Elian Gonzalez speaks out. He's not mad at his Miami relatives, ten years after being seized at gunpoint by federal agents, and he is happy living with his father in Cuba. Terri Horman is not talking to anyone, and she's hired Oregon's top defense lawyer. Car designer Gordon Murray has created a tiny car weighs just over 1200 lbs and gets over 70 miles to the gallon. The driver gets into the thing by hinging open the whole front, and the steering wheel is mounted in the center. It's smaller than a golf cart but can reach 90 miles an hour. I wonder if they could rig the thing to fly, shape it like the George Jetson mobile. A supertanker has been refitted and dispatched to the gulf. The Dodgers swept the Giants. The Ducks got verbal commitments from two speedy quarterbacks and two others are interested. A new study shows American lags behind in happiness. The Gaza Strip got a shipment of chocolate but were denied cement. CNN is suffering declining ratings; competing news stations garner larger audiences with loud, angry, polemic hosts. No one wants just the facts, calmly delivered. They want their commentators to take sides. Go right or go left, and don't let your hair grow gray. Jon Stewart wants to quit The Daily Show. He has a running battle with Fox News. Some rumors have him as the likely replacement for David Letterman. In life you're either a Lettermen or a Leno fan, a Bill O'Reilly, a Michael Savage or a Keith Olbermann. The calm voices are lost in the din. Larry King is retiring. He and his suspenders have long been irrelevant. Oprah's ratings are declining. Is Ryan Seacrest the least interesting least talented successful person in history? He gets paid a LOT of money for being able to look into the camera and pretend something or someone is important. New Moon/True Blood vampire werewolf supernatural fever is gripping the country. Every other movie and TV show has this escapist hyperviolent edge-of-evil element. It's a sign of boredom and decay, the ultimate attempt to distract and anesthetize the masses. In an age when we are feeling powerless and overwhelmed by the forces of mayhem and misery, create elaborate fantasies of hypersexuality and superhuman power. Imagine being able to leap twenty times the length of your body and feast on human flesh. For the oldsters there's a hot tub time machine, tame by comparison and infinitely more ridiculous. The Al Gore investigation is being reopened by the Portland Police. His credibility is destroyed. He'll retire to the Hall of Shame for ambitious, ruined men, in a suite down the hall from John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer. Spitzer's getting a new show on CNN. How far and how quickly they fall. Elin Woods gets $750 million in the divorce decree, the largest settlement ever in a celebrity divorce. Tiger Woods is expressly prohibited from introducing the children to any of his future bimbos, porno stars or coffee shop waitresses, unless he becomes married to one of them.
The news is a tumult. The news is frenzied hum and buzz. It flows unabated. It casts down like acid rain. It washes and thaws and gushes. It confuses. It titillates. It overwhelms. In the end it makes no sense, and one scandal is forgotten in the tropical storm created by another. Each new administration blames the last one for the mess we're in. And Al Gore must be thinking, "Somebody else please screw up, and get me off the front page."
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