I have been a fiscal conservative for all of my adult life. I believe there are more fiscal conservatives in the Republican than in the Democratic Party. I also believe there are more people who have no regard for science in the Republican than in the Democratic Party and that both disappoints and disturbs me. As the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.”
Thanks to MLB TV, I am reminded that Vin Scully still sounds great. Maybe he’s lost a step, but he is 84 years old.
Jerry Stiller is in a TV commercial for Capital One Bank. In it, he says, “Instead of earning bupkus, your checking account could be earning five times the national average.” Jerry, five times bupkus is still bupkus.
The latest TV commercials for Walgreens Drug Stores claim that Charles Walgreen invented the chocolate malted. Wow. To me that’s a lot more impressive than creating a nationwide chain of drugstores. I wish I could be remembered for creating the chocolate malted, or even the coffee malted, which is also pretty damned great, as is the vanilla malted. I’ll certainly be remembered for consuming more than my fair share of all three.
I also wish I had created reality TV. I mean, I said, “Oh my God,” many times before the phrase became a staple of television programming.
Some things bother me a little about home improvement TV shows. On the show “Hideous Houses,” I’d suggest that the product placements from Sears are a little heavy handed. I lost count of how many times they mentioned Sears; beginning with the large, portable shade structure they erected to shade the work area. It says Sears on it in huge letters.
On the same show, the designer is painting without covering her long blonde hair or removing her dangling earrings. She’s also painting in a nice sweater, good black slacks and knee-high, high-heeled boots. The clothes I wear when I paint are basically indistinguishable from paint.
On the other side of the coin, I saw a “Property Brothers” show in which the producers blurred out the Chevy bowtie emblem on the grille of the Chevy (I think it was a Traverse) belonging to the property owners. Once I noticed the bowtie blurred out, I paid attention to that instead of paying attention to the show. I don’t know why they do that. Some for-profit college ran a commercial a while back that blurred out the Ford blue oval on the grille of an SUV and that also distracted me from the message of the commercial.
