CSotD: Wake me (shake me) when it’s over

Mike Peterson Published: October 19, 2010 1 minute 3 comments

I can't be the only person Gary Markstein speaks for.

I really want to move back to Colorado, where the states are huge and the media only reaches one of them. Here at the confluence of the White and Connecticut rivers, I would have to expect, at the very least, ads for Vermont and New Hampshire contests, but, because we don't have our own NH/VT television stations, I'm also subject to either New York or Massachusetts ads, depending on the channel I pick. Over the course of a week, I get to see ads from all four states.

Yes, that's multiple doses of The Voice of Doom and Contemptuous Ridicule coming at me on a daily basis, and at this late stage of the game, they've gotten down to such ridiculous distortions that anyone actually following the news can shout back at the ads, "That's not what she said!" or "That isn't true!"

I wish I thought the majority of voters were actually following the news, but we know that this is not the case.

The latest idiocy is that one candidate was endorsed by the state police, who called a press conference to announce it. The troopers who appeared at the press conference were, properly, paid out of a separate fund by the police department so that they weren't drawing their normal pay for what was an off-duty gig. Now the guy's opponent is filing papers with the Federal Election Commission, charging him with failure to report an in-kind donation. And, of course, running to the press with the accusation of fiscal corruption.

I'm sure that this penny-ante issue will soon become the subject of some of that multi-million dollar anonymous advertising, and, worst of all, the straw-clutching clown isn't on this side of the Connecticut River, so I won't even have the satisfaction of voting against him.

Basta! I'm going to join Harold in that tree for the next two weeks or so. Then I'll come down and vote, not against "the bums in office" but "the bums (in my state) who ran the most obnoxious ads." Yes, a more complex matching exercise.

Now, I was looking for a YouTube link to today's title earworm, but given that this is a post about annoying media, and because I came across this rather good video from the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival while I was looking for the other, I'll leave you with something that you won't mind carrying in your head the rest of the day. Turn it up whenever one of those ads comes on.

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Mark Jackson

You might pack for more than two weeks in that tree, Mike – I’m not at all sure things will be less ugly after the election.
I suspect that clip is from the one and only Monterey International Pop Music Festival, not the annual jazz festival.

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About twenty years ago, I turned off my TV and didn’t get around to turning it back on. I do get robocalls from (a certain organization–I’m trying not to start a flame war here) saying that after our governor raised taxes, unemployment rose and businesses closed. It took me a couple of days to remember the term for their technique–post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I also get some attack ads by mail, but a few years back I registered as a Whig, and the mail slowed to a trickle. Apparently my party isn’t running many candidates these days. Still, I manage to miss most of the vitriol being splashed around now.
(Mike–was it you who came up with the comment about trying to distinguish between several Mamta Popats? For some reason I was thinking about it today.)

Mike

Not me — I’d forgotten the incident and had to look it up. There is, it may interest you, a Mamta Popat on Facebook, but she lives in Mumbai, was born in 1987 and appears to be an attorney, which means she is, indeed, the wrong Mamta Popat.
And Mark, yes, Monterey Pop, which I should have known because, as I was watching it, I thought, “Boy, this is really well shot and edited …”

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CSotD: Wake me (shake me) when it’s over

Comments 3

Mark Jackson

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Mike

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