The Rotten Word

I need to play catch-up again. This post includes some rambling about RSS readers, some complaining about which stories are declared news and then beaten into our eyeballs and eardrums until we scream, and a movie spoiler. Click through and enjoy.

Over 200 unread items

A Feed Reader For My Life

I am a huge fan of Google Reader and similar services . I keep somewhat up-to-date with 201 blogs (yeah, seriously) instead of always-completely-up-to-date with only a few. I scan the headlines every morning and decide what is interesting. I used to worry about going through every feed and skimming every headline. Nowadays, if I don’t get through everything, I mark it all as read the next morning, except for what’s new in the last 24 hours.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how great it would be to have a similar service to use with life in general. I would love to skim headlines like “need to do laundry” and “have to go grocery shopping.” A feed reader for my adult responsibilities would leave me with more time to spend with Meg and visiting my parents more often and, oh, I don’t know, blogging. Of course, lacking time to read over headlines like “need to do laundry” would result in an attempt to “mark all as read” and I’d probably be left walking around in dirty clothes. But the principal, at least in my mind, is sound.

Stupid News

Let’s move on, though. I want to say that I hope the parents of “balloon boy” are heavily fined and the fact that they may face jail time kind of makes me smirk. The fact that we watched and read about this crap for a week makes me sick, considering that I don’t think I saw a single front-page headline or extended television segment about the National Equality March for equal rights for LGBT citizens.

The protest was organized by 20- and 30-somethings with the help of Cleve Jones, found of the AIDS Memorial Quilt project and a friend of assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Incidentally, Milk and I share a birthday, and California recently declared May 22 “Harvey Milk Day.”

Anyway, once we learned it the balloon boy crap was a sham, coverage should have stopped until charges were filed. Or at least coverage should not have resembled the round-the-clock carnival that followed Princess Diana’s death or OJ Simpson’s arrest.

A Movie

I’m going to make this one quick. Paranormal Acitivty, a mockumentary about demonic haunting and possession, is in theaters now and I caught it yesterday with Meg a couple of friends. The title has been trending all over Twitter and most of the mentions have, unfortunately, been positive.  Let me offer a spoiler to those who are interested. I will tell you what happens:

Nothing.

Nothing at all. The movie mixes up haunting and possession, drops the ball on what could be an interesting back story, and essentially ends where a good movie would typically begin. If cheesey pretzels did not exist, and I was not so in the dark about where to buy some outside of movie theaters, the trip would have been a total loss. Consider yourself warned.