My favorite TV show is Inside Edition, hosted by Deborah Norville.  As news goes it's snack food, but entertainment has blended with the news media these past two decades.  By the time MSNBC was devoting entire news hours to the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton relationship in the late 1990s, the phenomenon I call Scaz had grown into unhealthy bloom.  Scaz, a nonsensical term I coined many years ago, is the interlocking of news reporting for entertainment and rating purposes.  In short, Scaz uses human societal chaos to generate profits for corporate-run entertainment and information distribution machines.  Getting people to watch news in a constantly competitive environment necessitates, to some degree, the magnification of non-events into "stories."
     The three big cable news networks, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, in spite of their ideological differences, are all dedicated primarily to satisfying their stockholders and making money.  All three networks are referred to as purveyors of "the twenty-four hour news cycle," an Orwellian term meaning they give out news to information-hungry viewers all the time.  In fact, since approximately fifteen minutes of each hour of programming on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC is dedicated to broadcasting ads, the alleged twenty-four hour news cycle is really eighteen hours per day.  Erectile dysfunction in handsome baby boomer men is not news. 
     Even eighteen hours per day to play with should generate some interesting and informative news programs, but what do we get?  I recall a story from about five years ago that could be called "Balloon Boy Hoax."  An "eccentric" father and inventor in Colorado had a little son who reportedly went missing inside the carriage of an experimental balloon that took off into the air.  It seemed like the premise of the climactic moments of a Lassie movie.  All three cable networks covered this potentially tragic story from morning until late in the afternoon, when the family revealed the little boy had been found on their property, safe and apparently unaware that the news-gathering organizations of three powerful corporate entities had spent hour after hour speculating about the boy's fate.  The silver balloon drifted smoothly over the flat eastern Colorado countryside, coming down, finally, without a dead boy inside.  All well and good.
     The next day, the little boy and his family were interviewed via satellite by Meredith Vieira.  The family was still regarded sympathetically by journalists and Americans generally.  The interview was characterized by the "Balloon Boy" throwing up on camera.  This hurl by an instant celebrity was shown on news networks over and over again.  I didn't see Vieira's interview when it played, but I saw the vomiting on a loop on MSNBC that afternoon.  I am not kidding.  They showed that little kid puking five or six times in a row.  It was news.  It was Scaz.
     I like Inside Edition because it lacks the pretensions of "serious" news networks.  Each show, lasting about twenty-two minutes without ads, covers a variety of topics: unrest in Ferguson, Pam Anderson's revelations about being raped when young, the death of Robin Williams, scams on consumers, how to properly perform the Heimlich Maneuver, how to perform it on yourself when alone and dying, what's going on with ISIS.  If you leave the room to get something to drink, by the time you return the story you were watching will have ended and the next one will be almost over.
     Each story ends with a synthesized orchestral sound.  It doesn't matter what the story is--the latest ISIS snuff movie,  a YouTube video of a cat riding a Great Dane.  Whatever the case, the same musical sound strikes, as if to say, "Ta da!  You have successfully processed another hit of Scaz.  Here's another!"
     A week or so ago I saw the last minutes of NBC News with Brian Williams.  He ended his show just like Inside Edition does; with a cute video probably snatched from YouTube.  The difference between Inside Edition and the rest of American news media (most of it Scaz) could be a matter of twenty-two minutes five days per week versus eighteen hours a day, with the people using the bigger number unable to figure out what to do with it.  When a Balloon Boy comes along, that's great for them.  Speculation in a vacuum of knowledge is easy.  Exploring why the world is so fucked up is difficult.

                                                                            Vic Neptune     

     While shoveling on this Thanksgiving morning the Led Zeppelin song, "The Song Remains the Same," entered my head from memory.  Disconnected parts of it played in my mind's ear as I scraped the plastic shovel against ice and pavement.  Unfiltered winter sunlight made everything seem
white.  
     My brain's random selection of that song made as much sense as when any song enters one's head.  I was, in the 1980s, familiar on a listening basis with the song.  I knew the band's music well, I owned all their albums, I was very upset when I heard on the radio that Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham had died.  Led Zeppelin's music is stored intact in my memory, even though I haven't listened to it in many years. 
     It's a remarkable feature of music-related memory that one can recall in detail songs one hasn't heard in decades.  I've noticed this with smells, too.  When I worked in a library in the 1990s I checked out books for a woman wearing the same perfume a girlfriend of mine had worn sometimes in eleventh grade.  Do these interruptions of mundane experiences, like shoveling snow and working behind a desk in public, act to remind us of potent times in our lives when, since we were much younger, the possibilities were vaster? 
     Damned if I know.  I do know that sometimes a song popping into my head can become annoying if it sticks around too long, and after smelling the perfume on that woman in the library I spent the rest of my work shift thinking about that girl in high school.  She liked Led Zeppelin, and later became one of my many lost possibilities.

