Can we talk about Knight Rider’s premise for a minute?
Anyone who reads this website on a consistent basis knows I have a high tolerance for suspension of disbelief. Talking car with advanced weaponry? No problem. I’m all in. Run with it.
But, even with a key point like that as part of the premise, the rest of the show has to make sense. With that in mind, let’s apply some inexplicably-timed scrutiny to the rest of the core tenets of the Knight Rider story.
Here’s the deal: An undercover police officer named Michael Long is trying to bust some bad guys. He may be a police lieutenant, but he’s actually spent half a year in the field. And, by “field,” I mean posing as part of a security detail for a chemical company in an attempt to prevent industrial espionage. At least I think that’s what’s going on. Something within hailing distance of that is definitely happening. We don’t need to get bogged down in details, nerds.
The important part is that this plan goes to hell within the first few minutes of the series, resulting in the following:
Meanwhile, the Office has been struggling of late. The folks from Scranton had put together a great midseason run, but an off week last time out casts some doubt on whether the Office will be able to put Archer or 30 Rock asunder. It definitely won’t this week, as the second new 30 Rock episode takes the place of the Office on the schedule. Perhaps its just as well to give that show a breather for a week. Hopefully the brief respite will allow the Office to return to the form it showed when it was winning this competition on a regular basis early in 2012.
1. All of the penalties seemed to be some degree of excessive. Sean Payton being suspended for a full year is a little much, but the Mickey Loomis half-season suspension is the most absurd. Payton and (especially) Gregg Williams don’t strike me as coaches who would be particularly receptive to a front-office person telling them how to run their team, even if he’s doing so on orders from the league via the franchise owner.
The 
I can’t imagine how much different my 20’s (especially my early 20’s) would have been without Instant Messenger. I used AOL’s IM program for three or four years before I ever had a cell phone or sent my first text message.
I think my principle reason for trying to create a website that had multiple authors was my belief that such a site has more inherent credibility. A sole author’s work is merely a blog, of which there are literally hundreds of millions across the internet.
Last week’s edition of the adventures of Liz Lemon and company was one of the better-written half-hours of television I’ve ever seen, and perhapsthe best I’ve seen recently. But, with Archer and the Officeboth on something of a roll, will 30 Rock be able to hold off the challenges of the opposition and take a second consecutive win for the first time this season? Or will the Office continue its strong finish to the year as we steamroll towards May?
The Axis of Ego 
The Need to be Needed
Bill Maher made a compelling case for a National Day of No Outrage on last week’s Real Time. After glancing at ESPN.com over the weekend and realizing that three of the front page headlines were about apologies for various types of behavior, I thought it might be a good idea to present the video of Maher’s comments:
I agree generally with everything Maher says here, and my only quibble would be that I would prefer we exist in a permanent state of “no outrage.” There’s one point in particular that’s worth repeating: The idea that what fuels much of this outrage is a need for us to feel important by stopping “the bad people.”
This is an idea that I discussed last week when I said that “[b]eing able to dismiss your opposite number as inferior or trivial quite obviously enhances one’s own feelings of superiority or importance, as does attaching inflated significance to the success or failure of your political agenda.”
This is a commonplace “tell” for ideologues of all stripes. It’s necessary for many people to feel as though what they do (or believe) is not only personally fulfilling, but absolutely pivotal to our society. Put another way, they can’t accept the fact that something might only be subjectively important. They need it to be important to the world at large in order to enhance their own sense of self-worth. There’s a narrow-mindedness attached to this, to be sure, but there’s an element of narcissism or insecurity as well.
But also consider again why this is done. Take any of the above topics. Or, take, for example, recent postulations over the sad case of Trayvon Martin that assert that racism is as prevalent and significant as ever in the United States. Much of the causation for that mentality is the same one that Maher and I highlighted.
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