The Hound of the Baskervilles

Facing The Hound | The Hounds of Baskerville | Sherlock - YouTube

Lately on YouTube I’ve been running into commercials (the horror! the horror!) when I try to watch a video. Certain hosts whose channels we watch now do commercials. To me it seems to demean them.

Patty and I have been away from network TV long enough to have grown unaccustomed to commercials. We don’t watch movies that are “free with ads.” We’d rather pay a rental than have to tolerate commercials.

For several years YouTube and other sites were commercial-free. (Way back when, wasn’t cable TV pitched to us as commercial-free?) I begin to see commercials, collectively, as a kind of devil-dog, a Hound of the Baskervilles, that stalks us till it finds us. Then it hits us with the ads.

Are we going to wind up with commercials on every YouTube video? The last time I went to a movie theater, they showed 15 minutes’ worth of commercials before the Coming Attractions came on. Effectively, I was paying to see freakin’ commercials! [Run screaming to the sidewalk.]

This is cultural decay. This is “Everything’s for sale.”

I hope folks appreciate that there are no commercials here.

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Somebody said, over Thanksgiving dinner, “Well, gee, if you kicked all the perverts and sex fiends out of Congress, you wouldn’t have much left…”

Ooh-ooh! Wait a minute! What a good idea!

I mean, where is it written that our country must be governed by creeps who, when they are not collecting money from lobbyists and betraying the interests of the wider public, spend most of their time chasing girls and women up and down the halls of the Capitol Building, or anywhere else?

Like, could we at least, uh, try being governed by sane and decent people instead of perverts, thieves, liars, idiots, and loons? What could it hurt, just to try it for a little while? We could always go back to a pervocracy, if we felt we really had to.

The American people, by electing Donald Trump, made it clear that they want people in office who will drain the Swamp–that is, Washington, D.C. Drain the Swamp, clean out the corruption.

Only of course the Swamp does not want to be drained. The Swamp resembles the Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles: one false step by man, pony, or dog, and it’s death–sucked all the way down to the bottom. I’m getting a sense that Washington does that to the people that we send there.

There’s something to be said for keeping all the crooks in Washington. It’s easier to keep on eye on them. Except nobody does seem to keep an eye on them, and they keep on wasting our money, mismanaging the country, and chasing girls and women up and down the halls. One close look at D.C., and you’ll be convinced John Calvin was right about Total Depravity and Original Sin.

Term limits might help, if you could ever get Congress to vote to put themselves out of business. Don’t hold your breath for that.

If I knew what to do, I’d tell the world; but I don’t. The Swamp will fight to stay alive and groping. The Swamp is rich, strong, and totally unfettered by any moral scruples.

Put our trust in God, and do our best.