Unsolicited Advice

Having watched a metric fuckton of (secondhand) news lately, I have spent quite a lot of time staring at channel bugs while Jon Stewart points out how shit their owners are at reporting these days. Mainly he picks on Fox for being intensely good at a terrible mission, CNN for being terrible at a pretty good mission, and MSNBC for being so terrible in all respects it's a wonder any of them get paid. CNN has existed since 1980, and has the incredibly generic name of Cable News Network because at the time, it was the only one. It theoretically aims to provide a non-biased source of plain unvarnished news. On the rare occasion where they manage to actually report something, rather than giving endless time to talking heads, CNN still carries most of the big non-network names in news -- people like Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper. Fox News and MSNBC were both started in 1996 as mortal enemies, Fox leaning hard right and MSNBC leaning hard left. They are both utter rubbish for t...

For all my facility with languages, I am not actually magic. There are a lot of tongues in which I know scattered words, some script, and some grammar, but not anywhere near enough to understand what's going on in, say, a TV show. Some of the music collection is in those languages. I find it annoying that I haven't stuffed enough into my brain to properly parse these things yet. My Arabic, for example, is wholly inadequate to appreciate the subtle beauty and poetry of the interlocking literary allusions in their surprisingly complex... AHAHAHAHA. Okay, no, I can't keep that up very long, not with a straight face. Pop music is just as stupid in Arabic, overall, as it is in English. Any time you hear someone say "habibii", swap in "my baby", and you get the gist. "Youm" is day, "layla" is night. "Wa'" is the root for 'love'. "Ana kan mali?" is something like "what have I gotten myself into?"...