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So long, Michael Jackson

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Michael Jackson died in LA today of cardiac arrest, possibly related to abuse of medication. I will remember him as a guaranteed floor-filler. You could count on the King of Pop to put the girls on the dance floor with any of a dozen songs, certainly more than any other artist.

Whatever anyone will say of him in the next few weeks, you have to admire the talent.

I can’t say I’ll miss him, per se, because we’re at the end of what I see as a long decline for him, with no small amount of scandal and financial trouble. He wasn’t well and I don’t think he was going to manage a come back, but no one could argue other than that a legend has passed.

In other news, Farrah Fawcett also died today. Wow. What a day.

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dear tv networks

critical thinking

Considering that, effectively, you could push one button and normalize volume across the board, one has to assume you punch up the volume during the ads just to piss me off. Gotta make sure we can hear your message while we’re doing anything we’ve been putting off during the brief intermission between ad breaks, right?

But common sense says that if you crank the volume during the ad breaks, your audience will just hit mute. I know I do. You think we will not do this because we don’t want to miss our show when it comes back, or we will end up paying even closer attention than we would otherwise, but the fact is we just miss the first few seconds and hate you even more.

My point is that, rather than placating your advertisers, you are merely digging yourself deeper. A short-term solution that was dead at birth.

You need to be far, far more acutely aware that you are competing with Tivo & the Interwebs. We don’t have to watch your ads at all.

So play nice. Or we will stop showing up at game time.

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