Thank You, Mr. Jobs

Went to a different gym tonight, which has small TV monitors fixed to some of the equipment, allowing you to see the screen closeup and pick your own channel. Kind of nice.

Except that during the hour I was on the machines, my choices were the following:

1) Bill O'Reilly, a pugnacious, opinionated conservative loudmouth, interviewing some public official who was a pugnacious, opinionated liberal loudmouth. O'Reilly gets credit for having people on his show who disagree with him, but I think that he has those people on as much because he knows a lot of the people who watch him like the shouting matches more than they like any lengthy exposition of his philosophy. Confession: I will put up with a few minutes of O'Reilly each week in order to watch Dennis Miller, a regular Wednesday guest on the program.

2) Keith Olbermann, who two years ago said that, in order to maintain his appearance of objectivity, he won't even vote in elections but who just served a (whopping) two-day suspension from his job for violating his company's policy by donating to three candidates. The policy sounds dumb -- like anyone who puts up with more than a hundred seconds of Olbermann can't figure out which candidate would have the jumped-up boxscore reader demographic sewn up tight.  Olbermann claims it's inconsistently applied. Which, given his own apparent change of heart in this area, would not seem to be a criticism coming from him. Confession: I regularly watched Olbermann when he was on Sports Center and had an ability to conceal his prodigious ego that seems to have gone the way of his black hair.

3) Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker. Spitzer's facial expressions range from creepy -- whenever he grins I think his eyes are about to light up and he's going to start clanging two cymbals together -- to super-creepy -- whenever he's grinning and looking at Parker I defy you to forget the reason he's not the governor of New York anymore is because he liked sleeping with hookers more than he liked sleeping with his wife. That's less his fault than the fault of CNN for pairing him with an attractive woman co-host, but still. Confession: I keep waiting for Parker to say something like, "Those don't talk, doofus. Eyes up here!"

So I plugged in one of these and let the Ramones motivate me to good circulation and cardiovascular health.