NP: John Cage, 4'33"

One thing about my gym, and I guess most gyms these days, is that they have lots of TVs over the cardio machines. And you don't really have any control over them. On the one hand, I guess this could be seen as a good thing, as it takes me out of my comfort zone with regard to popular entertainment.

On the other hand, sometimes it makes my head want very much to explode.

To the latter point, who the fuck is Glenn Beck? I picked an elliptical machine based on what looked like a news channel being nearby, and I'm subjected to this jackass on "Headline Prime," which I think is a variation on CNN's Headline News channel, which is ostensibly somewhere you go to get, you know, news. Apparently not, as this joker spent a good fifteen minutes talking about Miss USA, and how whatever she did to get in the headlines doesn't really matter, 'cause she's hot.

Not only is this not news, it doesn't pass muster as opinion. It's just moronic, only a little less so if it's coming from, say, Howard Stern.

Then he's got these two guys on who wrote a book about going to office parties, or some shit like that, and he's peppering them with viewers' questions about things like how to dissuade your girlfriend from coming to your work party because you want to hook up with a co-worker, or whether or not you should smoke pot with your boss. I'm not trying to get on some sort of moral high horse here, but advocating morally and legally dubious behavior on a news network? On MTV, maybe -- or, again, Stern -- but something about this just seems very, very wrong.

What made the whole thing even more offensively surreal is that this douchebag -- and yes, I am kind of mad about this -- goes from talking about hooking up at office parties and how hot Miss USA is to some tirade about how we shouldn't open diplomatic talks with Iran. Because at this point, he's got credibility on politics. Who watches this shit? Who actually buys into this shit?

I tried to focus on the ticker as much as I could -- along with the new Incubus record on my iPod -- and what struck me about that was the number of mistakes in the text. Ostensibly, the office party guys were on because Beck's office party was later that day, but it seems like someone was already drunk.