Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Just Flew In

I got into Wisconsin this evening after an uneventful trip. I spent all of my flight time watching my iPhone. It's sad when you pop open your laptop on a flight just so you can use it to charge your phone. Then again, videos actually play better on my iPhone than they do on the laptop, which is kinda sad. Oh yeah, with the iPhone, without a wireless Internet connection, doesn't the iPhone have the same communication capabilities as a regular phone? Why am I paying AT&T an extra $30 a month then?

Have you noticed CNN is everywhere when you travel? It's such an inane station, full of broadcasts of something that's about to happen. Nothing is happening, but something is about to. I wonder if anyone has tracked how much CNN airtime is comprised of waiting for something to happen. It brings the validity of broadcast media into question, along with the inane hosts which seem grossly out of touch with reality. Then again, if you watch as much CNN on a daily basis as I did today, just through osmosis, it is your reality.

I just got back from the hospitality suite, where game store owners drink and share horror stories about their customers. The socially inept (more inept than us), the thieving Yu Gi Oh players, the disloyal Magic players, the product slaves, the strange correlation between game stores and Asian restaurants (it used to be nail salons). The stories are all similar, which makes the insanity of this business seem somehow more real. We share war stories. These are people who understand you when you talk about this stuff.

2 comments:

  1. The validity of broadcast news media really shouldn't be questioned any more. It's simply not valid as a legitimate news source.

    Its forte is breaking news, but breaking news stories that really need to be covered as they happen only come up a couple times a year, and when they do the major broadcast news sources often don't even realize they are happening (like the Georgia/Russia conflict). Besides, the internet now handles breaking news at least as well as broadcast media.

    So these 24 hour news channels end up spending 99.9% of their time trying to make trivia sound important so that you'll keep watching after the break.

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  2. CNN is to actual news what MTV is to actual music videos.

    An both have a miniscule percentage of their programming actually devoted to what they claim to specialize in.

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