I think I rely too much on The Daily Show... :: The Life of the Traegorn

I think I rely too much on The Daily Show...
Posted Sep 11, 2007 - 22:35:58	Tweet

I hate to bump a vlog off of the front page (especially one that was apparently good enough to get featured on the frontpage for LiveVideo - not to mention how great the shot of me with the Sonic Screwdrive pointed at the camera was...) but I was thinking about this over the last few days, and I just decided that it was something that I needed not just to talk about, but also admit too:

I rely far too much on The Daily Show for current political news.

There was a time when I would sift through Google News and various blogs every day. Heck, I even used to maintain a small political blog during the 2004 election. I considered myself fairly well informed, and made a conscious effort to keep myself abreast of the events on a daily basis.

And then I finished my Political Science degree.

See, after that, for some incredibly bizarre reason, I got lazy. I still researched things, and made sure I knew what I was talking about - but a new pattern emerged. See, before I would research and then watch things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and enjoy the humor. Now what's happened is that I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and have found myself researching based on what's talked about there. Now, for a while, this was actually working out. I wasn't relying on admitted comedy shows for my deeper source of information, but they did lead me to what I should be looking for. And all of this was going great...

...until they took two weeks off.

This weekend, I was sitting down with my parents for Sunday morning brunch (on my birthday). Like many Sunday mornings, the Sunday morning talk shows were on my parent's kitchen TV. When ABC's This Week went to their standard "Sunday Funnies" segment, of course all of the joke clips were in reference to the Larry Craig scandal. This is to be expected, considering the irony of a man who has repeatedly voted against gay rights and highly criticized Bill Clinton for having an extramarital affair... was cheating on his wife by trying to have gay sex in the Twin Cities airport.

Ah, life is full of beautiful irony some days...

Anyway, I'm sitting there, listening to these jokes, and for the first time in my adult life I'm forced to do something that I never thought I'd ever have to do: Ask what the hell they were talking about.

See, with The Daily Show gone for two weeks, I didn't have my source for political scandal and the ironies of life pumping in on a regular basis... and I ended up uninformed. I plan on not letting this happen to me again. In my defense, I did stay on top of local news - reading for that in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but I tend to skip their national coverage, instead opting to read online sources for that... except I didn't. Because I didn't think to look.

Geh.

So yes, for the first time in my adult life I felt truly dumb in a matter regarding national politics. At least it was just a sex scandal, and nothing really important. What? He's resigning most likely? Well, I guess it's a little important.

I think I just feel bad for being late on the joke.

Life continues forward though, and such do things move on. At some point in the next two weeks I'm going to get myself a cell phone. That's right, I'm finally going to return to the land of the constantly connected. I did away with my cell phone several years back to save money, but life needs have changed. Because of this, I will be going out and getting a new one. Hopefully my terrible credit won't necessitate a massive deposit. This is all part of my plan to move back to Eau Claire in the latter portion of the month.

Hopefully everything works out in that plan. Keep your fingers crossed.
- Traegorn