Bugged

A manager of mine at Ross Dress for Less (the ex-military guy with the white mustang convertible and penchant for X96's 10:00 mosh-pit) told me about a friend-of-a-friend who went completely nearly homocidally crazy. She went to a psychiatrist who had a simple explanation: she drank too much Diet Coke. Apparently the stuff will bug you out to the point of wanting to strangle people just to feel their Adam's apples bob.
I don't believe the manager of course, but the threat has stuck in the back of my brain like Crush by David Archuleta (have you seen the video? Not sure how I feel about it, but congrats David, on #1) on a bad day. It pokes its over-long little nose into my subconscious on days like this, when I'm just bugged. And today had such potential too. But my haircut makes me look like I'm 17 and I kept having to pansy out to child's pose ("do you feel like moderate or intense this morning?" Moderate of course, it's Saturday morning, are you crazy?) and got sucked in to 2 episodes of Americas's next top model interspersed with the Daily Show which, while it has lovely moments, is so angry and negative. Diet Coke for lunch. Bugged.

Positives are these: I enrolled, finally, in my 401k. Yes, actually, on the very day that the Dow was at its lowest in memory. My economist step-father (in that subversively positive/pragmatic way that economists are so great at) pointed out that it's a good time to invest, prices are low at least. Also, I'm going to DC this week for fall break and the timing couldn't be better.

Also: I wonder about TV. I heard this article on NPR about how advertisers, due to TiVo and other commercial-avoiding technologies, are getting more aggressive/skillful at product placement. They sited 30-Rock's Soy Joy episode (I thought it was a joke, too), where a character's hand gets stuck in a vending machine trying to grab a Soy Joy (bar?) as one of the more obvious/pointed examples. They also talked about reality tv. It's cheap (no writers, no sets) and lucrative (hey you models, drink this Diet Coke, would you?), and terrible TV (except when it's fabulous, like Dominque facing off Claire and two other girls 3 cycles later). So what's keeping the networks from doing all-reality all the time? Pertinent here, too, are shows like 30-Rock that are brilliant and critically acclaimed, but that don't get all that many viewers (because people are blind?).
So what happens to TV next? A theory: the appetite for sequels and for TV on DVD (commercial free an always on) combine to form a new medium: Independent Television. But it won't be television. Show made especially for DVD. We've already begun, sort of, with Dr. Terrible's Sing-along Blog. A friend of mine made a claim that this is the Golden Age of television, and what better way to keep that gold shiny than to separate TV from the commercial realm (could it survive?)?