Why Is News Irritating?

I'm not sure which came first, advertising or the news, but in our modern times, I know advertising comes first way too often. News is a tease to get you reading or watching long enough to suffer the advertisements. The different varieties of news, including investigative reporting, magazine articles, TV documentaries, and weather forecasts, all indulge in exaggeration and hide-the-ball for the purpose of advertising.

It starts with the headline. Often it's a question. A question as a headline? "Nixon, Clinton, Trump, Why Is Impeachment More Common?" (USA Today, 12/7/19). "Does the world need any more large zoos?" (BBC News 12/6/19) Questions are safe. A statement might take a position that might dissuade someone from following the trail of ads.

Then there are the headlines that cater to the publication's reader base. My favorite culprit is Huffpost where partisan hyperbole is the business model. "Maddow Nails Hypocrisy of GOP." "Ex-Ethics Chief Roasts Trump-Defending Republicans With A List Of Future Quotes [sic]." Like, whatever Maddow or an Ex-Ethics Chief says will "nail" or "roast" anything for the GOP leadership?

I could quote and endless number of hyperbolic headlines from Fox Noise, but I cannot stomach that nonsense long enough to even skim its headlines. Tabloid Fox Noise, by far and away, is the most financially successful exploiter of any news base. It thrives on ignorance.

The effect of exaggeration is to mislead. News should not mislead.

Then there is the all too familiar clickbait. I first encountered the term only recently; maybe a couple of years ago. Clickbait is all over Facebook and, if you read news online, there are "sponsored" links all over the pages. If one clicks on the link, one enters the rabbit hole of hide the ball, if I may mix two metaphors. The clickbait headline is a tease that leads a person through an existential journey through a maze of endless advertisements to read another tease and search for the link to the next page where another tease is embedded in another maze of advertisements — often ads for other clickbait sites. If there is a point to a clickbait article, assuming you have the fortitude to find it, I can assure you it is a huge letdown. Exaggeration.

Granted, clickbait sites are not traditional news sites. But they operate similarly all too much: suck in the readers long enough to blast them with advertisements.

Which leads me to my major frustration: well written and substantive articles on interesting subjects where I have to find the ball.

I often wish I had taken a journalism class at (Theodore) Roosevelt High School (and drama, but that's another post). So I am no expert on how good investigative news articles should be written. But I know how I like to read any information: tell me what you are going to tell me; tell me; then tell me what you told me. The writer should be knowledgeable enough to summarize.

Ah, but to summarize is to make a statement that might dissuade someone from wandering through a forest of anecdotes followed by a trail of no doubt relevant details before getting to the point. I hate articles that begin with a touchy-feely anecdote, or any other anecdote for that matter. Start with the point and let me decide whether I want more information. Oh, but then I won't get to see the advertisements.

Now it is quite possible that there are people out there who enjoy reading investigative reporting, or eagerly suffer through Big Pharma advertisements to get to the weather forecast for the following day. They work like novels. The opening is a tease in the form of an anecdote, then curiosity and patience lead the reader to savor the verbal trail of carefully assembled information to, hopefully, a satisfying climax. Ah, minutes later the reader is educated and can conclude that fifty years ago Big Oil had its own scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, which evidence they promptly buried. Or, in the world of History Channel documentaries and their ilk, why  dinosaurs went extinct, or Atlantis sunk, or what was discovered in Caribbean waters. Or the chance of rain tomorrow.

I don't have the patience for exaggeration or hide the ball.

Polyglot

Warning. This is a rant about how mean we can be. But  when out Hair Product in Chief incites a crowd to chant, "Send Them Back", I get angry at our own stupidity and meanness.

I've mentioned before. This country doesn't even have its own name, but that doesn't stop some people from waving flags and taking it out on others.

Yeah, it's the United States of America. But then there is the United States of Brazil, and also the United Mexican States, but at least they have their own unique name. There's nothing unique about "America", but we throw the label around as if Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America aren't in the Americas.

It's arrogant. That's an epithet the USA'ns earned a long time ago. The Ugly American.

Now we have crowds happily chanting, "Make America Great Again" and "Send Them Back". That's disgusting.

You are uncomfortable with dark colored skin? Deal with it. You bristle at not understanding someone talking in a foreign language. Deal with it. You don't like people wearing ethnic clothes, whether a head scarf or baggy shorts hanging off someone's butt? Deal with it. Because the problem is you, not them.

You want to blame others for your problems? Stifle the urge because you are either a hypocrite or a conspiracy theorist; probably both. Go join a religion. They cater to such weak minds.

I'm angry at the intentional ignorance and ugliness in this country. People are actually proud of being nasty, vicious, even violent. I am angry at Fox Noise for making money by inciting the meanness in people. I am angry at a Republican party that shamelessly incites and exploits its nasty, vicious and mean base. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe such low-lifes.

But mostly I am angry at people who vote for such low-lifes. Or don't bother to vote. It's not like any of this is news. But hatred, even if contrived, is powerful.

