Thursday Thirteen #405

1. I win Jeopardy when I play along at home, but I doubt I'd fair well in the actual TV program.

2. The rumor is there may be a reboot of Xena: Warrior Princess in the works. This was my favorite TV show when it was on from 1995 - 2001. I think though the rumor is simply that - rumor.

3. Have you noticed the lack of originality in TV and movies? Seems like the networks and Hollywood simply recycle the same stories and storylines over and over. I mean, how many times can you remake Batman? I like Batman, but can't we come up with a new superhero?

4. I recently started watching Downton Abby. I am late coming to the show but I do find it intriguing. From what I've read, it is historically accurate, or as historically accurate as historical fiction can be.

5. I am a big fantasy reader and watcher, but two of my three closest friends neither watch nor read the genre. I find it interesting that opposites attract in this area.

6. TV used to be the biggest part of most people's social down time, but I think these days that time is taken up with social media, funny cat videos, and video games. Not all of it, of course, or TV would fail, but the TV's share has fallen. Might that have something to do with the lack of original programming?

7. My electricity has been blinking off and on for a while. It did it steadily for a week, then stopped, but this morning it went off again. It is very frustrating. I have to reset the internet and can't stream my TV programs.

8. The electric company sent out a notice asking if we would participate in a program that would allow *them* to turn my air conditioning off during times of peak power usage. Here's a story about it from the local TV station. I have asthma and can't take the high humidity, so we declined. Plus we want to be in control of our own power usage, thank you very much. If we want to pay the bill then we should be able to do that. But what's to stop them from putting such a device on everyone's unit? They could do it and all you could do is complain about it. The consumer no longer has power, and I'm not talking about the electrical kind.

9. Speaking of power, who do you think really runs the United States these days? Is it the elected government, or the unelected and stock-holder owned big-money corporations?

10. We don't mind letting big corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, or Apple having all of our personal information, including private documents that we place in "the cloud" for safekeeping. We trust a big insurance company to make our health care decisions. But we distrust the government to do or keep anything. Why is that? Nobody can tell me the difference. It's not like we have a choice either way. If you want to use any technology product, you have to agree to their little EULA documents. How is that different than a law?

11. I think we have too many laws on people, but not enough regulations on companies. We have it backwards. We regulate the personal lives of nobodies but let the big guys do whatever they want. I'd rather it be the other way around.

12. In fact, the regulations on small businesses are different than those on large corporations, and generally much more punitive. This is true of small farms as well.

13. I'm not sure how I went from TVs to farming regulations, but sometimes Thursday Thirteen just works out that way.



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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 405th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.