RRC Archives

watching the news is...ah new to me. I refuse to watch local evening and world news still...never will again I hope. These days I get most of my news from the radio via NPR and the internet and of course redriverclimbing.com. The Today show thing is new for me and after this morning I am not going to watch that anymore. Animal Planet does this cool wilderness slide show thisng in the morning, maybe i'll just chill and watch that as I eat my breakfast. Then listen to NPR on the drive to work.

good one Meadows...that about sums it up.

Just imagine how painful it is to watch TV reporters blather on to fill time when you know a little bit about structural engineering. Grrrrrr! Morons! After a couple of days, they started interviewing engineers so the stupid factor was relieved a bit. Too bad for the 24-hour TV news cycle that it really will take months to come to a conclusion about what caused the failure. Have we reached the point in the news cycle when we get the pieces where the media reports on how lots of media are reporting on the story? (with the obligatory wide-angle shot of the cameraman scrum around some official not saying anything new)

The real story that commercial media doesn't want to cover? It's estimated that we're about $1.7 Trillion behind on our infrastructure maintenance. (Would this be a good time to point out that we've spent about a trillion on our little excursion in Iraq?) The money has to come from somewhere to keep our bridges from falling down more often - that mean our taxes are going up. It's just that simple. ($1.7T divided by 300 million americans means about $6,000 each)

rhunt wrote:lately i've been in the habit of watching the Today show in NBC in the morning while I eat breakfast. This morning I had to change the channel because they were interviewing the surviving family of a women that was killed. It's enough to make you sick. We are a sick and disturbed society.

Was Anne Curry (sp?) doing the interview? Did she switch in to "lean forward and speak in hushed tones" when asking the "cum shot of emotional porn" question? I've been watching the Today show in the morning for a while, and it seems to have really, really gone downhill over the last year. It really sucked when the Tour de France ended and I didn't have the excitement of guys in spandex riding bikes to break up the "hot handbags for only $500!" Today show 'stories'.

There was an NPR report about a month ago about our aged infrastructure in this country (bridges and roadways) and how it needs addressed. Naw, lets just keep building new housing and live vicariously through Paris Hilton.

Actually, we're spending all our Civil Engineering money on building yet more sprawl-inducing interstates, rather than maintaining the thousands of bridges and tunnels out there.

I find that if you dedicate yourself to getting all your news from radio, you will be much more informed. Although, throughout the Anna Nicole stuff, she was talked about a lot on the radio too, but when someone like Hannity does it, it's just more fun to listen to regardless of whether or not you like the guy.

And as for news, local TV news mainly and I know there are a few people on here that work for such organizations as I once did...I'm not going to say that I saw newscasters cry after every sign off or antyhing like that, in fact it was just the opposite in my experience. I quit because of producers and assignment editors that ran around in a euphoric state when they would hear of a shooting or accident come across the scanner and I would hear them shout: "IS there a body! Come on we need a body tonight!" The old addage of news is true - "If it bleeds it leads..." but I have to wonder, like the chicken or the egg thing. Did we get blood-thirsty as viewers because that's all they gave us to watch? Or did they only give us that to watch because we are blood thirsty as viewers?

I'm currently editor of a weekly local community newspaper. It's nice here, trustee meetings, re-zoning committees, an occassional drug bust on an outlying major highway, and best of all people have character. Like the judge that makes guys that solicit for hookers wear chicken suits and signs declaring their crime on a busy street as punishment. I know that bad things happen in the world and maybe it's best we know about them, maybe it's not... but I wouldn't be upset if all the 24-hour news stations suddenly blew up and went off the air.

Now there's a story.

Now they're going on about all the "structurally obsolete" bridges we have here.

Hmmm, I thought we liked them...?

In 2003, the Minneapolis bridge was put on the "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete" list, a list that included 6,500 bridges in the country.

With over 600,000 bridges in the U.S., the lack of money or engineers to inspect bridges is something to consider next time you drive over one.

I just want to know what happened to Who, What, Why, When, Where, How? I caught a blurb of this incident in Utah and watched for fifteen minutes and all I got was what.

anyting to keep us distracted from all the pew pewing in iraq