Today's non-sequiturs

I continue to be amazed by the amount of media coverage that Dancing with the Stars and American Idol receive. Maybe I’m being too pragmatic, but in a country with 305 million people living in 110 million households where 109 million of them have at least 1 TV, why are we be bombarded with stories about programs that supposedly have 18.5 million and 25 million viewers respectively? To me, it seems that the much larger number of people are off doing something else. Granted, they’re the highest-rated shows on TV, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be foist upon us. I'd like to know what the other 280 million people are doing. That's probably far more interesting.

Here’s an interesting fact: 18.5 million people watched the regular Dancing with the Stars episode, but only 17 million watched the “results” show that immediately followed. Am I to believe that 9 percent of their viewers turned the show off before they found out who won?

Perhaps I’m a frustrated sociologist or should have studied psychology, because junk like that fascinates me. I’m also interested in how Americans are going to cope with what looks like $4 a gallon gasoline prices, or roughly twice what it was a couple of years ago and 3 dollars more than in 1999. Our individual driving habits are engrained and habitual now, so I don’t see that changing. Every tip I read about how to “save” gasoline is a nickel and dime method that does little to stem the bigger problem of moving our asses from the suburbs to work every day.

We’ve spread out to the point that it has begun to hurt us financially. We don’t have the public transportation infrastructure to support our population spread, if it is even possible at this point, and we are tied to our vehicles to the point that they are irreplaceable. To go back to $2 a gallon would mean cutting out half of our driving, and that’s asking too much for most people.

I suppose for that and some other reasons we are over the proverbial barrel.