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Watching the Watchers

Watching them watch the “Classic Replay,” CBS 5.

I sat down to watch a football game yesterday, and I was appalled. I knew it was a repeat, but I did intend to watch as if it was live, and I didn’t know the outcome. But it was a giant fail! Most of the game was framed by three local commentators eating, drinking, and making obscure inside jokes. It was one of those “What is the world coming to?” moments, which are happening with increasing frequency.

I do understand that there are rules. Sports are a form of entertainment, like circuses and magic shows, not an epic battle upon which the fate of the universe or local pride rests. Entertainment is for watching. I am watching it on a screen while eating and drinking, so others must be doing the same. Plus, given that there are 752 channels that run 24×7, content must fill the time, so much of the content is people talking. In fact, there is more content of people talking about sports than there are televised sports, so the cycle of discussion circulates around the same people, sports, drama, behind-the-scenes will so-and-so play or get paid or ask to be traded, &c.&c.&c.

(This plays out elsewhere. I was in the lap pool swimming yesterday, and there were three fellas in the seating area outside the steam room at one end. In between gulps of air, I heard “quarterback.” When I came up for a turn at one, another person not in their party had walked up and was wildly gesticulating while yelling something about Aaron Rodgers. It’s worth noting that said Rogers is not on any team in our local area, but he does seem to inspire many people to get very excited. This is proof of the ultimate success: you generate controversy nationwide even though you are just an aging human being who occasionally throws a ball a long way.)

So this is where we are. There is so much talking to be done about this entertainment form, that when you go to experience the entertainment, it’s packaged as another type of entertainment: “Watching the watchers.” It’s a disturbing trend.

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All the News that Fits the Puzzle

Spoiler promise: Stay to the end and you will see animated puzzle-creating.

Corruption, Politics, Talking Heads. Not much has changed. Kajmeister photo of Birthday Puzzle.

It is perhaps a personality flaw of mine to analyze Everything, even gifts. On my recent birthday, I received a puzzle based on The New York Times headlines on the day I was born a few decades back. (rhymes with -ixty). Of course, it got me to thinking about so many things.

The world, at first, in pieces. Kajmeister photo.

I decided to do the puzzle without looking at the cover, so it was first a jumble of pieces. But this became a fun analytical exercise on several fronts: first separating light from dark, secondly finding meaning in all these letters, and thirdly evaluating what made news in those days. Letting the meaning rise from the ashes, so to speak. As to the last part and what made the news of yesteryear? plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the saying goes. Things haven’t changed that much.

All you need to see is a headline like “Theobald says Brooklyn class built his boat…” to know that someone is in trouble. I don’t know who Theobald was, but I suspect the Brooklyn class was not supposed to build his boat. It seems odd that such provincial issues for New Yorkers are treated side-by-side with international incidents. But that’s the NYT for you. And they wouldn’t have known–at the time–which of these issues were nitpicking and which would escalate into years of grief. We know now.

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Bones from Dinoland U.S.A.

Bones sinking like stones
All that we fought for
Homes, places we’ve grown
All of us are done for
And we live in a beautiful world
Yeah, we do, yeah, we do

“Don’t Panic” by Coldplay (1999)
King of the Terrible Lizards, New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Kajmeister photo.

Do we know everything about dinosaurs? What if they built cities out of rock that turned to the dust in which their bones lay? What if they wrote stories on parchment which disintegrated and scattered to the winds? We don’t know whether they spoke languages; their brains were too small–we assume–to do so. We know that some dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs based on the bones. That they walked upright, lived near rivers, protected their young, and covered all the continents, including Antarctica. Two hundred million years was a long time to flourish. Some of it is still a mystery.

Humans have only been discovering things about dinosaurs for about 200 hundred years (happy bicentennial Mary Ann Mantell!) There may be a lot more dino-history buried in those formations. We already know quite a lot from a relatively little, a lot to imagine from just a few bones. If a vertebrae is six feet tall, how big must the creature who carried it have been? (A: 75 ft long)

Apatosaurus vertebrae, Dinosaur Ridge, CO. Kajmeister photo
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