MereRhetoric Contributes to Medical Science
Experiment: how high - and over what period of time - can my blood pressure spike if, while driving a stick shift on the 10 East between the 101 and the 605 during rush hour, I turn on NPR.
Result: my fingers are still kind of tingly. In fairness to me, I only actually screamed at the radio twice.
In case you haven't heard, there was a development in the War on Terror yesterday, in that the enemy murdered a lot of people in London. I don't mean to make light of the disgusting barbarism - my point is exactly that if you were listening to KCRW between 6:15pm and 7:00pm, you really might not have heard about it. Apparently, All Things Considered had better things to talk about. I couldn't make this up:
- 10 minutes from their "senior environmental policy contributor" discussing the distance between "the US" and "the world" on global warming policy. Not "the rest of the world". Not "other countries in the world". Literally, "the US" versus "the world." Nothing on Kyoto's total and complete lack of enforcement or on doubts regarding anthropogenic warming or on the economic costs of reducing greenhouse emissions. Just a lot of high snide petulance about "the distance" between "the US" and "the world." This was the nuanced portion of the news.
- 2 minutes on a ship of disabled people (ranging, if memory serves me, from paralysis to blindness) who are going to sail a ship across the Pacific. Inspiring, but have you heard about that blast in London this morning?
- 15 full minutes of some liberal mouthpiece badgering Judith Miller's attorney Floyd Abrams. Liberal-mouthpiece-guy kept trying to not so subtly hint that Rove committed a crime by leaking Plame's name, and Abrams kept dismantling him both on the idea that it could have been Rove and on the odds that a crime had even been committed. The following exchange really occurred:
LMG: The judge yesterday referred to the murder of the CIA chief in Athens as one of the reasons why allowing Miller to protect her source risked a "slippery slope" that could get operatives "assassinated".
FA: That's interesting but irrelevant, because no one has been hurt by the Plame leak.
LMG: …but you have to admit that Miller was complicit in a "character assassination."
That was the first screaming part for me.
- 5 impossibly pretentious minutes paying tribute to the late Evan Hunter. I don't want to get into details, but the reviewer painted a picture of gaily skipping out of a movie theater, pointing at his greased-hair childhood friends, and calling them Daddy-O. The word "Daddy-O" actually appeared three or four times, finally crescendoing into the I-think-I-just-vomited-in-my-mouth saccharine sendoff "so goodbye Daddy-O, and thank you." The whole thing was very West Side Story-ish, and by West Side Story-ish I mean boys handcuffed to each other singing and dancing.
- 5 even more impossibly pretentious minutes reviewing Terrence Blanchard's new jazz album Flow. The reviewer managed - with what one presumes to be a straight face - to describe one of the pieces as a "catlike solo". And then, in an act contrary to all observed laws of natural selection, his body failed to spontaneously go into cascading organ failure when he uttered the phrase "he seduces us... could he sound more at ease - and yet, what has he left unsaid?" This was my other yelling at the radio part.
In fairness to them, KCRW did do almost 3 whole minutes (over two segments) on the "potential parallels that some experts are pointing out" between Madrid 3/11 and London 7/7. So that was helpful. Because between the bombing of mass transit, the explosions during rush hour, and the Al Qaeda connection, people probably need those totally unintuitive connections repeated to them a couple of times before they get it.
No wonder the people in Santa Monica don't have the first clue about the world - all their information comes from "it'll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force needs to hold a bake sale" bumper stickers from a radio station dedicated to being more pretentious than its listeners– which is mind boggling when you consider that most of their listeners are aspiring actors who refer to their bodies as "their instruments".
Result: my fingers are still kind of tingly. In fairness to me, I only actually screamed at the radio twice.
In case you haven't heard, there was a development in the War on Terror yesterday, in that the enemy murdered a lot of people in London. I don't mean to make light of the disgusting barbarism - my point is exactly that if you were listening to KCRW between 6:15pm and 7:00pm, you really might not have heard about it. Apparently, All Things Considered had better things to talk about. I couldn't make this up:
- 10 minutes from their "senior environmental policy contributor" discussing the distance between "the US" and "the world" on global warming policy. Not "the rest of the world". Not "other countries in the world". Literally, "the US" versus "the world." Nothing on Kyoto's total and complete lack of enforcement or on doubts regarding anthropogenic warming or on the economic costs of reducing greenhouse emissions. Just a lot of high snide petulance about "the distance" between "the US" and "the world." This was the nuanced portion of the news.
- 2 minutes on a ship of disabled people (ranging, if memory serves me, from paralysis to blindness) who are going to sail a ship across the Pacific. Inspiring, but have you heard about that blast in London this morning?
- 15 full minutes of some liberal mouthpiece badgering Judith Miller's attorney Floyd Abrams. Liberal-mouthpiece-guy kept trying to not so subtly hint that Rove committed a crime by leaking Plame's name, and Abrams kept dismantling him both on the idea that it could have been Rove and on the odds that a crime had even been committed. The following exchange really occurred:
LMG: The judge yesterday referred to the murder of the CIA chief in Athens as one of the reasons why allowing Miller to protect her source risked a "slippery slope" that could get operatives "assassinated".
FA: That's interesting but irrelevant, because no one has been hurt by the Plame leak.
LMG: …but you have to admit that Miller was complicit in a "character assassination."
That was the first screaming part for me.
- 5 impossibly pretentious minutes paying tribute to the late Evan Hunter. I don't want to get into details, but the reviewer painted a picture of gaily skipping out of a movie theater, pointing at his greased-hair childhood friends, and calling them Daddy-O. The word "Daddy-O" actually appeared three or four times, finally crescendoing into the I-think-I-just-vomited-in-my-mouth saccharine sendoff "so goodbye Daddy-O, and thank you." The whole thing was very West Side Story-ish, and by West Side Story-ish I mean boys handcuffed to each other singing and dancing.
- 5 even more impossibly pretentious minutes reviewing Terrence Blanchard's new jazz album Flow. The reviewer managed - with what one presumes to be a straight face - to describe one of the pieces as a "catlike solo". And then, in an act contrary to all observed laws of natural selection, his body failed to spontaneously go into cascading organ failure when he uttered the phrase "he seduces us... could he sound more at ease - and yet, what has he left unsaid?" This was my other yelling at the radio part.
In fairness to them, KCRW did do almost 3 whole minutes (over two segments) on the "potential parallels that some experts are pointing out" between Madrid 3/11 and London 7/7. So that was helpful. Because between the bombing of mass transit, the explosions during rush hour, and the Al Qaeda connection, people probably need those totally unintuitive connections repeated to them a couple of times before they get it.
No wonder the people in Santa Monica don't have the first clue about the world - all their information comes from "it'll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force needs to hold a bake sale" bumper stickers from a radio station dedicated to being more pretentious than its listeners– which is mind boggling when you consider that most of their listeners are aspiring actors who refer to their bodies as "their instruments".
