Your Aging Public Television Spinmeisters: Stevie Nicks and Me

We taped "The Line" yesterday for broadcast tonight, and, sure, I'd like to somehow confiscate all the televisions in New Mexico about right now and prevent anyone the chance to see the show. Stupid things were said, and said poorly by your humble blogger, but overall I think those interested in the whole "AYP" thing (it's strange how it's turning away from being referred to as "testing" and toward "AYP") might find it worthwhile.

Especially worth watching for the AYP wonks out there is the opening segment of "In Focus" featuring NM Dept. of Ed. Secretary Veronica Garcia, Albuquerque Teacher Federation head Ellen Bernstein and some guy whose name I always seem to forget. Garcia and Bernstein are especially good at explaining what's going on here with testing, sorry... I forgot the new lingo... "AYP".

That first segment with Garcia et. al. will be on at 7:00, if I read KNME's schedule right, tonight on Channel 5. Viewers are strongly encouraged to smash their televisions at the end of this segment to avoid any possibility of being subjected to the rest of "The Line" show. Besides, won't it just be emotionally freeing to smash your television? Can't you just feel the inner joy of picking up that sledgehammer and driving it down and through the damn thing?

And speaking of public television, my wife and I made the mistake of coming across Stevie Nicks on KNME last night wearing the requisite spiderweb gownery and desperately trying to look as much like Stevie Nicks circa-1975 as possible. Some of you are going "Stevie Nicks...who the hell is that?", while the increasingly decrepit among us are shunted back to a time in which we were all supposed to buy Fleetwood Mac albums even if we weren't really sure why.

I could swear the new PBS fundraising strategy is to roll out these strange icons to 45-year olds and higher (Grateful Dead, Moody Blues, etc.), depress the Hell out of aged viewers by visually/aurally demonstrating that it ain't 1975 anymore and never will be again, and shake some money out of us as we think "Hell, it's quite obvious from watching this old washed-up Stevie Nicks in concert that I'm going to be dead soon, so I might as well give some of this increasingly unimportant money to PBS."

I wonder if that strategy is working. I just know that my wife and I literally lept at the remote control to change it from KNME Channel 5 upon seeing the woman o' spiderwebbed gownery and went back to the comforting brain death of "Law and Order".

Again, smashing the television is about the best idea going. Have a good weekend, everyone.


P.S.: Yeah, I saw today's Journal story about this year's test scores, uh AYP at Rio Grande HS. I expect to see a definite increase in these stories in upcoming weeks, especially as the constituent group of those mad at the whole AYP thing has expanded to cover Journal and other mainstream media reading/viewing groups. When La Cueva HS and Desert Ridge MS "fail", you're hitting even the Jim Villanucci KOB-AM afternoon drive-time right-wing radio crowd. What once was a "hey. we 'passed' you failed....booyah!" mentality may well turn into a "hey, this NCLB may really be stupid after all!" sentiment, and by more than us loony-left, excuse-making, public schools teachers. Let's pull up a chair and watch what happens, smashed TV or no.