isn't fair to the rest of us by any means.  Ignorance at work.  It's like being a member of one of those rare Middle Eastern religious minorities who get attacked because nobody knows what they actually believe, but they might believe what some other group believes.

Going from that, however, it's also interesting how chicken television and the media really are.  Everything is played so safe.  The Duggars were pulled from the air, which they should have been, but a certain other family which recently had a baby baptized in the Armenian Orthodox Church, a very conservative religions, lives a lifestyle that seems out of sync with that (or not, I'm not sure) and has a family member who is changing genders.   That's being celebrated on television.  Now, in this era, that's in sync with the general liberal view of the media, so the media is not going to take on the very un settled and difficult psychological aspects of that in a way that's controversial. That is, we're not going to hear any press on whether that's wrong in a psychological or metaphysical sense, but maybe we should.  But we won't, as that would be too controversial in the context of the times.

This same logic would apply, even more so, to "Sister Wives", a show that pretty much promotes plural marriage and which appears on the same network as Nineteen Kids".  Here we have a sort of irony that TLC promotes, though the show, the concept that the Duggars are Christian traditionalist, which they really are not, and that the very non traditional view (in the larger societal sense) of the Kody Brown group, should be tolerated.  It's a strangely mixed message, neither of which is very deep in its analysis.

Nor really very interesting, I guess, to the male half of the population.  Both shows really cater towards domestic blandness, which is the basis, oddly, and ironically, of their appeal.  Peculiarly, noting really is going to look at the domestic lives of the millions of other conservative Christian women that are actually part of the culture.  That would just be too normal.

And if we're going to look at really unusual groups, to Americans, maybe we should look at really interesting ones we know aren't part of the larger demographic and obviously are not. Why not, for example, look at Orthodox Jews?  There are a lot of them in the US, but TLC isn't following them around.  Or Moslems (in fairness, there was a show that looked at them, but for a group that has to be unpleasant to be a member of right now, why not look at their lives).  Or, Old Believers.  There are Old Believers in Alaska, why not give them a look?

Finally, stories like this become feeding frenzies in a shark like fashion.  I can't help but recall how, after the very weird Michael Jackson died, the press turned on him.  It seems fame can turn to blistering contempt in an instant.  

That's always been the case.  The people and press elevate people to fame, and then when things go wrong for them, they rip them apart.  Oddly, they create an Idol and then destroy it, and always have.  An odd aspect of human nature.

Did they listen to that song?

This morning, while getting ready for work, the television was on, and an advertisement which was playing Janice Joplin's "Heartbreaker" was playing.

Now, I'm a fan of Janice Joplin.*  I really like her music. Sure, she was before my time, and my parents hated her music, but I love it.  It may figure, as I'm a fan of Jimi Hendrix as well, so I have a taste for the blues and blues influenced music. 

Anyhow, as the ad was playing, I stopped to watch it.  It was a Dior perfume advertisement.

My gosh, that's weird.  Janice was one messed up woman, but I seriously doubt she'd approve of any of her music being used for perfume.  Perfume wearing is sort of basically anti-Janice.  Man.

Beyond that, the whole theme of the ad is weird, in relation to the music, which makes me wonder if anyone really ever listens to the lyrics of any song, ever.

In the ad, a bride at a wedding has a crisis, and fleas the groom, strips off her wedding dress, is lifted up into a helicopter, kisses the man therein, and flies off, presumably to a life of adventure.

In the song, an anguished singer cries out her love for a man who is mistreating her, professing her desperate undying love no matter what, in spite of the vast pain that man is causing the singer.

Boo hiss, Dior.

___________________________________________________________________________________

*In spite of her death years ago, Janice Joplin is so familiar to our household that everyone had no problems in immediately recognizing the reference when I named a stray female cat in the neighborhood Janice. She's small, has long haired, and extremely disheveled.  She's also desperately in love with our disinterested male cat and she hangs around trying to sing screechy songs to him in a very loud voice.

Lex Anteinternet: Vikings, maybe not so much after all.

I've recently posted this item about Vikings:

Lex Anteinternet: Vikings, maybe not so much after all.: One of the most interesting introductions into the field of history in recent years has been the study of DNA.  The populations of various ...

And then there's that television show, "Vikings".

Ack.

