Category Archives: tv

Euphoria!

Last night was one of those nights when the phase of moon and the barometric pressure and … all came together to make sleeping an euphoric experience. I can’t tell you how rare it is any more when the sinuses are clear and the aches and pains are gone and laying down is so pleasant. It was great.

Of course, I have been paying for the glorious night of sleep with an itchy nose all day. That might be because of the combined thunder and snow and rain storm that has dropped in today. It has gone from sunny and clear to thundering and raining to snow flurries and back to thunder and rain and then sunny again in the space of a couple of hours. Spring must really and truly be afoot.

The weather, especially the thunder, means that Molly the wonder dog has been Molly the trembling ball of nerves, trying to crawl into my lap all day. Once the thunder fully recedes into the distance, she’ll collapse on the floor of my office and sleep for a few hours. (In fact, she is asleep now.) So maybe she’ll have a euphoric sleep as well.

On a completely unrelated note and somewhat related to J. Cosmo’s cryptic comments about J.R. (from Dallas), what is the show or shows that you actually watch as scheduled? Note that tivo or DVR or online viewing via hulu or netflix doesn’t count. I want to know if there is a show or shows you actually watch as and when scheduled by the networks and cable companies. (None is an acceptable answer as well.) I have a deep suspicion that there are very few people who follow program provider’s scheduling whims anymore. but I want to see if I am wrong.

Disturbing

An article by Nicole Ferraro, “Intelligence Down, Social  Networking Up“, has some really disturbing statistics in it. The most disturbing is from our friends at A. C. Nielsen about the amount of time being spent on social networking sites by the populace of various countries.

Time Spent On Social Networking Sites

Add the fact the Nielsen also reports that Americans are glued to the boob tube 151 hours per month on average and you have a pretty good basis for understanding the decline and fall of American productivity. 151 hours a month comes out to 5+ hours a day. So we have 6+ hours on the social networking sites plus 5+ hours glued to the tube. It’s really fortunate that at least some people can multi-task; otherwise we would have only a few hours a day left to work and interact as normal human beings.

Inquiring minds want to know: do you find this as disturbing as I do? The loss of productivity, the increased obesity due to inactivity, the failure of normal human to human interaction and socialization – it all seems a high price to pay for things as mindless as TV and facebook and twitter, and …