                                                                                Vic Neptune         

     Charles Manson is engaged to be married to a twenty-six year old woman who goes by the name Star.  She's spent the last seven years involved with him at a distance, and has moved to California to be close to his prison home.  He's eighty, bald, nuts, still showing a swastika tattoo at the point above his eyes where a bullet should have entered the day he was arrested for masterminding the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and several others.
     Star, a true believer, claims, like many other Manson admirers, that her beau is misunderstood.  If it's difficult to understand how a manipulative psychopath can convince a group of lost girls that they need to commit murder for him, then I guess it's easy to misunderstand him.
     According to prison rules, the couple will get to invite ten guests to the wedding, but none of the guests can be prisoners.  Star's mother will not attend.  It's bad enough her son-in-law will be Charles Manson, but having to congratulate the bride and that groom, inside a prison, would disgust any sensible parent. 
     After the wedding, presumably, Charles Manson and Star will enjoy a honeymoon, inside a prison.  She's the same age as Sharon Tate was when she was stabbed to death by one of Manson's minions.

                                                                     Vic Neptune 

     I've always gotten along well with cats.  I like dogs, but I don't want one for a pet.  I like a four-legged friend who can act self-contained, doesn't have to go outside to relieve him- or herself.  I've walked dogs, the pets of family and friends.  Most of these experiences have consisted of stopping every ten feet or so while the dog sniffs something jutting from the ground.  The halting nature of the walks prevents my legs from doing what they're born to do: stride long and fast.  I have a friend who has two greyhounds.  They pull her along--under her firm control--at high walking speeds, as if they're harnessed to a sleek buggy. 
     Cats, meanwhile, sleep, eat, keep themselves clean with their rough tongues, climb into litter boxes, bury their crap, and purr when content.
     I know nothing about gerbils, but taking care of an animal that lives among its own shavings, inside its own litter box as it were, doesn't appeal to me.  Maybe that says something about me, maybe it doesn't.
     I like friendly dogs and mellow dogs.  Most of these in my experience have been mongrels. 
     Dogs that bare teeth at me and/or spring at me as I walk past bother me intensely.  I want the dogs' humans to give me ten bucks on the spot to compensate for the jolts to my nervous system.  A few years ago a small but loud chained dog ran at me, the sharp noise entering my upper arms and shooting into my chest, an odd and unpleasant sensation. 
     "You fucker!" I yelled at the little shit.
     A smiling woman opened her screen door and said, "He won't hurt you."
     "He startled me," I shouted, my legs taking me farther away from someone I wanted nothing to do with.
     "He's harmless!" she shouted back.
     I shook my head at her and walked on, hearing her yell, "Fuck you!"
     You see, cats don't do what that little dog did.

                                                                                Vic Neptune
      
    

     I've rarely experienced writer's block.  My fingers operate by themselves, usually, when touching lettered keys.  The blogging medium, new to me, has inserted a problem into my brain.  I've tried twice before this to write a third entry.  I struggle with not knowing how to deal yet with an unfamiliar medium.  The idea of making purposeful comments on specific subjects now seems inappropriate.  I want to break up the rigidity of categories and write whatever I feel like writing.
     Some might say, "It's your blog.  You can do whatever you want."  My thoughts, though, tend in the direction of trying to figure out what I'm going to do, followed by a seemingly casual switch to improvisation; a technique that prevails because it's more fun than mapping the imagination in advance of a creative session.  Hence, the following paragraph.
     Kim Kardashian's ass is in the news.  A widely published photo, in censored and uncensored versions, shows the whatever-the-hell-she-is standing nude with erupting champagne, her fantastic waist lending her the appearance of a dumbbell.  The image has been obviously altered, creating an impossible body, although her real ass is quite prominent.  Reaction has been strong, some celebrities tweeting remarks like, "Kim, how could you?"  We're supposed to be shocked by the photo, I guess.  We're supposed to forget the far more grotesque and grinding presence of the Kardashians in popular culture, a family featured in alleged reality TV shows.  When Kim appears in a magazine spread shaped somewhat like a Barbie Doll, this fakery is condemned. 
      

     On NBC News yesterday a report from besieged Kobani, Syria, dealt with Kurdish women warriors fighting ISIS.  One woman, nineteen years old, showed the hand grenade she keeps to kill herself in case she's ever about to be captured.  This image suggests in a few seconds bravery, resistance, heroism, and a lonely fight supported ineffectually from the air by a superpower big on talk and small on non-delusional actions.
     This day used to be called Armistice Day.  In 1918, at eleven in the morning on Europe's muddy Western Front, on the eleventh of November, "the guns fell silent," as I'm sure someone once put it.  Europe's war leaders said, in essence, "Enough."  Four years of intense and pointless warfare used to add up to what came to be called, "the war to end all wars." 
     We call today Veterans Day now and warfare is endless.  The nineteen year old Kurdish woman with the hand grenade she'll use on herself if ISIS gets close enough to her for a this or that choice does not profit from war.  Those who do profit from it can't imagine the necessity of saying, "Enough."
                                                                                 Vic Neptune    

     Hello people.  I've finally settled on doing a blog after a decade of being told I should do so.  What follows after this initial entry will cover a great variety of topics.  What follows will seem like an encyclopedia in non-alphabetical order.
                                                                               Vic Neptune