If you don't have anything to say …

don't say anything.

But if you do – and you'd rather it not be public – make sure you're not saying it on a hot mic.

You win games. Football, baseball, Scrabble, checkers … those are games. Shutting down the government is NOT a game and you should not suggest that you want to "win."

Especially when 800,000 furloughed federal employees aren't winning at all.

I'm kind of wishing we could all go back to a time when ABC, CBS and NBC aired news programming at 6:30 p.m. Or was it 6 p.m.? CNN launched in 1980, but even then wasn't a major player for news.

MSNBC hit the airwaves in the summer of 1996, followed three months later by Faux Fox News. The Clinton impeachment (I did NOT have sex with that woman!) happened in 1998, and cable news was ready. Viewers hunkered down in front of their screens, taking sides and watching every last finger-shaking defense from the President of the United States.

And the news hasn't been the same since. And neither have our leaders.

And that's the way it is.

Good night, Chet. Good night, David.

I've turned into one of those people

I used to think they were snobs, or held themselves to an impossibly high standard. Maybe you've felt the same way, upon hearing that new couple announce they "don't watch television."

Well, I can't say I don't watch it at all. I spend half an hour a day with Alex Trebek. Because I'm old like that. And because my husband likes Jeopardy, so it's 30 minutes of quality time he and I spend together.

My husband also likes cable news. Me? Not so much. I've also turned into one of those people who gets her news, skewed as it is, from Facebook.

I started watching Beasts of the Southern Wild last night, but 10 minutes into it I couldn't see where it was going and wasn't interested enough to find out. I am, perhaps, a good candidate for Short Attention Span Theatre.


It's not that I don't get plenty of screen time. I'm at the computer or on my phone or tablet several hours daily. PRODUCTIVE hours, lemme tell ya. I log my daily food in LoseIt, use the MapMyRun app to track my daily workout, get my creativity on with Instagram and read your blogs on Feedly.

And then there's Pinterest.

I'm also an Imperial Mahjong whiz, and I'M CERTAIN I'm doing my brain a lot of good finding matches and tapping tiles. (My dad's wife got me hooked on mahjong. I've uninstalled it from every device I own, many times, but it's very cracklike for me. And as long as the laundry gets done and dinner is served, I'm not hurting anyone. Heh.)

I've lost so many paper lists halfway through a grocery run that I've started using an app (currently trying out ZipList) for shopping trips. Because while I might misplace a scrap of paper, my phone is permanently attached to my body.

Just ask my husband. Heh.

There are downsides to all this technology, of course. I haven't memorized a phone number in years. If I needed to reach my daughter, for instance, using your phone, I couldn't manage it AT ALL. She moved to a new house almost two years ago and I still don't know her address. It's in the palm of my hand (or on my laptop), and I've recently started saying you only need to know where to find information. Why waste brain cells memorizing something you can look up? Brain cells are a limited commodity, after all.

I'll get back to television soon. Pre-season pro football starts less than a month from now. (I know, pretty soon we're going to have year-round a year-round NFL schedule.) And college football begins August 29. Football is my reality TV, and I'll watch it all day long.

I could also watch the hummingbirds all day long. I took my first picture of one yesterday with the DSLR, and have been trying to catch one with the camera on my phone, a nearly impossible (for me) exercise. The feeder is hanging right outside the sliding glass door next to our dining table, and I can tell you that while last night's curried pork was delicious, I certainly wasn't paying as much attention to savoring my food as I was to watching the birds.

Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But it's an entertaining thing. And probably a better use of my time than playing mahjong.

I hope you don't think I'm a snob because I don't watch CNN. Or Dancing With the Stars. How about you? What are your go-to apps? And, more importantly, how do you get your news?

Nowhere to run

A friend texted me yesterday afternoon: Did you hear about the explosions in Boston?

For someone who has run distance races in the distant past (not a marathon … yet), I'm ashamed to say I'd forgotten yesterday was the Boston Marathon.

[Aside: Runner's World is now delivered silently to my Nook and I have not read a word of any issue in a couple of months. Nor have I read any printed magazines in a couple of months. Perhaps I should stop subscribing to magazines. The reason I mention this is because they always have a big run-up-to-Boston issue. Which I missed.]

I stayed glued to the news until mid-evening, when I just couldn't take the senselessness of it any longer.

It wasn't just the senselessness of setting off bombs at the finish line of a marathon in Boston on Patriot's Day. It also was the senselessness of parsing the President's remarks, the guessing and second-guessing who might be responsible, the inaccurate reporting, the conjecture.

My last thought last night, and my first this morning, is of the – irony isn't the right word, but I can't think of one right now – of a situation in which athletes and families who support them and cheer them on and help them train, are cut down at the end, missing limbs, maimed, injured, dead.

If this were Syria or Lebanon or Israel or Palestine or Jordan or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or [insert name of Middle Eastern country here], they wouldn't have cut into regular programming to follow a breaking news story of a couple of bombs going off in a major city. That happens almost daily in [insert name of Middle Eastern country here]. It would be like stopping the normal broadcast line-up to follow a car wreck here in North America.

But this is North America, the United States of America, where setting off bombs in cities rarely happens. The 24/7 news cycle dictates that the networks will fill the air with something. The sponsors are paying for it, after all. One reporter said all those thousands of runners "signed up" to run the Boston Marathon. Well, I guess technically she's right. But if they didn't qualify for it by finishing a previous marathon in a specified time, then they raised a bunch of money for charity. That's how you get into Boston. You don't just pay your fee and pick up your number.

I'm feeling cynical this morning. And angry. And incredibly, awfully sad. Kind of like I did only a few short months ago, watching the news from Connecticut. I'm feeling helpless, discouraged, disheartened.

I'm feeling like there's nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.