Hey, national media producers, it's not about you!

We knew it was coming. Those "kids" of a couple decades ago are now officially in charge.

I suppose we can see it many places but today I want to talk about the people in charge at our national media outlets. Do the producers really get up in the morning and think, "It's all about me?" Or does it just seem that way.

Take for example ...

A recent "Saturday Night Live" skit that made fun of a young woman being recruited by ISIS.

"Take care of her," the girl's dad said.

"Death to America" was the response.

Now, "Saturday Night Live" has always been edgy and quite often made people uncomfortable. Remember, "Let's kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas?" It was a skit about the upcoming execution of a murderer that was scheduled to take place around the holidays. That bothered me for obvious reasons.

I would have been bothered by the ISIS sketch also, if I had seen it. What really bothered me, though, was the response to criticism about the skit: "It's a matter of free speech."

So, we can say anything we want is a sketch on live TV about the people sworn to destroy our country but when someone stands up and says, "That was just wrong," the proper reply is, "I have the right to free speech?"

Another example is the current winter season.

Repeatedly, the national media (I usually watch CBS news) focused on Boston and New York.

"Oh, the horror! Boston is about to set the record for snowfall!"

Meanwhile, we were setting records for cold in Indiana but the national media assumed we wanted to hear about their problems on the East coast where those people live. The South, including Atlanta, received quite a bit of attention this winter, too. I guess Indianapolis isn't a large enough metropolitan area to get the attention of CBS New York.

The Weather Channel always does a good job covering all the country and that has been good for NBC New York (The Weather Channel and NBC are owned by the same parent company.)

"It's all about me!"

Guess that attitude has come to permeate the national media.

Oh, well, I can turn the channel or even turn off the TV ... and I do.

No wonder people watching traditional broadcast television TV viewers are rapidly decreasing in number while many more people turn to the Web for information and entertainment.

Guess what. It's not all about you. Each one of us think it's about each one of us and now we have lots of options.

Frank Phillips is an on-the-way-to-becoming a curmudgeon. He is a reporter for The Brazil Times.

Nogood-niks set bad example for our children

OK. I'm over it. It's time to move on.
When the Colts lost to The Evil no good-nik Boris Badenov Patriots and we learned that the Pats balls were under inflated I was incensed.
The Pats perhaps didn't do it intentionally but suspicion indicates someone in the organization was responsible, so I went to social media and expressed my outrage.
"Boycott the Super Bowl," I said.
A few in that Twitter/Facebook court of no appeal agreed with me.
"Make a dent in that god of TV sports, the ratings," I said. "That is the only way to say we don't condone cheating." 

I doubt it made any difference. A half dozen or so people retweeted what I wrote. About 20 people read it. Many others expressed similar outrage but what is that against millions of Super Bowl fans?

I did see one story that indicated last year's Super Bowl ratings had dipped slightly from the year before and I wonder why.

If you watched the Super Bowl this year I hope you had a good time. Linda and I watched Episodes III and IV of "Star Wars" in protest of #deflategate. 
I really don't care if you watched the Super Bowl. But we should care about the message we send our kids. There has been a lot of illegal drug use in professional sports. In more than one instance, players have beaten women and committed other crimes.

What are we teaching our kids and grandchildren about making wrong choices? I don't mean what we say. What are they learning from our example?

A True Halloween Tale

Here’s a true Halloween tale for you to think about this week.

Halloween means different things to different folks.

A young lady I know found out through some mischievous and possibly illegal means that her boyfriend bought her an engagement ring and that he plans to propose on Halloween.

“Halloween is my favorite holiday,” she said. "I looked at his bank statement and called the jewelry store."

Her ring is to be in Friday.

Some of my happiest memories of childhood involve Halloween. The first Halloween costume I remember wearing was a plastic sheet and a plastic face mask that represented “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

Each Sunday I watched “Matty Mattel’s Funday Funnies” on TV. That was the show that first gave us such memorable cartoon characters as “Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent” and “Casper.”

