Bully Entertainment

How many of you are watching programs like Impractical Jokers or Deal With It?
You know, those shows where they bully people into doing stupid things?

Oh, you think it's not bullying, because they are getting paid for it?
It's not bullying because they agreed to it?
It's not bullying because they are just stupid for doing it and therefore deserve anything they get?
It's not bullying because it's funny?

Which of those excuses are not used by the REAL bullies of life?
Maybe the one about getting paid? You've led a charmed life to have never been the victim of a workplace bully/boss.

Money, of course, excuses all sorts of bad behavior in this world. Just look at our lawmakers.

Let's put aside the money issue. Children don't know too much about money,  nor do they value it as adults do.

Do you have or are you around young children?

What are they seeing when they watch you watching and laughing at these programs?
They see you, one of their role models, being amused and entertained by some people coercing other people into doing sometimes cruel, sometimes careless, sometimes dishonest activities. It doesn't matter what they are doing, or why.

The children see you laughing at the results of bullying.

How are you going to explain that to them?
How are you going to stop them from emulating this behavior that gets all this favorable attention from you?

What are YOU going to do?

They Think You're Stupid

One of the worst things about not working has got to be daytime TV.

One of the worst things about daytime TV has got to be the commercials.

Lately, these seem to have gotten worse. Many of them sound like they are talking down to you, some just use bad grammar -- and bad English, too!
There are some, I'm sorry to say, that seem to be actively looking for stupid people as their main source of customers.

This may even be true; I don't know. Maybe that is who they look to for a customer base. How hard can it be to confuse stupid people and get their money,after all?

The worst offender, commercial-wise, is LoanMax. This is a company that makes title loans on cars. Their main clientele, I think, is people who can't get a bank loan, even using their car as collateral. Banks don't want to make small loans, for one thing, and for another, they don't like older cars.
Title loan businesses know two things banks refuse to acknowledge. 1)People will generally pay to keep their car when it's all they have and 2) if it runs, they will likely get their money back at auction, if it should go that far. Maybe not all their (outrageous) interest, but at least the original loan.

The procedure is similar to a bank loan.  You get a loan using the car as collateral. If you ever try to sell the car, you have to pay off the loan/lien first.

Loan Max ads feature a woman who was just so relieved she didn't have to give them her car!  She got to keep her car! Imagine that!
Lady, if you didn't get to keep your car, it would be a/k/a selling your car, NOT a loan. How the blankety-blank did you ever get a car in the first place?

There's also a man who can't keep driving on tires with 'plugs' in them -- I was told 20 years ago they don't make tires you can put plugs in anymore. If that's still true, this man is driving around on excessively old tires, and I don't want to be on the road with him anyway. (I could, however, be wrong and someone somewhere did figure out a way to make plugs for modern tires. In that case, I'm the stupid one.)
There's a woman who doesn't want to drive around on bad rotors. I guess she can't plug her tires anymore and has no wheels.
And there's a guy who got a loan to get tattoo training -- not so bad, but you'd think they might go for something classier in the eyes of society as a means of going into business. And a fellow who buys storage units at auction. Maybe he'll be on TV someday!

There's a lawyer who "Gets answers done." Okay, I want answers, and I want a lawyer who gets things done. I don't want my answers done.

Then there's one of those infernal schools, with one-class-a-month, or one-subject-at-a-time classes. These people are really annoying. It's too bad the schools have no better representations than people who can't speak properly.
These women have their dreams accomplished.
How the hell does that happen?
I (or they) can accomplish a dream, but the dream doesn't accomplish. This person needs to speak with the lawyer who gets answers done.

This woman also talks about how the school 'accomplished' or 'created'  "new dreams for me and new opportunities for mySelf."
Only you can accomplish or create things for yourself.
The school can create or accomplish things only for itself
Only I can do things for myself.

Do intelligent persons want to go to a school that doesn't see basic communication skills as a selling point?

Do you? Will you?

I don't.
I won't.

Not even to get away from the inanity of daytime TV commercials.

Art will Out.

My husband used to say. when we'd go flea marketing, "I could do that if..."
He could be talking about wooden yard cutouts, or concrete statues, or handmade pottery, or plaster busts, or just about any handcraft.

His "if" was usually
"If I had the tools."
"If I had the equipment."
"If I had the space"

I was usually the penny pinching bully who wouldn't "let" him have the whatever he wanted for something he might do. Never mind that he probably never would do any of it.

I knew he wouldn't.

I made this judgement because he could have done many of the things using the tools at hand, but because they weren't specialty tools, he 'couldn't.'

Art doesn't work that way. If you have a need in your soul to create, you create. You don't wait for tools or stop for argument. If the need is in you and has to get out, you use what's at hand and do the best you can.

