One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)

Good Fun

     Marvel has spun, well, webs with all the permutations of their "Spider-Man" character.  The core character was popular with my male peers in Junior High and High School: here was this wisecracking kid like them, except he usually knew the right thing to say and he had superpowers!  I thought he was fun, if implausible.  Given similar powers, the zit-faced boys I knew were unlikely to rise to his level of heroism -- or verbal cleverness.

     I admit it: I was never a huge fan of comic books, not even when they started to call themselves graphic novels.  The horror/SF comics were screamingly derivative, often "borrowing" SF plots or entire stories without so much as a nod to the original and I found that offputting.  For pure mindless fun, "Doc Savage" reprints were a better value for my money.

     But Spidey was his own thing, not a sanctimonious stuffed shirt.  Not a millionaire, or invulnerable, or a rebooted Norse god, just Some Guy who stumbled into superpowers, and that was kind of cool.  The thing is, he kind of wasn't entirely original; he had a pulp precursor, much darker: The Spider was the alias of the entirely human (if slightly gadgety) crimefighter Richard Wentworth, maybe the number three hero pulp after The Shadow and Doc Savage.  The Spider ran to greater moral ambiguity (and bloodthirstiness) than the other two and gave rise to a movie-serial version of the protagonist with a much more spidery look, and between the pulp and the films, helped inspire the later comic-book hero.  The teen angst was all from Stan Lee, though, and that's really the emotional driver of the graphic novel character.

     All this is to set up writing about the entirely entertaining Amazon Video streaming series, Spider-Noir.  It's spun from the "Spiderverse" notions Marvel's been shoveling through a kaledeoscope in recent years, but what's come out this time* is a back-crossing between the modern-day four-color hero and his pulp ancestor that's half film noir and half graphic novel (and about ten percent Republic-type serial).  Seedy PI Ben Reilly struggles to make a living, having put away his past as a costumed superhero after personal tragedy, and then....  Then, of course, plot happens.  It's not any more plausible than any other superhero tale, or most film noir for that matter, but it's as engaging as any of them, with a reasonably good take on the 1930s setting and nice acting, cinematography, effects and editing.  It's good fun.  They've managed to explain or at least lampshade most of the incongruities, too.  It's unlikely to alter your worldview, but it's at least as good a value for money as an old pulp magazine or a modern graphic novel.
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* They'd already done a similar thing, "Spider-Man Noir," in print and animation, the latter with the same actor (Nicholas Cage) as the TV series.

When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
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* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

In Other News

     Odds are pretty good that I'm in a recurrence of rheumatic fever.  It's an autoimmune ailment, triggered by strep, and sure enough, I had a sore throat a few weeks back.  The sore throat ran its course and went away, as such things do, and....

     And I've had creeping fatigue, and aching knees, and figured I needed to move more, so I did.  And I kept on being tired and started to have eyelid twitches around my left eye, and sore knuckles, and wow, was I tiring easy, getting other aches and pains here and there, and oh, gosh, did my knees ever hurt, and...

     This morning, I went back to sleep for an hour after I fed that cats.  When I got up again, I was moving slower and slower.  It hurt like the dickens to go down the basement stairs and hurt worse to head back up.  Those darned knees!  Because I can (eventually) take a hint, I loaded up on aspirin* and kept moving, but things did not get better and I ended up back in bed by and by.  I managed to do my part in the Trash Day festivities (cleaning out the refrigerator and changing two catboxes, in that order) but it was slow going and left me worn out.

     Is it or isn't it?  This collection of symptoms lines up pretty well; if I was twitchier or had a bit of a rash, it'd be more likely.  But even physicians differ on diagnosing  mild cases, so darned if I know, but it sure feels like the last couple of bouts I have had with the stuff.

     Tam and I did watch the last episode of this season of For All Mankind tonight, and I would happily watch more if there was any more.  So far, they have done nothing to shake my theory that the series can be taken as a prequel to The Expanse.
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* If the underlying strep infection is gone, aspirin is still the hot ticket for treatment: it's one of the best anti-inflammatories around.  I usually use it as my backup pain relief, since it's a bit harsh on the stomach and acetaminophen in milder, but until this either settles down or drives me to the doctor, I'll do steady aspirin and take the other as-needed.

