When did everything become a “teaser”? Every scripted show on TV is now bookended by, “Previously on blah, blah, blah” and “Next on blah, blah, blah” with a few minutes of new blah, blah, blah wedged in between. Reality TV often never stops teasing and The News has become like the Encyclopedia Britannica, plenty of topics and headlines, but actual, meaty information is but a vague promise by a fully-made-up televised version of a door-to-door salesman. The InterNet teases, entices and lures us into any number of unfulfilling destinations, (I, for instance, was just looking for cheap, cotton socks when I inadvertently stumbled on vixensintornpanythose.com and then site after site after site of…really…socks). Teasers are all around us, blatantly and subliminally coercing us up and down grocery aisles far from the dozen eggs and two onions we came to buy; beckoning us to take a shot at the lottery or latest scratcher because it’s fun, (they long ago stopped pretending proceeds go toward education), and you can’t win if you don’t play; or promising we can have it “Our Way” or some other very special way if we’d only drive-thru or stand in line for twenty minutes while enjoying free Web access until a taunting barrista mispronounces our name to announce the arrival of our erroneously caffeinated double-non-fat-decaf-chai-mocha-latte. Lately, absolutely everything is a teaser for something that may or may not happen. How many times do we really need to hear that the President is going to give an important speech or outline a vital plan. Just give it or outline it already! It’s not necessary to prep us like it’s 1945 and we have to find a radio to huddle around. Unannounced information will find its way to anyone who cares to hear or read about it in far less time than it takes to titillate us with its immanent arrival. Why do we need minute-by-minute reminders of the Palestinians’ intention to request UN recognition, or stock footage of a ranting Gaddafi insisting he’ll fight to his last, dying breath, or hours and hours of chit-chat about the departures of Oprah and Regis? Just ask, come out of hiding and put ‘em up, or pack up and go already! We can have no progress, on any front, if we continue to be lulled into the the preposterous notion that a promise of action is in any way similar to the action itself.

In the next ‘Joel’s Blog’, does finger food discriminate against people without hands?