The world is getting smaller. Cultures, languages, and skin color are getting a lot less isolated. Deal with it. "French", "English" and "Italian" are getting new meanings. Yes, it's shaking up our cultural identities. Deal with it. Maybe it's karma: just deserts for centuries of imperial and religious exploitation. And you complain?

And who is leading the free world in this orgy of hatred against "others"? Why, one of the most polyglot societies of them all. The political collective that shamelessly cleansed a half a continent of its inhabitants, and imported slaves and the poor in order to exploit and exhaust its natural resources, a political collective that doesn't even have its own name.

We have to deal with this. We have to do better. The alternative is too ugly to imagine.

Pet Peeve: Leg Tourniquet Socks

Says the website: "Learn about
the symptoms, causes and treatment of
sock-line hyperpigmentation,
a health issue caused by
tight socks with elastic bands.

I understand there is something chic about being dressed up and crossing your legs to reveal ankle and a little leg under one's trousers, naked skin and hair perfectly covered by smooth gentleman's socks held up against gravity and nature by bands of elastic.

Mind you, most of the year, if I do wear socks, they are the kind that don't reach the ankle bone. These short anklets, something I never had occasion to wear in Lower Alaska, don't provoke my peeve. But then, they really are not a gentleman's sock. They are more a sports sock and are related to the full sized, thick, white cotton crew or gym socks. You can readily get crew socks without overly constrictive elastic.

Summer uniform.

My school in Sydney, St. Aloysius College (may Allah bless the Jesuit priests), had a dress code. We wore uniforms. Grade school students wore shorts. The winter uniform was grey wool shorts and blazer. Summer was khaki cotton. Heaven help the kid who lost track of the seasonal change and showed up dressed in the wrong fabric. Regardless of the season, we had to wear grey shin socks pulled up taught to just below the knee. They had to be smoothly taught. A wrinkled mess of grey sock crumpled around the ankles was likely to earn a couple of hits on the palms with a thick leather strap.

We kept our socks hoisted using rubber bands, like the kind that bind asparagus, only a little thinner and more circumference. Like cuff links and tie clips to a gentleman of the 1960's, the rubber bands were a critical element of school dress.

Socks could not sag. Each morning we pulled a sock on, followed by a rubber band which we artfully hid by folding over the sock top. Kids with higher social status dress had newer socks with elastic collars woven into the fabric. My socks were so worn the original elastic had long since lost its vim and vigor.

The price of such uniform neatness was a deep concave ring around the flesh of one's calves. At my age, I don't really care whether my dark blue or brown socks slump in wrinkles around my ankles. I do care about deep concave rings around the flesh of my legs.

I refuse to wear suspenders.

You would think that at least some manufacturers of gentleman's socks would produce a style that didn't function as a tourniquet, but I defy you to find one. It's just a matter of how ridiculously constrictive they are. Even some athletic socks have lots of sadistically tight elastic woven into their tops. I know. I ended up buying several pairs.

What I do in my frustrated anger is to pull apart the sock tops as hard as I can to stretch and hopefully break the elastic. The elastic is way tougher than my pull, an indication of just how constrictive these gentleman's tourniquets can be. I have taken scissors to socks, making strategic cross-snips designed to sever at least some of the thick elastic tendons. It helps a little. The best solution is chance and wear: chance that a particular sock uses inferior elastic, and wearing and washing it enough that the sock sags. In drawers full of dozens of pairs of dress socks, only two pair have achieved perfection.

My solution, hardly perfect but quite practical, is to fold the top of the sock down to the narrowest part of my ankles.

Why are all dress socks, I do not exaggerate, all dress socks made with elastic so tight you can count the threads by the impressions they leave in your flesh? I don't get it. Thank goodness I work in a home office and a desert environment with not much need or occasion to wear dress socks.

Pet Peeves

Senator William Proxmire announced Golden Fleece Awards to ridicule what he thought was taxpayer waste. Rowan & Martin gave out a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award each episode of Laugh-In. Andy Rooney earned a good living in his dotage complaining for five out of Sixty Minutes about, "You know what bothers me . . ." Today we have Bill Maher and New Rules.

Pet peeves originate from daily lives. Simple things repeated over and over give rise to irritation. Some regular irritations are inherent in living: haircuts, root canals, the common cold, and tsunamis. Others are unavoidable because they are caused by others: pick-up trucks with Confederate flags or NRA stickers, McDonald's corporate food, and Christmas retail.

W. C. Fields had his three peeves: wet toilet paper, young children, and I forget the third. The bandits in Sierra Madre had no use for "stinkin' badges." You must have your pet dislikes.

It is in a spirit of reconstructive frustration, albeit in a much more humble scope, that I offer my own examples of petty complaints.  After years and years of silently enduring silly irritations on a daily basis, Tucson Tom introduces his Pet Peeves.

Do not expect earth-shaking revelations, or even pointed social commentaries. This is the trivial stuff of modern life. This is stuff that is not so much inherent in nature as man-imposed for little social benefit.

I take it back. These are social commentaries on such fundamental matters as socks, underwear, garbage, blister-packaging, and software updates.