What it's been like in Pennsylvania in 2024

 My home state is actually a commonwealth, but if you call it a state, only dorks like me will point that out. You'd think that living in a ... place ... that's the center of the political universe for so many months would sate the lust for attention we all have in some form.

Voting for me went smoothly. (Yay burbs!)

Not for me. A geezer of over 65 now, I watch so little broadcast TV that there are often appealing photographs of Big Stars on magazine covers and I have absolutely no idea who there are. Shows that have lengthy runs come and go and I've never seen an episode even when they're on channels I get for free with my rabbit ear antenna, which has a piece of aluminum foil wrapped on it to pick up more. 

When I'm not streaming on Netflix or Amazon, the only two services I have, I'll watch the national evening news and local news occasionally, and Jimmy Kimmel's monologue. The only show on network television I watch in full is Jeopardy! The regular version only. It makes me feel old when the contestants don't know the answer to something that is, to me and others of my generation, common knowledge. A couple of nights ago, the question was about what James Cagney mushed in Mae Clarke's face in the 1931 movie, Public Enemy. None of the three knew.

 

On Jeopardy! these days, in my part of Pennsylvania—the crucial Philadelphia western suburbs—there were, last night (Monday, November 4) a total of 22 commercials. Of those, nine were for either Trump or Harris, eight were for local races, and just five were for "normal" things like cars and prescription drugs. The ads are meant to induce at least anxiety, and often outright fear. I hit Mute on the remote and block all but a sliver of the screen with my knee, but some of the negativity seeps through. Bill Clinton was the first to target ads to the states that mattered. Apparently, it works. Thanks, Bill!

For uninteresting health reasons, my diet has been somewhat restrictive and disciplined for a few years now, and I haven't touched a drop of alcohol for two years, even though drinking was never a problem for me. Today, however, I went nuts in the grocery store and bought things to indulge in, stopping short of alcohol. It's as if I've gotten over a lengthy illness.

Watching Alex Trebek

 I watched Jeopardy! faithfully for years, often not missing an episode for many months at a time. For a couple of years in the mid aughts I'd post the Final Jeopardy! clue in the Rants &

Raves section of Craigslist, when that section was a lively, pre-social media venue for anonymous posts. I'd have the answer on top and the reader would have to scroll down far to see the question, so they could try to answer it themselves. People would write to thank me for doing this. Once, someone politely requested that I also post who won, the current champion or someone else, so I added that to the bottom. At the time, Craigslist would let you post in more than one city, so I posted in my own, which is Philadelphia, and New York. 

When television went digital in 2009 I got a government-issued voucher which enabled me to buy a converter so I could watch on my aging television set. It worked fine until one day while watching something the little green light that indicated it was on faded out. It reminded me of robots dying in science fiction movies. Although streaming wasn't a thing yet, I didn't bother replacing the converter or my television. It's best to read more, and there was always the internet and radio for current news and Netflix discs for movies. 

I moved and now have a working television but I don't have cable and the aerial reception is iffy so I rarely turn on the television unless I'm streaming movies and shows from Amazon Prime or Netflix. I was long out of the habit of watching Jeopardy! but I began watching it again after learning of the death of the show's host  Alex Trebek, of pancreatic cancer November 8, 2020. 

I liked him. I'm old and fussy about language. (If you say you "could care less" about something, I will tell you that you've just said the opposite of what you meant to.) I liked that Alex pronounced words correctly, words like "sophomore." He'd make it a three-syllable word. I read that young people are amused at the way he pronounced "genre," but he says it the way I do, with the "g" like the second g in "garage." He and I also say "houzes" instead of "housses" for the plural of "house." I don't mind that language changes over time, but it's better when it changes to make it more efficient opposed to changes due to ignorance. "All right," for example, should be spelled "alright," as with "almost" and a few other words like it, and "alright" is becoming accepted now. The same goes for the use of "hopefully." 

Watching the show airing since Trebek's death is at times heart-wrenching. Just last week, for example, he said, brightly, "Can you believe it's just two weeks until Christmas?" When you hear that now, you hear hope in his voice. 

Yes, I know some will say it's hard to feel too sorry for someone who made millions of dollars a year doing a job he loved and dying at eighty, but when you see a person directly and they're not doing something evil, you can't help feeling for them, at least a little. A thing I read about the final shows he did that makes watching them hard for me is that he'd said in the last weeks of them waves of pain would hit him, going from level two to ten, and he had to struggle to keep himself functioning. (Chemo hurts a lot.) I watch him in these final episodes, knowing from personal experience that duty can sometimes trump discomfort, and wonder whether he was feeling pain at that moment.

Uncomfortable questions about Alex Trebek

The Jeopardy! host, Alex Trebek, posted a video recently in which he described his grim medical condition—late stage pancreatic cancer. Trebek talked about it with courage, honesty, and even humor. His attitude is an admirable one.
He also asked for prayers on his behalf. 
Questions about that:

• If he lives, is that proof that prayers work?
• If he dies, is that proof that prayers don't work?
• If he lives and it means that the Christian god responded to the prayers, why would this be so? Would it be because of the volume of prayers? If true, why would that matter? 

Trebek seems to be a good person. He has participated in USO tours, donated land to conservancy organization, and donated millions to education. As a percentage of his net worth (a reported $50 million), however, his totals are not exceptional. He does his job well. There are many people, however, who are as upstanding and do their jobs well but few will ever know who they are. Their jobs are not jobs that ever touch the lives of others in any significant way, no matter how well they do them. Trebek has never cured a disease or ended suffering for anyone, to my knowledge, though he may have been a fine son/brother/father or spouse.