Oh, Hey

     I forgot to post today. Distracted by the race -- the Sunday morning political shows are usually a rich source of fodder, but pre-Indy 500 coverage preempted all of them except CBS, and it was apparently guest-hosted by "Flo" from the insurance-company commercials 

A Return To Space

      The next season of For All Mankind is out.  On Apple TV, it's an "alternate history" in which the Russians beat the U.S. to the Moon (barely) and the Space Race never stops, forcing technological advancements.

     It's a world both familiar and strange.  In some ways, it's the future the adults promised us during my childhood -- but in the real world, we'd stopped going to the Moon before I started High School.  Because of that, at times it's almost painful to watch the show: they've got science bases on the Moon and a settlement on Mars!

     In other ways, it's clearly fiction -- and remains on a timeline that would result in the setting of The Expanse.  Politicians exhort, "Earth first!" in both shows, Martian settlers are determined and resentful, asteroids are mined for minerals (just beginning in For All Mankind and an ongoing industry in The Expanse). Some of the fractious nations of Earth have come together in the Apple TV series as the "M-7," which runs Mars and oversees the exploitation of space-based resources.

     It's a timeline based on the Sunday-supplement articles and TV specials of my childhood, but the showrunners aren't looking through rose-colored glasses.  "If only..." is a wistful dream and the TV series eschews wistfulness for a sprawling cast, a storyline as wide as history and a past that feels like a future.  The story hasn't quite leapfrogged the calendar -- the current season is set in the 2010s -- but the technology certainly has.

Television Of Interest

     Tamara and I recently watched the entire run of the CBS-carried show Person of Interest, finishing last night.  Despite ending nearly a decade ago, the show is surprisingly current, addressing the rise of "machine intelligence," pervasive surveillance, government (and government contractor) corruption and the morality of power.

     Heavy stuff -- but carried along with no small amount of action and adventure, by a group of competent characters who will beat you at chess or in hand-to-hand combat.  The series begins as one more entry in the "mysterious strangers help good people and stymie evil" genre, along the general lines of, say, The Pretender, Mission: Impossible, Quantum Leap, Have Gun Will Travel, Danger Man, The Avengers and so on: drama in the Gothic mode, with a clear conflict between good and evil, in which good triumphs just in time for the credits to roll, usually by the skin of its teeth.

     That would have been more than enough to carry a TV series, but Person of Interest didn't stop there.  A smart underlying concept and strong characters pushed it more and more along science-fictional lines, in a near-future, near-cyperpunk world of corrupt cops, honest cops, warring criminal gangs, computer geniuses, super-spy/assassins -- and a number of surprisingly human touches, throughlines of love and loss.  From season to season, the story deepens, the bad guys get bigger and badder, and our small band of heroes rise to the occasion or die trying.  There are Classical mappings to most good drama, and if you ever wondered what might happen if clever, lame Hephaestus; bold, handsome Apollo; wise, cryptic Pallas Athena; implacable Nemesis; Artemis the huntress; the Delphic Oracle and a gritty NYC police detective* faced off against Hera, Zeus and Hermes (with a small army of giants and Titans on their side, all answering to Colossus the Forbin Project), this is an answer, with enough side characters and conflicts left over to fill out any collection of ancient gods or a modern rogues' gallery. 

     This is a series well worth watching while it is still fiction.  Don't wait too long.
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* Even I can only strain a metaphor so far, though impulsive Ares is a not-unreasonable analog for Detective Lionel Fusco.  But I will still argue that most ensemble-cast dramas (and not a few comedies) can be mapped onto the various pantheons of the past, for a very simple reason: our stories still deal in archetypes and in human emotion writ large.  Good casting helps; the actors in Person of Interest were as varied as their characters, people of divergent inclinations and career paths who all brought something of themselves to their roles. 

And The Winner Is...

      Advertising! That was the biggest winner in Indiana's primary elections yesterday.  There was a big uptick in ad money, largely spurred by supporters of President Trump's efforts to unseat the seven State Senators who thwarted redistricting efforts.

     Turnout was unusually high -- in Marion Country, nearly double that of the previous two primaries.  And that's half of the story.

     The other half is not so great.  All that money pouring in, those TV ads painting that candidate as a closet liberal* and this candidate as a true-hearted America First† stalwart did bring people to the primary polls in record numbers, but that record still amounts to a 14.9% turnout instead of the usual single digits.  Just over eighty-five percent of registered voters are, apparently, okay with whoever the rest of us pick.  I'm honored, I guess -- but should you really trust me when you have a chance to put your own two cents in?

