Ala Cartman

I’m sitting here in my room singing a slow loop of the only words I know from the song “No Diggity” (which, I am not proud to say, are just “I like the way you work it. No diggity. And that’s it. It’s a very short rendition), and I can’t figure out why CBS is so popular. I’m not entirely sure how those two things are related, which is a phrase I haven’t uttered since the first time I saw Bruce Jenner and Kim Kardashian in the same house.

It’s 3am, I always find myself writing these things at 3am. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not staying up to write. I’m staying up because I’m in the middle of my once a month laundry marathon (that’s exactly what it sounds like. I only do laundry once every four-to-six weeks. I have a lot of underwear) and I can’t go to bed until I get this last load into the dryer. That should be soon so hopefully this post will be short.

I don’t know all the details because honestly who could possibly care, but basically Time Warner is mad at CBS because CBS doesn’t think CBS is getting enough money and Time Warner doesn’t think Time Warner is getting enough money so they’re taking their ball and saying “Screw you guys, I’m going home” just like Cartman from South Park.

So now, Time Warner has blacked out CBS’ channels from its cable service until they can reach an agreement on the best way to give all the millionaires more millions.

I own exactly zero copyrights to this image, in case you wondered.

The problem is that blacking out a single channel as a result of this dispute has caused them to accidentally stumble onto the reverse of what cable companies should have already been doing for years: offering their services ala carte.

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What Does The E Stand for Anyway?

This may come as a shock to you, but when I go to the grocery store, I’m going for milk. Maybe some cereal and the occasional can of soup (I know, I’m not much of a chef), but you get the idea: groceries. When I go in to an electronics store, I’m going to try out the latest gadget or gizmo that I can’t afford, or buy the game that everybody else got six months ago. The point is that I don’t go to an electronics store to buy milk, and I don’t go to a grocery store to buy HD televisions.

Which is why I get so frustrated with the way that ESPN tweets (watch as I turn that non-sequitur into just a sequitur with the power of…writing!). I am a sports fan — I might not look it, but I am — and so when I go to social media for sports updates, that’s what I want. Sports updates. News, trade rumors, the latest scores, facts, historical notes, interesting stats — that’s what I want from my sports social media. To the best of my knowledge, I’m in the majority with this sort of thinking. Now, generally, organizations are self-aware enough to realize that this is what their audience is looking for, and they happily deliver. A sort of unspoken social contract of “you give me the info I want and I’ll give you my attention”. Attention is a valuable commodity (arguably the most valuable commodity of our day), and so organizations are usually careful to abuse or waste this sort of thing. For instance when I follow Variety for entertainment news, that’s what they give me: new trailers, insider industry info, contract upheavals, castings, awards coverage, etc. They provide the facts and current info as is, without needless speculation or silly half-witticisms. Unfortunately with the ESPN twitter account, this is only true part of the time.

Some of the time, I get exactly what I want from ESPN’s social media: headlines, scores, trades. But then some of the time I get this ridiculous, half-editorialized faux commentary that reads like my little sister’s tweets (no offense, Alissa). My sister is allowed to tweet like a college-age girl because she is one. The worldwide leader in sports is not. If I wanted to follow someone’s opinions or half-baked witticisms on sports, I’d follow sports writers or anchors that I like. When I roll my eyes at a sports tweet, I want it to because The Cavs lost or The Bengals made a terrible draft pick, not because whoever runs the ESPN twitter is trying to be clever.

Disclaimer: Of course, I understand that I can unfollow at any time, and ultimately I bring all this on myself, but it’s almost July 4th and nothing is more American than complaining about something asinine that you have total control to stop/avoid at any moment. Also, please bear in mind that we are fully in the uncharted depths of the pet peeve zone, so I understand if this seems arbitrary or irrelevant to you. Just chalk it up to one of those things I needed to get off my chest.

With that in mind, I present:

Just the Facts, Ma’am: ESPN and Sports Journalism 101.

1)

Ok so let’s kick off the rant strong: I hate it whenever ESPN talks like it’s our own voice. I am my own person, I don’t need the twitter account of a sports website to try and speak for me. Specifically I don’t need it to imply that I’ve ever gotten up and intentionally watched tennis. Secondably, the NBA made tens of billions of dollars off of me and “Basketball Fans Everywhere” this year, so I think that’s thanks enough. Good rule here, just don’t put words in my mouth. There are plenty there already.

Topical References: A Review of 1980 SNL

I always try to keep these things under 500 words, to make them more accessible to you ADHD kids with your glowsticks and your Kardashian sisters and your pogs to distract you. Out of the 135 posts I have on here, I’ve been successful exactly…zero times. But like I always say, one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth time’s the charm.

Saturday Night Live (or, to use the abbreviation I invented for it, SNL) is starting its 38th season, making it America’s longest-running television show (unless it’s not, I didn’t feel like fact-checking that). If you’re Amish and have never seen the show (yet somehow have a computer, an internet connection and are reading this blog), SNL is a sketch-comedy/musical show whose general premise is to put a celebrity in wacky situations for 90 minutes and hope the supporting cast of funny people around them can make a handful of the sketches bearable. And twice per episode they cut away to the musical guest du jour. Some casts are more successful at this than others, and I could probably crank out a pretty healthy 12,000-word article trying to rank each years’ casts in order from best to worst, but man does that sound like a lot of work. Maybe some other time.

30 in 30, The Recap (and Lessons Learned)

So with a little over a week to digest the “results” of my 30 in 30 project, I thought I’d share with you some insights I picked up, and an easy place to check out all the offerings for something that might catch your eye.

Pros:
• Actual completion of the project. I’m not gonna lie (stupid saying, maybe the stupidest ever — anyone you trust wouldn’t need to say they aren’t lying, and anyone who was planning to lie to you wouldn’t call attention to their level of honesty), there were times where my not-quite-best laid plans had fallen all to hell and I didn’t think I was going to get anything out on a given day. Somehow this never happened, though I couldn’t say to you with a straight face that everything I posted was of equal quality.

• It got me doing. A shortened version of a big philosophy of mine is that the action of doing something that you are passionate about is often a greater success than the actual product you create as a result of that passion. That is to say, the very fact that I was able to force myself to make time in my life for creation again was in-and-of-itself a better accomplishment than any of my rambling writings, poor cover songs, etc.

• Networking. No, really. For as much as social “networking” is all the rage, if we’re being honest very little (if any) social networking is actually networking related. More often it’s trying to track down the hot co-workers’ bikini pics and avoiding finding out which of my friends go engaged most recently. Or maybe that’s just me. But what 30 in 30 was able to do was really open my eyes to the resources around me in terms of areas where I lack expertise (photography, directing, etc.), and force me to network with people who are actually good at those areas where I’m even more lacking than usual.

30 in 30, Day 27: The Five Best Gifts to Get Your Man

Whether the occasion is a birthday, holiday, anniversary, or Jewish high holy day, a constant frustration I hear from many girlfriends/wives is that they’re almost never sure what would be the best gift to get their man. Well fret not, considerate ladies of the world, because I’m here to tell you the five gifts that any man you’re dating will want (so I hope you saved the receipt for that 70th Anniversary Collector’s Edition of Gone with the Wind).