My Relationship with Google Viewed as Burn Notice

For the longest time I’ve been somewhere between nervous and terrified of the growing influence of Google. Any organization that feels the need to tell me that they are not evil probably ain’t really on the up and up. I used to not want to ever be logged in to a Google account and also search because I feared that they were building a dossier on me. As their toolset grows though eventually they got me, with Gmail and Reader and Analytics and such. However, as a devoted viewer of the best current show on TV Burn Notice, I have come to a realization.

Think of you, me or any other user of Google as Michael Westen. Google itself is Sam Axe. Google/Sam helps us out. A lot. Certainly the relationship is useful, and we/Michael have our bacon saved by them. However, Google/Sam is also keeping tabs on us and will gladly sell us out whenever there is enough to gain from that. We/Michael also know that, and we keep that in mind as we deal with Google/Sam. We/Michael keep the really good info away from Google/Sam out of self-preservation.

So, Google will be happy to betray us and the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been offered the right price. We know that and can use them for what they are worth. Just watch your back, keep your eyes open, and don’t let them learn the real good information about you that would fetch a nice price. Then everyone can coexist is this stable equilibrium of betrayal. It actually does work out.

The Wire on Super Sale

I’ve never seen even a single episode of The Wire even though I know many people say it is the best TV series ever. I was a huge fan of Homicide: Life on the Streets also by David Simon, which I think is the best series I’ve ever watched. Well now, you can purchase all 5 seasons from Amazon for $82, which includes free shipping. I did a back of the envelope calculation that at $4 a disk from Blockbuster this series would cost $92 to rent, so if you are interested this seems like a deal that can’t be passed up. I’m about to buy it myself. It seems like the thing to do.

Dollhouse Paper Dolls

I’m weird about Joss Whedon. I loved Serenity/Firefly and I really don’t like Buffy/Angel. I did enjoy Dr Horrible, so if that’s the tie breaker then I’m willing to give him a little more slack. When Dollhouse hits TV, I’ll watch it and see how I like it. I did decide to be a geek and print out the Dollhouse paper dolls that are up so far. I don’t know why, I’m just feeling nerdy. If I end up liking Dollhouse then maybe I’ll say that I’m a Whedon fan and the Buffyverse is an anomaly.

An Open Letter to TBS

Below is the text of an email I just fired off to TBS. I stand behind it, so here it is on the blog as well.

I’m watching the playoff baseball games and I have hit the point where the Frank TV promos have driven me insane. I started out with a neutral opinion of Frank Caliendo but the repeated airings of the same few promos of him doing his stale corny crap over and over have convinced me he sucks and that I will NEVER watch one second of this show.

I may well start taping the games and watching on a delay so I can skip these mind-numbingly repetitious promos which are not the slightest bit amusing. They make me angry. They make me want to lobby MLB to yank your license to baseball. They make me want to find the executive that green lit Frank TV and light on fire a bag of dog poop on their porch. They make me want to shove Frank Caliendo in the same tube with James Doohan’s ashes and have him fired into orbit.

As a Braves fan I’ve been watching baseball on TBS for over 20 years and I’ve never hated the experience so much as I do now. Stop the insanity. These promos suck, Frank sucks, when TBS is airing this stuff TBS sucks. TBS used to be great. Please just dial down the suck. It’s not so much to ask, is it?

NBC Olympics Coverage is Unbelievably Bad

[Whoops, I forgot to press publish on this last night. The specifics change but the basics are always the same.]

It’s 10 PM and the NBC coverage of the Olympics just went something like 30 minutes without showing any actual competitions. We got people talking in the studio, mind-numbing preproduced bits about the Great Wall of China and lots of assorted nonsense that had nothing to do with the actual competitions taking place.

I think you could do a lot better by just having a few channels on digital cable that just aired uncut, live footage of competitions with no commentators at all. Instead, we get coverage that is time-shifted, edited to where we see only the USA and the bits that affect the outcome of the finals, lots of schmaltzy bullshit set pieces. I hate the way NBC covers this event, and they screw it up the same way every two years.

Update: I turned in tonight to find Mary Carillo doing a piece on food in China. For Dobb’s sake, you have got to be kidding me! They truncate the coverage but they have time for this? I think I am just about done even bothering with this. NBC coverage is so execrable as to make the Olympics more pain than they are worth to watch. I’ll check the medal count via the web every now and, but screw NBC. For reals, hoss.

