Is it me, or...

...is the news getting more and more stupid every day?
Take today, for example.
Kids are now using webcams to film themselves in street races.
The federal government is selling items seized from grow-ops...to drug dealers.
China is fourth on Canada's list of foreign aid recipients, even thought the Chinese government is looking to spend umpty-billion dollars buying Noranda. The money, said an Ottawa flunkie, is going to support "social and political reform" in China.
As of today, Bush is still leading in the polls.

Robert Heinlein dubbed the last half of the 20th century "the Crazy Years": a time of rocketing illiteracy, public apathy and general inanity and insanity. If only he could have lived to see the world we're dealing with now: people eating sheep's asshole on prime time television for money; asshole sheep voters in the millions absolutely certain that Iraq was behind 9/11; fundycostals (tm) everywhere uniting to try to "save" marriage by preventing its extension to loving, committed couples on the grounds of a missing Tab A or Slot B.

It's enough to make me sound a retreat. Or, as the British Army famously defined it, "an adjustment of the front".

Luckily, amidst the dreck and hokum inhabiting pop culture these days, one can find the beginnings of an anti-moronic backlash.
Every week, it seems, somebody has minted a brand new reality show. "Let's see," the thinking (?) goes, "can we find a married man and put him on an island with a bunch of sluts...would he commit adultery in a large shallow pond filled with maggots and leeches? And if we offered the women $250 for each creature they ate, and $1000 per creature inhaled mid-orgasm....and oh! Suppose one of the men was not married, but in fact was gay, and had to act straight...wouldn't that be funny?"
Yeah. As funny as a brain-ectomy.
But strangely enough, the reality weeds aren't choking the life out of television. Far from it. In addition to the previously extolled Joan of Arcadia, there's the CSI megalith and its related shows (Navy NCIS,. Medical Investigation). There's Desperate Housewives, the Sunday night hit that manages to satirize suburbia by playing it ever-so-slightly bent. On the Canadian front, there's Corner Gas. And sixteen years old and going strong, The Simpsons. And that merely scratches the screen. It's as if somebody somewhere has heard our prayers. TV God, we beseech thee, canst thou not put all reality television on its own network and culleth the rot out of television? No, my child, but I shall ensureth the remainder of programming will satisfyeth the most discerning viewer, amen and hallelujah.

Hollywood has seen a virtual explosion of intelligent documentaries to counter the Dumb and Dumberer effect. Spellbound, City of God, Farenheit: 9/11 and Super Size Me entertain while they edify. Each movie will mark you and will certainly allow you to forget the plot intricacies of White Chicks.

The book best-seller list has also seen a real smartening-up. Even amongst about five thousand historical inaccuracies and glaring plot holes, you can't fault Dan Brown's attempt to remake the thriller genre. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a throughly engrossing piece of world-building from the debut novelist Susanna Clarke that manages to mix history, magic, and the gothics in a way that will leaving you panting for more after 872 pages of small type. And most shocking of all, Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, a witty and probing history and guide to...punctuation? Highly recommended, either for your garden-variety grammar stickler or somebody who really would like to know (but was afraid to ask) where, exactly, apostrophes go.

There's hope for this ol' human race yet. If only we can start checking to see if our brand-old submarines have GFCI wiring.