First a disclaimer.  I'm going to run down Vikings.  That will eventually somebody who reads this entry, sooner or later. But I'm entitled.  I'm partially entitled because anyone is entitled to argue historical truth.  I'm also entitled as I can claim Viking ancestry.  Anglo Norman, actually, on my mother's side, with those Anglo Normans ending up in Ireland.  But any Norman was, by descent, a Norseman.  More specifically, part of that group of Vikings who ended up with Rollo in France, his having secured Normandy for a residence for his band.

Rollo, who was baptised (a not uncommon thing in the second half of the Viking era) takes the hand of Gisela in marriage, which may or may not have actually happened.  He probably didn't look quite so pacific and mild in real life.  He's buried at the Cathedral in Rouen.

So, some of my ancestors having boarded long boats in Norway and having followed Rollo to France, I'm entitled.  I'm slamming my own distant ancestors.

Well, actually I'm not, I'm just being honest.

The Vikings are really interesting, which is why they're featured in a television series right now.  But they were bad.  Really bad.

Extremely bad.

Their raids on the British Anglo Saxon and European coasts were horrific, featuring murder and the worst sort of perverted actions imaginable.  They not only exhibited a thirst for gold, but for blood and just simple debased and gross violence. They were most young men, and they were as bad as any criminal gang made up of young men. The television show that currently debates them as rough, pretty, people has it wrong. They were way beyond rough. Some of them may have been pretty. But at least at first, they weren't farmers looking for homesteads.  They came to attack and attack they did.   When they were met with serious armies, as for example those of Northumbria, they didn't do that well, after all, they were just floating gang members, really.  Later on, when they were real armies, the story was different.  But evolving from street gangs into armies, like the NASDP did in Germany in its day, does not credit the effort.

Then something happened to them. Something I doubt we'll see in the television show.

In their later years their adventures became bigger and more advanced.  They evolved from sort of a seagoing street gang (or rather gangs) into what we can sort of regard as Mafia families.  Much more skilled and advanced, and larger.  Then they did in fact begin to settle in other lands (although we now know in the case of England, they never swamped the existing population.  

And they became Catholic.

On another blog, I suppose, might say they "became Christian", but we try to present full accuracy here, and they became Catholic.  The entire Christian world at the time was Catholic, Catholicism and Christianity being the same thing.  They became, largely, Latin Rite Catholics, although I suppose, as some were hired out to the Byzantine Empire, and others, the Rus, located in the Slavic nation now named for them, became Eastern Catholics.  Indeed, a few in the late stages of their conversion became well recognized saints who are still recognized in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

And they took to it more completely, and indeed rapidly (keeping in mind that everything moved slowly in prior times) than movies and whatnot would credit.

In our modern era, television, which basically has a thing against conventional Christianity, likes to portray troubled and disenginuine Christians struggling against rustic but sincere pagans.  But that's not the way it happened.  Violent enemies of the Church at first, for economic reasons, once exposed to it, they converted pretty quickly and sincerely, keeping in mind that they lived in remote locations and that in that era, 300 years (which is about the length of the Viking era), wasn't really a long time. 

Iceland, a Viking island, but incorporating a fair number of Irish Catholic slaves within it, converted by vote, with the deciding vote cast by a pagan priest. The other Scandinavian lands were exposed to the Faith by raids which seemed to be particularly influential amongst their leadership, and also by missionary activity. By the later stage of the Viking era, Scandinavian Christian monarchs, such as St. Olaf, who had been a Viking, appeared.  Really tough men, they brought the faith to their lands, which remained pretty rough places.

This isn't to say that the Faith came instantly or perfectly to these places.  It didn't.  It took quite awhile, as we reckon time today, before the old beliefs were abandoned, and there was a period of imperfection where behavior was somewhat mixed.  King Cnut, the Dane, and King of England, for example, had two wives, even though he was a Catholic.  But it did come, and pretty completely.

What's the point?  Well, basically, the Vikings are really interesting.  A forgotten northern pagan people whose population exploded during a period of dramatically warming climate, their displaced young struck Europe with a barbarous fury, during which they raided as far as North Africa, and into the heat of what is now Russia.  In the end, they evolved into a military people and then a Christian one, which in its final stages gave us three Norman political entities, one in Normandy, one in England and Ireland, and one in Sicily, that were vibrant and hugely significant.  Over time, they became the peoples they are today, who are not at all associated with the acts of their fierce forebearers, and they left a record of their presence throughout Europe and even extending to North America   That's a much more interesting story than the one television is giving us.

