If networks can provide dowdy, rehashed "television events" with "limited commercial interruption," why not do the same for the Olympics?

Oh, and will egotistical sports announcers ever learn to shut up and let the action unfold? (Note to Bob Costas: It's not about you and there are loads of Americans who could have taught you how to pronounce people's and countries' names.)

Nope, instead of showing complete coverage of any event, even the opening ceremonies, NBC cuts to commercial every few minutes. I counted an average of four minutes of coverage for every two+ minutes of commercials. Not only doers this provoke people to give up on watching the station and go tidy the kitchen or balance a checkbook, thus missing those expensive ads, it creates a belief that you're not going to see much anyway so why make time to watch at all?

Self defeating strategy, at least for the advertisers who aren't going to get their money's worth. A better plan would have been to delay occasionally interrupted opening ceremonies for national broadcast, but then go right to live programming.

NBC, ever heard of a DVR? Tivo? People have these clever machines, and know how to use them. And really, no live feeds to the internet? Come on. This plan is yet another way for NBC to lose advertising revenue.

Edwards had an affair and lied about it. That puts him with anywhere between 37% and 60% of married people. It also puts him in the same club as loads of other politicians and famous people who've done much less good work.

The media will now go on and on with pseudo-outrage posing silly questions framed as examinations of trustworthiness, reliability, honor and political survival. In reality, it's the media who will choose or not choose to turn infidelity into a lead weight around Edwards image. Talking heads will tell us we should care and harp on it until we can't avoid thinking about some part of it. No one will ask whether a personal issue matters to anyone except the people involved.

As they did during Clinton's impeachment for lying about the same thing, sex, the media and opposing politicians will turn attention away from truly important matters and focus on digging through trash. How many politicians have spent years building an anti-poverty program or working on changing the crappy US health care system? How often has the media examined poverty in the US? How much did the media examine the reasons for war?

Nope, it's easier to take on a personal issue, one that many people can relate to, then inflate it into the shape of yet another political football. We're so much better at kicking people around that tossing ideas back and forth.

Three columns? The right side is mostly blank, so it makes it appear that there's more empty space than there are feminist ideas. Or, worse, that feminist thinking has gone missing.

This isn't a story, it's a way for a political operative to keep harping on his fatuous, mean spirited talking points.

Not once did Mitchell call Davis on his overbearing behavior - a strategy that works when one side is trying to be polite while the other stomps all over the place. She could simply have said, "You've got to be kidding, you're telling me you had no idea what you were doing in that campaign ad?!"

Nope, that's too straightforward. Instead this mealy mouthed lack of challenge is called, wrongly, "objectivity."

Study after study reports that doing too many things at once decreases efficiency, effectiveness and attention. Yet, we pile on the tasks and continue to cram stuff into small spaces of time and place.

What are people talking about? Are we communicating or just jabbering? Are we really so pressed for time that we have to eat, make business deals, get directions, call friends and change our clothes while driving? If so, the problem is not talking and driving, it's not making good choices about what makes a life worth living.

We don't need most of the stuff we've got jammed into our garages, spare rooms and storage lockers any more than we need to be use driving time as a sales call. As long as people think of driving as private time and cars as small mobile homes, they blur the edge between work and home, attentiveness and rest, need and safety.

We're strangled our lives with trivial tasks. By believing we need to be on the phone at all times we make hanging ourselves easy, even if we kill ourselves by accident.

Writing representatives doesn't help. I've tried that, In fact, I do it every time I go through the stupid TSA line and find yet another example of incompetence and meanness by petty nazis.

How do we get the media to do a story on how ridiculous the set up is instead of doing more fearmongering claptrap? (Ooh, we're so investigative, we snuck a gun and a disposable shaver through security!)

Surely someone at Salon.com is connected toa media mogul.