Taylor the Teacher

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This week was Christmas, and I’m pissed off about my job. So I’ve not been watching news or reading anything serious online because I can’t have any presidential stupidity threatening the peace of my holiday.

That means I’m out of the loop.

Then again, who am I kidding? I never stay in one loop long enough to really know what’s going on. I’m always out of the loop. Pick any given loop, ask me about it, I’m sure to be behind on the latest. Whatever. I have a loopaphobia, or maybe it’s some kind of personality disorder. I’m sure someone more white-coatish than me has already classified this along with all my other crazies. (And they’re keeping good records. Fuck ‘em.)

So even though my News Aversion Disorder, NAD, was acting up, I turn on the TV. There’s a screaming red background with the words “Breaking News.” But the same news “breaks” for these cable news people for hours and days on end. So I’m wondering, “How long ago did this happen?” Decided the net would be quicker than listening to these blowhards. But everything on the net is given in UCT.

This contact with UCT caused yet another of my Time Zone Induced Strokes. Time Zone Induced Stroke, or TIZZ, occurs when efforts to translate between multiple time zones cause sudden blockage of dendrites, reducing the supply of thought to the brain. Both TIZZ and NAD are members of a family of diseases called Impediments to Thought Disorders, or ITDs.

Wouldn’t my TIZZ be much better accommodated if all news stories offered, in addition to the current TIZZ-inducing method, a Twitter like method, telling me how long ago something was? All I would need to prevent Time Zone Induced Strokes would be local time of the incident and how long ago it was.

But, there’s this impression I get from reading around, or maybe from the voices in my head, that not having ready, fluent understanding of all the time zones is just, like, soooo provincial and gauche. It’s so American.

But wouldn’t putting that information up together regularly cause me to understand time zones better over time? At any rate, it would have helped me understand the assassination better if I hadn’t been seized by sudden TIZZ, and then wound up searching for time-consuming time zone calculators online. Is the time zone memorization more important than the assassination?

Reporting that the assassination took place at 6:16 pm Pakistani Standard Time only tells me half of what I need to know. It gives me context for the event in Pakistan, but it doesn’t tell me how “breaking” this news really is.

Alternatively, they could just stop lying about “breaking news” and call this what it is: ongoing coverage.