Tuesday, August 9, 2005

Some nights, the KPTV 10 o'clock "news" show looks as if they took a bunch of true-crime stories, threw them in a blender, then put whatever flew out the top of the ol' Waring onto the air. Tonight was one of those nights.

Top Story: Vanished! Ah, this story was just tailor-made for Ye Olde Channel 12. A mother and her three kids from Keizer disappeared on Saturday. Deb Gil was On The Scene. There's no indication of foul play, according to the cops. She might be in Seattle where she has family. Finally, at the end of the story, we got a Small Fact that they perhaps should have mentioned earlier in the piece: Mom has a mental illness that causes her to hear voices occasionally. Which doesn't make her a bad person.

I've mentioned before on this blog the three years I spent in the Mother Of All Stupid Jobs (as my wife nicknamed it) outside the White House dressed like George Washington. Some of my favorite people out there on Pennsylvania Avenue heard voices in their heads. A lot. In fact I have a terrific idea for a documentary based on the people in front of 1600 Pennsy. Anybody got some grant money from an arts council they don't know what to do with?

Fox 12's Most Wanted. The cops are looking for 2 black men involved in a July 27th shooting in North Portland. Know where they are? Drop a dime (or a quarter or a half-dollar or whatever pay phones take nowadays).

2 men have committed 3 bank robberies in Southeast Portland lately. Gee, I just noticed how some of my typing looks like Prince did it, what with the digits and all.

Ken Bowling, registered sex offender, is accused of assaulting 2 6-year-old girls who were out riding their bikes on a path near their home. What an (alleged) scumbag!

There was a shooting outside a club in downtown Portland. There have been arrests in the case. What is the deal with all the lead flying in downtown lately? Is it directly or indirectly related to the new "prescriptions required for cold meds" law? Is it making meth harder to get (and therefore more expensive) short-term or am I just pulling this out of the filing cabinet in my ass?

Normally, even though KPTV moves pretty quickly, I can write fast enough, using my own abbreviations, that I can reduce the gist of a story to a few words. This one kind of got away from me, I confess. OK, remember that guy who shot himself in the head the other day and became an organ donor as the result? Apparently, he was locked up at some point under another name AND a guy named Mark Tucker claimed to have been kidnapped by him but may or may not have really been kidnapped (that's the part that got away from me). I s'pose I could check on another TV stations's news site (KPTV.com doesn't seem to have anything about this) but that would be cheating, wouldn't it?

The Clark brothers are accused of getting some underaged teenage girls drunk in Kelso, then raping them. As even a casual viewer of the KPTV "news" show could predict, the neighbors were stunned by the revelation that people living so close to them are accused of something as heinous as this.

Question: Why is Brooke Wilberger the only crime victim who gets music underneath the "news" segment about her abduction? Tell me again that TV "news" shows don't value white women more than other people. Anyway, in the absence of any real new information about the Wilberger case, David Frietas/Freitas gave us the story of Detective Michael Graham who dealt with Wilberger's alleged abductor/murderer Joel Courtney 20 years ago when Courtney was a teenage weasel. Detective Graham feels guilt for not stopping Courtney from committing crimes later in his life, although how the detective could have done that is a mystery to me. Even he admitted that he had done all he could in dealing with Courtney.

By the way, since there's no corpse and Courtney hasn't confessed to killing Brooke, on what is the accusation that he is her murderer based? Just asking.

Break.

People in the Cedar Hills section of Southeast Portland are opposed to a new Wal-Mart in their area. The Grand Old Man of Portland TV "news," Jim Hyde, was On The Scene, standing in an empty lot where absolutely nothing was, or could be, happening for this story. The locals are raising money to fight the Arkansas Juggernaut. Face it, people, it's Wal-Mart's world, we just live (and work part-time) in it.

That closed motel where the management left all the receipts inside and people stole the info and committed KPTV's favorite new Scary Crime, ID Theft? The plot thickens. We saw pictures of the three unbelievably scary-looking people that the owners of the place supposedly hired to keep an eye on the joint. No shit, these three just screamed "Crankenstein." They are now accused of ripping metal out of the place and selling it as scrap. Hmm, now why would a person need some quick cash? *cough* meth *cough*

There's been an arrest in a stabbing incident that ended with a body in the Sandy River.

Speaking of river-related assaults, a victim found near the Willamette has been ID'd. Yay, forensics!

