"Sure could use, a little good news...today"

(In the words of Anne Murray)

Well, as you can see, it's taking me a while to get back in the swing of regular blogging. I just haven't had any inspiration hit lately...January is always a pretty mundane month. The excitement of Christmas and New Years is over, and the closest holiday now is Easter - months away. I suppose there is Valentine's Day, but it doesn't exactly reach "Holiday" status. The Superbowl is coming up, but I can't seem to muster up much excitement over that, aside from being glad that the Giants lost a couple weeks ago.

However, this morning I got the blogging urge. Actually, I got downright irritated. As I turned on the TV for a little news, I was assaulted by a constant barrage of footage of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River. When I first saw the story yesterday (I happened to have the TV on, and they broke in with the story), it was interesting and a bit alarming, but not exactly what I'd call earth-shattering. Yes, it's bad that the jet crashed. But, nobody died, injuries were relatively minor, and the pilot is being hailed a hero for the placement of the plane lightly in the river instead of crashing it in a firey ball of carnage somewhere not quite so soft. A nice story, but does it REALLY warrant CONSTANT coverage from every angle possible? I figured this morning the excitement would be mostly over - good for a single story, then go on to what's happening in the rest of the world. Years of seeing our news degrade should have told me better. What I found instead - on EVERY channel from ABC to CNN to FOXNews to BBCA - was re-hash after re-hash after re-hash of the same dang story. Constant commentary, live footage, computer-generated crash re-creations, experts on airplanes, experts on birds, experts on birds-crashing-airplanes, expamples of plane engines being tested by being slammed with a "chicken cannon" (won't that have PETA up in arms), interviews with crash survivors, debates on "how this accident could have been prevented" and "will anyone sue?" And to top it all off and send the whole thing spinning into complete ridiculousness - ABC had a sad and soul-felt musical montage featuring photos from every angle of the crash site...followed by a story about the latest contestant to do something cute on Dancing with the Stars.

What the CRAP? I hate our news. I'm a very proud American, but we are not the center of the universe, and there are a myriad of issues and events going on not only here but around the world right now that will directly affect us. There are wars our soldiers are currently fighting, social unrest, starvation, dictators, and impending natural disasters (Yellowstone earthquakes, anyone?) - just for starters. We have citizens starting to ACTUALLY think that Socialism is a "not that bad of an idea", mostly because we are so out of touch with what is REALLY going on, no thanks to being spoon fed utter horse pucky by the media.

I ended up turning the channel over to the only decent television I could find - The Waltons.

*sigh*