Other Yesterday Occurrences.

I was home all day yesterday because on Thursdays and Fridays I usually just bunker down and do schoolwork until my eyes bleed, and I usually have the news on in the background (I don’t have cable but I have an AppleTV and most of the news apps have a live streaming feature) and so I saw the very brief report when a small yellow plane crash landed on a golf course in Santa Monica. It was interesting, but that sort of thing actually kind of happens not infrequently in a place as big as LA.

But then … BUT THEN … the world began to learn that it was Harrison Ford flying the thing and oh my god it was like someone lit the planet on fire! In fact, if someone had actually lit the entire world on fire that probably would have gotten bumped to the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Now I like Harrison Ford just as much as any other good red-blooded American and, sure his politics are kind of retrograde, but he’s like seventy years old and I’m just happy that he’s not standing pantsless in his yard screaming “GET OFF MY LAWN!” at the squirrels.

I’m not making fun of Harrison Ford (I just want to clarify that in case he is reading this from his hospital bed; Get well soon Harry!), I’m making fun of the fact that no one gave two shits about a little plane crash until Han Goddamn Solo was on board. I was sitting right here where I am sitting right now as I write this and I seriously spent some time trying to decide if Harrison Ford’s plane crash was news or not. I guess it is, in so far as a plane crash is news, and — yes — I guess it is news if only because he is such an iconic figure that he transcends simple celebrity, but other things happened yesterday too.

Yesterday a plane full of people slid off a runway at LaGuardia and nearly into the freezing waters of Flushing Bay, the LAPD locked down the dorms at my college because some idiots were firing a handgun, forty miles of traffic was stranded on a freeway in Kentucky, NASA put a probe in orbit around that dwarf planet Ceres — you know, the one that appears to have a couple of bright lights on its surface. This is to say nothing of the fact that some raving lunatic recently slashed the face of the American ambassador to South Korea, that somebody knocked over a shipment of gold in North Carolina, that the Iraqi Army if right now trying to retake Tikrit, some silly Republicans are trying to gin up a controversy over what email account Hillary Clinton has been using, Jodi Arias was sentenced yesterday, and for the first time in a century a tortoise was born in the Galapagos Islands.

I guess I’m just in a complain-y mood this morning, but doesn’t it seem like that in the age of the 24-hour news cycle and instant information, that we would have the time, the ability, and the inclination to care at least a little bit about all of the things and not care so much about only one or two of the things?

I think that is all I wanted to say about that.

Oh! Wait! One last thought:

If I had participated in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I would be too afraid of karma to even go outside, much less fly my own plane.

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