Speaking of ads, they’re ruining regular TV for me. There probably aren’t any more ads than before, but the older I get the more intrusive they become. And you can hear<\/em> the volume being jacked up about one second into\u00a0the first commercial of\u00a0a block of ads —\u00a0didn’t we pass a law against that a few years ago? Thank goodness for streaming TV, I say, and the DVR.<\/p>\n Now, what to do about those content-blocking ads on\u00a0YouTube and news websites?<\/p>\n ——————–<\/p>\n Listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR yesterday, I heard a journalist guest\u00a0argue that traditional media is the best place to get the news because professional journalists can be relied on to explore all sides of an issue and ask tough questions.\u00a0Say what? Have you ever watched Meet the Press<\/em>?\u00a0Traditional media jumped on the bandwagon and helped\u00a0Bush & Cheney lie us into a disastrous war in Iraq. Traditional media was silent when Obama abandoned\u00a0his promise to keep\u00a0single-payer health care on the table during the policy negotiations that led to Obamacare. Traditional media is ignoring the massacres in Nigeria today. Traditional media —\u00a0Rachel Maddow excepted, as I noted at the top of this post —\u00a0isn’t asking questions about the conduct of our current campaign against ISIS.<\/p>\n If it weren’t for non-traditional media —\u00a0news and political websites and blogs, for example —\u00a0tough questions would never be asked. Over on the right sidebar I have a blogroll of sites I visit daily or weekly. One of those is a political blog called Hullabaloo. If you don’t go anywhere else on the internet, go there. Wonkette’s not bad either,\u00a0if you don’t mind sponsored content disguised to look like news (I use an RSS reader to view\u00a0Wonkette because it cuts out the fake articles, similar to the way Amazon streaming TV cuts out the ads on The Sopranos<\/em>).<\/p>\n ——————–<\/p>\n Donna’s away until next Thursday, staying with our grandson Quentin in Las Vegas while our son and daughter in law take a short vacation in Florida. She left Thursday\u00a0while I was at the Barrett-Jackson car auction in Scottsdale, so I came home to an empty house that\u00a0night. Well, not entirely empty: there were three hungry critters waiting for me.<\/p>\n I have plenty of prepared food, which is good because I never feel like cooking from scratch when it’s just for me, and I’m slowly catching up with the streaming TV shows I like but Donna doesn’t. There’s a book club meeting this afternoon, a Hash House Harriers run tomorrow, and my museum tours on Wednesday. Monday or Tuesday I’ll probably take the motorcycle out for a long ride. Time flies, and Donna will be home soon.<\/p>\n Oh, one last thing. Last week I took a new vision prescription to Costco and ordered new glasses. I didn’t take Donna with me because I wanted to pick my own frames. This time I decided to go with tortoise shell. The glasses came in yesterday, so Donna hasn’t seen them yet. I don’t know whether she’ll like them or hate them, but I think I like them. Here they are:<\/p>\n
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