     (And by the way, my thanks to the two parties, especially the GOP, for spending the big dollars buying airtime from my employer, whom you otherwise revile.  You helped keep my paycheck from bouncing, in a market where my industry's share of dwindling advertising dollars continues to shrink.)

     Looking at horserace-level results, of the seven primaried Republicans, five lost to nearly indistinguishable challengers, replacing Tweedle-don't with Tweedle-do.  One held on, and the seventh hung in the balance over a difference of three (3) votes for a long time before being called for the incumbent.  Still okay staying home for the primaries?

     Don't look at me to lay a feather on the scales against either candidate's heart in that close contest.‡ I voted in the Democrat primary.  These are times to pick a side, and downstream of the 2021 insurrection, I'll never vote for a Republican.  They could have cleaned house, tossed out the vandals, religious extremists and authoritarians.  They chose to retcon recorded history and double down instead, so I'll content myself with picking the best Democrats I can find.  (As the late P. J. O'Rourke said of Hillary Clinton in 2016, "...she’s wrong within normal parameters.") 

     The 2026 Indiana primary is done.  The main event is in November -- and the future of the country is on the line.  Nobody's coming to save us, nobody except for us.
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* Despite, in every instance I could check, a voting record somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan and fulsome support of the incumbent President on nearly every issue except redistricting.
 
† Seriously, when did they stop teaching U. S. History in our schools?  That slogan has an ugly history, only barely outside living memory.  Yes, the surface meaning of the words is just fine -- in much the same way as an English word of Scandinavian origin meaning miserly has utterly no relation to a vile racist slur and swastikas have a long and innocent history in Greek, Indian and Native American art.  People of good sense avoid 'em anyway, because the negative associations are far too strong.
 
‡ Indiana Senate District 23 isn't my neighborhood anyway.

Punished For Retroactive Bad Taste

     There was a time when you didn't mess with The Mouse.  Used to be, if legislators started talking about the need for copyright reform, you knew one or more of the copyrights covering a certain famous animated cartoon rodent and his pals was about to expire.

     Back when every major TV network changed hands and ended up belonging to one huge corporation or another,* Disney got hold of ABC.  They've never let go.

     And they had deep pockets.  TV networks in the United States own only a few of the stations that carry them, with the remained being independently-owned "affiliates."  ABC's got seven stations that are all theirs at present.  And in the U.S., the FCC regulates stations: anyone using up over-the-air RF spectrum has to have a license.  Networks themselves don't get a lot of FCC regulatory interaction; the individual stations do have to promise to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what they say and do, and to respect themselves and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and....  No, wait,  that's Girl Scouts; but the FCC regs for broadcast stations are almost the same thing, plus a pile of technical stuff.

     ABC was a latecomer among radio networks; NBC had "Red" (primo stuff) and "Blue" (B-grade, things they were trying out, some highbrow shows that didn't make a profit) networks serving different stations and went into WW II under an anti-trust cloud because of it.  Once the war was over, Uncle Sam made 'em sell one off, and of course it was Blue that went.

     A candy company bought it up and eventually changed the name from "Blue" (c'mon, the word already had that connotation) to ABC, the kid brother of networks, gamely charging after the older, larger NBC and CBS (and Mutual), doing their best to keep up.  The first two were already into TV and as television bloomed, ABC leapt in after them, underfunded, scrappy, willing to try almost anything.  (After a few experiments, including developing Meet The Press, Mutual stuck with good, dependable radio.  They're gone now.)

     ABC remained the upstart network for decades, until Fox (entertainment, not News) came along and showed there were realms of edginess yet to be explored.

     And with that as background, their evening talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, a few days before the White House Correspondents Dinner, made a tasteless joke about the First Lady and how she'd look at the dinner, referencing the 23-year age gap between her and Mr. Trump (and perhaps her usually-serious expression): he said she had "a glow like an expectant widow."

     It's funnier if you don't see public figures you dislike as quite human.

     It's not funny in hindsight after a guy apparently tried to make her a widow at the dinner.

     It's much less funny if you react in an all-too-human way: the Trumps aren't laughing.  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has crossed swords with Kimmel and ABC once already, and blinked, announced the handful of TV stations directly owned by ABC are now up for license renewal, well ahead of schedule.  They've got thirty days to get their paperwork together and filed (and there's rather a lot of it), and they're going under the microscope.

