Man, I totally want lots of money! Does anyone else feel the same way?

Oh, and this is great:

The morning news was just showing some old commercials. This is a still from one of them. Fred and Barney enjoy the smooth taste of Winstons while Betty and Wilma do yardwork. If I recall my history correctly, TV cigarette advertising was banned on a January 2nd in either 1971 or 1972. The reason the second was chosen as the date was to allow tobacco companies to advertise during one last superbowl.

And now, NBC announced that it is going to start advertising hard liquor again. The Federal Communication Commission isn't really going to do anything about it either. After Kennedy, the FCC became something of a paper tiger. Many of its regulations were repealed, allowing corporations to own a lot more local television outlets and radio stations than they previously could. Obviously, when corporations with outside interests control the flow of information, we're getting their idea of what we should be seeing. And thus buying. Or, even more insidiously, how we should be living. Did you ever wonder what happened to all of our Saturday morning cartoons? Well, major networks have struck a deal with the FCC that allows them to broadcast less educational/community programming or advertising as long as they insert 'positive' messages about drug use, tolerance, etc. into the plot lines of their shows. This is why kids today get to spend their Saturday mornings seeing less of 'Spider Man's Amazing Adventures' and more 'City Guys' and other crap.

Anti-drug and tolerance messages are fine and good in themselves. The issue here, though, is that the government is buying our ethics. When a network executive is faced with a choice between spending $30,000 on a fifteen second public service commercial and pressuring a producer to get a character on a show to say "drugs are for losers," which way do you think the exec is going to?

We should be like England. There, people pay $60 (or something like that) annually for 'television licenses.' It may be a pain in the ass and an extra expense, but at least the people, as opposed to the advertisers, have more control than we do over what they see.

Ah, television. You are both a blessing and a curse.

I hadn't really planned to spend all morning talking about this. However, when I sat down to write, I realized that my anecdote about sleeping til noon yesterday and then leaving my house only twice wasn't really worth a fleshed out retelling.

Ah, here are two things:

1: When I looked at the packaging for the robot bugs I mentioned in the last entry, I found out that they cost $20 apiece. My aunts and my mom spent $140 on seven of those damn things. My aunt June said that, when they went into the Radio Shack, the sales clerk told them that they were "very popular, and everyone is buying them." Good lord. These women should have the word 'pigeon' emblazoned on their foreheads.

2: My mom bought me a huge jar of garlic to replace the one lost in the Ground Zero Garlic Incident. It now sits in my refrigerator, waiting to strike.