Missing News Story

We got all the way to the end of the local news last night before I noticed that a story was missing. There was no coverage of last minute taxes! For the last 20 years, I have hated the April 15th news when they send some junior reporter out to a post office to cover people mailing their taxes late on the last day. Not only is it not news but it is invariant. I’ve said that you could use the same story from year to year and just digitally change the hairstyles and no one would ever notice. News flash: bonerods wait until the last minute to file taxes!

Thank you, WBTW, for not running that story last night! Right on, some sound news judgement.

The Writer’s Strike and New Media

In my first job out of college as a chemist, I worked in a factory. I was in QC and worked alongside lab technicians that were unionized. A lot of progressives have a love of unions that I don’t share because I saw a lot of pure human sorriness excused by the union rules. I watched guys set up a test that took an hour to run and 50 minutes into it would abandon it because it was their break time. They’d refuse to wait 10 minutes to break, and just let the test get ruined and need to be restarted later. I felt the union engendered a very much “what do I care?” attitude between the workers and their work.

Nearly 20 years on, I actually have flipped a lot of that feeling. I understand that unionizing takes the flexibility out of what you do, reduces the ability of the highest performers to more of a pack norm with the rigidity. I also have realized that no one does that lightly, and those workers willing to give up yet more of their money in union dues and sacrifice some of their advancement are doing it for a reason. Only when you are really getting screwed hard are you willing to organize and make those sacrifices. Whether it is for safety or working conditions or benefits or pay, unless you are seriously shafted as a group it makes no sense to introduce another player between you and your money. Entertainment industry writers are a group like that. They are the most poorly treated participants on the creative side of the house. They’ve had to unionize to protect themselves and now they think they need to strike to protect themselves.

I’ve seen lots of commentary on this strike from the informed participants like Ken Levine (1, 2, 3) or John Rogers (1, 2), but also from the uninformed and kind of dumb.

My friend CC Chapman weighed in and mused about what the strike means for new media. He has two points, one good and one heart-rendingly bad. If the strike is protracted and this means a drastic slowdown of new shows produced by Hollywood, that would be a wise time for the independent new media producer, podcaster or vlogger or whatever to try to make a splash. Fair game and when the entertainment vacuum arises, trying to suggest to the public at large that your show could fill that is cool. What is not cool is his second suggestion – that Hollywood look to new media as a source of non-unionized scab writers to work on their shows. Bad idea, really really fucking tragically horrible insane idea.

First, it is bad on the moral and ethical level. When these writers are striking to get their compensation in line with the rest of the Hollywood creative personnel, it is not your business to get into that and undercut their position. They live here, you are a tourist. What if you are at lunch and ask your boss for a raise, and the waiter overhears and says “Hell, I’ll do that job for 40% less than what you pay him/her!” If you slapped that waiter with a breadstick, he had it coming. That’s what you are doing, if you get into this you deserve to be slapped with whatever is handy.

Secondly, it is bad on a business level. If there is one thing I have found podcasters to be freakishly wiling to do, it is to work for free for the profits of others. Over and over and over again, I see this. Some company will arise, want work for free with some vague promise of possibly paying later if money flows, and new media people will flock to it, eager to work for nothing on the outside chance of getting paid or getting dubious promotion value from it. Have some goddamn self-respect, people. What the WGA is striking for is exactly that situation. 20 years ago, there was little money from home video and all the cash was in TV syndication so they were given a horrible deal on video sales with the promise of “We’ll take care of you if this ever makes money.” Oddly enough, when the money came in then no one was in a hurry to take less in order to give the writers more. Funny how that works.

On multiple occasions, I have received emails from someone “writing a book on podcasting.” They want me to submit a chapter. I always respond and ask if this is a paying gig, and they always come back with “Well, you’ll get a copy and the promotional value.” Nice. It’s cheaper for me to buy your book at Amazon than spend hours writing a chapter to get a free one. It’s not that I need the money per se, but I hate when people want to use my time, pay me nothing and profit from it. I’ve donated time in charity situations, but I’m not going to go work the counter at Starbuck’s for free. Way too many new media people don’t seem to view it like that, sign on to these work-for-nothing deals, devalue their own labor and that of their compatriots and basically screw the whole deal up. Either everyone is eating at the table, or no one is. It’s that simple.