War On Drugs

*Longview is going to have drug-sniffing dogs patrol the middle and high schools in the area. What's with this half-way shit? Let's just go all out and make the school experience indistinguishable from the prison experience--prepare our kids for their future in The Joint. Mesh over the windows on the school bus, "finger waves" before gym class, razor wire on top of the fence in the exercise yard...oops, I meant SCHOOL yard, guards in towers with rifles. Uh, is it too soon to declare that the "American Experiment" has failed yet? Call me wacky, but a society that fears its own children so much that it sics police dogs on them is a society that could use a little retooling.

Somebody is stealing metal parts off the trains in a museum in Roy, Oregon. Yup, raising the price of street meth is really lowering that crime rate! Anyway, the guy who runs the museum is understandably upset and says it will take at least a year and lots of cash to repair the trains.

Meth Watch. Some kids in Clark County came up with the idea for rubber bracelets that say "Live Meth Free" and have gotten enough money to have 3000 of them made. Cute idea, but I don't think a catchy slogan is the answer to the spiritual (and I don't mean that in the religious sense) rot that has infected American society. Can't blame the kids for trying, though.

32 abandoned kittens turned up on the doorstep of an animal shelter in North Portland. Damn cat welfare mothers! Hey, Whiskers, if you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em!

An SUV was stolen from a local gas station. A dog was inside it. The vehicle and doggie were found unharmed a short while later.

Thomas Smolka is in trouble for filing a false claim against the Catholic Church for molestation. Hey, all the cool kids were claiming to have been sodomized by a priest! Tommy didn't want to be the only one who had control of his sphincter. You laugh now but you'll stop laughing if and when he uses that as his defense. Actually, you'll probably just laugh louder. I know I will.

Break.

A couple of kids in Salem were cooking without adult supervision (a recipe for disaster, if you ask me. Get it, RECIPE FOR DISASTER! I crack me up). Anyway, the kiddies soon learned a valuable lesson about Mr. Grease Fire. They did the right thing though by going to a neighbor's house and calling 911.

Northwest Tonight

*The School wildfire in Washington has consumed 37,000 acres so far.

*The attack on a guy at a party in the University district in Seattle may have been racially-motivated. The victim is black and the attackers allegedly made some comments about his Negritude.

*OK, so a woman was hiking in the mountains in Hawaii. She gets all lost and stuff and uses her cell phone to call for help. The battery keeps dying on her though so she figures she's doomed. The T-Mobile operator figured out there was a problem and used GPS to get the woman's approximate location. Presto change-o, rescue-o!

Break.

OK, who said all along that the Space Shuttle was perfectly safe and would land without incident? Um, not me. Yes, the Space Pinto is on the ground, albeit California ground rather than Florida ground, thanks to bad weather in the Penis-shaped State (that's on their license plates).

Fight For Iraq

*An Unmanned Vehicle (AKA radio-controlled plane) provided video of some alleged terrorists allegedly making plans to allegedly blow some shit up. We beat 'em to the punch by blowing them up instead (not allegedly). We will never, I'm sure, be told exactly how we knew they were planning to commit violence. It's all about the Gee Whiz Technology, stupid.

War On Terror

*Color me amazed. We got a story about how some "intel" (as they call "intelligence" in the "intel" biz) ID'd some of the 9/11 terrorists, including Mohammad Atta, a year before the World Trade Center bombing. Nothing was done to follow up on the information, though, because the men were in the country legally. Uh, I'm in the country legally, too, but now, because of this fuck-up, I have to take my shoes and belt off every time I go to the damn airport.

*Homeland Security has come up with the Next Answer to Terrorism: Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips embedded in cards that anyone entering America from Canada who wasn't born in Canada has to wave past some high-tech machine at Customs. It's voodoo and it won't do diddly-squat.

Going into the weather segment, we got some cute infrared pictures of Mt. St. Helens. Did you know lava is hot? If you needed infrared pictures to tell you that, please report immediately to the nearest high school at your earliest convenience for re-education in science.

Weather. Break.

*A wife shot a cop to help her husband escape from prison (he was being escorted by guards at the time) in Tennessee. They are now both on the run.

*A guy robbed a convenience store with a machete in Massachusetts. Fortunately for a post-literate society, the incident was Caught On Camera.

*A guy who was allegedly upset about the deal he got on a used car returned to the dealership and shot the salesman. "What is it going to take to put a bullet in me today?" If you don't get that joke, ask your nearest car salesman to explain.