But its one today that television won't give us.  A barbaric people whose first exposure to Europe included acts so vile that even modern television, which dwells pretty much in the sewer, can't touch it, and who in the end become a Christian people with values that television would rather lampoon than feature.  History more interesting than anything TV will offer us, and which has a message that television, which operates as sort of a modern early Viking culture amongst our own, wouldn't want to touch.

Television is stupid

Truly, amazingly stupid. So stupid, it's depressed the collective IQ of the population of the Western World 100 points. It's so darned dumb that its impact would be like burning 1,000 libraries at Alexandria.

It's dumb.

And getting dumber.

In 1961 the Chairman of the FCC, Newton Minnow, observed the following:

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Truer words were never spoken, and things have gotten infinitely worse since then. Indeed, the era that Minnow was writing about is now regarded as "The Golden Age of Television", with entire channels devoted to rerunning the very programs that Minnow complained about.

In comparison, the "vast wasteland" that Minnow wrote about has become some sort of tar pit of stupidity.  Consider what's on.

There are, for example, an entire collection of "reality shows" based upon the goings of of allegedly "beautiful people" of one kind or another.  Some, set in the epicenter of vapidity, Hollywood California, feature people whom we are clearly supposed to believe are beautiful, wealthy and interesting. They may be wealthy, but that's it.  And yet the impressionable minds that watch this slop are fed hours upon hours of programming that this or that aging actress or personality must be beautiful, rather than plastic, and their sad lives of bitchiness and cattiness are interesting. 

As part of that, I'd note, there's a clearly some sort of program going on, probably run by the UK's MI6, to export the village idiots of England to the United States.  We're on to you, United Kingdom.  It can't be the case that the US is lacking idiots, so this is clearly nefarious.  Having a British accent doesn't make a person interesting, television it makes them English.  They can stay home and pollute the BBC if they must be on television.

Or, for another example, take Guillianna and Bill.  Here's a married couple that works on television or in entertainment, but they're so boring, they make oatmeal look fascinating in comparison. They're boring with a side order of dull, served on cardboard. Boring. And yet television serves up a series based on their boringness.

Or let's take TLC, which started off as "The Learning Channel".  Now, it seemingly is focusing on people who are violating the laws of their states by having multiple boring spouses.  Why is this on television?  TLC virtually serves as some sort of propaganda channel for a lifestyle that is pretty uniformly regarded as horrific by those who escape it, and yet they serve it up every week. 

Kids' programming doesn't escape this either. The dreaded Disney Channel looses nothing in methods to the glory days of Ford Motors.  It's a factory, serving up show after show based on absurdly precocious children with bizarrely naive friend, living in homes with childlike almost stupid parents. Anyone who has watched more than two Disney Channel episodes ought to be able to write an entire series effortlessly.

Regular programming, to the extent it exists, is not much better.  Ever single season television outdoes itself to be more "edgy" or "contemporary" by taking things further and further in a moral swamp, and portraying it as cool.  The hallmark for this may be the former really popular series "Friends", which is supposedly really funny, but if you stop and consider what the real lives of somebody living in the fashion portrayed would be like, it wouldn't be so funny at all.  Quite the contrary, actually.

Or even the alleged "news" now fails.  Entire channels are more or less in the category of political cheerleaders for one political view or another, and not real news.  Edward R. Murrow must be crying in the next world.

Probably ought to just turn the whole stupid thing off.

New Year's Resolutions for Other People

Yeah, I know its rude.  But if you are in the public eye, I guess you are open for public content.  So here's some resolutions for folks who might miss these obvious ones.

So, here goes:

Congress.  Let's just assume that your audience is intelligent and can follow an intelligent argument.  I bet it can. And after assuming that, whether you are in the left or the right, conduct your public debates that way.  If you can't do that, you ought to not be there.

Congressional Judiciary Committees:  Avoid appointments to the bench from Harvard or Yale for the entire year.  Not a single one. Don't we have enough of them already?  There are lawyers from other places.

For that matter, how about not appointing any sitting or retired judges to appellate benches.  Branch out.  You'll be glad you did.

And put a retirement age on the Federal Bench.  These are public jobs for the American public, not jobs for life for one single benighted generation.  Appointments for life no longer make any sense.

Country Music.  If you aren't actually from the country, please sit this one out or admit you are a "pop artist".  It's different.

And cut out the sap, too, will you?  

ISIL  Open your minds up, at least a bit.  And get a calendar and see what century this is.

