The last 20 minutes

I fell asleep during the Blues Brothers DVD last night. Usually, there's a kind of inevitable sympathy for artistic license when the networks bleep a cussword. But Blues with shock language intact, in a post shock world, just seems tired and commonplace. Aretha, fat, but sans the Mammy hat dripping with rhinestone respect, is still classic. The family watched, I slept with my feet up in the big ol' easy chair.

This was followed by the last 20 minutes of the Super Bowl, the best 20 minutes of any football game — almost as good as the last five minutes on the clock, IMHO. Plenty of time for commercials. Are they even trying anymore? After that last ballerina-like touchdown and the hopecrushing fumble, I surfed through the rest of the wasteland.

Apparently, Americans now have the attention span of three-year-olds. Sunday evening television on February 1, 2009, was so bad I actually thought for a moment it was deliberate ... heh heh ... like psyops, you know, a kind of topical anaesthetic sloshed onto the collective American brainpan to dull wits, deaden critical thought, and prevent awakefulness.

Then I pondered (weak and weary) who'd do something like that? A few ideas crept unbidden into mind. Fortunately, we have paranoia to throw a wrench into that dreary cognitive wheel of dawning realizations. Such a convenient diagnosis, that paranoia stuff. You gotta be crazy to be paranoid. There's gotta be a rational explanation.