Ok television news producers, lets get something straight, my TV screen is not a Web Browser, so quit making your broadcast look like a web page!   Every day it seems they add more and more CRAP to the bottom or sides of my screen and further shrink the space for actual video.   In the Weather Channel’s case, now with the local forecast and other crap at the bottom, you’ve filled over one third of my screen.  I can wait 8 min or less for my local forecast, I don’t need it continuously at the bottom 1/3rd of the screen.   What’s even worse and applies to most any news broadcast is that the person behind the cameras never takes into account that whatever is in the bottom 25-33% of their viewfinder will very likely be cut off when shown to viewers.  They either need to size the full video into whatever space they decide to make available for it on your screen,  tell the video crew to frame their shots knowing the bottom will be cut off, or just get rid of all the extra crap.  It’s so annoying when there’s good video footage of something and you can’t even see it all!  

I don’t need to have scrolling bars with other news events running at all times.  If I want to read, I’ll goto the website.  I don’t need font size 1000 titles on the screen surrounded by a bunch of pretty graphics for what is currently being discussed..  I don’t need to see your huge logos in 3 places or practically in the middle of the bottom right quarter of the screen, my cable box already tells me what channel I have on..  I’m already watching your station, I don’t need ’sold’ on your brand!  And yes, I know you have a website, I don’t need it burned into my TV screen or need to hear about it every 30 seconds.  And yes. we all know you always have the latest and greatest Super Duper Doplar Radar 50000 Turbo with 25 towers,  but that green, yellow, orange, and red line of storms pretty much looks the same on every channel.. and pretty much the same as it did 10 yrs ago with Doplar 1000..  

Another quite annoying thing news channels are starting to do is make me watch their TV on my TV.. CNN  Headline News, oh, I’m sorry, ’HLN’ News & Views, weather segment for example.   They think is so cool that they can drag little windows around on their big flatscreen that we have to see all their weather maps by watching their TV through our TV, usually at some skewed angle all while the newscaster is screwing around in front of it flipping windows around and trying to size and rotate the next window correctly.   

Can’t we just get back to the basics and lose the information  overload and self promotions to people that are obviously already watching your station.

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When are people going to wake up and realize we are getting shafted by sports organizations and all their cry baby millionaires?   Cincinnati is a prime example..  Back in the day we had one stadium, like every other city.  Then some city, I believe it was Kansas City, had to come along and build two stadiums and of course every other city’s teams got jealous and demanded the same.  Obviously baseball and football players were not being paid enough to tolerate sharing a stadium (sarcasm), so something had to be done!  So they preceded to build a new baseball stadium and the poor Bengals had to play in their old stadium for a while, boo hoo..  Then they and various politicians preceded to sell Hamilton County on a sales tax increase to build a new football stadium because it was just too much of an inconvenience for them share a single stadium for the whopping 8  days they actually play a home football game!  The clueless (stupid) voters pass the tax increase only to find out later that the project was severely over budget and has been a problem ever since.. Seen that coming a mile away.  Personally, if I got paid millions to play a damn game, I’d happily play it in the middle of  Death Vally on the sand.  We have these people so pampered that if their turf is a little discolored or the grass isn’t green enough, is a major problem.   Don’t even get me started on the millions that goes into the turf on these fields.. Again, we’re talking about 8 games a year, it should last forever!  What ever happened to playing on good old grass?  They don’t get paid enough to get their pretty uniforms muddy and slide around on the field when its wet?  That’s what made the game fun in the past!

The politicians ’sell’ the stadium as a benefit to the city that drives traffic to surrounding businesses and then they take the prime entertainment real estate right on the river to build it,  both of them for that matter.  So now we have all of our prime real estate tied up with stadiums,parking lots and 3 practice fields!  Most people can’t even see the river from inside the stadiums, so what’s the point in being on the river?   Kentucky smartly builds out their entire shoreline with restaurants, stores, a theatre, an aquarium and other entertainment that draws in crowds daily, not just 8 days out of the year.  Then we build a ‘Purple People Bridge’ (ugly) to make it real easy for everyone to head over to KY for post game entertainment on the river.  Many people even park over there now since they were smart enough to build a huge parking facility right next to that bridge.   So in the end, the county across the river is raking it in while the Cincinnati taxpayers foot the bill for the main attractions.  It’s funny, the people in Kentucky even have the best views of the stadiums !

Now just recently release to the public and the drive behind this post is that the Bengals want to offer lease concessions, which if you dig into the details, is just another ripoff!  I’d be happy if they just packed up and left, because the only thing they manage to do with consistency is get arrested.  The only reason they’re probably even doing this is because they’re finally starting to feel stupid seeing Cincinnati in a major budget crunch right now and having to make cuts in police and fire departments, public libraries, and prisons.  So not only do we have suffering police and fire departments, we’re letting criminals go because we can’t afford to keep them behind bars.  But rest assured,  we have two new stadiums and our players are still making their millions!