So I think if new media people want to choose now to make a full court press on their promotions, it would be a wise time. If you are going to take your naive asses to Hollywood and write for pennies on the dollar and get an ever worse deal than the one the guild members are striking over, spare us all and don’t do it. You can’t negotiate a good deal in the podcast world where all the business people are relatively speaking gentle lambs. If you try in Hollywood, the sharks will eat you alive. So you will screw the existing writers for a chance to get screwed even worse yourself. Don’t do it.

Proactive update: Before I even published this, I see CC got a comment explaining the mechanics of why studios wouldn’t do this regardless. I’m publishing my post anyway because I always like to exhort the crowd not to give it away for free. If you want to be a successful whore, you can’t get there by being a slut first. That’s not a viable career progression.

Anthony Bourdain/Harvey Pekar Crossover

Boy, I wish I had found out about Harvey Pekar appearing on Anthony Bourdain’s TV show before it aired, rather than after. It showed last night, and while the Travel Channel replays the living hell out of most programs, they don’t seem to be repeating the episode in the next week. I’ll have to keep my eye out for it, but until then I can satisfy my curiosity by reading the Gary Dumm drawn comics about the show.

I’m with Bourdain. I passed up a chance to talk to Harvey at Dragon*Con a few years ago, even though he had no one waiting to talk to him and I’ve been a fan of his for over 20 years. I was just too nervous from the comic book image to actually go speak to him. I’m not generally nervous about such things, but I was with Pekar. Here’s hoping I get another crack at that.

RIP Tom Snyder

I was sad to hear of the passing of Tom Snyder. I’ve always liked him and in a lot of ways I try to emulate certain of his strengths when I do interviews. I remember sneaking out of bed and watching the Clash on the Tomorrow show, carefully only turning it up as loud as I thought wouldn’t wake the rest of the house. I watched the Tomorrow show whenever I could, and I was a big fan of his 90’s talk show comeback, watching both his CNBC and CBS talk shows. Back when he was still on the air at CBS I wrote away for one of his autographed photos, which I sadly never received. He’s one guy I’d have loved to have been able to have a conversation with. Somewhere, Tom is having a colortini and I think I’ll have on in his memory too.

My Last Word on the Sopranos

I’m going to make one more post about the final episode of the Sopranos and then cash out of this discussion forever. A lot of what I’m saying and why I’m saying it is adapted from a post I made to the Nicola Griffith mailing list on the subject. It probably goes without saying that this post is filthy with spoilers, not just for the last episode but the series as a whole.

This post seems to be the poster post for the whole “Tony Soprano was whacked and here are all the clues” theory. People that love the episode seem to really enjoy the game of all this. Let’s assume for a minute that is in fact the “correct” answer and is exactly what David Chase was trying to get across. Even so, I think that’s bullshit. This show has never been about subtlety. We have been asked for six seasons to empathize with a central character who routinely orders the death of other people including people close to him, such as his nephew’s fiance. He killed at least two of his own family members (Christopher and Tony B) to smooth over business concerns. He cheated on his wife in pretty much every episode, and we are asked to care about this man and by and large we did and do. That’s a lot to ask of an audience, and we responded. This show slapped us across the face over and over and we let it and enjoyed it because it was well done, even if at times it was hard to watch.

Now, when we reach the end to hide the actual denouement in plausibly deniable vagary is not cool. He gets to say “the clues are all there” but then if the opportunity comes up for a film he can still do it and deny everything later. That is noncommittal waffling of the worst kind and has no place when trying to finish off a masterpiece. You expect that the actual stuff of the plot will be hidden in clues in some bullshit M. Night Shyamalan piece of obscure puzzle art. That’s not what we’ve been given here for the last decade, and not what we deserved at the end. When the show ended, I didn’t want to have to decipher the finale by scanning for hints about what songs are on the jukebox. That might be preferable for obsessives who treat TV shows like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but not for me. I’m not a lazy viewer and I’m willing to decipher symbols. I’m usually looking for religious iconography in cinema and literature, and I appreciate shots like the Last Supper homage in the film of M*A*S*H. When a dying character’s arms flop out like the end of Old Man and the Sea, I know what that means. I can appreciate those things but to avoid the actual point of your story in the text and hide it in subtext is pussying out, precisely the one thing David Chase has denied his audience all along.