Period.

I know this, because I write. I write in all conditions, under any, many circumstances. I HAVE dived into trash cans for something to write on. I have used a mascara brush to jot down notes for a plot twist that just came to me as I was waiting in line. I have written with crayon, with full-fledged permanent marker, with broken pencils where I've chipped and peeled the wood away from the lead with my teeth and fingernails, because the words need to get OUT.

If I had no tools or equipment, I created some, I found some, I made some.

The same can be said for those who want to dance, or design, or act, cook, or do any other creative, expression.

There is no "if" in making art.

I'm reminded of this today watching my granddaughter.
She draws.
She paints.
She has taught herself to use the Paint program on the computer. She knows more of how to get it to do what she wants than I do.
If she finds an ink pen, a crayon, a marker, a burned stick, a charcoal briquet, she picks it up and draws a line or a circle with it.
If she has no paper to draw on, she uses a sidewalk, a rock, a board, a wall.

There is no "if" in this child when it comes to her art.

"If" she has no other legacy, I hope this is what she gets from Mammaw.

There is no "if" in "art."

Back to the schoolroom

It's back to school time, and the news is out. All over the broadcasts are good schools, bad schools, charter schools, school levies, buses, teachers, backpack programs, and a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions are about costs.

Anyone who thinks free public schools are free hasn't gone to one for more than two generations. When I was a child, we had school fees every year  to pay for workbooks to go along with the textbooks. These workbooks were not and are not optional. There are more programs today than there used to be to help parents pay for them, but that's not the point.
The point is that free schools aren't free.

There's been discussion, too, about the school year. About the whole school year concept. The September-to-May concept is fairly recent .  School, in my lifetimes, started after Labor Day and ended by Memorial Day. Many things have happened to change that -- standardized Monday holidays, for one thing. Memorial Day isn't the 30th of May anymore.

The school year somehow changed into a certain number of days in school instead of a season of education. I have a lot to say about this ridiculous concept. My daughter had to make up absent days one year by going to school during her Christmas vacation. She didn't have to learn anything -- she wasn't making up tests, or reviewing chapters she missed due to her injury. She just had to have her butt in a seat at the school building, so they could have the requisite numbers of students on the minimum number of days.

Education is not the goal of school. Attendance is.

Some of this -- most of it -- is due to funding formulas. #of students, multiplied by # of days = $$$. Never mind the learning. No child can learn in 52 days, they absolutely need to have 53 days. It's the law.

It's the law.

Schooling should never have been made a matter of law.
Once it was a matter of law, it should have remained a matter of local law.
Not state.
Not Federal.
Not run by dollar dictators who want only a return on their investment.

To get that return, they turned to athletics. The games children play at recess for fun have become big business and are the secondary purpose of having school.
Again, if you think school athletics are about equal opportunity, you haven't been living in the real world. All sorts of personal gear and equipment have to be purchased. One year it was name brand shoes decided by the coach, because they were best and safest. Problem was, the shoes cost more than the monthly electric bill. Without the proper shoes, the students aren't allowed to play.

Doesn't sound very free or equal to me,and kids have always been pretty good at playing games without help. Just because the town council can get a cut of the gate and the state can run the concessions doesn't seem to me a sound educational platform.

It's back to school time.

At least we don't have to worry (too much) about what's required of us or our children. All we have to do is make sure they get there (Attendance) and encourage them to play games (Athletics.)

That's what school is all about.

Chaos in Colorado & the Right to Know

Last week, there was a shooting in Colorado. No doubt everyone has heard of it by now, and they've heard misleading quotes, incomplete assessments, rumors, outright lies, and everywhere the young man's name all over the news. We've seen it and him and he knows he's going down in the history books, so now he's going to act or claim crazy. (As if a sane person would shoot up a theater and booby trap his own home.)

I'm not naming him. There are enough people and mechanisms doing that, and that is what this young man is eating up. He's FAMOUS! He's INFAMOUS! He's on the Front Page, he's the LEAD Story, he's on YouTube, he's shared and reshared on Facebook and other social media.

Everyone knows his name. He can sit back and wallow now. And that's exactly what he's going to do.

To most of the public, especially the politically attuned, the Horrible Happening is a new reason to scream and open debates about gun control. It is somehow the fault of the guns that they were amassed and misused in this fashion.
To me, the issue should be about the media. The Fourth Estate.
We have freedom of the press. That's a good and wonderful thing.
Until something like this happens.

The  media is helpful when there is a question of locating a perpetrator or suspect. The media is at its best when reporting events as they unfold. The media is a force to be reckoned with when someone in the public eye is trying to hide secrets. The media tells us we have a right to know, and they will inform us. They can keep us informed of all rumors and speculations as long as they say they are rumors and speculation. Reporting of the booby traps may have saved lives.