Kim Jong-un.  Kim, you are on your way to being remembered as a complete clown.  You could be remembered as a hero.  Take the bold move, open the borders, and announce that you intend to peacefully reunite North Korea with the South by letting the Republic of Korea take over.

You could go into comfortable retirement in Switzerland within a year, and be a hero for life.  The way you are going, you are going to be remembered as one of the all time biggest doofuses ever.

People with the last name Bush or Clinton.  Enough already, the country can function fine without you as President.  Sit this one out, and the next several as well, and surprise people by not running for President.

Barack Obama.  Go outside and see where you live.  You are not a law school professor anymore.  Yapping at people doesn't equate with action, and getting mad and assigning things to the class you can't deal with isn't going to work either.  Quit studying Wilson.  Study Roosevelt, Truman, Reagan, Bush I or Clinton and see how to get some things done.

New York:  Hello New York and things New Yorkish.   We still love you, but you aren't "Number One" anymore, and you haven't been for a really long time.  Just because you pass a bill or collectively think something doesn't make it the up and coming thing, it probably is viewed by the rest of us as stale and a little moldy, which is how we also view New York.  You are going to have to get over yourself.  Your resolution is to have a little humility this year.  Think of yourself as, oh. . . Labrador.

The People's Republic of China.  You can only pretend to be a "people's republic" while ignoring democracy so long. Read the history of your own country, and realize that China's always only a second away from a revolution, and take the next step to open the politics of the country up.  Your excuse for not doing so is long gone.  And stop acting like a 19th Century colonial power too.

Pop-Tarts You know who you are, you collection of women famous only for being famous, or for your appearance alone.  Stop acting like your for sale on the street and have a little big of dignity. Spend their year dressing modestly and really shock people. Read a book. Go outdoors with some outdoorsy close on.  Just be something, for goodness sake.

Television.  Hello television, you are stupid.  Get an education and quit broadcasting crap.

This is particularly the case regarding anything billed "Entertainment", or that appears on "TLC".  Enough already.  But it applies to the rests of television as well. Time for some remedial classes.

Prostituting their image

I'm not a fan of children's television, and I'm particularly not a fan of television aimed at "tweens."  Generally, it's well established that that children tend to watch television which the producers of which have aimed at an older demographic, so TV aimed at tweens really hits a younger demographic than that, just as the teenage soap dramas that television loves to slop out tends to hit tweens. 

Most of the tween TV is incredibly vapid.  The plots are all stamped out of a mold, and the shows are overall extremely irritating.  It'd be better, in numerous ways, if the entire genera didn't exist at all.

Of of the tween television that's been around in recent years, one of the very worst, in my view, was Hanna Montana.  I hated it, but my daughter simply loved it when she was a little girl.  This isn't surprising.  Overall, Hanna Montana had a huge following amongst girls.  For those so fortunate as to not know what the show was about, it centered on a early teenaged country music star who lived a double life, being Hanna Montana while on the stage and being Myley while not.  It was stupid, in my view, but it was relatively harmless, and it wasn't at the chemical weapons grade level of irritation that the Suite Life of Zack and Cody were.

I mostly dislike these shows because I hate how stupid and predictable they are.  I frankly think that they grossly underestimate the intelligence of children, but I have to confess looking back that when I was in grade school, when we went home, we'd watch Gilligan's Island, McHale's Navy or Hogan's Heroes, shows of equal stupidity that were aimed at adults.  At any rate, my dislike, therefore, is largely personal and perceptional.

But, amongst the other reasons to dislike this genera of television, indeed to hope for its demise, is what it apparently does to its starts, the young actors who are featured in these shows, and what that in turn does to our culture.

Popular entertainers are, in general, seemingly uniquely plagued by personality problems.  Perhaps that has something to do with why they entered those fields in the first place.  There are people in any sort of performing art who are stable as can be, but for those who are singularly focused on the regions of those fields that produce fame, there seem to be a lot of truly messed up people.  And our culture has become so debased that for those who need to feed off of constant fame, the depths to which they need to reach down to are increasingly deeper.

For that reason, I'm often amazed that anyone thinks anything that people in the entertainment industry does is interesting or avant-garde.  Most of it is just "look at me!"  This is particularly the case when they take up a cause, as the basic nature of their personalities is such that what ever cause is trendy at the time, which they can fallacious claims as avant-garde, they will.  In other words, if Hollywood is protesting for you, you are probably yesterday's news.  If an entertainer really wanted to shock, the most shocking thing they could really do would be to espouse orthodoxy on something.