     This is bureaucracy-as-punishment, and it is punishment not so much for a crass joke but for failing to predict the future when the joke was told.  It's a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects even cruel and insensitive speech.

     The Mouse still has deep pockets, and though they have, finally, let the earliest version of their well-loved Mickey slip out from beneath copyright protection, Disney may decide to fight this one out; knuckling under will just get them more of the same, and the burden is likely to be laid more heavily on them than the three other major networks.  Or they may try judo: those "O&O" TV stations represent the smallest part of ABC's income; running them, mostly in major metropolitan areas, is more for prestige and ready access to newsmakers and they could easily sell them off and stand back, largely insulated from the wrath of Chairman Carr and the President he serves.
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* Arguably, when General Electric bought RCA, NBC wasn't their main interest: RCA had a nice collection of lucrative government contracts, including plenty with the Department of Defense, plus an array of patents to warm the cockles of shareholder's hearts -- or wallets.  Nevertheless, GE held on to the network through some years of David Letterman ribbing that kept the company name front and center, before selling it off and making money on the deal.

Deserts Of News

      At one time, it was easy to be awash in news: pretty good newspapers, five-minute radio newscasts -- even the screamin' Top 40 stations on AM and blissed-out album rock on FM had two-minute news capsules once an hour, while their pointy-boots country and suit'n'tie middle of the road peers handed out five whole minutes of network news that covered the world, often alongside another five of state and local material from their own newsroom.  (The "elevator music" stations might or might not have much news -- often very little, since it got in the way of being radio wallpaper.)

     It wasn't in-depth detail and analysis, and you rarely got hard-hitting exposés unless a politician got caught in the wrong bed and/or with a finger in the till, but it was useful, solid stuff, wars and plane crashes, sports scores and election results.  Opinion was clearly labeled and set apart from news coverage -- the editorial page of the paper, or the station owner or general manager gruffly complaining what a terrible idea the new bypass highway was, avoiding car-dealer row.*

     You could glance over the paper as you ate your cornflakes or Cream of Wheat; you could let the radio play while you washed up and got ready for work.

     Our local paper went to the dogs a long while back.  I held on as long as I could -- the catboxes need lining! -- but it kept getting thinner (especially of local news) and subscription rates kept going up, and by the time it was ten times the price of the same amount of blank newsprint, I dropped it.  Radio news -- well, there's NPR.  Their hard-news coverage is a lot more balanced than claimed by their detractors† and you can get 'em via podcast.  That "podcast" part is important, because while over-the-air NPR morning shows have more news content than commercial network TV, there's still a lot of feature fluff and it can get annoying: "The world is at the brink of war and/or recession -- but first, twenty minutes with the woman reintroducing stoats to London." Look, it's lovely but it doesn't affect the price of gas, okay?  I can call up the podcast and let it play actual news while I do dishes.

     On opinion stuff, I balance NPR with The Bulwark, mostly staffed by ex-Republicans repulsed by Mr. Trump's remaking of their party.  The downside -- and why that's not a live link -- is that their content is hosted by Substack, which is still "neutral" on things like Nazis, neo-Nazis and Andrew Tate.  You don't stop evil by closing your eyes and pretending it's just as good as anybody else's honest opinion.

     And that's the other thing about those old newspapers and local radio stations: they stuck to a narrow line, a consensus about decent behavior.  They might lean Right or Left (mostly Right, with those Democrats and hippies at the album rock station and the afternoon paper as exceptions), but they all agreed Nazis were bad, the Soviet Union was bad, abusing women was bad, elections were honest and politicians bore watching.  It wasn't much (and sometimes it was more talk than action), but more and more, it looks like The Good Old Days.
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*The symbiotic relationship between small-to-medium market radio stations and their local car dealers was deep and profound.  You could tell the #2 or #3 station in town, because the GM drove a Lincoln instead of a Cadillac. None of 'em drove Chryslers except for the sales guy who had that account.
 
† Ad Fontes rates NPR News Now almost dead center, a little to the right of conservative-leaning The Hill, and they provide examples.

The Churn

     In the novels and TV series The Expanse, spacecraft mechanic Amos Burton makes many references to "the churn," a period of time when everything is in flux before it settles into a new normal.  There's even a novella in the book series and an episode, part of a narrative arc, in the TV series with that title.

