Dear Penthouse forum

On April 21,2020 at 4:30 a.m. in the before sun rise I woke up the rooster time zone

Dear Penthouse,

There is a thing that's been going on for quite sometime now. I'm probably overreacting to this, and yet, for some reason I don't think I am. The irritation over it has been building and making me more of a high value cursing curmudgeon every day and I am truly now a legendary complainer. As if I don't constantly bitch about some of this ignorant crap enough right now. Do you know (or remember or have been told), how at about the same time as immediate post 9-11 , your TV screen suddenly seemed to become targeted territory? You used to watch any program, or the news, or even a commercial and the entire TV screen would be full of the intended subject matter? Usually you would be watching a program , say the News, and the WHOLE SCREEN would be about this one topic. Those were glorious years. No promos for new shows or their hottest properties, No clever reminders about their animation programming, you get the idea.

At about this time clever programming kids figured out how to place "crawls", that is rolling morsels of textable garbage along the bottom of the screen or at the side with some design flair. It would run for the entirety of the show and was nothing like the old breaking news model of the prior 25 years where they usually just ran a crawl of white text in a black box superimposed on top of the existing picture in a line at the bottom?

You can thank modern professional football for this little stupid invention, because it is based on similar technology that is used to create the fake "yellow" first down marker and other lines that are placed on the active field during a live TV Broadcast football game. The original picture is displayed, a yellow line marker is created on another type of device and then the two of them are "melded" together to create one seamless picture which is presented to the viewer as live action. It helps to see the goal the teams are working towards and puts you in the "action" so to speak. Well they have dressed up that sort of technology and carved up the TV screen to an extent that the original portion that is being displayed is almost lost. Same technology is used to display the "telestrator" where an analyst would do the X's and O's on the screen while explaining how the catch you just observed , was indeed ,actually a catch, or not.

Currently If you are lucky, you may have a 40% square (S.W.A.G.)  in the top left corner that is the original content, and everything else is being carved up for data, statistics, commercials or in some cases like in the example of live Auto racing broadcasts (The Indy 500 comes to mind) the commercial and the content is broadcast side by side , live , and it never leaves the live action all while trying to sell you a toothbrush. Other models have crawls, other bullet points, other ads and other content being displayed all concurrently. Turns you into a type A multitasker and makes you flit between content like a fat moth to a hot smoky candle. Also makes you want to turn the device off and begin to talk incoherently to yourself. It's probably why my children think that I am off my rocker , as much as I in real life yell loudly at inanimate objects.

The Web marketing and Ad design industry has taken this lead and ran with it. Sometimes now when you click into a website, even ones where you would think they have their shit together by now at least, there is good 30 seconds of secondary content loading , the typical cookie disclaimer,several  pop up forms asking you to join their site, their mailing list or to register to their site in order to continue or some other such nonsense. Finding how to disable or close this crap can be annoying to say the least and sometimes depending upon my mood is enough to make me scream at the screen.

By the time you have waded through all the crap, you forgot why you were there. On top of all that , they now also resize the main video content displays as you scroll down and BAP, here come the video autoplay where the sound starts in the background like a radio ad and then it begins "WHERE IN THE HELL IS IT COMING FROM?",  he said while frothing at the mouth !!

Please also, I won't get started talking about stories you may have wanted to read that never actually materialized but and instead became a click the friggin NEXT button marathon instead. Start slideshow it says, what it should have said was begin torture session, the pieces of absolute crap.
But I digress .

So, anyway , um I'm good, how was your day?

1. I am of the opinion that Piers Morgan of TV Interview fame (I am not sure why though), is an absolute idiot. A blathering , blithering, mouth breathing twat that serves no good purpose on this earth and for the life of me I am not at all certain what his appeal is? Can anyone explain to me why this idiot keeps showing up on American TV? Who in the hell keeps giving this waste of organic material another TV show to appear in. I could't like this guy if I stood on my head and cut off my oxygen supply, inducing hypoxia, where I could legitimately make a bad decision without repercussions. Jesus what a moron this guy is.
   
2. Yesterday for a very short time, oil prices dropped in to the negative value. This means for May future contracts suppliers and brokers, were willing to pay storage facilities and others (like refiners) to take oil off their hands and they would pay them to do so. It was / is cheaper to do that than to build more storage of their own is what they say. Here's one thing you won't see, no provider is going to pay you to pump gas into your vehicle. The negative pricing didn't last long but it happened.
   
3. That North Korean asshat, his holy fatboy Kim Jong Un, of the UN family,  kill everybody in his country dynasty is allegedly seriously ill following surgery,  he allegedly has had on his heart. News from here is almost always wrong so he could have a cold and he is screwing with us, or he could be recovering from Covid-19 , or the heart stuff could be true. No way to really tell. It would be ok with me if he would explode from within however what do I know I am just the messenger.
   
   He is around 37 or so, and apparently and allegedly was/is a heavy smoker, is way way fatter than me, and never exercises at all so the heart story seems plausible, but who knows? We shall see I suppose. I wonder who they have lined up to take his place should he kick off? The very very latest rumors say he is brain dead. Ha fuckin Ha! Makes me giggle, you go Karma.
   
   If so? Wow,  Couldn't happen to a nicer dynasty. What a nice group of folks they are.
   
4. You ever watch or play along with the program TV program Jeopardy? I used to watch it and play along every day as this was just about the time I was getting home from work and was just about the time we would all be setting down to have dinner as a family. Now just occasionally, but still like it. Me and the fam would sit and play (well I would play, the kids would get pissed off because they were always wrong or couldn't get a word in edgewise) . Great TV in my opinion however I usually get Greek mythology, British writers and feel good topics all wrong. How do you do?
   
5. The US supreme Court (SCOTUS) has ruled (?sic yesterday) that criminal jury trials require a unanimous verdict affirmed by all members of the jury in order to convict someone in a criminal trial. Only two states used a majority of the verdict (Louisiana and Oregon) and I think both of them had recently changed their laws requiring it.
   
   This overturns decades old precedents, set by another Supreme court from another time, and overturns a 1972 decision made in the case of Apodaca V. Oregon, that allowed non unanimous verdicts. The core doctrine of "Stere Decisis" basically only allows a decision to be overturned (I'm way Oversimplifying it here) if it was an egregious decision that brought harm to the law. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “Lowering the bar for overruling our precedents, a badly fractured majority casts aside an important and long-established decision with little regard for the enormous reliance the decision has engendered” https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/supreme-court-says-criminal-convictions-require-unanimous-juries.html
   
   While I agree with this one decision, I'm no lawyer, I'm just a non attorney uncompensated spokesman for the BigMikeRant. It seems like a good idea however, hmmm,  I wonder if it just became easier to overturn laws and past decisions they don't like (Hello Roe V. Wade anyone?)
   
   Anyway also in other news on totally other topics,  my wife said no, so I can't go..
   That figures. Killjoy.
   Know what I mean jelly bean?
   
   BigMike