big bang theory

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Why Does Prime Time TV Have to Suck?


I would like to know who decides what should be on prime-time television. Why? Either they lack material or they are too afraid to say “no, this sucks” to the network executives. For me, there are exactly two network prime-time television shows I watch all the time, The Big Bang Theory and Moms. For about a season and a half I liked The Good Wife but then they turned it into a prime-time soap opera and lost me.

What happens to every prime-time television show, in my opinion, is they do not seem to comprehend year two. Take Jane the Virgin, for example. How long did they plan on keeping her a virgin? I cannot imagine there being much excitement over a women pledge to hold on to her virginity until marriage. And so that show should have ended after one season; Jane gives birth and live moves on.

Networks love crime shows and medical shows. The last good medical show I watched was not on prime-time, it was Nurse Jackie. They also knew when to end it. Good for them! Law & Order was great during the Lenny the cop era but when he died so did the show in reality. NBC saw fit to keep it on life support but after a while they knew they had to pull the plug. And Law & Order SVU was really gritty for a few years but ever since Mariska Hargitay decided she should write, direct, produce and act in it, well, it too has truly sucked. It needed to end at least 3 years ago.

The original CSI knew when to call it quits and it was still fairly good in its final episodes.

Ah, then someone had the bright idea to do a military law show, NCIS. It too was pretty good for about 2 seasons even with its constant errors over what agents of NCIS can actually do and what the show portrayed, very dissimilar. Then they decided to put an NCIS in New Orleans and another in Los Angeles. Those are two cities where the actual naval population is extremely small. The Department of the Navy is not going to put its resources in places where its footprint is close to non-existent. NCIS Norfolk, NCIS Charleston, NCIS Pensacola, NCIS San Diego, NCIS Honolulu, all places where there is a considerable Naval/Marine population would have been better choices but then they aren’t glitzy, just real. Oh yeah, I always wanted to ask why so many of the original NCIS scenes, purportedly in the Virginia countryside looked so much like the California countryside.

For medical shows the executives need to watch the old series St. Elsewhere. Well-written with great story lines and characters. Believable, something most of today’s medical shows are not. For police dramas, Hill Street Blues was really good. Why is it so difficult for today’s network executives to look at old-time extremely popular television shows and take notes on how it’s done. Here are a few more they may want to view for cutting edge extremely popular television, All in the Family, Taxi, Cheers, and M.A.S.H. Each show ran a long time, drew large audiences, and were of course extremely successful. Let’s do away with shows that a dumb beyond belief, I nominate Two Broke Girls and The Odd Couple for that category. The old Odd Couple was good. This version is very blah!

Come execs, put it on the line! Create a show that shocks us, that makes us think, that is gritty, that is poignant, that takes on the issues of the day head-on, I recommend teen-age issues where the main character winds through the headaches and heartaches of growing up. A story with a moral, a story where bad things happen to good people, a story that does not have a happy ending and where characters work their way out of the show while others join.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

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The Face of God


universe

The above is a picture taken by the Hubble Deep Space telescope.  Every one of those points of light is a galaxy.

For some time now I have been trying to come to grips with a question I have had, is God and the universe one and the same?   I have come to the conclusion that the answer is a resounding YES!

Yesterday I heard a noted English scientist who is also a priest in the church of England say that science is all about figuring out what things are and religion is all about why things are.  In essence he said that science and religion complement each other.  Problematic to such a belief is the fact that many noted scientists contend God does not exist, while many religions say large amounts of scientific data is wrong.

Jinx 003

The above is a picture of my cat Jinxie.  She has no knowledge of there being a God and as long as I feed her and give her a place to sleep, she does not care a wit about science.  But in her, as in all creatures, is the hand of God.  But her ancestors looked more like the picture below.  This is a scientific fact, but it does not discount “intelligent design.”

cats

Man is famous for coming up with answers and solutions to things and problems he does not understand.  Until Copernicus, everyone believed the Earth to be the center of the universe.  To suggest otherwise was considered heresy which is exactly why Copernicus did not publish until just before he died.  Copernicus only moved the center of the universe to the sun but that was a huge step, and one most people of his day could not accept.  Now, we not only know that the sun is not the center of the universe, but that our sun is no where near the center of our own galaxy, and that is a good thing!  No one with a lick of sense argues this fact any more either.  Why?  We improved our knowledge of all things around us.  But all good scientists accept that every answer gives birth to at least two more questions we had not previously considered.

A Roman Catholic priest, of all people, George Lemaitre, came up with a theory in the 1920s that we all know as “The Big Bang Theory” today.  After Edwin Hubble figured out earlier that decade that the universe was expanding, Lemaitre came to the logical conclusion that as you went back in time the universe must have been smaller until it was a single tiny point of energy.  The two question that answer brought forth are, “What triggered the big bang” and “Where did that point of energy come from?”  To this the physicist, Steven Hawking, said that to know that answer is to understand the mind of God.  Not bad for a guy who is seemingly an atheist!  But in Hawking’s statement we find the perfect answer to science’s most thought provoking question.

Even more, in a funny way, the Bible’s book of Genesis is proven true, at least in its first instance, the declaration that prior to anything there was darkness, and the first creation was light.  This is 100% in line with the Big Bang theory.

For some time now quantum physicists have been looking for the every elusive “Higg’s boson.”  This particle is also known as the God particle.  This is important because it is believed that this tiny particle is the most basic part of “mass.”  Mass is what gives everything weight, or for that matter, existence.  They think they’ve found it, but are still discussing the fact.  It is called the “God particle” because they believe it was the first most basic particle at the time of the Big Bang.  They are saying, “here’s what God started with and went on to make everything else.”

Another group of scientists, astro-physicists, figured out what the chances are that we human beings came into being at all.  What they came up with was the odds are so slight that under any other circumstance, in consideration of anything else, we would entirely discount to possibility.  At that point you can rightfully insert that when, 13.7 billion years ago God caused the Big Bang, He also created the absolute certainty that, at least here on Earth, we would come into existence.  Now, remember back to my original statement of how many stars are in our galaxy and how many galaxies exist?  The math states that there are at least 200 billion billion (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe.  Given that intelligent life evolved once, why not twice, or ten times, or a million times?  Science cannot discount such a possibility and God has not.

Historical man goes back 7,000 years, more or less.  But it is only in the last 100 years that we have evolved enough to begin to understand our place in the universe, and for the most part, we really do not know very much.  But the fact is, God did not give us brains so we could sit on our hands!  It is only logic that intelligent design that built intelligent beings would want those beings to educate themselves.  It is a fact that every answer to every single question we have, God has placed in plain sight.  But it has always been up to us to see and understand what is right in front of us.  The only thing which keeps us from understanding God is our own prejudices and biases.  God certainly is not hiding anything, so why would anyone want to deny the possibility of anything, including God!