Random Thoughts

Film At 11pm

Maybe this whole 'reality' thing is just a dream.

I got up early this morning. Couldn't sleep much because we have a new dog. Like many of our pets he was abandoned in our neighborhood as a puppy. He is an American Bulldog we have named Maximus (Max for short). He is all of 4 months old and we just had him neutered. So he kept us awake all last night as the anesthesia wore off.

As I sat in the early morning twilight watching the morning news I started to question the sanity of the world I inhabit. Let me give you a few of the examples:

News Story #1: A study has shown that in these tough economic times, many viewers don't know which bills to pay first. Many opt to pay their cable and cellphone bills before paying their mortgage or power bills, because these are the services that they feel they cannot live without. Bad Idea, always make sure to pay your Mortgage, Power and Car Payments before you pay for your Credit Cards and Cable / Cellphone. That way you won't loose your house and car.

.....excuse me? You really have to tell people this? They can't make the leap of logic that if they don't pay the power and mortgage, they won't have a home to plug the cellphone into and watch TV?

News Story #2: Dangerous Soccer (Futbol) Fields....the news story you, and your children, can't afford to miss, tonight at 10pm. The story being, that many soccer goals on playing fields are NOT anchored down and if your children climb on them they could tip over and injure the child(ren).

.....no kidding? I always thought this was natural selection. Nature weeds out the youth that aren't smart enough to make it in their environment. Do they still have 'Monkey Bars' and 'Teeter-Tooters' on playgrounds? Do they have any idea how dangerous those devices are as well? What ever happened to this concept of supervision and teaching your children responsibility. Why don't we just cover children in bubble-wrap and make them wear a helmet when they leave the house. It a dangerous world after all and lord forbid if they get hurt.

News Story #3: They arrested the man that rear ended a police cruiser, killing the police officer inside last Saturday. This comes as no big shock to folks living here but here are the facts about the man accused of the murder. He is Hispanic. He has 3 warrants out for his arrests. He has been arrested before for driving under the influence (for which one of his prior warrants was issued) and he is an illegal alien that has been deported back to Mexico FOUR times. It appears that he did not have a lot of trouble getting back into the United States after each deportation.

.....for those of you that might wonder what the big deal is about illegal immigration, this sort of sums it up. We caught and released this illegal alien three times, deported him each time before he went to court and he still managed to get back into the country and kill a police officer in a drunken stupor. Seems like the 'system' (if you can call it that) really isn't working to well.

Finally, I left the house at 6:30am to take my walk to the office. As I was walking across the Bridge of Sorrow I noticed that the freeway traffic headed westbound underneath me was at a stand-still. Thousands of cars were backed up to the horizon. As I walked over them I could hear the sound of helicopters swooping in from all directions.

There are four major television stations in the Phoenix Metro area. Each of them has a news helicopter. There are so many of them that two of them actually collided last year while covering a story. Whenever there is a relatively gruesome accident (usually involving a rolled over vehicle, a fire, or a dead body laying on the pavement), the 'News Vultures' swoop in and hover over the scene like condors searching for dead meat.

I don't know what the cause of the traffic backup was, but as I left the bridge, the four copters had all taken up position over the accident and the cameras were rolling. I could hear them all the way to my office as they hovered over the destruction.

When I was a child, I had no idea that this is what I would get to see everyday as an adult. Many mornings of late, I wish I had never grown up.