If the media did their job, rather than trying to plug things into their pre-established narratives, they wouldn’t be so easily fooled all the time.

Anyone who wants a lot of media coverage just has to package their event as one of the predetermined classes of story, and the media is all over it. Report actual news that requires them to do some work, and they’ll ignore you.

too bad

They have been ragging on the cops for not searching the attic over the garage, even though the kid had to show them how he managed to get up there, which wasn’t exactly by an obvious or direct path, nor one that could be used by anyone larger or heavier that the kid.

Even today, at my age, I would be hard pressed not to want to see that balloon fly. I assume one of the reasons he used mylar was to make it easy to track on radar, to avoid problems of aircraft running into it. Having it tethered was like setting up an elaborate dominoes display – it’s hard not to want “the show” to begin.

The hardest part of trying to coach kids soccer [excluding dealing with parents], is to convince the kids to pass the ball and not all converge on it [and to go to the bathroom before the game started]. Kids want to do, they don’t want to watch.

As for parental “irresponsibility,” again, good grief; Mom kept some disinfectant handy for the inevitable scrapes we got, but no one thought we should be confined at home to avoid the scrapes. My parents weren’t even too upset the time I fell, dislocated a kneecap and had to walk on a stick for a couple months (and oh, what a cool hand-carved stick it was; we borrowed it from an elderly Mexican-American neighbor who saw nothing unusual either in my dislocation or in lending his stick to a neighbor kid).

Kids cannot possibly be any less sturdy today than we were in ancient times… what’s up with the media frenzy, anyway?