     It's an inflection point, a place where the slope of the curve changes.*

     It's where the United States is now.  Up or down?  Authoritarianism or our imperfect-but-striving republic?  War or diplomacy, guns or grain?

     This is not one man's decision, no matter how much the figurehead who's tried so hard to nail himself to the prow of the ship of state may smirk and preen, no matter how much his enablers, handlers and flacks claim otherwise.  We're coming up on critical midterm elections, and it's a time for choosing.

     What do you want?  More imperial presidency, and not just from one man or one party, but a growing trend like the one that twisted ancient Rome?  Or back to the brawling, boisterous and, yes, flawed tripod of American Constitutional government, with a noisy, arguing Congress, an overworked Executive bound by law and a court system that is not open to the highest bidder?

     Our country prospered under the system we put in place 237 years ago.  We'd gotten ourselves well shut of kings, and we needed something that was almost unheard of at the time, a system suited to growing cities, the sparks of industrial production, hard-headed farmers and romantic pioneers.  It was never perfect but the general trend was to make it more accessible, more evenhanded, less corrupt, more free.  It shouldn't be given up without a fight.
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* Strictly speaking, it's where the curve reverses, but the metaphoric use is considerably looser than the mathematical one.

Free Cable!

     Okay, not exactly cable, and there may be a little upfront cost; or not, if you or the previous people who lived in your place were lazy enough.

      See, the other thing about over-the-air digital TV is that in addition to providing video good enough to show on a giant screen (seriously, guys, when I was in my teens, we thought a 25" color screen across the living room was huge and now that's the size of my computer monitor), there was bandwidth left over -- as the technology has improved, a lot of it.  So now every over-the-air-channel has multiple extra "dot channels" to fill.*  You can watch them free for nothing -- if you've got an antenna.

     Some of the TV stations put together newswheels or local weather services for their additional channels, but there were already a few companies providing programming to low power TV stations, and a few independent TV channels in the largest cities that weren't quite the size of Chicago's WGN or Atlanta's WTBS but provided a similar mix of old and new.  Those stations and not-quite-networks saw an opportunity and stepped up, making most of their money from commercials and offering their programming to fill the otherwise unused dot channels.

     That was over a decade ago.  In and around a big city, like, oh, Indianapolis, these days you have the usual ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC/PBS, but also MeTV (a kind of homage to a well-run independent local station, complete with Perry Mason and Andy Griffith reruns, Saturday morning cartoons and a Saturday night monster-movie host), a  science fiction channel, two different Western channels, a full-time cartoon channel, a channel of action/adventure programming, one aimed at Black audiences, one for Indian/Southeast Asian viewers, scads of religious channels, a local newswheel and at least two classic-movie channels.  It's better than you used to get from cable TV without the premium channels (and those are all available on streaming).

     Tam mentioned this on her blog recently.  If you live outside the big city and its bedroom communities, you'll probably need something better than old fashioned rabbit ears or a modern flat-panel indoor antenna (bigger is better for those -- you can hide it behind a picture if need be).  You may find a spiky Yagi antenna hiding in your attic or on a pole strapped to your chimney, left over from the days before most people got cable TV.  They work just as well with digital TV signals as they did with analog ones; the only difference is that if you had a lot of "snow" back then, digital TV will either come in great now or not at all; there's not much in-between with a digital signal.  (If you do have to buy an antenna, all I can tell you is the brand I have stashed away in case the well-worn one on our chimney doesn't survive the raccoon removal process: Winegard has been making home TV antennas since way, way back.  I'm sure there are other good brands, and there are still contractors around who install them.)

     Rabbitears lets you look up TV stations serving your location, and lists the channel they transmit on ("Digital Channel") as well as the one your screen displays; it's not always the same.  (This was supposed to be a clever idea to let stations maintain their established identity while everything got shuffled around during the analog-to-digital transition, but I have my doubts.)  There are still a lot of stations on the VHF channels, even low-VHF, so in many locations, you want an antenna that picks them up as well as UHF.  The channel information will help you figure that out.

     Indianapolis has a staggering number of free channels, well over 70 depending on how fancy an antenna you have and if you're willing to point it in other directions than at the main cluster of towers on the northwest side of town.  And that's about average.  It's not "500 channels and nothing on," but these channels have to sing for their supper and there's probably something on one or two of them that'll hold your interest.
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* People call them "subchannels," which is technically inaccurate, or "dot channels," though the main channel is always "[Channel Number].1" and the others are 2, 3, 4, etc., so they're all dot channels.  The channel changer on your remote clicks through them in order, same as always.

