g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Sunday, July 25, 2004
19:20 - At least this doesn't happen in the minors

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Watching the HDTV broadcast of the Yankees/Red Sox game at Fenway this afternoon, we couldn't help but notice how much time the ESPN announcers spent throughout the game talking about John Kerry (who was in the audience, in a luxury box right next to the Red Sox dugout), the Democratic Convention, and how everybody in the city is just drunk with anticipation of the coming week's citywide happytime party. The HD cameras keep flitting back to Kerry to get his ho-ho-ho, I say, hurrah to all that! Smashing defense of the wicket, what? reaction shots to Red Sox homeruns, to the faces of Hollywood big-names who were also in attendance (Ben Affleck, the Meet the Press guy, and others), and to just generally talk about how great Kerry is. They spent a whole half-inning interviewing him instead of covering the game, for Pete's sake.

I know we can't expect such a thing as impartiality from our media, not when they openly admit their biases and stick out their lower lips like, "What? You wanna fighdaboudit?" But come on... there have got to be some corners of the entertainment world that are free of politics, right? I'm not asking for a lot—I don't want political bias in my direction, I just want not to have to worry about stumbling across yet another blankly-grinning knot of Kerry-bots on every channel. I don't want to have to start watching The 700 Club just because I can count on it to cause me less teeth-grinding pain than what's on the rest of the dial.

Last night we were out in Stockton watching a Ports game—single-A ball, in the Rangers system, in a biome all its own both politically and economically—two hours from San Jose, it's a quiet agrarian community where RC Cola has the concession contracts instead of Coke or Pepsi, and where in the parking lot of the stadium, there are actually one or two cars with yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbons and "Bush/Cheney '04" bumper stickers in between all the "Vote Bush Out" and "War Is Not the Answer" ones. And you know? It was great.

This is what it's come to: I'll take cover under country music, nostalgic Route 66 Americana, and outposts of a staid Midwest just to make the noise stop.

It's barely even worth asking whether Kerry thinks he's risking any votes from battleground New York by mugging shamelessly for the HD cameras as a Red Sox fan.

UPDATE: And then there's The Simpsons, which tonight featured Mr. Burns forming a media monopoly and crushing all dissent and protestors, including pure sweet Lisa who dares to speak out under his iron boot. The conclusion, if I'm reading it right, makes fun of bloggers, too.

No more... no more... I'll talk, I'll talk...


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© Brian Tiemann