The other alternative, that the theory is wrong, makes it much worse. That makes the wrongheadedness of this decision sheer laziness or cowardice or unwillingness to tackle the big subjects or even give us a thematic conclusion. There were a thousand ways the show could have ended that I’d have gone along with. Like I’ve said before, had the series concluded with the second to last episode, I’d have been better satisfied. Here’s an ending I could have dug: Tony goes near the pool, sees the ducks return, has a panic attack and drowns in the pool. Phil’s hitmen arrive to kill him and he’s already dead in the pool. Big irony machine engaged. Here’s another: Tony is killed early in the episode and AJ decides to avenge him but unlike the Uncle Junior fiasco actually pulls it off. It becomes obvious that AJ is going to go into the family business. Life goes on, same as it ever was. Here’s a third: Tony turns rat and gives the FBI guy some juicy info. They move to Arizona where he really becomes Kevin Finnerty, and has either a normal happy life, or an abnormal unhappy life, or like Vito can’t live normally after a lifetime of hustling, or lives as a paranoid who sees danger in every shadow. How about: Tony realizes this can never end well so he fakes his own death and does about the same thing.

As it ended now, what the fuck was all that coma dream stuff in the first half of the season? It was pretty boring, so if it wasn’t going to pay off later why did we have to endure it at all? Weren’t we supposed to believe that the mescaline trip taught him something about himself? If none of these things actually meant anything in the larger picture, then we have to come back to it being fairly uninteresting, overly padded treading of narrative water. This is where the Matrix 2/3 comparison comes back to me. There was so much stuff that doesn’t seem to stand by itself and then the resolution pays off none of it. That’s why I feel cheated, because if I am going to get an unsatisfying resolution, don’t make me endure lots of boring pseudo-profundity leading up to it. Play fair, or kiss my ass. In the case of the both the Sopranos and the Matrix, I feel they didn’t play fair and for the Matrix it really hurt its legacy. I firmly expect the same of the Sopranos. They may have done the ending like that to leave the door open for a film, but honestly I don’t give a shit to see it anymore. The show and anything that might follow on is, as they say, dead to me.

More Thoughts on the Sopranos Ending

This is spoiler laden for the Sopranos final episode, but honestly, at this point can I possibly spoiling anything for anyone? I think the surprises are pretty widely spoiled for anyone who hasn’t seen the show.

I’ve seen a lot of reactions about the final scene of the final episode, and I think it is completely bimodally distributed. Either you thought it sucked or it was brilliant. I fall in the former camp. It seems like those who enjoyed it are marveling at the ambiguity or the audaciousness of pulling off the non-resolution. They point out the minutiae of the conversation with Bobby about things going black when you die and how this is a reflection of how Tony must live his life with every person a possible threat. None of that means anything to me. It was not satisfying and worse, it was non-committal. We’ve had to face lots of ugliness over the run of this series, and to leave us with a lady or the tiger at the end is not in keeping with what we’ve been doing up to this point. You’ve asked us to face many things without flinching, and to rob of us of that at the end is not how we’ve done this thing of ours up until now.

I agree with the people that point out that all the supposed benefits of the ending would have been served in a more satisfying way if they had just ended the series at the previous episode. It would have left Phil unresolved, but we would have finished with the image of Tony reduced to sleeping in his uncle’s house cradling a rifle like a binky. Twenty-five years of climbing the ladder, killing and manipulating and sacrificing yet the best he has is sending his family off and then making a stand with the C-team of irregulars that were still loyal to him, unsure if he’ll make it through the night. That’s a haunting image and one that would have been more emotionally satisfying to me. Fade to black followed by lots of theories does not make brilliance to me. I didn’t like it in my gut, which is where I experienced The Sopranos. To get all hoity-toity and analytical about this show that has been so raw and deeply felt is a complete cop-out.

But now it is over, and on to the next thing.

Update: I like the theory that Rob reposts in the comments so much that I choose to use this interpretation of that final episode. If I think about it that way, I like the final episode so why not?

