Anna Nicole Smith: The Real Mystery

I haven't counted the number of channels we have on TV. Let's say there's about fifty. At least twenty of them at some point during the day are covering stories about Anna Nicole Smith. To be honest, there isn't much on the other thirty channels so I've been reading a lot lately when I'm not working on Donkey Path. My wife, on the other hand, has been determined at times to find something watchable, anything but Anna Nicole Smith, which means I subliminally hear some part of Anna Nicole Smith's name about thirty or forty times almost every evening as the channels fly by. It's like when President Bush gives a major speech: you surf through twenty channels and Bush is still telling us to trust him and how hard his job is and, for the thirteenth time, how victory is just around the corner.

You figure the networks and cable news people have been showing a lot of Anna Nicole Smith because they make money on the story. Or do they? Here's a survey from the Rasmussen Report:

Americans have had enough—more than enough—of news stories about Anna Nicole Smith. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 85% of American adults believe the media has paid too much attention to the story of her death. Just 2% think more coverage is appropriate.

Either a lot of people are lying to the pollsters or the media is working hard to avoid bringing us the news. And thanks to the coverage, poor Anna Nicole Smith is more famous than ever. It's a real mystery that leaving a lot of people scratching their heads.

That's America on February 26, 2007. Have a good night.

Merry Christmas!

The many events of the world don't stop for Christmas but the news has been slow. On the other hand, my wife is one of the lucky ones who has to work on Christmas day (she's cooking for 85 people!).

I sometimes have wondered what it's like to shake one of those bells for The Salvation Army and while wandering through a number of blogs, there was Benjamin Dueholm of The Private Intellectual:

I'm in Madison again for the end of Advent, and as I did last year I signed up to ring bells for the Salvation Army. I have plenty of theological disagreements with the Sal Army, but they do critical work that no one else does. I was ringing this morning at a supermarket on the west side and the response was very good. Probably half or more of the patrons dropped at least something into the bucket, even while I was sitting there doing the Isthmus crossword. I'm not one for the hard sell, even when it comes to charity. ...

Dueholm goes on to mention what does work and he's right. I suppose there's been too much hard sell in the last six years. On Saturday, I was buying a printer for $89 and I couldn't believe they tried to sell me an extended warranty. Enough already.

Many of us who write political blogs are passionate about the issues and most of us who consider ourselves part of the reality-based community try to get the facts right (even if our opinions sometimes race ahead of the available facts) but it's not always easy to remember that part of what is useful about blogging is creating dialogue, not just hammering some point home.

For me, blogging is still an experiment. I wish I understood a great deal more than I do. I started writing many years ago and one of the reasons I became a writer was that there were things I wasn't reading and I discovered that sometimes you have write those things yourself, even if it isn't easy, even if you struggle with it and have to learn what it is that you don't know, even if it takes years, even if all you do is scratch the surface. Life is an adventure and we sometimes forget that too easily.

A lot of politics is actually easy to write about once you get your hands on some of the details and use a little common sense. The hard part is staying focused on what's important and finding ways to talk about those things and stopping long enough to hear what other people have to say—creating a dialogue in other words. That's hard in any kind of writing, though Donkey Path has some excellent commenters and I've been lucky to find a range of very good blogs, all of whom I learn from (and we sometimes hear something of the same from other bloggers).

I have a strong respect for passion but I sometimes catch myself writing too much out of anger; now anger is sometimes necessary but it can feel too much at times like a hard sell; sometimes we need to talk simply because it is important to do so. When the stakes are high, finding the human level isn't always easy to do. Sometimes it's important to take a deep breath and just try again. That's all any of us can do. For me, after a year of blogging, it remains a challenge and an adventure.

Let's hope the holidays a year from now see a little more peace in the world. And a little more thoughtfulness.

An American Icon Passes On

In these troubled times, we can use more humor, even if that humor is sometimes aimed at children. Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna kept two or three generations of Americans laughing with their Hanna-Barbera cartoon productions.

CNN has the AP story on the passing of Joe Barbera at 95:

Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, died Monday, a Warner Bros. spokesman said. He was 95.

Barbera died of natural causes at his home with his wife Sheila at his side, Warner Bros. spokesman Gary Miereanu said.

(snip)

The partners, who had first teamed up while working at MGM in the 1930s, then went on to a whole new realm of success in the 1960s with a witty series of animated TV comedies, including "The Flintstones," "The Jetsons," "Yogi Bear," "Scooby-Doo" and "Huckleberry Hound and Friends."

Fred Flintstone's version of Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners was my favorite even if it was a little decadent to have a cartoon character selling Winston cigarettes (did the tobacco companies ever give up trying to sell cigarettes to children?). In its day, The Flintstone was considered a show for the entire family in prime time, the only cartoon I'm aware of in that era that made it to the big leagues, so to speak. Ralph Kamden seemed to live in the late 1930s when the economy was still tight for most Americans but The Flintstones was proof that anyone could make the middle class in the 1960s. Cartoons are ridiculous of course but they were great fun. Hanna-Barbera's Fred Flintstone, loud and noisy as he was, seemed more in tune with America's optimism than Archie Bunker who appeared in the more circumspect 1970s.

Because we lived in the Los Angeles area and had a knack for getting around, my middle brother and I once ran into one of the main cartoonists for Hanna-Barbera. We were down in a marina and he was on a very large boat; we quickly got permission from our parents and later we sat around a table with him as he first did a caricature of my brother on a surf board with Huckleberry Hound just behind him. It took him less than two minutes. He turned to me and very quickly decided to put me on a skateboard whizzing by Yogi Bear ducking out of the way and yelling, "Whoa, that was close!"

Silly, I know. But you remember these things and it can't get any more American.

Humor is still alive and well but increasingly we find it in places like Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. But I still have a soft spot for those long ago Hanna-Barbera productions.