-On the blink-

The view screen on the phone winked at me once, then went blank. Thirty seconds later, it winked again, then went blank again. And so on, and so forth.

Funny, I thought. I’m supposed to do a phone interview in five hours.

It was a perfect day for electronic equipment to go haywire. The new ipod, about which I still harbor a great deal of class trepidation for merely owning, also needed repair. And I think one of the brake lights on my car might be going.

Phoneless, toneless, and brakelight-less, the confluence of electronic mishap left me scratching my head and thinking about popular culture, and how much of our attention it still demands. Is it only the loss of all these other distractions that has me seeking another distraction?

Don't answer that.

A leader of a Christian fellowship can rail against 'Book of Daniel' for an alleged anti-christian sentiment. But what gets my goat? Knowing so little about television these days, except for those informative tidbits that somehow cross the gator-filled moat and scale the walls, I did manage to come up with one show that fills with me with hate; not for its ideas, but its lazy style.

Put aside for the moment their voyeuristic and sleazy tapping of juvenile kidnappings and sex crimes. I recently saw the moronic police officers on a Law and Order clone (all of them are awful, it doesn't matter which one you see) did one of their preachy group-exposition pieces. They stand roughly in a circle, and pipe up one by one.

Hargitay: What about these children? My character is childless, but look at me as if I’m maternal, will you please?
Melloni: Yeah, what about all of those missing children’s fathers? And do I get to beat the crap out of their stepdads, or what?
Wong: It’s all psychological with these missing girls. They look for father figures, and the pimp takes advantage of that.

Suspect: um, are you actually going to ask me any questions?

Ice-T: Lotta broken homes, lotta pimps. This problem is all over the country.
Belzer: wouldn’t be so many pimps if there weren’t so many johns to pay for it.

Just once, I’d like to see the perp in the other room look from expository cop to expository cop, incredulity growing. When the police captain finally comes in to worry about jurisdiction – his only other job is to exhort them to “find the girl!” – the perp should slip off the cuffs he’s been working on, and walk out of the station shaking his head.

“Jesus,” he should say once he’s outside. “It’s almost as if it’s in all of their contracts to take turns recapping the social issue of the day.”

“The writers must really think we’re fucking stupid.”

:Roll Credits:

Are they right? Are all our brains on the blink?

Don't answer that.