Easy Listening

     When I was young and (some) regular household electronic devices still had genuine light-up vacuum tubes inside, I took Radio-TV Production classes for all three years of High School.

     The man who taught that subject was middle-aged and very heavy.  He'd worked his way through college as a jazz and middle-of-the-road music deejay before getting into news (and part-time police work, but that's another story), and told stories of the days when even a medium-sized directional AM station was a Big Deal, with full-time engineers on duty to turn the knobs.*

     One day, a particularly apple-polishing student lamented that there was hardly any jazz at all on the radio any more, and he chuckled.  "You watch TV, don't you?  Listen to the theme music.  Nearly all of it is light jazz of one kind or another."

     He was right.  Most of it still is, with some notable exceptions, and if you want background music and have an Alexa or similar widget that only needs a single song to go searching for more of the same but different, you can spin up a nice fifteen minutes or half an hour of undemanding entertainment by asking it to play the theme from "Mannix," "The Wild, Wild West" (TV show) or something along those lines.

     Semi-relatedly, when I was even younger, I was a fan of both "The Wild, Wild West" and "Love, American Style," and it wasn't until years later that I realized what they had in common was that they were as close as TV ever got to newsstand pulp magazines.  There are other good examples, but those two had taken the essentials and run right from pulp-paper page to the camera lens.
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* That's not all they were doing.  Directional antenna arrays for AM radio are large, from two to as many as nine towers in the 100-foot to 700-foot range and spaced about that far apart, with a large, complex gadget called a "phasor" (no, really) to feed the right amount and phase angle of radio-frequency energy to each one, and a smaller gadget called a "phase monitor" to ensure it was all working as it should.  They were drifty, and regular readings had to be made, along with occasional adjustments.  Over time, the change to transistors and then integrated circuits meant the phase monitors got better and better, and as computers replaced log tables and slide rules, the design of phasors and antenna arrays became less art and more science.  Eventually, it became obvious even to the FCC that most of the drifting was not, in fact, the big hardware, but the little gadgets we used to check it every half hour.  30-minute checks became three-hour checks; engineers on duty 24/7 were replaced by a requirement for one full-timer with the right license and, eventually, "whoever," a part-timer to occasionally look over the automated monitors and make sure the EAS tests ran.  But oh, it used to be a thing, once upon a time.

He Said What?

      Look, if you're going to put your political party forward as the party of moral probity and traditional virtues, admitting (or even claiming) you have snorted cocaine from the seat of a toilet should be an absolute bar to holding any public office, ever.  Period.

     And yet....


     I don't think we should cut politicians much slack for having smoked pot; it remains Federally illegal and it was against most or all state laws when our known pot smokers did so, even if they were only smoking it for the articles didn't inhale.  Drinking to excess is reprehensible, especially while in office.  But these are now vices at the outer edge of social acceptability, legal in many places under the proper circumstances.  Using cocaine...is not.  Snorting Bolivian Marching Powder off the seat of a commode previously used for its intended purposes is way beyond the pale.  Even joking about it (and make no mistake, that will be the face-saving retcon, despite the story having been told in utter seriousness) indicates a marked degeneracy.

     Many people in the current Administration make my skin crawl, and none more than our Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Visiting Outer Space

      I'm in the middle of another catch-as-can rewatch of The Expanse, and it annoys me that I've somehow gotten stuck in the ignorant nitwit future with the flat-Earthers and antivaxers.  This timeline isn't looking good for a glorious future in space.

     On the other hand, a recent episode pointed out what timeline The Expanse might be in: Amos Burton is in transit from Ilus/Medina Station/The Ring/The Belt to Earth, and he has a short stopover on the Moon.  While there, he walks past a poster advertising tours of "Jamestown Base" in an old-fashioned-looking font -- and Jamestown Base is the name of the 1970s U. S. Moon Base in the Apple TV alternate-history series For All Mankind.  I've commented before that they line up pretty nicely, with Mars in the early days of being settled in For All Mankind, and a Lunar establishment well underway.

     I'm glad they cleared that up, I guess, but yeah, not our timeline.  We get to visit outer space on TV but the odds keep looking worse for an affordable tourist ticket.

