Improving my figure

My brain is so tired that grammar is a strain, much less rhetoric. To make matters worse, I spent the entire day away from my computer and the Internet, so I do not know what Ray has been up to out there.

But I have set myself an exercise regiment, so I had to find some way to write a blog entry.

I revved up the computer in the evening and turned on the Internet to find some foolishness. Foolishness is most of what I found, in fact. Why Brad Pitt must be in the headlines every day this year escapes me, but the rest of the "news" was so predictable as to defy its name: Obama is trying win over Clinton supporters (you don't say), while Clinton is portraying herself as better than Obama (the gall!); Jay Leno has said something offensive (so turn off the TV already), and the speaker of the house thinks that we should go ahead and have the presidential primaries (yawn).

The one headline that caught my attention: "Home defibrillators do not increase survival." I was shocked at the mere thought of a defibrillator in my home; my home is a monkey farm, and some of the monkeys who can operate machinery would not know if I were fibrillated or not. But on second thought, this bit was already "olds" before it was "news": essentially, it said, what could have been news did not in fact happen. You might have thought you needed a defibrillator--the thought had never occurred to me--but relax, because you don't.

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

Perhaps the most sensible definition of "news" would be information that might cause me to change my plans for the near or distant future. The rest is titillation.