Thursday, January 3, 2013

When news becomes news, sort of...

Now  it has been nobly decided that Democrats as well as Republicans will have House Speaker John Boehner to kick around for  still one more term, let's  take a breath and catch up on some real news:

The  term "fiscal cliff" was repeated 2,390,864 times in the media in the weeks leading up to the vote, thereby narrowly  topping the number of shoes that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said he wore out campaigning for one political job or another.

If you  felt slightly less significant  from the report that there are 100 billion moons swirling around in the Milky Way, how about the research reported by the New York Times that human beings have a lot in common with jellyfish, chickens, roundworms and fruit flies.  That's the word from the laboratories that humans have no  more than 21,000 protein-coding genes, which isn't  much different from the jellyfish you disrespectfully squish at the seashore.

You may soon add another pill bottle to your medicine cabinet,  the one labeled "effective against bedbugs".   People who ingest the pill, it says here, will exhale an odorous carbon dioxide that will encourage the vermin to bite you - and die.  So your choice will be between bedbugs and red welts from the bites. That's as far as I want to go with this.

As the year ended, we learned of a fresh supply of terms to describe America's folly, among them the insistence by the right-wing loonies that Hillary Clinton had faked a concussion.    Talk of  faked orgasms has  beome so boringly ancient that in Hillary's case, it became something else called the 'Immaculate Concussion".  Former UN ambassador John Bolton, never at a loss to reveal his madness,  started the rant against Clinton with "diplomatic illness" - the term he used to describe her  tactic  to avoid testifying on Benghazi. This much we know: Bolton is not feigning his loopy view of the world.

It wouldn't be surprising if the nation's TV networks had no sense of a recession last year.  The latest round of reports on political advertising in 2012  said TV revenue was as high as $6 billion, an increase over 2008 of 68 pct., according to, the New America Foundation,  thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling to let the money gush.

Isn't it just like nutritionists to rain on the parade of the power-seekers?  Now we are told that all  of those power drinks that give people a kick  have no more punch than a cup of strong coffee. They're caffeine-based and cost more.  Starbucks will be pleased to hear that.

Finally, for the purest  confirmation that the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The cumulative records of the 2012 Cleveland Indians (68-94),  Browns (5-11)  and, currently, Cavaliers (7-26), is  80 wins, 131 losses.  Did you see this first in Grumpy Abe ?










1 comment:

David Hess said...

The fiscal cliff, as it predictably turns out, became more of a terraced rice paddy akin to those in mountainous regions of Asia. Instead of one precipitous plunge toward fiscal disaster, we're now in for a series of shorter falls in fights over spending cuts and upping the ceiling on federal borrowing authority. Instead of a parachute all we need now is a golfing umbrella. What a way to run a country!