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Writing a column for Election Day is tricky. All anybody wants to talk about is the election, but editors frown on last-minute columns announcing that restore-traditional-values candidate Blather Purine, in the company of a woman not his wife, rented an hourly room at an Aurora motel recently closed by the police, and the bill was paid by a shady Indonesian wheeler-dealer who has ties to the tobacco lobby, the NRA, the NEA and the Bavarian Illuminati.
Thus it's time to clean the stuff that never quite
made a full column
file and wait out the election.
Let's start with Richard Jewell. The day after the bomb went off in Atlanta last summer, he was hailed as a hero. Then suddenly he was a suspect, and stayed that way for months. Now he isn't.
I'm going to guess at what happened. In my days as a
police reporter, I'd see something on the blotter that
looked rather heroic, like Truck driver rescues family
from river.
As I prepared to make the truck driver a hero, a deputy
might pull me aside. Don't be in a rush to promote that
guy, Quillen. There's some stuff that doesn't quite add up
in his story -- like maybe he ran them off the road and
into the river because he was asleep at the wheel. You
could end up with egg all over your face if you elevate him
before we know some more.
And so, I'd hold off. Sometimes it turned out that there was heroism, and other times the story was more complicated.
I suspect that's more or less what happened in Atlanta. The big media machine was set to make Jewell a hero for spotting the bomb-laden backpack and starting to clear the park, and then some cops pulled some reporters aside.
Don't be in such a rush to make Jewell a hero,
they were told. There's some stuff that smells funny
here.
And so the big media machine pendulum swung hard to the
other end, when the real message from law enforcement was
We want to check out this guy's story more, so why don't
you hold off for a little while?
In the superheated Olympic environment, though, there wasn't any chance of anybody holding off on anything. If they couldn't make Jewell a hero, they were going to make him a villain.
Now let us ponder the peculiar names of metro sports teams. There are Denver Broncos, and one of them is a Bronco. That's fine. Likewise with Nuggets and Nugget.
Rockies and Rockie? Well, the best you can say is that it works better than the others. What's one skater of the Avalanche? Snowflake? Drift? Cornice?
Even weirder is the Xplosion. Bad enough that it skips a vowel so that it resembles a software title more than a team name. Worse is the problem of a singular.
If they'd named the team the Xplosia, then a singular player could be an Xplosion, by analogy with phenomenon and phenomena, and all would be well. But they didn't, and now we have to guess what part of an Xplosion might be -- Cartridge? Detonator? Fuse?
And it's time to bid farewell to public TV from Channel 6, KRMA, whose programs I have enjoyed from time to time out here in the boondocks.
On Nov. 1, the local cable monopoly, TCI of Englewood, replaced KRMA with KTVD, the United Paramount Network station known as Channel 20 in populated regions.
We will still get one PBS station, KTSC from Pueblo, but KRMA sometimes runs some good stuff that KTSC doesn't, and further, I can get the KRMA schedule out of the Post, whereas KTSC means buying yet another newspaper, the Pueblo Chieftain. For that matter, I wish they'd add KBDI to our cable selection, too.
But no. When KRMA broadcasts Race to Save the
Planet,
KTVD offers reruns of The Jetsons
and
The Flintstones.
When World of National
Geographic
is on KRMA, Baywatch
is on KTVD, and
the same holds for Masterpiece Theater
and reruns of
The Three Stooges.
In short, KTVD offers the same brain-dead recycled stuff and superficial titillation that you can get from a dozen other channels. It adds nothing.
TCI's announcement said something about a federal
regulation requiring this move from Democracy 96
to
Baywatch
last night.
I have tried to find out more. The Englewood TCI number is voice mail from hell, and the local number was busy for half an hour until I finally got through and exacted a promise that the local manager, who must not be all that local because he had to go to Leadville, will call back one of these days.
I could get a satellite dish, I suppose, except the little ones don't fetch Denver TV stations, and the big ones cost more than I want to spend.
The federal regulation
in question was doubtless
approved by people who campaigned on traditional family
values
while decrying the moral decay of this
once-great nation.
And now I know which families held up the Three Stooges as role models to their youngsters a generation ago.
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