The needle poked past eighty today. The thermometer needle, the one for the air (or maybe it’s rectal in the earth. I know how mercury works, but everything is digital now). Maybe the speedometer needle pushed eighty too, I don’t know, the volume was cranked and I was busy singing.
I’ve been watching a lot of what I would have called trashy TV before reality TV became a thing. It doesn’t get much uglier than reality TV, it’s like latter day Jerry Springer with recurring characters. A lot like latter day Springer with recurring characters, or it was the last time I saw one, maybe five years ago.
I’ve been watching traditional trash, modern traditional trash, but, you know, the kind with a plot and ad’s. In shows where people drink it’s shocking how much and how often they drink. Maybe that was part of the allure for mad men, but Christ, they were almost moderate comparatively. Mad men smoked a lot. You don’t see that so much in TV anymore or the movies. A cigarette gives a movie an automatic R rating. Which is fine for directors and studios who were shooting for R anyhow. The theory, however, sucks. It’s morality based and yet the morality is subjective. Real subjective.
Bitch has become common language on TV, even on FreeForm which is ABC’s new “Family” station. So it’s ok to denigrate a teen girl with gender specific insults — no, fuck, I’m already bored of that. Oh, I don’t watch TV. I could, I mean live, I mean as is scheduled, but I don’t. I catch shows on the computer. Free form seems to have a few shows about demons and shit. Apparently the new conservative morality is more disturbed with smoking than the occult. Just an observation, me and the censorship industry are never going to get along even if we find ourselves agreeing; the word bitch will be used.
Online TV is interesting advertisement wise. I think ads are purchased for the site and not the individual shows. They’ve been running back to back Verizon commercials, the ones with Ricky Gervais. I liked him a lot more when he wasn’t working in the States. His humor shifted from quirky, awkward, self-sabotaging to insulting. I know, he probably isn’t improvising the commercials, but he also probably didn’t audition either.
There’s this one where the logic is disturbing. The premises for all of them (or all I’ve seen) is that Verizon really is great and everyone else is misleading. He always says “We” when he gets to the part where the claim was looked into and found lacking, uncharacteristically, these commercials don’t name which competitor they are talking about. I think, in part, the we and looking into could be contested. Oh, hang on, related tangent coming.
Some company, I think Verizon, backed some claim with “a recent study by Root Metrics”. I looked root metrics up, not well enough to find a site of theirs explaining their method, but I found an article from the online version of PC Magazine. To sum up a couple page story; the study was a clusterfuck and wasn’t definitive on anything. This wasn’t a slam from PC magazine to Root Metrics. Best as I could figure it was a slam on any cell company claiming to “the best”. The study didn’t make any such conclusion at all. Funny how a rash of cell ads followed that study though.
Anyhow, Ricky Gervais says some competitor claimed to be the fastest and “we” looked into it and found it was fastest in “Kansas City and some other places” (um, other places could involve north America, just saying, not like I’m coming to the defense of some anonymous carrier, hell, for all I know they’re talking about themselves). In the fashion of current Ricky humor he says something like “You wouldn’t want the guy who packs your parachute to say — this works fine over Kansas city …”
There’s all kinds of flaws in the logic of that comparison (e.g. would you let a stranger pack your chute? What if you’re sky diving into Kansas City, I mean the next dive the chute gets repacked? How can a parachute know whether or not it’s over Kansas city and why would it work differently(( with cell phones it’s a question of towers, it’s not the phone that decides where to work))?) But the one that gets me the most is the one that makes the whole joke fall apart; Fastest (the quality in question) is not a virtue with parachutes. You sure don’t want it to hit the ground faster and you don’t want it opening faster either. Parachutes like jokes depend on specific timing.
Um, I also don’t know any Verizon customer who is proud to be a Verizon customer. Just saying. In general more people bitch about their cell provider than praise them, but still, never heard anyone rave about Verizon service. I briefly worked in a call center, we had the contract to do Verizon customer support, so I’ve actually heard a great number of people bitching about Verizon, but, I assume the get the same number of calls as everyone else.
You know what study I’d like to see? How often the average user switchs providers in their lifetime. I’m guessing the percentage for sticking with the same provider is single digits, um, just one single digit.On TV shows after having a dozen drinks of brown stuff in a rock glass at a bar full of pretty people that look like actors and actresses, the character more often than not pulls out a burner phone. Although most people have no need for one, I think, all things being equal rate and service wise, most people would prefer a phone that’s hard to trace.
I don’t know. Places like facebook seem to be full of photos taken with Cell and location stamp on them. I always turn location off. Even at home where my location is known except, apparently, by the new postman. I’ve been quite a few places on this continent. This town is the only place I know of where the city planners decided 666 was an ok street number to use. Like a 13th floor, most zoning boards skip that number. Yes, I know, I just told you part of the address where I am. This town has two 666 addresses, though on different streets and separated by (I, 2, 3 let’s call it four blocks). The mailman fucked up the other day delivering my package to the other 666. I’m pretty sure Satan was on the zoning board. But Satan doesn’t work for the postal service, those guys make him squeamish.
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