This site? I love it so much, I really do, but I keep telling myself “You CanNOT spend another two hours re-reading every thread you just spent two hours reading. You have work and chores to do!!!”
Then I do it anyway.
Is this guy perhaps Jeff Goldblum? His latest interview with Stephen Colbert was like following a maze. But it was funny!
My wife will sometimes watch ABC World News Tonight, their early-evening network news program. The last 22 minutes of that program are absolute time wasters.
The program is structured so that they present their 2 to 4 top news stories in a row at the start of the program (taking 7 to 8 minutes), then go to a commercial break. From that point on, the show is more commercials than news: they come back from an ad break, show 60-90 seconds of sound-bite news stories, and go back into another break.
Even worse, going into each of those breaks, anchor David Muir will tease at an upcoming story, but that story is frequently not what’s shown in the next segment: it’s near the end of the program, making the viewer wait through a ton of ads (mostly for nutritional supplements, insurance, and prescription drugs) before finally seeing that particular story.
I’m retired, but still enjoy teaching chess and bridge.
After a 2 hour training session, I need to relax.
So I watch something mindless like ‘Love Island.’
We have watched “Washington Week” on PBS for years, through many hosts, starting with Paul Duke and now with Jeffrey Goldberg. I absolutely cannot stand him. He will begin asking a question of a panelist and invariably goes off into all manner of asides and hems and haws and “witty” comments until he finally gets to the point and lets them answer. Every week I sit there and shout “get to the G-damn point!” at the screen. He’s the moderator but he just can’t shut up! Drives me crazy!
The National Lampoon once published a parody of a small town newspaper, which included local TV listings.
One program was an old B-movie shown at 10:00 AM every weekday, appropriately named, “Timewasters Theater”.
Whenever I see this thread title, I remember that.
… The Dacron (Ohio) Republican-Democrat!
“One Of America’s Newspapers”
I’d leave a copy casually tossed on my coffee table, and friends would pick it up, and pretty soon go “Wha…?”
And this is relevant because quirky humor has always been my favorite time-waster. Does anyone need an entire side of a Firesign Theater album recited off the top of my head?
I got to do that when a client said there’d be a forty-minute wait on a multi-country conference call, and could someone in our office recite something filling that time, to calibrate/EQ each location?
Cue Nick Danger:
Los Angle’-ese, he walks again by night.
Out of the fog, into the smog …[cough,cough]
Relentlessly… ruthlessly… “I wonder where Ruth is?”(et cetera)
“We can’t fill time like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville…”
My mother usually watched ABC World News Tonight, and yes, the show is full of time wasters and teasers.
I’m about to unsubscribe from all my newsletters once more, because even very fine journalists need an editor but that’s not a thing anymore. Without an editor, people tend to write 10,000 words making the same point over and over.
Just as in the olden days when the pile of unread New Yorkers grew and grew, and with it a crushing sense of reading obligation, my inbox tends to fill me with dread since I can’t keep up with the barrage of words. The words are on very fascinating topics, but there are too many words.
And there are far too many interesting topics.
I stopped watching local news broadcasts many years ago, because I could no longer handle the stupidity. In an half-hour broadcast, far too many stories began with the anchor starting the story, followed by “we now take you to some random idiot we found on the street, who is going to say something totally obvious, adding nothing to this story. Take it away, Bubba!”
They could probably fit twice as many stories into the broadcast if they’d stop wasting time with this nonsense.
Hulu has these shows called “____ wars". Customer wars, neighborhood wars, road wars.
Basically TikTok videos of people acting up on public.
It’s a 30 minute show but you only get 5 minutes worth of videos.
They’ll play half a video, go to commercials, and when they come back they play the first half again along with the rest of the video.
It’s insane! Lol
No. What’s insane is that any of us watch that contrived garbage. Just say “No!” to content-free entertainment. If it quits being viewed it’ll quit being made.
I can waste an unholy amount of time picking dust out of baseboard cracks, furnace vents or anything that attracts such debris.
I even have specific tools for each task.
It’s a very unpredictable time suck though and can only be enjoyed after the dust re-accumulates.