Indeed, given that this class of people, while famous, seemingly uniquely plagued by peculiar problems, it further amazes me that anyone is really interested in their personal opinions on anything.  Take any number of actors who run through spouses and housemates like cats run through kibble and ask yourself, why would I listed to this screwed up person's opinions on politics?  But I digress. . . .

Back to child actors, one of the things that being a star, young, in these fields seem to do is to create a massive dependence on news media attention in the souls of these people.  But translation of childhood success into adult success, as an entertainer, has always been against the odds.  Most don't make it.  But, up until recently, most seemingly tried to make the transition and faded away, with some never adapting very well to the spotlight's glare growing dim.

Now, however, with our debased focus on the vulgar and obscene, these declining personalities have hit on the truly pathetic, the prostitution of their image.

This seems to have really started to be noticeable, in its current form, with Lindsey Lohan, who started off as a child actress and then went into her teens as sort of a troubled soul. Right about that time, she took up a lot of public bad behavior, and then finally, in an attempt to get back into the public eye, determined to show all she had in Playboy magazine.  So, an actress associated early on with "identical cousins" in the renewed Parent Trap, or high school glamor girl in other shows, now was bearing it all for inspiring lust in glossy print.  Pretty sad decline, but apparently one that didn't serve to reverse the declining fortunes of ossified creepster Hugh Hefner's sagging empire.  Apparently the bloom was already off her rose.

More recently, we've been unwilling participants in Amanda Bynes efforts to run out in front of us and show us everything.  Bynes was a child actress and the focus of her own show, which was so bad that I wouldn't let it be played in the house.  Past her prime, apparently, she's' been unable to handle it, and has been taking nearly topless photos of herself and tweeting them..  By all accounts, she's troubled, but a lot of that trouble may be based on an inability to just handle reality.  Being young and well off isn't a bad thing.  You'd have the luxury to devote yourself to worthy pursuits.  But apparently the drug of fame, or what being in the entertainment industry does to you, is too corrupting to address.

As bad, weird or pathetic as the Bynes example is, we're now all spectators in the more calculated efforts of Myley Cyrus, the Hanna Montana of old, who now has is repeatedly showing us all she has in a manner that's nearly inescapable.

Cyrus has been becoming increasingly trashy in her public personal for some time, in what seems to be a calculated effort to shed her childhood actress persona. The chosen method has been to be as brazen as possible, thereby seemingly set to destroy the old image with a new one that's as wantonly sex driven as possible. Not too long ago Cyrus appeared sans clothes in a campaign to draw attention to skin cancer, but which tended to serve to draw attention to Cyrus as well, and not in a good way. This past week she went a step further and performed Blurred Lines on a televised music awards show. Blurred Lines is already in the trash category and Cyrus adopting it for a species of striptease, sort of, isn't surprising, except as an illustration of how far down the latter we've climbed.  Apparently the performance was so prurient that it could not be shown in its entirely on the morning news shows.

A person can pretend that this is all artistic self expression, but they'd be pretending. This is simply a desperate effort to get a "look at me" reaction from somebody whose fame was indelibly associated with a childhood role. And she shouldn't do it.

Cyrus, like others of her ilk, want fame, but the fame they have now comes only due to a childhood image.  If they no longer wish to be associated with that image, that's their right, but they don't have right to pretend that they have any other claim to it, and they shouldn't prostitute it.  That is what they are doing. Their image is based on a childhood portrayal of innocence, and they use that association, which they seek to escape, in order to draw attention to themselves.  They're trading on their former fame, exchanging memories for leering glances.

When they do that, they destroy the image, in some ways, for the thousands who were attracted to it as children in the first place.  Fame is conferred, not owned, and in this case they are seeking to grasp a continued hold on something by wrecking it. 

When I was in high school the J Geils Band had a popular song on the charts entitled Centerfold. The song centered around the shock of a young man finding that a girl he had a crush on in high school was now a centerfold. Satyric and comical, the song used a central theme of shame that would be almost inconceivable now.  Portrayals like Cyrus' have made it so.

If Cyrus et al really want enduring fame, they have a brief window of opportunity to build on that fame conferred by a childhood role.  A few managed to do that, most do not.  It requires smarts and exceptional talent, however.  Simply parading nearly naked isn't going to do it.  It does damage to them, and to us.  By doing it the fame they achieve will be a species of infamy in a real sense, and the positioning that gave them the ability to trade for it shows itself to be corrupted in some fashion by its impact.  And with each nearly naked former childhood actress on the television, the overall culture becomes that much more cheapened.

