It’s a great pity…

…that local TV station KHBS (my former employers, so it’s not as if they don’t know a thing about me!) couldn’t think of a way to localize this story by contacting, oh, I don’t know, a local author who’s written a giant book on the subject.

The above Twitter link led to this story, which was almost certainly relayed straight from the wire service.

Still, I’m highly amused at the thought of channel 40, or even their Twitter account, running a story about Doctor Who. 😆

Now, about all this Doctor Who business… I’ve had a few friends express their frustration with my recent laser-like focus on a certain TV sci-fi show, when there are much weightier issues demanding our attention in the real world. I should be, apparently, thinking of, and talking about, nothing but the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis. Or, like some of the people who have complained, I should simply be mindlessly relaying meme graphics that come from sites and individuals who are tilted hard in one political direction or another, even though the people relaying them often haven’t checked to see if the claims are:

1. True at all
2. If true, only telling one side of the story or quoting wildly out of context

Let me put it to my friends very bluntly: any of you who have ever hung out with me, you know I’m not the political meme guy. I’m the guy you used to hang out with to get away from it all and take your mind off of it. I’m the guy who looks for any not-entirely-insensitive* nook or cranny of a serious conversation into which a zinger or one-liner can be shoved. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the major issues of the day – I have friends who are on furlough looking around going “what the hell do we do now?” – but generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of carrying my political views and beliefs around on a ten foot flagpole, and then stabbing everyone in the eye with the pointy end of the flagpole as I walk into the room. I’m much more at home with the idea of making people laugh (even if it’s at me), putting them at ease, and not loading them down with a careful dissertation of how my views differ from theirs, and mine are better. In other words, I don’t want to be this American:

(Then again, I wouldn’t want to be that Englishman either. Ow! Bony finger right in the eye!) I make my views known at the polling place. I don’t spend a whole lot of time boring the rest of the world with them. Me, I’d rather talk about Yeti spaghetti – and that’s probably why those of you who follow my misadventures with the boy and a bunch of cats and a couple of dogs and the occasional horse happen to follow me at all.

So: do I care about Doctor Who to the exclusion of all else? No. I have a child who I have to care for and raise. I have cats and dogs to feed. I try to find ways to make a buck here and there. I look for things to make us go. And I don’t look at every new face in the room trying to figure out if this person’s worldview lines up with mine, or if they’re “doctrinally correct”, or if they’re the “enemy”.

You go looking for enemies, you’ll find plenty. If you can make people smile instead, you tend to find friends.

* it’s not real comedy unless it runs at least a slight risk of being taken as bad taste.