MACROBLOCKING

202 – Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Good ole Ted! Ted is my Brighthouse cable TV tech - we desperately needed him today! To get Ted, you have to schedule an appointment with him at least four days in advance – much like your doctor, except Ted still comes to your house. As I explained to my female customer service representative when I spoke to her earlier, “The picture is flickering and bouncing all over the place in boxes and rectangles and it sounds like the television set is gurgling under water”. She did not understand my layman’s description, but graciously took down my explanation for the work order. A short while ago, when I turned on the set to show Ted, it took him all of two nanoseconds to announce that the problem was ‘macro-blocking in the video matrix’ – okay, so I felt about an inch tall and as dumb as a box of rocks – why didn’t I know that? I am certain that if I had told my phone contact that the real problem was ‘macro-blocking’ that she could have told me over the phone how I could fix the darned thing! About the time I think that I am getting up to speed on some of this techno-tronic jargon, along comes a well-intentioned Ted and, whoosh, I am again swept back under the carpet of enlightenment and relegated to the ranks of ignorance – though in excellent company, I might add. But this was a good thing – it forced me to go online and query ‘macro-blocking’ where I encountered 487,692 opportunities to educate myself and creep up the ladder of illumination, much in the same way I challenge some of my readers at times when I use unfamiliar words and force them to ‘look it up’! It is never my intent to brush any under the aforementioned rug – it is only my writing style to colorize the language with journalistic sanguinity.

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CARTS

201 – Monday, July 20, 2009

Pulling into the neighborhood supermarket parking lot this afternoon caused my internal emotional control mechanism to overheat – there were no less than thirty shopping carts, most of them abandoned helter-skelter all over the lined asphalt. At first, I was peeved at the lot attendants, but upon a scan in my rearview mirror, there was a young lady on her way out to retrieve the rogue rolling baskets. It is difficult enough to locate an available slot to park in our bustling grocery establishment, let alone to find one that affords some realistic probability to not have the quarter-panels and doors of our beautiful auto bashed in and scratched up by metallic monsters improperly deserted by patrons. To exacerbate the problem, the man in the car in front of me pulled into a spot, hit a cart and pushed it into a newer model Camry without so much as a glance and then side-stepped the same cart to head for the entrance – it truly would have been easier for him to push the cart back into the store than the energy he burnt dodging its presence which obstructed his path of ingress. I risk possibly offending one of you by this statement, however, I will pose this as a challenge to all of us for consideration – first, if each of us would pick up a cart from the lot to take in with us, the number of strays left to interfere would be drastically reduced. Secondly, if you just cannot find it within yourself to make that minimal effort, at least take the additional twenty seconds or so to place your cart in the racks that retailers strategically provide to make it safer and as easy as possible for us to organize the pick-up process that we, as consumers, always pay for, since the staffing for said task is a part of their operating overhead. Those stubborn and insolent readers might say that it is not their ‘job’ to do this – perhaps not, but we could all go an extra step to just provide some human kindness while thinking of others. Enough said!

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A CURE FOR INSOMNIA

200 – Sunday, July 19, 2009

I watched the tiniest sliver of last week’s Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings of the first Hispanic/Latino for the post of Supreme Court Justice – most of the rest of you did as well – a true media snooze-fest if ever there was one. How deep did the panel probe into her adjudicatory prowess? Reminiscing over ‘growing up watching Perry Mason’, the Senate committee seemed to lack a decent decorum and completely missed (in my personal view) proper protocol in sizing up Ms. Sotomayor’s ability to rule impartially for the protection and preservation of our nation. But then, why should that surprise any of us? The recent public displays of our neo-class representatives reveal that they do not really ‘represent’ any of us! The adolescent antics of some only prove over and again that being a writer/actor on Saturday Night Live does not provide an adequate unbiased insight and springboard into high-performance government. But we must look at how they attained their luxurious pediments of pandemonium – uh, we voted them in. Perhaps these representatives really do exemplify the majority of the people who placed their misguided confidence in them. History pretty well records the fact that, amid all the pundit statements and oaths to provide fair, impartial, and non-partisan renderings in their decisions, once a justice is seated they vote pretty much they way they were expected to vote when they were nominated. So, what is the real value of these hearings? – Not much, unless, of course, you are contending with insomnia – then I would highly recommend a hefty dose!

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AND THAT'S THE WAY IT IS

199 – Saturday, July 18, 2009

“And THAT’s the way it is!” Those trustworthy words were heard at our house every night as a precursor to prime time family television and accompanied me from my youth through adulthood and well into middle age. Walter Cronkite was the iconic network anchor man, even though before ‘Uncle Walter’ there had been some famous readers and talking heads. But there would only be one of his imposing stature in all my remembrance – he was the trusted authoritative voice of world news to the ordinary man. All America listened intently as Cronkite did the play-by-play on the civil rights movement, liaised with NASA to take us to the moon and back, grieved with the nation as he helped us through the Kennedy assassination trauma, showed us, first hand, the battle fronts and atrocities in Viet Nam – he was the stalwart bearer of the history of our modern America. Someone once said of him, “In my younger days, there was God, Dad and Cronkite, and Walter is the only one I never struggled with.” In a way, I understand what the source of this quote meant – he was a trustworthy mouthpiece, not a rambling purveyor of rhetoric in the current styles of today’s news staffers, but in an enigmatic class all his own – defined, fabricated and personified by him completely – probably the reason he has schools of broadcast journalism named after him, news awards bearing his moniker, and has earned his pedestal in the ‘News Hall of Fame” (if there is such a place). He has been honored by NASA as their spokesperson and inundated him with accolades and awards innumerable. I am moved at the announcement of his death on Friday. At 92, ‘Mr. C’ had rubbed elbows with more celebrity figures, interviewed more prominent politicians and international citizenry, and shared more historical tidbits with the world than any other broadcast journalist - ever. The television news world will never feature another singular embodiment of the individual broadcaster qualities equal to a Walter Cronkite, but that’s just the way it is!!

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