Epilogue

Since writing this, Myley Cyrus has reentered the public eye, quite literally, through photographs associated with a single she is releasing entitled "Wrecking Ball."  Not to be outdone by Thicke's parading around of naked models, Cyrus apparently decided to parade herself around naked, apparently, further debasing herself.  Wrecking Ball would seem to be an apt name too, as she appears to be intent on wrecking herself.

On this, I can't help but think of an automobile advertisement of a few years ago, I think it was by Volkswagen, in which some parents buy a toy for some kids at a gas station. Advertising the mileage of the car, we next see the family when they finally stop again. The toy was a "Rapping Ball", which repeats, over and over again "I'm a rapping ball!"  The parents are sick to death of it when they stop.  I suspect that's generally what will be happening to Cyrus.  Or already is.

Epilogue II

I have to give Cyrus credit for having a unique talent for destructive self promotion.  Every time I think she, and therefore in this overbroadcasted world the rest of us, have hit rock bottom, she proves me wrong.  Not even a week or so has gone by in her clothless self promotion of her latest musical release when we now awake to find out that the news is reporting that she has had "rolling stone" tattooed on her feet.

I suppose this is some sort of odd shout out to the old phrase "a rolling stone gathers no moss", although I think relatively few people even know that there was such a phrase and think, instead, it's simply the odd name of a British rock band.  But it is such a phrase.  Of course, all rolling stones eventually come to rest and are reabsorbed by the earth or crushed into dust, so the ultimate lesson of the phrase isn't really cheery, in so far as that goes.  But as a phrase endorsing low material attachments, I suppose it has its merits.

It seems, however, that Ms. Cyrus is gather a lot of moss.  Perhaps stones that roll through a bog do gather moss.  Or rather she isn't so much a rolling stone as she is some poor creature caught in a swamp.  I suppose to really avoid those sort of attachments, and indeed to be a real rebel in this day and age, you'd actually probably have to enter a religious order with a high attachment to poverty.  There are such orders, of course, but I don't expect Cyrus, or Lady Gaga, to any such person, really be a true radical by taking such a course of action.

At any rate, I hope for a week with no Cyrus news soon.

Epilogue III

I happened to read the USA Today this morning and found that it had an article relevant to this discussion.  The article, moreover, is both revealing and not too surprising.

It turns out that almost all of the really libertine music popularized by young female musical performers recently has been written by, you guessed it, men.  Indeed, the whole exploitation of the female image, both musically and in terms of the video presentation of it is male in origin.  Basically, as the article concludes, what we're seeing and hearing isn't a female image of this topic at all, but rather a middle age male fantasy of it.  Women's aspirations and feelings in this arena remain quite traditional.  I suppose male explotation of females is, unfortunately, traditional also.  In other words, pimping remains male.

Over time, it seems that some musical artist exploited in this fashion have objected to it,  but not enough to prevent it.  Olivia Newton John apparently objected to the video for Physical, but not enough to keep it from occurring.  And Fiona Apple was horrified about the release of a video some years ago that depicted her nude, which she was pressured into doing.

So, not surprisingly, these videos are both destructive to females, and the product of males regarding women in a cartoonish way.  All the more the shame.

Television?

I'll be the first to confess that perhaps my opinions various television programming is suspect, as I don't really follow television much.  It's not that I'm in the category of a television protester, like some folks are, and have tossed out TV out the window.  No, we have a TV. Two actually, which seems to be an increasingly small number for many houses.  I guess, in thinking about it, we have three actually, as I have one out in my shed as well.  Our used travel trailer came with one, but we never watched it and I wiped it out taking the trailer up the Big Horns in 2012.  As nobody ever watched that TV, nobody ever expressed the desire to replace it, and I always thought it a bit odd that it had one.  It isn't the fanciest trailer in the world and, for that matter, you have to fire up the generator to use it, which would seem to be a pain.

My association with television began to decline when I entered the University of Wyoming, which is now some 30 years ago.  For most of the time I was an undergraduate I didn't have a television, and I didn't miss it. When I was a law student, I lacked a television for two out of the three years I was in law school.  I didn't have space for one, and I just didn't miss it.  Electronic stuff wise, at that time, I had a compact stereo/record player.  I didn't have a computer, which was something most of us lacked, and I just didn't bother much with TV until my last year at law school, when I brought a very small television down to Laramie that my father had.  At any rate, since 1983 I haven't really followed very much television regularly, with some exceptions.  There's a few TV series I've followed over that thirty year period, but just a few.  That doesn't say anything wonderful about me, it's just a fact.

