pleasant surprise of the day: the box speakers in my jeep have sounded like crap for quite some time. i assumed it was the result of being wet too many times and just plain old age. they've done a good job over the last 7 years, but maybe it was time to upgrade. too bad i can't afford it.
it wasn't til i was sitting in the applebee's parking lot tonight listening to the intro of 'heavy' by collective soul that i realized only one channel was working. after reconnecting the wire to the right side, the bass and treble came alive and all the sudden my system sounded like that high-class optimus* system that i know and love. yay.
*optimus is the dubious (and discontinued) line of stereo equipment from radio shack. draw your own conclusions. it was good for the money paid. (read: it kindof sucks to begin with but gets the job done.)
rant of the day: while watching the nascar race on sunday, i saw an ad for the FX tv movie, 'meltdown'. looks kinda cool. but in the middle of the 30 second spot, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the race, no doubt with many impressionable young people watching, they showed not one, but TWO blood curdling, graphic, bloody machine-gun murders. one victim was even identified as a hostage--as if the shooting needed to be even more shocking. and this was just the commercial!
ok.
in a post-columbine, post-9/11 world, do we need to see bloody, bullet-riddled bodies falling to the ground during a family-oriented sporting event? NO. sure, we've all seen a million deaths on the movies and late night tv. but doesn't the FCC have rules about this kind of stuff?
oh yeah, they do. during primetime: 1. no swearing. 2. no sex. 3. no drinking alcohol. 4. no nudity.
swearing, sex, alcohol, bare ass, murder--of these five things, only one is a crime. only one is something you and i will never do. only one is the most heinous thing a person can do to another person. it's also the only one that can be seen on network tv in the middle of the goddamn afternoon. what the hell is up with that?
we can watch half of the nicholas berg beheading video on the cnn, but if dan rather ever dropped the f-bomb during the evening news, he'd get his ass kicked into early retirement and every cbs station in the country would be fined for airing it. in fact, he wouldn't even be able to say the term "f-word" without the producers saying "um, dan, you can't make a reference to the f-word during the broadcast..." BUT we can see a human being's terrified last moments before some piece of shit terrorist hacks off his head with a machete. oh wait, we didn't see his head get cut off--but we knew what was coming. just like if dan implied that he was gonna say the f-word. though, somehow it's different.
now i'm not saying we should be able to see and hear drunken sex, boobs, and the f-word on network tv (even though in europe it's standard fare and they're all just fine) but damn, how does this make any sense? is this a result of america becoming desensitized to violence, or the cause of it?
when i see my 4 and 5 year old nephews pretending to shoot and kill each other i wonder where the hell the pick this stuff up, cuz it sure isn't from their berenstain bear books. yeah, i know--when i was a kid, i did that stuff too, and i've never even been in a fight, let alone killed anyone--and neither will my nephews. but let's also consider that not every person out there is smart enough to accept entertainment as entertainment only. desensitizing people to murder (as opposed to say, sex, which is a normal human function) is just plain wrong. families don't cry at funerals when someone flops a tit at a party. people don't go to jail for 15 to 25 when they drink alcohol. children don't grow up without brothers, sisters or parents when someone says "hey asshole!"--people do that stuff when someone pops a cap in someone else's ass and and someone dies.
so i guess it's ok to kill someone on tv, as long as it's done fully clothed, clean mouthed, and with no open containers of alcohol in sight. goddamn, i love my american freedom! only in this country does that make sense.
if you haven't seen it, go watch 'bowling for columbine'. hell, you might just vote for john kerry if you do, which is a good freakin' idea. but that's a whole nuther story. gotta tie my dad to his recliner on election day so he can't vote for that numb nut bush again. for christ's sake, bush has fumbled almost as many speeches as he's dropped bombs on foreign countries, and that's a lot. but as i said, that's a whole nuther story.
