Bye-Bye

Advertisers finally did for me what I could not do for myself: they made me give up television. I couldn't take it anymore, the unyielding yowling of advertisements, be they in the form of 10-minute commercial breaks, 4 minutes of programming between commercial breaks, product placement (on Dexter! sob.) or this jaw-dropping thing where the people in the program actually promote the product, such as the Colbert Report which was supposedly once scathing political satire and now shills mayonnaise and beer.

Apparently, TIVO's to blame for this mess of advertisements. Advertising dollars pay for show + no one watches advertising = advertiser a bankrupt sucker. What a crock. If they're putting the commercials in the programming, why are there still commercial breaks? And why when I buy a DVD or pay for cable, do I still get a bargeload of commercials?

It was time to make a break with Forensic Files anyway. I've seen about a thousand episodes and I've got the formula. 95 percent (I'm guesstimating here) of the time it is the spouse, 2 percent of the time it the gardener/roofer/painting contractor and the saddest 3 percent of the time, the victim, usually a woman or child, runs into the wrong stranger at the wrong time.

If it's a poisoning, it is almost certainly the spouse. If not the spouse, it is the person the deceased let live on the property in exchange for odd jobs here and there. Many murdered people kept these sorts of characters around.

If it is a sexual/fetishistic murder, it is probably not the spouse.

If the surviving spouse is having an affair, he/she probably did it.

If the dead spouse was having an affair, the surviving spouse probably did it. Or the spouse of the boyfriend/girlfriend did it.

Etc. etc. Of course Forensic Files is less a whodunnit and more a how do we prove whodunnit, but with 6-7 commercial breaks in 30 minute time slot, I just don't care anymore.

The only other show I watched with regularity was Chelsea Lately. As much as I salute her deadpan comedic genius and I love John Caparulo, I was discomfited by the constant references to Chuy's size, like we were all still in 8th grade. Let's make fun of the short guy then blow pizza out our nose. But again I could have put up with that if it weren't for the 5 to 6 commercial breaks, all of which giving me ample minutes to ponder: why am I still watching this show? I should be working on my novel.

Bye bye TV.

Perfectwordasauras

OK, you've got your dictionary and you've got your thesaurus, both valuable tools, but there's a need for something new. For instance, I know there is a word that means something that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful, like a mushroom cloud or a whirlpool, but what is that word? I need a web site where I can enter two words and get a third one back. You know, enter "artistic + grisly" and the database would return "macabre," or "sad + peaceful" and you'd get "melancholy"—that sort of thing.

On a completely unrelated note: I suspect there is a cruel law of hummus that dictates if you buy a small container you can expect to consume it in one evening leaving you wishing you had bought a larger container, particularly considering all un-hummused leftover pita bread about to grow stale in the fridge. But if you had gone ahead and bought a larger container of hummus, well there is something vulgar about hummus in quantity—completely unappetizing, and it will wind up in the trash unopened one day a couple months from now, bubbling and fizzing from fermentation.

There is no right amount of hummus for purchase. There is no word for this.

New Work

Here is the cover and one interior spread from a 280 page book I designed with the Office of Arts Education at the Chicago Public Schools. The Guide's purpose is to elevate the quality of arts instruction throughout the 600 Chicago Public Schools. Click here or go to my web site to see more sample spreads.