Media notes for a new season

I didn’t watch TV yesterday, but even if I had I wouldn’t have been watching “Cavemen.” As my regular readers know, I detest those commercials and certainly don’t think they should be expanded to any additional length. I’ve only read one review so far, and it contained this brilliant line:

I imagine an afternoon watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be less annoying.

Maybe it’s the sheer amount of work on my desk right now and the late nights bleary eyed in front of the computer (yet still not earning enough to pay the mortgage from this stuff); but I haven’t been watching TV much at all and I’m not really that interested in anything at all appearing this season. I’ll be watching “Ugly Betty,” of course, and if it ever returns I’ll watch “Lost.” But the rest of it is a big old eh. I’ll record “Pushing Daisies” for later viewing just because it’s produced by hottie Bryan Fuller; although I have to say right from the get-go that it seems like it will be derivative of his other gem, “Dead Like Me.” Oh, Bryan — get over your death fixation and just live. Seriously. Call me. I mean it.
Woof.

After much deliberation I finally arrived at a conclusion regarding my recent lack of interest in NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Again, faithful readers will remember that I have fallen out of the hours-of-listening habit since I moved to California because of the depressing nature of the show of late.

Now I know why. My alarm goes off at 5:50am. The stories that greet me are usually enough to put me back to sleep. At the top of the hour, the news takes over for 5 minutes or so, always depressing. By that time, I get up and stumble into the shower.
I get into the car at 6:45, and drive to work for the next 10 minutes, getting there a few minutes before 7. Again, the story on the radio is numbing and uninteresting.
But late last week, that end-of-the-hour story was fascinating — it was about how Microsoft creates and tests games like Halo, using psychiatry. I was riveted, it was one of those Driveway Moments, the kind of story that makes you park the car and wait until the story is over.

Then the announcer came on at the end and apologized that “The California Report” wasn’t aired due to a technical difficulty.

Aha! I thought. This is the problem: KQED pre-empts large portions of “Morning Edition” in order to insert its mind-numbing, plodding, wonkish 10-minute snooze-fest called “The California Report.” This is the radio equivalent of those annoying locally-produced public affairs programs that public television stations do so poorly. And KQED runs it every damned hour at 10 minutes before the hour; they also run a short segment after the news at 5 minutes after the hour.

“Morning Edition” always runs the least serious and most interesting stories at 10 minutes before the hour once they’ve gotten the depressing news out of the way. But on KQED, all you get is the depressing stuff because they snip out that portion of “Morning Edition” in favor of their own homemade snooze button.

I guess the time has come to listen to NPR online. So I can hear what I’ve been missing for the last two years.