TV vs. Second Hand Smoke

I used to smoke cigarettes. Okay, that's an understatement. When I quit, there was a recession in North Carolina and Virginia, and political pressures were levied that I might go back to my old ways.

Second hand smoke, if you could get a nicotine buzz off it, I'd think it might be dangerous. If a house has such bad ventillation that someone else smoking is a danger, the radon levels are probably worse.

Anyway, I came up from my weekend's freelance work to eat some pizza and my fam was watching the home makeover show, where they take a house nicer than the Bangladeshi Royal Family's and tear it down, replace it with an all-out trophy house.

It's supposed to be entertaining, this supposedly useful guy with a bullhorn, a guy with horn-rims he must have stolen off Bill Evans circa 1962 who cries a lot, this animated Barbie doll who 'designs' things.

There's always an emotional angle played. Sure, the family gets a new house, but only if they're willing to be a National Object of Pity. To make things worse, the producers of the show get their neighbors to line up behind flimsy baracades, so there's no chance anyone in a 2 mile radius does not know you got that shit for free.

From what I caught of tonight, they at least didn't commit the vulgarity of making the garage the most prominent feature of the house. The father of the family was given a prosthetic leg, on account of he lost a big chunk of one in Iraq.

Isn't the VA supposed to take care of that?

And in the moments before I retreated to my work in fear that I'd vomit my pizza up or say something that would start a fight in the family, they highlighted an American flag and stressed that this guy had lost his leg definding his country.

The guy was not Iraqi, not so far as I could tell. He lost his leg for U.S. munitions manufacturers, and for Halliburton, who gets to rebuild what those bombs blew up on non-competitive contracts.

Not even 9/11 excuses this bullshit. And you can't blame it all on W.; the resolution for 'regime change' in Iraq was passed by Congress under Clinton's watch in 1998. Saddam was a fucker, but so are at least 175 Presidents/Dictators/Prime Ministers around the world. Including our own, probably without exception, all the way back to Washington.

And I couldn't help but wonder, given the speed these houses are rebuilt at, and salaries paid to people who have good camera presence but aren't exactly crafstmen, how many Habitat houses could you build for the production cost of one 'Extreme Makeover?' How many sub-Saharan famine victims could be fed for the catering budget this show commands?

Bottom line, second hand smoke is never as bad as TV.