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Living in Texas, I should be used to bugs. My parents house has always had a minor scorpion problem. My college apartment was a seasonal breeding ground to what looked like small wasps, but thankfully turned out to merely be large flies. Ants have found the kitchen everywhere I’ve lived. But, for some reason, I panicked the first time I came home to find ants all over the kitchen counter of my current house.

Whatever the psychological underpinnings of my reaction (it may have been the first “Bad Thing” that happened in/to my house), it was…energetic. I squished ‘em, I drowned them, then I squished ‘em some more. Yet, there were still so many. So, I grabbed a paper towel, and started squishing with that. I suppose I thought it would have more surface area, so I could squish more at the same time. I failed to realize that paper towels are far too soft to kill ants, and soon they were running around the paper towel. A few started to find their way onto my hand and arm. So, I threw the paper towel in the microwave and started it. It seemed like a fitting vengeance. Then the paper towel caught fire. I slammed the button to open the microwave door, after which I intended to dash to the sink to get water, but the draft of the door opening wafted the burning towel out of the microwave, and onto my counter. The next few seconds, as I stared at the fire on my kitchen counter, in a house I’d be paying off for 30 years, were long indeed. The first thought I had after “aaaaaagggghhhhhhhhh!!!!” was that you put a fire out by depriving it of air. So, that’s what I did. With my hands.

For quite a while afterwards, I thought to myself, “How stupid were you to put a paper towel in the microwave! It’s paper, and paper burns very, very well when it gets hot!” Since then, it has occurred to me that I’ve been putting paper towels in the microwave my whole life, albiet ususally to cover what I’m trying to heat up. I still don’t know if a lone paper towel in the microwave would catch fire, or if the ants were the key ingredient. In any case, I now keep bug spray under the kitchen sink. It’s much more effective than the microwave.

You may have heard or seen some adds for a new horror film called “Primeval,” touting the film as being based on the true story of a serial killer, still at large, who has claimed over 300 victims. What the ads don’t reveal (understandably, given the nature of what they’re advertising) is that the killer is a crocodile named “Gustave.” He lives in war-torn Burundi, and is often referred to as “legendary,” leading me to wonder if many crocodile attacks in the area may be misattributed to him. Anyway, this is actually a serious post – I ran accross this quote on the National Geographic site:

Faye and other witnesses saw Gustave last November on the Bujumbura shore area, which is very good news, as many feared he had died or been shot. Apparently, two more deadly attacks were linked to Gustave’s coming back. Since then, we’ve lost track of him. It is difficult to spot Gustave these days due to the heavy showers that have poured over Burundi over the last two weeks. Water in the lake is high and muddy. The rainy season has been intense this year; the water levels will finally go down in April.

I understand that a very large, old, and aggressive animal is interesting from a certain perspective – I was curious enough to look this up. However, I don’t see how anyone can write in good conscience that his continued survival is “very good news”, followed immediately by “two more deadly attacks were linked to [his] coming back.” Faction leaders of Burundi may have little regard for human life, that doesn’t mean that the lives of the Burundi people are acutally trivial.

I’ve been known to complain about television.  I made my own “Break Your TV” shirt, inspired after seeing a tee that said “Exhalt your new God” with stylized hands praying to an idiot box.  To clarify my own throughts, and to have somewhere to point when people ask what I’ve got against the greatest American passtime, I’m going to explain myself.

Complaint 1: Commercials irritate me, both at a visceral and an intellectual level. Viscerally, I simply don’t like constant, pandering interruptions in my entertainment. I have better things to do with my time. Intellectually, I view advertising as a “tragedy of the commons” problem. Like lawyers, advertising is an overhead cost of our society. It performs a necessary role – informing the public that products are available – but every dollar spent after achieving that goal is meaningless. Given their interests, we cannot trust advertisers to provide a fair and balanced appraisal of their product. Overall, the capitalist system of competition is very efficient, but this is one of its ugly points.

Complaint 2: I think it’s unhealthy and wasteful to schedule your life around trivial entertainment. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been addicted to a show, but I know many people who go out of their way to be in front of a television at certain times.

Thanks to TiVo, there’s a way to solve these first two problems. I wonder what long-term effect it will have on broadcasters whose primary revenue comes from advertising, but for now it makes watching television a less onerous task. It doesn’t wholly placate me, though.

Complaint 3: The producers of televised material have a conflict of interests with the viewers. When we go to the movies, we want to be entertained. The creators of movies share our goal – they want to entertain us so we’ll recommend the movie to our friends, see other movies by the same creators, and maybe even buy merchandise related to the movie. Likewise, when we watch TV, we want to be entertained. But, the goal of television producers is subtly and critically different – they want us to keep watching. As long as we sit through the commercial breaks and come back next week, they’ve done their job. They can, and sometimes do keep us coming back by providing good entertainment. But, they also use frustrating cliffhangers and stretch story archs far beyond their limits. We get watered down creative work because a season requires a certain number of episodes, whether there’s a story worth telling or not. We get second- and third-string writers, who may not care one whit about the characters, because the creators and main writers are overworked, or have simply decided to move on. Shows don’t end when their story has been told – they end when the ratings fall, resulting in truncated masterpieces and zombies of shows that don’t know when to die.

So, I’m not much of a television fan.  If you hear me talking about how I love a particular show, I almost certainly watch it on DVD.