Slow News Day?

Within the last couple of days I saw and heard no fewer than 17 bazillion, gazillion television news clips, newspaper articles and radio commentaries about the incident where a grandmother placed her baby grandchild on the xray conveyor belt at an airport. The articles all spoke of this incident as if child care giving skills were being eroded to such an extent that the next thing you know western civilization will have relapsed to the days when female babies were placed on ice bergs and sent to sea. I believe these sort of child care mishaps occur with much more frequency than congressman take bribes. Maybe even more often than George Bush f#$&*^s something up. By which I mean "a lot." I think this is especially true with grandparents although the parents are pretty goofy too, at times. But that doesn't warrant headlines.

And that's my point. I know of numerous episodes which, had they happened today, what with mass media, reality shows and Nancy Grace's big mouth, might have caused a global stir. For example, a friend of mine who I'll call Mrs. Stone, although her real name is Rose, knows firsthand the kind of errors and lapses when the senile are left to care for children. Martha, Rose's mother, who is the sweetest, kindest most caring lady you would ever want to meet was, and I'm sure Mike will back me up on this, dumb as a hoe handle when it came to childcare in her later years. On one occaision, Martha, God bless her, was sitting for Brad and Brett when the little rascals, toddlers at the time, complained of being thirsty. Kind hearted Martha proceeded to the fridge and found a couple of two litre bottles of fruit drink, which she gave to the grateful children who downed them in a flash. The rest, as they say, is history. The fruit drink, was of course, NOT fruit drink at all, but those wine coolers they used to put in big bottles. Can't you just hear Nancy Grace and Geraldo now?
CHARDON, OHIO: DASTARDLY, CHILD ABUSING GRANDMOTHER, FEEDS TODDLERS WINE COOLERS SO SHE CAN PURSUE HER OWN WILD, CAREFREE NIGHT ON THE TOWN! BLAMES AL QAEDA. Film at 11:00.

I guess in this day and age, the media must come up with anything just to fill our 24/7 need for news. But it seems they are scraping the bottom of the barrel when this kind of story is making headlines. I happen to know for a fact that when George Washington cut down the cherry tree, his own grandfather had inadvertantly supplied the axe thinking it was a baseball bat.

Here is an issue I have with today's print media. Did anyone else see this headline?"WWF Finds 52 new species in Borneo"

If so was anyone else dumb enough to wonder "what in the hell is World Wrestling Federation doing in Borneo?" Let alone why is Hulk Hogan digging around in the bat crap looking for new kinds of animals. I'll bet a lot of my uh, mountain reared kinfolk were on the same wavelength.
I am fed up with all these initials being used to express things. It is just another example of how the mass media have essentially substitituted brevity for clarity. In and of itself that may not be such a bad thin. However, it is very confusing for morons such as myself, and can cause quite a scare sometimes. Here I am envisioning all these steroid abused piss poor excuses for humanity, out in the wilds of Borneo. Picture Hulk Hogan holding some poor delicate little critter between his fingers in the jungle and Hogan says, "Hey look I got another that makes 53 new species." Then a squishing sound and he says, "Uh, make that 52 new species."

I'll bet I spend several waking hours every day trying to decipher initialized communications. LOL, LMAO or WMD. The first time I saw WMD it had Bush's name throughout and I started thinking it stood for something like "Dubya flogs the dolphin every 24 hours." If you get my drift. Come to think of it, I wish it did mean that, so he couldn't cause so much damage.

Of course, I should know by now that with news papers, particularly rags like our "Newsless Herald" eventually print the whole name. Sometimes they don't, especially when the figure anyone with an IQ over 30 could figure it out. In which case about 50% of the readership is left in the dark. I did eventually discover, buried somewhere in the article that WWF stood for the World Wildlife Fund. Whew, what a relief, I was worried that a new world order was on the horizon.

SYITFP
You figure it out.