Cecil and his arch nemesis, Dishonest John, were voiced by an Elkhart TV personality. Yes, TV occupied much of my life growing up. Today, we would criticize parents who let their children watch TV that much but it seemed to develop my imagination while limiting my social skills.

That Casper Halloween costume was not fun to wear. It was hot and it was hard to see out the two little holes in the mask. Eventually, I swore off commercial costumes in favor of Halloween make-up that made me more scary but at least let my skin breathe.

We would all wear our costumes to class at Westside Elementary School and parade  before the younger classes. I’m not sure what purpose that served other than to help the teachers fill the day.

Now the weird story for this Halloween. I say weird because it was more strange than scary.

In high school I decided to attend the Bible-based Lincoln Christian College (now Lincoln Christian University.)

From an economic standpoint that was definitely a mistake for we all know ministers never make as much money in life as other professions -- as my dad’s elderly aunt Jessie, who was a retired school teacher, pointed out to my mother. It was Aunt Jessie who first thought I was a good writer and I'm sure she would have liked me to follow her footsteps and become an English teacher.

But the Bible gave me great comfort in those teenage years when my hormones were running high. The hormones have settled down 40-some years later but the Bible still gives me comfort.

When people learned of my college choice, I received invitations to speak at a few churches. Following a sermon at one small church at Hudson Lake, the minister asked me to spend a week on his staff at Michiana Christian Service Camp in Niles, Mich., just outside my home town.

I was the Recreation Director for the week and the campers were all in the third grade.

The week went well, with nothing really noteworthy except for the subject of this story.

He was a little guy who showed up for camp wearing a little brown suit, complete with shirt, tie and matching fedora hat. He was dressed like he was 60 years old instead of eight.

Usually, adults brought their children to camp and made arrangements to pay the fee.

This little boy just showed up. No one saw him arrive.

He proved to be a little dickens that week. He seemed to be trying the staff constantly.

Then, later in the week, he decided he wanted to be baptized.

We baptized children in the camp’s new swimming pool after calling their parents and their ministers. If the adults agreed, the children were baptized. I should mention that our church did not practice infant baptism and baptism came at a time when a person was added to the church.

We called his minister, a name no one seemed to recognize, and in those days before cell phones, we could reach no one at the church or parsonage. We tried to call his parents. Again, no response. So, we explained our policy to the little boy and much to his disappointment, he was not baptized that week.

Our dean, the minister who had invited me to go to camp that week, decided he would talk to the boy’s parents when they picked him up on Friday night at the end of the camping session.

But when Friday night came, the little guy, wearing his brown suit, matching shirt, tie and fedora on a hot and dusty summer evening, disappeared as mysteriously as he arrived.

I’ve often wondered about him. 
Years later, I asked the minister if he ever learned about the little boy. No, none of the other ministers in the area seemed to know anything about him.

I still wonder about the one worn by a mysterious and mischievous little boy at church camp who came dressed as a little old man so many years ago.

Frank Phillips is a freelance writer. His blog is found at frankphillips.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is frank.phillips@gmail.com.

Why do we still care about the death of TV's Superman?

I care about George Reeves, but sometimes I am at a loss to understand why.
I think there were several things that came together to make him as popular today as he is.
My generation watched first-run TV "Adventures of Superman". But, there were all those reruns on TV. I watched WGN-TV channel 9 on Sunday mornings for the show. That was before there was cable and satellites were scientific objects few and far between, floating around the earth. No TV signal from them. No superstations.
Certainly we could all tie a towel around our necks and pretend to be Superman. We could even "fly" for short distances, if there was a soft mattress beneath us when gravity pulled us to ground.
George Reeves was so identified with Superman, that we saw his image and could easily pigeon-hole him in that role.
That is important for children.
Kids have trouble seeing adults in multiple roles of life not only in films.
Last night I was watching the serial Superman starring Kirk Alyn and learned he didn't get screen credit. They just said they hired the real Superman because no actor could live up to the real guy.
Think of the time in history when George flew, too.
UFO sightings were big in the '50s. Science fiction movies and movies about monsters were big, too. A strange visitor from outer space with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men just fit into the genre.
The tragedy -- as is always true with suicides -- is that George never understood his importance in TV. If he was murdered, that is another ball of wax, but I'm not convinced it was anything but suicide and a botched investigation.