Th-um, The, er, The Expanse

     For fans of The Expanse and Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies: Tweety Bird has a Belter accent!  "Dat mean ol' Puddy Tat, him a wellwallah!"

     It's a re-imagining I'd like to see.  Some of the roles write themselves -- Granny as Avasarala, Bugs as Holden, Daffy as Alex, Taz as Amos.  Marvin the Martian won't even need costuming.  Naomi is a challenge -- she probably needs to be played by a rabbit, but most of Bugs's cartoon wives/girlfriends are minor characters.  Possibly the Queen of Mars as Bobbi Draper, Foghorn Leghorn as Fred Johnson -- which makes the hen Miss Prissy plausible as Juliet Mao, and other chicken/rooster characters to fill out the Mao family.  Porky Pig as Joe Miller and Elmer Fudd as bad guy Sadavir Enwright, and there you go.

     Oh, and Tweety? Surely Camina Drummer!

     Sylvester would of course play Marco Inaros, with Sylvester, Jr. as Filip.

     And that's only a start.

Flashback?

     Fox News is in court again -- well, still -- facing off against a voting-machine company.  What, you thought it was over, and that they'd settled out of court for a staggering sum?

     That was Dominion.  This is Smartmatic, and it ain't over yet.  Lawyers and PR flacks from both sides are talking tough and the shockingly cynical comments from Fox on-air talent and others that came out in the run-up to the Dominion settlement are getting another run-though.

     Will Fox blink?  Will Smartmatic prevail if the case goes to trial?  I don't know.  I do know it's all about eyeballs and the relentless pursuit of them -- and the ad dollars they bring -- by Fox News.  If you were expecting any Edward R. Murrow-like pronouncements of journalistic ideals, or even partisan flag-waving like the newspaper magnates of old, forget it.

The Ipcress File...Again?

     I found Len Deighton's not-quite-Everyman spy Harry Palmer the long way 'round and in reverse, starting with the book series by Charles Stross, a crossover between British spy novels and Lovcraftian horror,* The Laundry Files.  That led to Deighton's books (well worth reading) and from there to the films starring Michael Caine (well worth watching), and when one of our streaming services offered a preview of the updated, reimagined TV series version of the first novel some months back, of course I watched it.

     But it was one more streaming service, and expensive at the time, and there wasn't much else on it I wanted to see, so--  Maybe later.

     Much later, AMC finally re-released the series 1990s Remember WENN, (set in a small, independent radio station between 1939 and 1941 or so) and the first two seasons were available with ads on a free streamer.  I watched those, found it to be just as good as I remembered and wanted more.  The last two seasons were only on a couple of pay services, and one of them seemed like a better deal than the other.

     It wasn't until I'd signed up for it and saw their line-up that I realized why: they've got the TV series version of The Ipcress File, too.  So I've been watching it.

     The director and actor's Harry Palmer isn't Micheal Caine's.  The plot isn't exactly Deighton's either -- but he hadn't bothered to name the character to begin with, and the new guy is as delightfully competent and cynical as his predecessors in print and on film.  It's very stylish fun, set in a lovingly recreated 1960s (minus a few anachronisms most viewers will never notice) and I'm not entirely sure many of the reviewers figured out we're getting Harry's take on the story -- and Harry's looking up from fairly low on the class-system totem pole, with a complete lack of respect for the people who are supposedly his betters.  This is very much not James Bond, without bothering to sneer at the Bonds of fiction; Harry's much too busy to bother with that sort of thing.  He'll leave it to the empty suits who came from proper families and went to the right schools.

     They've taken such liberties with the plot that I'm not sure how it will end -- and I'm looking forward to finding out.
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* And also between computing history, a bit of math theory and a stack of D&D-type gaming, as things go on.

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Remember WENN

     It's back!  The TV series Remember WENN ran on AMC for four seasons starting in 1996 and then vanished.  A mostly-gentle comedy, it follows the career of a plucky young woman from Elkhart, Indiana who arrives at a radio station in Pittsburgh in the late 1930s to work as a radio scriptwriter.  The sets and costumes are first rate, the dialog is period-snappy, and while the technology isn't one hundred percent consistent, it's generally so close you'll never notice.  (I will, especially using carbon and ribbon mics together in the studios, but here's the thing: they're all real microphones, and it's not that far off.)

     It's on AMC and another streaming channel now.  I watched the first episode again tonight.  It's just as charming as I remember.