I watch Game of Thrones. The genre is really not my cup of tea, but it was promo-ed so relentlessly as a lead in to Boardwalk Empire that I gave it a shot…and got hooked. I can’t say, for sure, what compels me to remain engaged. I most certainly could not begin to summarize its numerous plot lines and my name recall is shaky, even with my closest friends, so retention of the three hundred or so main characters is challenging. Maybe it’s Peter Dinklage, he’s quite good…or the abundance of really pretty naked ladies.

I watch the News. The genre is really no longer my cup of tea, mostly because it’s become relentless promo-ed, shamelessly biased and non-journalistic to the point of being self-satirical, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I need to know and I still believe I can weed through the miles of bullshit to glean an inch or two of empirical real estate. I can’t say, for sure, what compels me to remain engaged. I most certainly could not begin to summarize the daily emergence of atrocities, injustices, inanities, (not to be confused with those adorably ugly manatees), and simply bad behavior that fill the ten-minute anchor-time portion of the nightly news half hour or the miniscule and endlessly repetitive filler of CNN’s twenty-four-hour promotionally commercial [Wolf]blitzkrieg. Maybe it’s that seemingly trustworthy Brian Williams, (Wolf has long ago become an SNL parody), or the fact that I feel pride, (embarrassing as that may be), in being able to properly pronounce Hamas in the guttural, throat-clearing manner of an Al Jazeera correspondent. It’s definitely got nothing to do with naked ladies.