The End of the Sopranos, Beginning of John

The second the last episode of the Sopranos finished I realized that I’d had this sensation before. It felt just like watching the last Matrix movie, waiting for something to happen and finally finishing with a big wet sloppy WTF? Now I think my previous diffidence was probably the correct response. I’m glad I didn’t spend a lot of energy being excited about this. To quote Johnny Rotten: “Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

On the upside, John from Cincinnati was completely intriguing. I predict we will find out that the titular John is in the role of John the Baptist, and the Yost family are either the second coming of or descendants of Jesus. Anything with Luis Guzman will get at least a fair shake from me. I figured this would have to be strong, because HBO doesn’t want to have a massive cancellation of the service tomorrow. Kind of like we were planning to. We shall see.

Sopranos Winding Down

You know, I must be a more diffident Sopranos fan than I thought. Even though I intellectually know there is only one more episode left, I had to have it pointed out that it is, like, in a few hours. The true fans are excited and conjecturing, I forgot it was even happening.

A few weeks ago, I thought the ending would involved Tony getting killed and AJ picking up the mantle in some form of symbolic or metaphorical way. Now I’m not sure. It seems like there must be something circular to it, something final and devastating but at the very end a sign that things will continue on not unlike how they always have. Maybe the last scene will flash forward 25 years and Meadow Parisi will be the wife of the big boss as they try to deal with their kids.

I always like the flashback scenes from the 50s that they did in the first few seasons. I wouldn’t mind a “Sopranos: the Early Years” period show that focussed on Johnny and Junior’s antics making the family a powerhouse in the Mafia.

One way or another, it will be over in a few hours. And as always, this can only end in tears.

Firefly and Serenity

Spring of last year when the Serenity DVD was released, I picked it up as well as the Firefly box set. Around the same time I placed a preorder for the Done the Impossible documentary. My original plan was to watch all the episodes of the TV show, then rewatch the movie (which I saw in the theater), then to watch the documentary. After all that, I’d go back and watch TV episodes with the commentary, then the film commentary and call the project good. That was the plan, which I guess is still alive. However, the timetable is suspect.

Almost 18 months later, I have finished the TV series. In fact, most of that was in the last few weeks. I don’t know why I had such a slow ramp up. I enjoyed the film, I loved the pilot TV episode and then I just sort of tapered off. I never had anything but positive feelings about the show but for some reason had no urgency in the watching process. For no real reason, I started watching the show over my lunch hour and really kicked it in.

When I hit the “Jaynestown” episode is when I got really enthusiastic. What started out as hilarious slapstick at the beginning of the episode had me weeping actual tears by the end. That’s some good TV. I’d say that the series improved continually as it ran. I think the latter half was even stronger than the front half. I’m looking forward to rewatching the film, reading the comic book series and then watching the documentary. As much as I’m enjoying this, I know that I remain less than a total fan because I still can’t listen to any of the podcasts. I tried the Signal and Firefly Talk but I found them too cutesy for my tastes. That pretty much defines the level of my involvement. I dig the show but can’t buy into the full immersion.

Here’s my one big problem with the ‘Verse milieu: If the future is so Sino-centric that all the characters know Mandarin and use it frequently, how come there are so few Chinese characters? Are you telling me that China did a lot of the expansion into space but then the people all disappeared?

Gentle Readers in the Wild

Here’s one from the “holy crap” file. I was watching the episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations set in his childhood home of New Jersey. At one point, they were in the strip club that you see as the Bada Bing on the Sopranos. While Tony is doing the voiceover and a young lady is grinding on the pole, the music you hear in the background is “How Low” by the Gentle Readers. I shit you not. I rewound it on the DVR, cued up the song in my iTunes and did a head to head comparison. I wasn’t dreaming it, they really used it. Neat, no?

The Return of WKRP

Several people have written in to me about this. After I pointed out WKRP in Cincinatti and the music rights nightmare as an example of what happens with the heavy hand of the Man, it is coming out on DVD after all. However, my understanding (I think someone emailed me this, I didn’t see it in the linked article) that some of the original music has been substituted for replacements that they could get the rights for. So, it is coming out but not untouched. It’s apparently a middle case, where some but not all of the music rights could be obtained so ultimately they worked around the recalcitrant cases.

The original point stands – that basing any new work on Big Machine Music is insanity, particularly when there is a wealth of available music via Creative Commons or trivially licensable sources like Magnatune. And also, when you cut your deals for licensing things, look ahead a ways. Maybe they could be excused for not thinking there would be a sales potential for archival editions in 1978, but you don’t have that excuse today. It would make sense to — not license all future rights in perpetuity like some businesses seem to want to do — but build in a framework that future rights to as undeveloped technologies could be licensed for some set figure without a new negotiation required.

