Globex Corporation Newsletter

Thanks That One Gal, I nearly forgot that as Monday is Positive Day, Tuesday is Mega-Bitch Tuesday. I didn't actually promise that I'd have a Mega-Bitch Tuesday, but I figured that Positive Day would sort of create it's own antithesis (Bonus Vocabulary Score! I'll be sure to win this year's "Blogger's Open" with big words like that!). I wrote the Rosa Parks/Tom DeLay piece because that mugshot of Rosa just hit me in a strange way when I saw it. I looked at it a long time and realized that I had something to write about it. I wasn't thinking Mega-Bitch Tuesday or anything of the like, just thinking. And with that, off with the bitching!

I was up really late one Sunday night, just flipping around the channels when I really shoulld have been in bed. I came upon a disclaimer before a TV program. I've written before about disclaimers, "flags" as we called them when I used ot work in TV. Generally I don't like flags, I don't think they do any good. Particulary, the FCC has made it mandatory that all programs have a rating that airs during the first 15 seconds of the show. Those are the little black squares with white letters that say things like "TVG" or "TV13" or even "TVMA." If you're going to make TV outlets display ratings in that fashion, I think a traditional flag is redundant. Why run a content flag when the same information is going to be displayed a few seconds later.

So I see this content flag late Sunday night: "WARNING! THE FOLLOWING PROGRAM CONTAINS SCENES WHICH MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME VIEWERS. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED." I don't know, sometimes a content flag seems kind of like a dare. Now way is any TV show going to gross me out, man! So I watched, just to see what the fuss was about. I'll tell you what the program was about, not that it really means anything. It was about that guy down in Valentine Nebraska who gained so much weight that he had to be cut out of his house and driven by ambulance to Sioux Falls to have surgery to simply keep him alive. I don't know, not much in that program was going to be disturbing to me, I actually watched for quite a long time and found it rather interesting. I didn't find anything about the program disturbing.

Except for maybe one thing. Immediatley after the flag, the programs rating came up. It was rated "TVG." For those of you who aren't hip to the whole TV ratings thing, TVG is the equivalent of the MPAA's G rating, meaning it's suitable for all audiences. So why the flag? It's suitable for all viewers, but may be disturbing to some viewers. What the hell does that mean? Were the good folks at Discovery Channel just trying to confuse thier general viewership?

I think that Discovery wanted to attract viewrs like me, viewers who were looking to be dared. I'll admit it, I wouldn't have started watching that program if it weren't for the content flag. That I found the show interesting in irrelevant to my argument. They are deliberately misusing a tool that is supposed to help parents decide what is OK for their kids to watch. Misusing it to attract viewers. That's pretty damn low.

On a bitch related note, The Globex Corporation Newsletter has now been blocked by management at DirecTV. If you work for DirecTV, you aren't reading this. I wonder why that is? I mean, there's nothing that can be downloaded from this site that would harm their precious network. Could it be that I'm a digruntled former employee who occasionally airs his feelings about the management there? You're the ones that hired someone who didn't know what a satellite was, I just let the world know about it. Geez, now I'm the bad guy.....

BOJ