But what, exactly, do we have a right to know about? What is needful and/or entertaining and informative? Do we need to know, on a national level, speculation and gossip?
 Is it right to be shoving their microphones into the faces of families waiting for someone to come outside from the scene of a massacre? Is it our right to know when they finally accept the unbelievable unacceptable fact that their loved one is not coming away from the scene?
Is it our right to know what a mother thinks when her son has admitted to this type of horror? Has she no right to the privacy of thought?
Do we have a right to know about every clipped toenail or late bedwetting incident ever in the guilty person's history?
Do we have the right to decide -- believe -- he's guilty before there is any sort of due process?
Does the media have the right to claim our right to know gives them the right to lionize punks and publicity hogs?

There are no easy answers, which is why the problems have been unresolved for so many years. There is a right to know, but who can or should decide what anyone else has the right to know?  Is there, or should there be, a time that it's right to know.

Difficult questions that need to be looked at and discussed and worked on as intently as gun control or defining insanity. It's no wonder that policing authorities try to conceal identities and evidence from the press. Irresponsible reporting compromises deaf, dumb, and blind justice.

And then, there  are young men like this "joker" who do the deed, then, when the media is fully present, walks up to the police and says "Yeah, I did it," then spends the next three days -- or three months, three years, three decades -- smirking and preening and posing for the cameras.


He has the right to know how important he is

Dark Shadows. (No, not mine.)

Spent the weekend browsing the old show. YouTube has quite a bit, if you have the patience to weed out the Johnny Depp- Tim Burton overwhelming publicity. YouTube has quite a few clips from the old show, including one with the very beginning. Fan club events and interviews, from then and a few from now.

I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.

What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'.  It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.

Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.

Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.

It started out as a Gothic Romance.

"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."

Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.

Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)

It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.

Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)

The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.

This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.

Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.

So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.

It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.

But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.

Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun. 

TV judges and Social Security

I think they all need a crash course on Social Security laws. Of course, I also think anyone with a Social Security payout problem needs to take their case to Social Security, but there is probably a backlog, for one thing. For another, one wouldn't get to be on TV (or get paid for suing) if they handled their problems that way. I'm not real sure what the appeal is in displaying one's ignorance and stupidity (two different things) all over the world, but it seems important to many people.

And, yes, I will watch you air your dirty laundry. It helps me know how to keep mine unexposed. Judge shows are pretty good for quick character studies, and sometimes name finding.

The judges have different personalities and different agendas for their shows. The People's Court bends over backwards, usually, to apply the law of the state where the litigants live. That's a lot of work, and the result makes for educational entertainment most of the time. Judge Judy doesn't really seem to care what the law may be. Her 'courtroom' is her kingdom, and she makes all the rules -- even if they aren't the law of Anywhere Else. The other programs fall somewhere in between.

Recently there have been quite a few cases dealing with Social Security (and its affiliate programs) issues. Usually someone squabbling over who should get payee money for children, but not always.

One case was a man whose girlfriend 'stole' his payments while he was incarcerated. She used his money to maintain his apartment, buy his bills and other horrible misspending.

Prisoners are not allowed to receive Social Security payments, according to the documents my husband received. When you 'become incarcerated' your benefits are supposed to be suspended, until such time as you are no longer incarcerated. No exceptions, although there is an appeal process of some sort.

So why is the judge not educating people that this is an illegal act, if s/he must hear the case on TV?

Other cases involve payees of SS or SSI for the disabled . Now, any monies accumulated before payment is made should go to whoever is taking care of the child or person. Roof over the head, food in the mouth, entertainment, education, clothes on the back.
It is NOT for whoever takes custody later.
It is NOT to be saved up for college. In many cases, especially with SSI, if there is any 'extra' income, there will be no payments. The payments are to help support the recipient with basic payments.

Social Security can, and does, ask for an accounting. Every year there's a paper to fill out. Every now and then, the payee for the recipient has to haul off a year's worth of receipts and canceled checks and bank statements to the local office and show that the money has been used to pay the person's fair share of expenses. (In a four person family, each person can be responsible for no more than one-fourth of regular living expenses. Specific expenses for the individual for personal needs and medical expenses are handled differently.)

Whoever paid for these things during the waiting time is who should get this money. Period. The end. That, too, is spelled out in letters and forms the government sends out when there is a new judgement on receiving benefits. It doesn't belong to the recipient, unless there is leftover. It doesn't belong to the next person to take over -- except for that leftover.

Why do I know this, and so-called experts -- even ones who do detailed research -- don't?

Who educates the educators?