Potpourri (curmudgeonly thoughts for breakfast)

It's Personal, On Writing (and/or Media), Politics, Telecom Comments (0)

Yes, I had to look that word up, which is a little shameful to someone who has done hard toime as a newspaper columnist. Because every once in a while, you don’t have that big, delicious idea in time for deadline, and you do a “potpourri” column, blended from all the ideas that weren’t quite worth a whole 800-1,000 words. Columnists know potpourri and I shouldn’t have to look up the word.

First off, there are a few things about television that are bothering me.

1. I do not care about high definition television, and I wish all the billions of dollars that have been invested into making the pictures sharper and more lifelike had, instead, gone into making better television programs. More money for writers, actors and producers … especially for writers. Less money for high tech factories in China, Taiwan and Malaysia.

2. The following old programs can never be found in rerun, nor have they been squished onto DVDs with special features, and I want to know what the hell is the problem. They are some of the best TV shows ever made and broadcast, and I want to see them again.

a. My World and Welcome to It : Emmys for best actor (William Windom) and best comedy in 1970. Canceled after one year.

b. The Bold Ones, especially “The Senator” episodes with Hal Holbrook. Allegedly made it to TVLand in 1999, but I missed it.

c. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Those will do for starters. We need to bring them back.

3. Regarding politics lately: like everyone else, it seems, I’m leaning toward hoping Barack Obama gets the Democratic nomination. But I’ll support Hillary if she gets it. McCain? Puhhlease. I can give you a host of reasons why I won’t even consider him but the dealbreaker, for starters, is that he’s still in love with the Iraq War.

The other “good enough” reason is that we won’t have any real change, even a minute amount, if we don’t send the Republicans home from Washington. I don’t mean just G.W., I mean the whole lot of political appointees in the executive branch.

4. Regarding telecom … apparently the auction of 700 mhz spectrum is basically over and the guv’mint will be $20B richer … but we don’t know yet who won, though the suspicion apparently is that at&t and Verizon did, and that Google did not. Damn.

OK, four is enough. I feel better now, other than wondering how well Google translates my blogging style into other languages, since no one has told me yet. Shannon (Hi, Shannie) wants a Dutch translation, but the whole idea of letting a bot, however sophisticated, translate for me is a little scary. It reminds me of some old Monty Python sketches, the ones where simple phrases in some language always seemed to come out in English as “please fondle my buttocks.”

Back to trying to figure out “what next” for my dentist blog and drumming my fingers while I wait to hear what my agent has to say about my latest proposal to write a book.

It’s about sex, somewhat. I’ll divulge that much, for now. Maybe I’ll post my research reading list soon … it would be fun just to pick keywords, on that post.