Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Blame The Media

I didn't have to be anywhere until 11:30 a.m. today, so I stayed up until nearly 3:00 last night/this morning (I'm a night owl) watching some of season two of Six Feet Under on DVD.

It was great sleeping with the windows open after all those nights of stifling A/C, but then sometime around 4:30 or 5:00 I was awoken by the sound of one, then later two or more (it was hard to tell how many) helicopters overhead. I would doze lightly for a bit, but then be repeatedly awoken by the copters.

I eventually got up to check the news on why there where copters in the sky, figuring it was either 1) Officer down, or 2) Terrorist(s) on the loose in south Minneapolis. Then I remembered that there won't be any terrorists in my neighborhood until we pull out our troops from Iraq. Whew - I just hoped no officers were down.

Turns out a duplex over on Nicollet was up in flames. The helicopters were courtesy of the local news channels. And if you've ever seen those fluffy weekday morning "news" shows (I hadn't watched in years), you can see why a duplex fire would cause the local channels to send out their forces en masse. Next time somebody in the area acidentally starts their house on fire, I hope they do it in prime time when the local channels won't be so quick to send out their copters. (Though golly, can folks live without an overhead shot of a fire??)

And when the terrorists do follow the troops home (#17 in in this strip) to my neighborhood, I hope they're a little less noiser in those early-morning hours than Channel 5. Because once I'm up with the noise I stay up. And going through my day on less than three hours of sleep is no fun. Then again, maybe the terrorists will sell me a rocket launcher to take care of that KSTP chopper.