News of the world

* So apparently NBC is starting up yet another streaming service, for which they will charge.

I tweeted this earlier:

1969: There are four networks, they are free over your tv if you live close enough to a broadcaster

1989: You can pay for satellite or cable and get more networks if you want

2029: there are 365 pay-streams, each with exactly one show you would want to watch on them.


I'm especially annoyed to learn that Parks and Recreation - of which the middle seasons are comfort-watching for me - are going to be removed from Amazon Prime, and transferred to this new service. Yes, I get that NBC owns it and all, but....I guess Amazon will be left with "original content" only, then. (I will probably keep it, the free second-day shipping is the main attraction for me, given that I live in the middle of nowhere and it's sometimes hard to schedule a time to get to Sherman for bigger shopping when I need stuff, even if I WANT to go)

I will admit that I hope a lot of these services fail for lack of subscribers. What they're doing is recreating the cable model, except instead of bundling, you have to pay $10 a month for a single channel or whatever. And I don't watch enough tv to make it worth it to me to pay for a bunch of streams and especially when getting TO the stream takes some effort (getting to Amazon Prime via my dvd player is more work than just flicking on the TV, and I'm not hugely in love with watching on  my small laptop screen.)

But whatever. What this is gonna do, i suspect, is feed the market for dvd box sets - unless the networks decide to axe those, too. I'd rather spend, I don't know, $25 to have a couple favorite seasons of a show that I might rewatch fifty times than pay $10 a month for the privilege of streaming it.

* If what is alleged in this story is true, it's absolutely shameful and that judge needs to be gone. I live in an economically depressed area (Ardmore is about an hour to my west). A lot of people could not afford to pay off fines all at once, and keeping them in jail is just going to hinder that, and maybe lose them their job. Allegedly in one case the judge would not even let a person go to the bank to get the money to pay the fine! (And that could very easily happen to someone like me....that's the scary thing. I don't carry much money on my person.)

I am also guessing - without investigating further - that many of these fines are traffic matters or code violations, in other words, non-violent crimes and perhaps not even "real" crimes. (I do not consider a code violation, like letting your grass get a bit long, to be a 'real" crime)

Yeah, great. Let's re-create the worst parts of Victorian England here.

* The UAW strike - which seems like it might get pretty ugly pretty fast - just feels vaguely to me like "we're reliving the bad parts of the 1970s." I don't even know why other than that when I was a kid growing up, two of our neighbors were people employed by auto factories - one by Ford, the other, I think, by GM.

Also the stuff about oil production being cut (this time because of bombings/tensions with "Syria" but really Iran) maybe leading to gas shortages some places. I am just old enough to remember sitting in the back of the car while my dad waited on line when it was "his day" to get gas (they went by digits on the license plate, as I remember). 

I dunno. The whole bad/hard news smashed in your face thing right  now. Also talk of another big recession maybe coming, this one would probably wipe out my retirement savings, thanks so much. I don't want to work until I die but that might be just what happens.

* On the other hand, there's this. One of the untold stories on a lot of college campuses is just how precarious many student's finances are. I joke about having been a "broke college student" but I was "broke" in the sense that I had to be frugal and I ate a lot of beans and rice and shopped at the farmer's market, not that I actually went hungry.

We have a food pantry on my campus, and the Wesley Center here has a "blessing box" (which can also be used by local residents) (And which reminds me - I have a meeting of the board of that group in a couple weeks and I should gather some canned goods to take and stick in the box. I feel like that kind of thing is important; I have what I need so I should share.)

My campus also recently started a support group for single mothers; we have a lot of non-traditional students and many who are single mothers. And especially given how difficult the child-care situation is in this town....it's hard. (I really think my campus should start up a drop-in child care program. We have an Elementary Ed program, perhaps it would provide internship possibilities too? I suppose funds and space and federal regulations are an issue, but I wish we had that; I have too many students who have to miss class on days when their child care fails)

I mean, yes, it's sad that people have such struggles, but this is life now and it's better to have a food pantry on campus than to wring your hands about how students struggle.

* And one last not-news thing: I follow Pee-Wee Herman (yes, that Pee-Wee Herman) on twitter. I know, it's probably NOT Paul Rubens writing the tweets himself but rather some staffer, but the tweets generally have the "feel" of Pee-Wee Herman, and they are all very happy and silly and positive, and it's one of those silly little things that makes my life a little better and a little happier these days. Yes, I know he had a "problematic" past and all that, but I remember Pee-Wee's Playhouse fondly for its 1980s absurdism, and it's just nice to see a tweet from him about hot dogs or something pop up in the middle of everyone else calling for everyone else's head on a platter.