After law school, and before I was married, I did renew my acquittance with older movies.  While I hardly ever go to the movies, I do like movies, and I like classic movies a great deal.  In the several years I was away at university the movie channels developed and when I started watching television again, that's what I tended to watch.  I still do, although after getting married, and more particularly having children, I've just basically lost control of TV in general.  I know what's on TV, and I know what I really dislike about TV, but I don't watch much TV.

Maybe this was true for some in the radio era also, but there are some syndicated things on the TV which I just don't get.  This is beyond that which I don't like, I just don't get it.  Those things inspired this post.

 The cooking shows.
 

I realize that there's always been cooking shows on television.  Always.  All a person has to do is look back to Julia Childs, who remains a well respected and well remembered early television figure, to realize that.  But since there are now a zillion television channels, it seems to have gone completely out of control.  Nothing demonstrates this more fully than The Food Channel.

Food Channel?  How bizarre. An entire channel devoted to nothing but cooking shows.  It's one of the weird ironies of modern life that at the same time that the UN comes out with one of its typical overblown panicky warnings (see Holscher's Eighth Law of Human Behavior) that in the future we'll all have to eat bugs that the evidence is that that food abundance has reach the ridiculous level that we can now play games with food. There are food competitions based on such things as cakes that are designed to illustrate fables or cupcakes made out of the improbable.  Cupcakes, in particular, have enjoyed an absurd level of televised attention. Cupcakes are cupcakes, they don't deserve a television show.  None the less, there are cupcake competitions which will even involve such unlikely things as a team of radical sugar free vegans who have to make cupcakes out of nothing other than wallpaper paste and flax seed, and make it taste like pastrami.  

There was even a series, and may still be, featuring two women who lived in the D. C. area and who ran a cupcake shop. They had a lot of infighting on a modern level, and called their mother "mommy" even though they're in their 30s. That alone sort of bothered me.

One that really bothers is me is Cake Boss.  Cake Boss?  Cake Boss involves some big city bakery that bakes cakes, and it seems everyone who works in it is related.  They spend a lot of time sort of arguing with each other, and the show is sort of a stereotype of Italians.  I'm surprised that Italians aren't offended actually.

Anyhow, neither of the shows mentioned above bother me as much as cooking shows do.  Does anyone actually cook any of these recipes.  I highly doubt it. But the number of the shows is endless.  I think people are watching them, and then they go and fix a bowl of cheerios for dinner.

This isn't; to say that every single show on these channels is horrible.  I sort of like the ones where the hosts travel around and sample restaurants.  I've actually eaten at a couple of cafes that showed up on such shows, when I was in those cities, so those shows are a little useful.  But I don't think a show on how to cook some odd Lithuanian dish in 25 minutes actually means that even one single person ever makes it, and I'm not sure why anyone wants to watch a show that shows you how to.

Wedding shows.

Even stranger than the cooking shows are the vast number of wedding shows.

A subset of this genera involves insanely expensive wedding dresses.  I was married not quite 20 years ago and while we thought wedding dresses were generally expensive, they didn't cost anything like what television portrays.  I suppose that's because the dresses that are portrayed in things like Say Yes to the Dress or Say No to the Schmo, or whatever they are, are being bought by the wealthy.  I hope so, because a lot of the dresses actually exceed the median annual income for the middle class.  No kidding.  But as odd as that is, I don't grasp why it is interesting to watch a bunch of people you don't know buy a dress.  Would a show based on buying a set of athletic shoes deserve weekly attention?  I wonder.

While I find the dress shows strange, I find the competitive wedding shows appalling, and is at least one such show.  In that show, four brides are pitted against each other and rate each others weddings.  The weddings are rated on superficialities.  My son happened to catch one (because my wife and daughter like these shows) in which the brides rated down a Greek Orthodox wedding because it was too traditional. Seriously?  A person who would rate down a Greek Orthodox wedding as too traditional is ignorant beyond belief.  Of course its traditional.  It's a Greek Orthodox wedding and meant to be taken seriously, a sacrament in the Greek Orthodox faith with a form going back a thousand years or more.  

But why would brides want to compete in the first place?  Bizarre.

Pregnant again shows

It must be a sign of the cultural times that television audiences apparently find large families, or even just pregnancy, novel.

