Emergency law, wish list of large companies and voter guide: News in 90
FLORIDA TODAY’s Rob Landers brings you some of the most important local news of the day in 90 seconds.
Time.
I’ve become a little obsessed with it over the last few years. I’ve written a piece about time travel and am working on another about the nature of time. I’ve always said that the one superpower I want more than any other is the ability to manipulate time.
Need a few more hours to work on a column? Just stop time. Want to get through the root canal with the very talkative dentist? Speed it up.
I feel like I barely have any time to research my dynasty fantasy football team lately, especially with the draft coming up. And that’s why I’m so amazed at how much time some people have to spend to carry out their… projects? plans? missions?
You’re probably confused. And I don’t blame you. But if you were to go through the emails I get every morning, you’d understand.
There’s a guy, I don’t know how he does it, but he sends a mini obituary to my inbox – and I assume to a lot of other people’s – whenever a celebrity dies. Maybe he has inside information or a direct line to St. Peter up there at the gates of heaven. Either way, I’m amazed that someone has the time to write something like that, put it in an email and send it to me, especially when they know I’m not going to print it out.
But that’s innocent enough.
In June of this year, there was a guy who emailed me saying he would write to me every day for the entire Pride month. His goal? I quote: “My goal is to seek knowledge and truth in journalism about evil, cultish Pride.”
After eight days of receiving emails, two of which I read, I wrote back to the gentleman and asked him to remove me from his email list.
“I understand,” I told him. “You hate gays.”
He is entitled to his opinion, however narrow-minded it may be. Go ahead and hate me all you want, I just didn’t want to expose myself to his hatred every day. He respected my wishes, but only after sending one final email with an attachment containing the 33 letters he intended to poison my email with.
The guy then asked me if I would stop publishing his letters to the editor. Of course not, as long as they met our submission standards.
But the winner of the award for “Too Much Time” has to go to a guy who emailed me earlier this week to tell me about a study he recently conducted. He said he watched and documented every television commercial that aired during the “Today Show” for the past four months. Yes, four months. No, I’m not kidding. (But wait, it gets better.)
His conclusion: Although 72 percent of the US population is Caucasian, “white men have virtually disappeared” from the commercials he documented.
“When they appear in commercials, they are either old, ugly and sick or they are the partner of a (black – not the word he used) woman and have no speaking role,” the man wrote, before going on to talk about how many of them featured interracial couples. “Most couples in TV commercials consist of a white woman and a (black) man. Are the owners of TV trying to program the young people of today?”
“Looks like white lives don’t matter.”
There’s no point in even trying to respond to someone like that. It would be pointless to try to explain demographics and the way TV shows and advertisers target certain audiences to someone who only sees things in black and white. Attempts to find out why this bothers him so much would undoubtedly be fruitless.
What is his motive for sending me this email? I am at a loss.
I guess my only other advice would be that he should stop watching so much TV and get a hobby like collecting baseball cards from before Jackie Robinson broke segregation. Either way, he definitely has plenty of time.
Speaking of time: My fantasy football team is waiting.
Contact Torres at [email protected]. You can follow him on X @johnalbertorres or on Facebook at facebook.com/FTjohntorres.
