Road Apples #69

Intellectual Burger King - Funny, but much of what I posted this week was basically the intellectual equivalent of Burger King (as opposed to the normal fare of Arby's). Lindsay Lohan? Give me a break! I do tell myself though that the whole La Linds thing is more a statement about American culture in 2010 than anything else. Yeah, that's the ticket. It's worth nothing that that I have been making the rounds at some of the local blogs commenting from time to time on the serious issues of the day. Maybe that moves me up to the intellectual equivalent of Pizza Hut. Maybe.

Blu Ray - Two weeks now with a new Sony Blu Ray player and I've yet to actually watch a Blu Ray movie. Having the attention span of a brain-damaged rat has its downsides.

The Goodbye Note - Saying that there is some turmoil at work these days is an understatement. There is a lot, but that same statement can be said by employees at just about any company these days, and since I have a job I am not going to complain. That noted, I did something this week that I've never done before: I drafted my "goodbye note". This is the little ditty that you send to your friends at co-workers in the office to officially say goodbye. I'm not sure why I did this, as over the last 21 years I haven't been compelled to do it before, but for whatever strange reason I did it now. Here's to hoping that the note sits safely in my draft folder for years to come.

Local Blogs - The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazelton statistical area has a population of about 614,000 but yet there are only a handful of local bloggers who regularly add content. About a third of that population lives in Lackawanna County, and yet there are maybe four or five bloggers (including yours truly) from the county who regularly post. Note that I'm not counting "blogging for my job" types like Steve Corbett, but I do count Andy Palumbo's excellent blog (as I think he does it independently of his job). Anyway, I often wonder why this is the case. Is it that we simply aren't as Internet literate in this area? I don't think that's the true, as I work with enough Gen Y types to know that they have this technology down pat. Maybe it's the inherent personal nature of blogs and blogging that is somewhat intimidating. Even if you just blog about political issues (for example), it's been my experience that you always put some of yourself into the content. That kind of exposure can be unnerving for some. Regardless, here's to hoping that there are more bloggers out there that I've simply yet to discover.

Speaking of Corbett - I heard him give a dressing-down yesterday to a caller who was basically just spewing Limbaugh sound-bytes. It was actually kind of cool to listen to, and I say that as someone who isn't a Corbett fan. The cherry on top? The caller was my brother. You simply can't make this stuff up.

Liberal Media Dominance? - Speaking of Rush, one of my brother's favorite lines of Limbaugh-parroted commentary centers around the "drive by media". In case you are not familiar with the term, this is the big, bad, liberal/socialist network news that supposedly has an enormous amount of commie-inspired influence in America. Of course I am usually quick to point out the fact that network news isn't exactly all that big or influential. For example:

Total network news viewers: About 23 million

Total listeners, Rush Limbaugh radio show: About 20 million

In other words the Limbaugh alone has about 87% of the big, bad, evil drive-by media's audience. He also has an audience for up to 3 hours, as opposed to the 30 minutes of network news. Add in the other conservative commentators and Fox News (which alone averages about 2.5 million viewers) and what you find is a media landscape that isn't in fact dominated by a leftist, liberal agenda. And this is assuming that the network news is leftist/liberal/commie in the first place.

In the "You Are Getting Old" Department - My youngest daughter got her nose pierced this afternoon. As I've noted many times before, I see myself as barely being an adult, let alone being adult enough to have nearly adult children. As for the nose piercing, well it's not my taste, but Becca is a great kid who works her ass off (20+ hours a week at Dunk'n Donuts and a 93 average in high school), so I'm not going to complain.