Most of the time I can’t stand the media, but I don’t know which is worse: national or local press. You’ve got the national media that never leaves their news offices in New York City or Washington, D.C., and thinks that anyone who doesn’t live in these two regions is in flyover country. Then again, you’ve got the other side of the coin with local media and the stupid stories that appear at roughly the same every year. On the commute home this afternoon I was listening to a local top-of-the-hour newscast, and one of the top stories was about people in the southwestern Pennsylvania area seeing the first snowflakes of the season. Christ almighty, these so-called reporters were even asking these people what the snowflakes looked like. They looked like snow you assholes. But this isn’t as bad as whenever the price of gasoline rises and these on-the-scene reporters ask people filling up their SUVs how they feel about the sudden jump in gas prices. What the fuck do you expect to get? “You know, I was thinking just the other day that I wasn’t paying enough for my 93 Premium.” Of course you’re going to get a bunch of nimrods going, “RAAAAR I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE RAAAAR!” Another favorite “story” is whenever the local cable company raises rates and the newscasters act like this is some breaking story. “OMG HOLD ON TO YOUR WALLETS CABLE PRICES ARE GOING UP BY 10 PERCENT!!” Christ, it’s only a few dollars; it’s not that big a deal, and if it is then your household has other problems and shouldn’t even be ordering cable in the first place. Put down the food stamps and use your cable money for something else.

Whenever I was in college, a similar event took place every spring when the cost of tuition for the next school year would increase. Yeah, like this ever came as a surprise; the real story would be if tuition went DOWN for one year. This reminds me of a story back during my school newspaper days when there was this announced tuition increase that also included another provision that basically eliminated subsidies for students who were not commuter students but didn’t live in the dorms. Basically these freeloaders were taking financial aid just for living in apartments in the city, but with the shitty dorms in the college I attended for two-and-a-half years who could blame any of these kids? Then again, with the school’s dorms always only one-half to three-fourths full, why should this college be giving money to students to live elsewhere? Shit, after I stopped to read what this new policy was, I actually gained a little bit of respect for the college’s administration for cutting off the moochers. Shit, the dorm vacancies were so bad our college was accepting students from the area’s one culinary school to live in the dorms. It was funny seeing these poor students, who would spend all day in hell’s kitchen, bitch to one another about having to go back into their stuffy, dilapidated dorm rooms. Well anyway, our school paper did an article about this new policy, which was basically a re-write of an article some real reporter in a real newspaper room wrote the week before. Of course, when it came time to write our newspaper’s editorial on the matter, it was funny to see the reaction some of our profs had when our opinion didn’t favor the students. I think part of our anti-student opinion stemmed from the fact most of us who wrote the piece were commuter students and didn’t give a fuck about some freeloader getting a subsidy to live away from the dorms when there was more than enough space for them to get their ass in one of these rooms. Hey, that’s part of that whole “college experience” I missed out on because I lived with mommy and worked 40+ hours per week.

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Where the hell was I going with this?