Brendan Gates

I was driving home tonight and a pedestrian walked out into the street down the road from me (not at a crosswalk). I was going about 20, slowing towards a red light at the end of the block, and the pedestrian was about 150ft away. He scurried across my lane and was almost across the other lane and to the sidewalk when I got up to where he was. He turned towards me and flipped up his middle finger, while shouting something I couldn’t understand. For a half-second, I considered stopping to roll-down my window and ask him what I had done to offend him. I was probably already down to 10 mph at that point, so it wouldn’t have been difficult. He looked like a spitter, though, so I thought better of it and just kept on movin’.

In unrelated news, last week I twittered my frustrations that CNN wouldn’t clarify if Lisa Ling had been abducted in North Korea or not. I was in the lunchroom at work and CNN gasbag Rick Sanchez was apparently too busy between playing voicemails from his call-in line, listing tweets in a word document, and showing a closeup of comments from his myspace site. Three times, they went out to a commercial break with a very misleading teaser about Lisa Ling’s “connection” to a detention in North Korea. I suffered through many minutes of commercials and Sanchez-pomp while I waited for a story that ended up being not at all what they had implied. Minutes of my life I would like to have back.

I’m all for new media, and web 2.0, but not for CNN. I want CNN to tell me something insightful or late-breaking, or give me something that only they with their massive news organization can provide me. If I wanted to know how my friends or co-workers felt about an issue, I’ll just ask them myself. Or if I wanted to get the web 2.0 take on something, I can go to Wikipedia. I don’t need it from CNN.