Entry 108: Our Culture War and Mattress Moving

So, a lot has been going on these past few weeks with the "Culture War" in our country. I touched on it a little bit last post with Rick Sanatorium, but it seems to have gone into overdrive the past few days. One reason is that conservative blogger/provocateur Andrew Breitbart died on Thursday of some sort of heart trouble. He was only in his early 40s. I never bothered to learn much about Breitbart, but from what I could tell he sorta had a Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde private-public life. In private, he supposedly was a nice, normal, loving, and funny guy, and in public, he was a vitriolic dispenser of anti-liberal half-truths, and a leader of some conservative "busts" of suspect fairness and motive (most notably ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, and Anthony Weiner). He was frequently criticized for using quotes and videos out-of-context to support his point of view.

[Breitbart (left) and Taibbi.]

Shortly after Breitbart's death, Matt Taibbi the liberal Rolling Stone writer (about whom I'm never quite sure what to make) posted an entry on his blog entitled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douchebag." Needless to say, many people thought this was in extremely poor taste, and I did too at first -- I mean regardless of what you think of his politics, the guy wasn't Pol Pot, let's have a modicum of decorum -- but then I actually read the post. It's not that bad. The title, which seems particularly heinous at first glance, reveal itself to be kinda tongue-in-cheek, and the post is sort of a dark homage to Breitbart from somebody on the opposite end of the political spectrum. In fact, Taibbi tries to make just this point in an update at the bottom of his post after being harassed by Breitbart fans. Plus, as Taibbi also alludes to, Breitbart wasn't exactly magnanimous when Ted Kennedy died, so, yeah.

The reason I never paid much attention to Breitbart was that I just didn't care. I had other things to do. I heard a few things he said when he was just getting big, they seemed stupid to me, so that was that, moving on. I wish more people would treat ridiculous talking heads and idiotic political bloggers this way, shrug your shoulders and move on. The push back and outrage is what fuels these people. Take a certain radio host, who's again captured the spotlight recently by calling a birth control advocate a "slut". This guy has been saying moronic, incendiary things since I was in high school. The story should be when he says something reasonable. So, let's just move on, the same way you would move on if a homeless guy on the street corner was raving about reading people's auras in the trees. They deserve equal respect.

And so, moving on, myself, new topic. I decided last week to start watching Celebrity Apprentice. The show always sounded terrible to me (I had never actually watched an episode), but the cast this season is chalk full of people I find interesting like Adam Carolla, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, Arsenio Hall (hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo), and Clay Aiken (very funny guy, actually). So, I watched the first episode on Hulu, and I could barely get through it. It was two hours long! Who on Earth would want to devote two hours to an inane show like this on a weekly basis? I could watch two episodes of an actual substantive TV show, or watch a movie, or play 15 games of online Scrabble with two hours of free time.

[Dee Snider, Lou Ferrigno, AND, George Takei, how could anybody ruin this? Watch it to find out.]

And the production of the show is awful. The boardroom takes 45 minutes and every time they cut to commercial they replay the first minute of what they showed before, and they try to build suspense out of the stupidest things ("Which sandwich did Rachael like best? Find out next"... dum, dum, dum). It's not dramatic, it's irritating. I'm not surprised that the production is bad, I expected it to be bad, but I was thinking maybe the personalities could make up for it. Nope, the show sucks. Needless to say, I won't be watching anymore episodes. If it were a half-hour, maybe an hour, I'd give it another try, but when I went back to Hulu and saw the second episode was also two hours (I thought maybe it was just an extra long season premier), no way.

In other news, we finally got our mattress for the master bedroom. Getting it up our narrow staircase was a BITCH. It was just S and I moving it (so basically just me), and I think I dislodged a few vertebrae. At one point we were having such a difficult time that S just wanted to call professional movers to try to hoist it up through a window (which is how our box springs in the guest bedroom made it), but I was determined. I was at the top of the stairs sweating, looking at a twisted mess of cushion jammed into our stairwell thinking, "We ARE getting this son-of-bitch to our bedroom." And, lo and behold, we did.
The bed is super comfortable, but probably just coincidentally, I've haven't been sleeping great lately. It's not like I'm up all night, but I'm lying in bed a lot longer than I usually do. It's taking me longer to "turn my brain off". Then, yesterday I woke up at 6 a.m. about two hours earlier than normal. They are doing construction across the street, and this truck was dropping off supplies, which wouldn't have been a problem, but it had to constantly do back and forth, so it was often in reverse and doing that "beep, beep, beep" thing. Seriously, why is this the default setting for all machinery? It's so annoying. Was there once of rash of people being maimed because they didn't know a giant hunk of metal was moving backwards at them ("If only RVs made annoying beeping sounds when they move in reverse, little Johnny would still be alive today")? Or is it a bullshit, check-the-box, safety regulation? I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing it's the latter.

OK, that's all for this week. S invited friends over tonight for dinner, so I should at least make an empty offer to help her prepare.

Until next time...