Beef Anyone?

I've been trying to decide exactly what to put in this post since shortly after 5am. I've got a couple (3) of sides of beef to cook here:

1. Local television sports coverage. It's horrible, across the board, it's bad. Now, I would say that when it comes to getting information about local teams (high school specifically) it's a necessary evil, but the FCC really should bar all local TV stations from making everyone dumber by trying to report on major college and/or professional sports.

Case in point, this morning the local NBC affiliate reported that Arizona had won last night's NLCS game 1-0 over Colorado. In fact, Colorado won 5-1. Now you might be thinking this was a really late game out west. Well, it was 4-1 Colorado at about 9:45 last night when I went to bed. I know they aren't going to update anything between the 10pm and 5:30am broadcasts, but at least check it before you go on the air at 10. Even better, don't do local coverage at all on major sports, pay ESPN or Fox Sports or someone else who does sports coverage for their programming. Really, we'll all lose less brain cells in the process.

2. Joplin stoplights. First, there are far too many in this town (I maintain that Joplin is more like an overgrown small town than a small city because it lacks cross-town expressways, but that's my personal bias). They just keep putting them up. For the love of everything good and holy stop it!

Now, I will give the city props for the fact that virtually all of them are on sensors (this is good) and that the ones downtown and some over on Rangeline become flashing signals at night (also smart). Aside from the overabundance of lights my other issue here is with the aforementioned sensors. Too many of them are not biased toward the predominate traffic flow. What I mean is this, the sensors in all directions at a light are equally sensitive even though the bulk of the traffic is on one street, not both.

For example, there is a light at Junge (13th) & Maiden Lane Avenue (long story). The light probably only exists because Joplin High School's football stadium and school bus lot are a few blocks east of Maiden on Junge and so there are buses that come and go from this area and I'm sure on Friday nights there is traffic with fans getting in and out. The problem isn't that the light exists, but that it will immediately start the change cycle as soon as the first car on Junge hits the sensor - never mind that there is several times more traffic on Maiden. So you end up with several cars waiting on the light to change back so that one car can get out onto Maiden. The sensor needs to be there, it just needs to have a delay so that it favors the traffic on Maiden. This is possible, there are other lights around town that do it (or appear to).

3. I was appalled to learn this morning that Al Gore had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his "documentary" titled "An Inconvenient Truth". I wasn't surprised, nor did I care when he won an Oscar for it. That was expected, it was merely Hollywood expressing their political point of view. I have 2 issues with the folks handing out the Nobel awards.

First, the film has been found by a court in London to contain factual errors and/or exaggerations. See, when you make up the information or spice it up to make it more powerful, that's called a drama, a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Second, Al Gore is a huge hypocrite. I don't have an enormous problem with people who have private jets or live in large homes that consume large amounts of electricity - but Al Gore does and yet he's among the chief offenders. Pot or kettle today Al?

Let me be clear on this, I'm not saying global warming doesn't exist or that it's not important. I think we don't really know the full extent of what effects our activities are having on the planet yet and it needs to be looked at. Clearly it's unwise to continue with activities that are immanently detrimental to the planet. I just think the Peace Prize proved two things with this award: 1. it's political, because the science behind Mr. Gore's film isn't great, 2. it's irrelevant, because they made such a poor choice in giving it to Gore.