News at 11

Posted by Seth Kramer on Wednesday, January 9th 2008 at 10:26pm



Lately my local news has been getting on my nerves. Here are just a few things that are keeping me watching MSNBC.

The Weather Guy Pissing Match
Inevitably there some sort of commercial every hour or two on my local channel telling me about their Super Hyper Doppler Nexrad with VIPR storm cell tracking technology. First of all, I have a suspicion that half of those words are fashioned out of whole cloth by some secret cabal of weathermen somewhere. What's worse than their quasi-orgasmic gushing over predictive weather equipment is when they feel the need to explain it. I don't know about you but I could give a damn what they use. A divining rod, chicken bones, hell cut out the newsgirls speen and use it for all I care. All I care about is do I need an umbrella?

Seven at Seven
I don't know about you, but my local news does this thing where the first 7 minutes of the 7 o'clock news broadcast is the "most important stories". I really reject the premise of this on it's face. I mean I'm so busy I can't watch all the news, but I can watch 7 minutes? And if that's so why would I watch the local news? I mean did someone ring up the station and say "Hey, I really want to be informed, but I only want to be, you know, 7-minutes-informed. What can you do for me?"

Sports Guy
It's not Sports Guy's job to be a reporter, but damn if he doesn't try. It's sports guy's job to take a series of box scores like so:
Lions: 2 Ostriches: 3
Wombats: 17 Flautists: 0
Emus: 4 Sloths: 6 (3 OT)

His job is find a verb to make it a sentence. Like so: "The Capital City Ostriches beat the Valleydale Lions 3 to 2. While the Lake Mountain Wombats shut out the Fightin' Flautists 17 to nothin', and last but not least the Harper Cove Sloths cleaned the Eastville Emus' clock 6 to 4 in triple overtime. Back to you, Ed." But Sports guy can't resist when there's a story even tangentially related to sports, he's chomping at the bit, and smiling just a bit too much for a story about a Pro Linebacker shooting up a Miami Nightclub. Revealing why he's Sports Guy, and not Ed, the anchorman.

I'm feeling tired
I'm spinning The Mountain Goats