It wasn't all that long ago that large families were fairly common.  I knew plenty of kids when I was a kid who came from families that had seven or so children.  One person I was friendly with came from a family where she was one of twelve children.  A graduate student I knew at UW was the youngest of fifteen children.  What seemed odd, at the time, was to be an only child, which I was, or to be the only child in the household as the siblings were much older, which described the situation of at least one of my friends.  What was really unusual was to meet a child whose parents were divorced.  I don't think I knew anyone who was being raised by just one parent.

Now, this situation is so reversed that there are actually television shows devoted to the topic of big families.  I just can't quite grasp why that's so novel, and it seems extremely voyeuristic to me.  To follow somebody around with the "gee, shes pregnant again!" type of implication is a little perverse, but it would seem to describe such shows to an extent.  Indeed, just this morning I overhead on the Today Show, which was on (but I wasn't watching, that married son of the Duggers, who have one such show, and his wife are going to have a (second?) child.  Well, so what?  Is that really that interesting?  Congratulations to them, to be sure, but why is that newsworthy?

In some ways this seems to have gotten started with a couple of shows about families that had a large number of children at one time.  So, for example, there was Jon and Kate plus Eight, the novelty being that the couple had all but one (I think) of their kids at one time, through fertility drugs.  That this was the novelty, however, seems to have been quickly forgotten, and now it suffices just for a couple to have a lot of children.

This has even developed to the point where even people having smaller sized families is deemed noteworthy if the couple is a celebrity couple.  There are a couple of television shows that have had this as a platform even though I can't grasp why that should be any more interesting to people than any other couple having children.  Indeed in real terms, it isn't, as you don't know the couple.

The worst example of this show, in my view, is MTV's Sixteen and Pregnant.  Defenders of the show argue that it shows the viewers that you don't want to be sixteen and pregnant, but what it really seems to do is follow around a fairly clueless set of male and female couples in an expertize of pathos. And it seems to me that its simply odd to be following around teenagers with a camera and pretend that the cameraman isn't there.  Of course the camera is there.  Who has a deep meaningful discussion on anything with a camera there?

Well, anyway, there's still the old movie channels.

The Food Network

What do people who watch all these cooking shows on television do with the information?

Unless we're becoming a secret nations of chefs, and I don't think we are, I think a lot of people are actually watching other people cook on television?  Why?

I suppose, if nothing else, perhaps its encouraging diversity in menus.

Why?

Why is it:

1.  That television advertisements, and "entertainment news" think it's neat to have pitchmen/babblers with thick Cockney accents?  How did that happen?

2.  That soap operas pitched at teenagers, and twenty somethings holding on to their teen years in an undignified manner, like to feature male and female characters who appear to be well fed, well clothed, and good looking, who do nothing but mope?  If I didn't have to work, had lots of stuff, and was really good looking (okay, I am stunningly good looking) I wouldn't run around moping.  I'd probably buy cattle and work, but I wouldn't mope.

Heck, I don't have a lot of money, and most of the time I'm not moping. What's up with that?

3.  That television associated Italian men and French men with sophistication, beauty, and libertine, apparently sterile, sex?  I've seen, and even met, real French and Italian people. They're fine, really, other than a different standard of bathing (why doesn't tv associate them with that) but they're no more beautiful than anyone else, quite frankly. They're not as chubby as we Americans, but then who is?

4.  Why is that people (well, really mostly women) like to watch television dramas that are all about turgid messed up family relationships?  Do people like turgid messed up family relationships?  If so, why don't they just hang out at divorce court, where things are even more turgid and icky.

5.  That people with serial bad relationships seem to think that launching into another is a good idea?  Maybe they ought to just cool it and try hanging out with themselves.

6.  That people regard the opinion of any entertainment figure as relevant to anything?  After all, if you are in the entertainment industry, you make your living by putting yourself on display.  "Hey!  Look at me!"  If you make your living that way, that doesn't make you a great intellect by any means, and it doesn't qualify you to venture an opinion on diddly.

This is so much the case that I don't grasp it as to anything.  I don't care what Lady GaGa feels about homosexuality, and I don't care what Charlton Heston thought about guns.  Betty White's opinion on animals is meaningless as far as I'm concerned, and I don't care what any actor or singer has to say about any politician.  I'll give a rare pass to anyone who seems to be engaged in serious thought for a prolonged period of time, but in that industry, it has to be pretty demonstrated to bother with.