Signs of Cabin Fever

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Okay, I've been cooped up in the sleet and ice for entirely too long grading end-of-semester exams and term projects. The only way I can get through this mind-numbing exercise is to turn the television on, which is something I seldom do otherwise except when parked on various exercise gizmos.

The point of this is in order that, between trying to decipher for the thousandth time yet another student's handwriting (and determine that, yes, they have indeed written the answer they should have, more or less), and the gabbling yawp of the television, my brain doesn't turn to lime JellO. With bits of fruit cocktail.

If you do this long enough you begin to wonder about a few things on television:

The Rambo Non-Conservancy Principle:

Why does Rambo get some kind of minor injury in every scene in the movies, yet they never accumulate, even to the extent of cuts no longer bleeding extensively in the next scene? Most people would be well-pulped after twenty minutes or so.

The Bond Conundrum:

Why does James Bond only stuff a very few gadgets in his pocket when he sets out to pillage and seduce, yet these are *exactly* the items that he will need, even to the extent of having none left over that he never used? I've got enough widgetry in the garage to build an F-16 (and probably the aircraft carrier to go underneath it) and it seems that I'm always missing something while not using most of what's there.

The House Credibility Blur:

How are the doctors on "House" able to give a different definitive diagnosis and changed course of treatment every five minutes to the same patient without a problem? I think they have confused "Differential Diagnosis" with "Different Diagnoses". If I brought someone into the hospital and a flotilla of physicians changed their minds (and operated or medicated with experimental goo every time they did so) with that frequency, we'd certainly be out of there and on the way to the lawyer's in nothing flat.

The CSI Green-Tinged Up-Set:

I've been in laboratories literally all my life and I've never seen one so poorly lit and overdecorated as to be too chi-chi for most martini lounges, yet this is how all of the big science on the CSI set gets done. If you dropped a pencil in that environment you'd never see it again until the building was demolished, much less trying to resolve any kind of detail in physical samples.

As an extension of this architectural suspension-of-disbelief, there are a lot of scenes set in older turn-of-the century building supposedly in Las Vegas. Las Vegas wasn't in Las Vegas at the turn of the (last) century, much less with green lawns. And speaking of green, how is it that they've decided to permanently turn off the white balance in their cameras so that half the scenes look like out-takes from "Seven"?

The West Wing Economic Deflation:

The West Wing, which one could classify at this point as being the fiddle that was played in reruns while Bush allowed his idiots to burn our economy and foreign policy to smoldering waste, is a great feel-good show about how tough it is to make world-scale decisions about actors in a mockup of the White House. Oh, wait, that's supposed to be the president and his related minions except he's principled and literate.

What isn't shown at any time is fund raising that is constantly done in the real world of politics. With congressional campaigns running into the tens of millions of dollars (and a lot of those contributions being converted into private capital unless they have to be spent on something pesky like campaign expenses), it's a nonstop feeding frenzy most of the time. I believe the minimum is something like $10,000 per day in order to run a congressional reelection campaign every four years. Never mind the presidency. In the few episodes I've watched, I have yet to see a check change hands in a cloakroom anywhere.

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