*A chemical explosion at a recycling plant in Detroit caused toxic fumes to excape into the air. Locals couldn't detect a difference in the city's smell. Joke.

*A home exploded about 7 AM in Kansas. Propane, the Official Hydrocarbon of the Hillbilly, is suspected.

*Anyone still give a flying fuck about the Runaway Bride, Jennifer Wilbanks? No? Good, then I don't have to tell you that she is mowing lawns at public buildings as part of her community service in Georgia.

*Hot 97, New York City's favorite station among people who think Howard Stern is too highbrow, has to pay a $245,000 fine for staging "Smackfests" (the New York Daily News says $300,000). They involved women slapping each other repeatedly until one of them gives up. There is a New York State law against "combative sports" and the "Smackfests" were ruled to be in violation of it. Hey, Spike TV, I think I've found the replacement show for when you lose the WWE this Fall.

*Key West, Florida is being invaded by iguanas. People buy 'em, get tired of 'em, then ditch 'em and the damn things thrive in the semi-tropical climate. I say round 'em up, put 'em on a barge and shove it toward Cuba. In your face, Fidel!

World Tonight

*People protesting something or other were arrested in Moscow. I can't think of a joke. Damn, where's Yakov Smirnoff when you need him? (Probably at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, Missouri, actually.)

*There are big ol' wildfires in Spain and Portugal. Hey, that reminds me, what happened to Fire Season 2005 tonight? And where has Hilary Hutcheson been lately? She gets a new hairdo and disapppears, just like that?

*There's stupid and there's STUPID. The revival of an old "sport" in Spain is a primo example of STUPID. Men perform gymnastics by jumping over charging bulls in a bullring. Actually, now that I think about it, I'd kind of like to see this in the Olympics. You're either a Gold Medalist or you're a corpse.

David Wilson was in News Control for the next story on Underage Piercings. Kids today with their wacky genital piercings! Actually, this was about piercings in general; apparently you can find places that don't worry all that much about age restrictions on piercings in Portland. Eli Goodman's mom didn't want him to have a steel needle shoved through his face but he did so he went to a place called Metro on Hawthorne Boulevard. Metro claims that Eli showed them a fake ID but he says he didn't.

Oh, kissing politician ass is SO edgy, isn't it? The people who make the John Madden video football games produced a special version with the faces of Florida governor Jeb Bush and his brother George, who has some job in government, on some players. Jeb was said to be amused by the little prank. Then he signed a proclamation ordering all Floridians to worship John Madden as their Lord and Savior. What is this "quid pro quo" of which you speak?

As someone explained in the comments section of this blog a few days ago, August means that a lot of people at KPTV are on vacation, requiring the crap-filled stories they've been running lately to kill time. The next two pieces were prime example of this phenomenon.

"KPTV's Beth Galvin" told us about "Fast Fitness." Oh, it was some horseshit about how maybe you can get some value out of short exercise sessions a few times a week. How short? Less than 10 minutes per week. Personally, I doubt that you can derive much value from so little exercise, but they don't call me "Doctor," do they? Well, they do, but only in Honduras; the damn U.S. calls the Universidad de San Pedro Sula a "diploma mill." Hey, those were the hardest two weeks of my life!

*A new lip gloss called "Plump Lips" which costs between $10 and $40 claims to be able to give you that pouty Angelina Jolie look. It didn't do a thing for me. Why are you making that face at your monitor?

Hollywood Buzz

*The widow of Christopher Reeve, who died last year, has announced that she has lung cancer. She has never smoked a cigarette in her life.

*A man suspected of shooting Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Marc Cohn during an attempted carjacking was arrested after a standoff with police. KPTV didn't mention this, but Cohn wrote the hit "Walking in Memphis" and is married to ABC reporter Elizabeth Vargas. Details, details.

*The city of Sydney, Australia has asked Mel Gibson to stage a live recreation of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ if the city wins its bid to host the 2008 World Youth Day. Can I make some casting suggestions? Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan as Christ, Yahoo Serious as Pontius Pilate and Dame Edna as Mary Magdalene.

WHAT KPTV DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT TONIGHT (a sampling):

*Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is dropping broad hints about attacking Iran.

*Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq, is keeping a vigil near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. She has vowed to stay there throughout the month of August or until Bush grants her a visit with him.

*Crude oil neared an all-time high, rising above $63. per barrel.