The text crawling across the bottoms of television news broadcasts came into play on September 11, 2001 for very good reasons, and – for reasons unknown – never went away again. Soon after the original calamity was sorted out, news people ran out of actual news alerts to put into the endless crawl and began posting any scrap of evidence of life on Earth: “Senate convenes… Panda something… Atlanta temps seasonal… DOW opens down… Something panda…”
Staring at a television one day in an airport lounge somewhere in America, hypnotized by this dribble of nonsense, an alert caught my attention, “Man fires watermelon through Pontiac with homemade cannon…”
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