Having descended from the creamy white tower loft where I observe all my TV news viewing, I’m left wondering when some enterprising tank commander is going to tip the Saddam statue evident in CNN’s wallpapered lock-down weather/traffic cam showing downtown Baghdad? It not as though I have any fear that anyone at world headquarters in Atlanta will ever notice anything in, much less happening in, that shot but many of us here at home will know Baghdad is ours when that particular statue tumbles.

Unexploded Bombshell

Here’s a link to a sometime serious mostly funny glossary for TV at war from Minnesota’s CityPages.com. I particularly enjoyed:
Crawl Boy, does it ever. The ticker at the bottom of the screen changes about as often as the coffee creamer at Perkins. One can wake up in the morning to read a battle statistic from An Nasiriyah, see it again when one comes home from work, encounter the identical bulletin upon shuffling off to bed, and discover the same tag scrolling along the screen the next morning.
Enlisted Soldiers From the battalions of colonels and generals and admirals pontificating for the camera…you'd think the battlefields were made up solely of commissioned officers. Fox slips a captain in front of the camera in the deep hours of the a.m. But among the regular squadron, the lowest rank you'll see bloviating in the expert's chair is a major. Surely a misery-tempered marine sergeant would have some insight into the exhaustion, dread, anger, and killing-guilt of the forward troops. The near-total absence of enlisted soldiers on the TV stages is the equivalent of a sportscast staffed entirely by graying general managers.
Hardcore Band Name Which phrase makes a better name for a hardcore band: "Shock and Awe" or "Coalition of the Willing"?
Vaseline Described on one admiring web site as a hotter version of Ann Coulter, Fox's night-and-weekend anchor Laurie Dhue sinks deeper each night into some kind of lipstick dysmorphia--she's the customer who is such an easy mark for the ladies at the makeup counter that they actually start feeling guilty. A week into the war, it appears that Dhue is slathering fistfuls of Vaseline over her mouth, perhaps as a prophylactic against chemical weapons.
Video Still Frame: FOX
- posted by Sean @ 12:02 AM