Why are cities and tax payers responsible for building these stadiums in the first place?   Pro sports is a ‘Business’, so just like any other business, they should build their own facilities in which to operate their business, specially when the tax payers that built it still need to buy a ticket to get into it!  If they can afford to pay ever increasing ridiculous salaries so these people can PLAY A GAME, then they can afford to build their own damn stadiums.   I’m so sick of these greedy rich bastards threatening to leave the city if they don’t get what they want (like the Cleveland Browns did) and then everyone freaking out over it and heeding to their every desire.  I say screw’em, let them leave.  Eventually they will realize they need major cities to survive, cities don’t need them to survive.  There are plenty of major cities that are thriving without major league sports.

Want to read more?  There’s a great book about all the corporate and political BS that goes on in sports, aptly named ‘Field of Schemes’  .. and no, this isn’t an Amazon affiliate link..

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Yea, the regular season is over, but the season is not officially over till the Superbowl is over in my book.   Yesterday Maualuga gets busted for a DUI, and of course now he’s apologizing for it on Twitter no less.  Boo hoo..    Of course he’ll just get a slap on the wrist and back to business as usual.  When the f*** are we going to laying the law down on these people?   Even Donte Stallworth who was driving drunk killed a man in Florida last year and pretty much got away with it!  How many people have to die before we actually start punishing celebrities ?  What’s even more annoying is that they expect (and usually get) special treatment.  In the cruiser cam footage of Maualuga’s arrest, he clearly requests special treatment requesting not to use his name over the radio so he’s not all over the media the next morning..  That’s such BS.. not that it actually help .. haha!!    These people need to learn if you want to make millions to play a f’n game, then you open yourself and your life up to the media, good OR bad..

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Seriously, now were baning the dictionary because it contains an entry for ‘oral sex’, as if that’s somehow worse than the definition for ‘Sex’ itself, and what dictionary doesn’t have that?  Its not like it had a full color photo next to the definition, but I’m sure they’ve already checked the Internet for that.  And come to think of it, who even uses a paper dictionary to look things up these days?   So why don’t we just shut down the entire Internet and close down all the public librarys while we’re at it.  There’s plenty of other books with the same or worse language in our libraries and those sex site blocking programs don’t really work too well.  Most kids know their way around a computer better than their parents do.  Trust me, if your kid is in 5th grade and/or can sit down and actually read a dictionary, he/she already knows what the definition if oral sex is and a whole lot more you don’t know about!   Unless you keep your kid locked in a room with no connection to the outside world and other kids, you’re living in a dream world thinking your kid hasn’t already heard these things.  When exactly do you expect then to find out about this stuff anyway?  A senior in high school?   While you’re at it, you better take that cell phone away from them too, somebody might text them something that you don’t agree with. What 5th grader needs a cell phone anyway!

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Well today is just one more step to a corporate run country as our court system strikes down the campaign funding rules.   Same old trend, the haves will have more , the have not’s will have less, WTF is the point of even having elections any more when all the rich pricks at the top of all these corporations get to decide what campaign gets all their funding and thus pressure to heed their special intrest demands?  Now we’re going to have to deal with even more annoying one side bashing the other side commercials funded by special interests in the coming voting seasons.   Oh fun.

Elections don’t even work right in today’s world.  Thanks to the ‘Electoral College System’ designed for the 1800’s , we ended up with GWB even though the other guy received  the most votes. How screwed up is that?  Why should the people in any one state have any more or less of an impact on an election than in any another state.  I’m glad I live in Ohio, somehow it makes a huge difference in elections and we get lots of attention.  Not sure how I would feel if I lived in another central state that in most elections the media could care less about.

If corporations are going to be allowed to dump millions into political campaigns, how about having a employee and/or shareholder vote and distribute funds based on the percentage of the vote outcome?  

If our government is going to be run by, funded by, or influenced by corporations so much, then lets run it like a corporation. Get rid of this multi-party system that never gets anything done because they’re always spending their time and our tax dollars fighting each other.  When is the last time you’ve seen a company run with 2 CEOs, and their own management staff constantly working against each other?  If we could all vote on someone for the person they are and the skills that they have without a factor of which party they’re in, we may actually get someone in office that more than 50% of the country agrees with.

And as for Obama’s end of first year approval rating of 51%,  that’s a 50% increase over the approval rating of GWB at the end of his term.  From a ‘Corporate’ standpoint, that’s a pretty good 1 year gain.

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