Little known trivia fact about WKRP: The creator of the show was from Atlanta and involved in radio there. This episode includes some references to WREK, the station I worked at. That page references the automation system “George P.”, which was named after the Georgia Tech psuedo-mascot “George P. Burdell”, a mysterious non-entity that haunted the systems of the school. In 2001, what I did at the station was build the thing that replaced George P. with a computerized system.

Rosie v. Trump

Quote overheard on the Craig Ferguson show, about this Rosie O’Donnell thing with Donald Trump.

I’m trying not to take sides, but it’s hard. Rosie is like America’s plain-talking lesbian sweetheart, and Trump is like America’s forked tongue publicity whore.

We saw the promos for the Apprentice in LA. Wow, it looks really bad. I mean, bad even by the baseline of the previous seasons. I predict this one will be the lamest one yet, not only critically but that viewers will collectively stifle a yawn and find better viewing. Which will turn out to be, well, anything else.

Update: Just so we’re clear, a lot of people seem to be commenting on this so I thought I should state explicitly that I don’t give a good goddamn about either Rosie or Trump. I think they are both full of themselves and both full of shit. Rosie is a JV Oprah wannabee and Trump is a boring scumbag. I only blogged what I thought was a funny joke from Ferguson. Their feud means nothing to me, and if they locked in pertual mortal combat in a cave beneath New Mexico never to be heard from again that would be fine with me.

Dixie Chicks and PBS

Last night An Evening with the Dixie Chicks was on PBS. I recorded it with the DVR and am watching it today. Bless you, little DVR. Pledge drive programming on PBS is watchable again! Bob help you if you don’t have one and have to sit through the mind-numbing faux populism of the on-air pledge shills. Considering that every public broadcasting organization I know of has the goal of becoming an ever bigger machine, the whole “You are one of us” schtick falls pretty flat to my cynical ears. Now that Georgia Public Broadcasting is trying to bully WREK off the air during the day, trading the latter’s unique programming for the former’s commodity widely-available-elsewhere NPR slate, I’m embarrassed that I ever gave money to GPB. I wish I could take it back.

And as far as the Dixie Chicks go, I wasn’t a big fan until Home which I bought on a whim one day and really enjoyed. When the whole political thing started, I should have bought one more album every time I heard of some anti-Chick rally. It’s nice to see that it doesn’t take much to bring the barely buried prejudices and misogyny of the country scene to the surface. Even if I didn’t like their music, if Toby Keith hates you then you must be doing something right.

Holidays and Elections

Written while bored on an airplane.


I deal with holiday fatigue and political fatigue in exactly the same way. I ignore all XMas stuff until after Thanksgiving. It doesn’t matter how early before Halloween you hang the decorations and start playing “Jingle Bell Rock”, I’m not paying attention and will block it out with measures up to and including putting my fingers in my ears and humming “La la la la.” I’m the opposite of a harried suburban character in a Connie Willis XMas story. I’m not stressing over the details, and I would never dream of asking anyone else to stress over me. Don’t have time to get me a present? I’ll live. I’d rather have you unharried and unstressed than get my favorite cookies. Just relax, that’s the only thing.

In the same way, I refuse to listen to any of this electioneering horserace bullshit from the 24 hour news channels. I haven’t watched them myself in years, but spending 24 hours in airports they are unavoidable. A huge chunk of what I heard is about who is running for what in 2008. Folks, it’s one fucking week after the election! Give us all a goddamn break. I understand that your business is horserace driven and when you don’t have one readily available, you will manufacture one. That’s why I’ve gotten all my news from the 11 PM local news. I get all the national news that is important, and lots of news relevant to me in my town. CNN and Fox, et al, pretend they are serving up the highest form of journalism. In fact, all they serve is “information product” that bears the same relationship to information as Cheeze Whiz does to fresh brie. It’s manufactured, homogenized, highly processed and nearly completely unrecognizable as sustenance. For the sake of our republic, stop watching these channels unless and until they return to the practice of journalism.

We now return to you a special marathon of “Nancy Grace”, featuring lots of cases about dead pretty blonde white females.