Whare are they now? Eddie Curry is producer

By FRANK PHILLIPS

frankphi@hotmail.com
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 8:15 AM CST

Eddie Curry not only remembers Terre Haute and ISU fondly, he has remained a Hoosier since he graduated in 1989.

This is Eddie’s 19th season at Beef & Boards, though he was not full-time for the first five years. He had roles on stage in one or two productions a year until he became a show producer for the company in 1994.

About eight years ago, Eddie began doing some TV commercials as a hobby, but now he is looking more seriously at a career in TV and films.

Last summer, he worked in three 15-minute films shot in Indiana, to showcase the talents of the film’s creator. Last weekend he was involved in a multimedia project at Ball State University. The project involved film, TV and live stage work and was broadcast live on a Muncie public television and on the Internet. A DVD will soon be available.

“I couldn’t watch it, obviously, but my wife said it blew her away,” he said.

Eddie can be contacted at Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre, 9301 N. Michigan Rd., Indianapolis, IN 46268, (317) 876-0505.

What's the DISH on Distant TV Networks and Satellite TV?

— or — some days they can send my satellite TV DIRECTly to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire!

In the beginning ...

God created fire and he saw that it was good.

And people sat around their portable fires in their caves or outside their dwellings and talked, telling stories and singing with their families.

Later ...

Man invented the radio. And he thought it was very good. Eventually, the electric box brought Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Lone Ranger and even the NBC Orchestra into his home.

Then, he invented television. And, not sure what to put on it, he filmed Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly and The Lone Ranger. The classical music didn't go over too well, so he played that on Sunday afternoons. But Dick Clark found out that popular music could draw an audience when vivacious teens danced on camera. So, "American Bandstand" and a host of imitators were created.

Americans loved quantity more than quality, so man said, "If half a dozen channels on TV are good, 30 or even 130 channels would be better." (He didn't care what he put on those channels, just as long as there were more and more channels filled with the same stuff and different people.)

So, cables were strung from high towers and even the tops of lofty mountains, down into the valleys so people could receive many more channels. It was the same drivel, but static and snow on the picture were reduced.

Then man saw people would pay a monthly price for their cable-TV and man thought, "Aha! What if we could provide people far out in the country with hundreds of channels and charge them each month for their reception?"

And man invented satellite television.

But there was a problem called the FCC -- the Federal Communications Commission.

One day, in a move to protect local network TV stations and, perhaps, cable TV companies, the FCC passed a ruling (i.e. the same thing as a law for all intents and purposes). The ruling said, "Thou shalt not offer distant networks to people who receive signals from satellite TV."

And DISH satellite customers became very wroth.

People in Brazil, Ind., received conflicting information from DISH network (Direct TV did not carry local channels). Some people were told, "You won't be affected. You will still get ABC-TV from WRTV in Indianapolis." Others were told, "Yes, you will lose your ABC channel from Indianapolis."

Then Dec. 1 came and people in Brazil lost both WRTV-6 (ABC) and WTHR-13 (NBC) from Indianapolis.

And the DISH technical support people promised TV antennas would be installed on their customers' houses free of charge, so those people could receive Indianapolis TV, free of charge. But the DISH people forgot why cable-TV was invented -- that normal antennas don't pull in distant TV stations very well.

So, DISH operators called their customers in Brazil and said, "We'll have to buy better antennas for you -- make an appointment for a few months down the road."

The future hasn't' been written yet, but I would not be surprised if one day I read in The Brazil Times:

"Wife calls 911 when her husband tears out their TV equipment, starts fire in the back yard, and begins singing."

Thank goodness for books and libraries! (and newspapers!)

Frank Phillips is The Times editor. He can be e-mailed at frankphi@hotmail.com — assuming his e-mail is working.