Taiwanese animators coloring future news

Something I used to enjoy doing three times a day is becoming impossible for me to do even once.

I’m sure exposure to multiple hours of erectile dysfunction ads have conditioned you to conclude I’ve become sexually feckless.

That isn’t it and I’ll resist the manly urge to make up some face-saving “Hail, Zeus!” quotes and attribute them to my wife.

This is something lots of people do fully clothed while they’re eating breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I’m talking about watching the local news.

It’s become a bore. There nothing new about the news. Only no-frill white box cereals are less generic.

Worse, we rarely watch the news. We instead watch reporters and law enforcers talk about the news. And it’s all the same.

I swear you could take any random broadcast from the past year, re-broadcast it today, and no one would know the difference.

Happily, I’ve found a futuristic solution. And I’ll tell you all about it right after the weather (that’s what those in the news business call “a tease”)!

Few people realize it but the root of news is, in fact, new.

This was, er, news to me back when I was a young reporter in Nashville. I overheard an editor ask a police reporter, “Any news, Jimmy?”

Jimmy, a bright young wit, said, “Nope, not one single new.”

I’ve never forgotten it. News were living things reporters were duty bound to herd.

Today’s news has become like the great American bison. Too many hunters, not enough buffalo.

No where is that more obvious than the local TV news.

I still watch, of course, because seeing pretty people smile always soothes me. And after they get through the obligatory six minutes of mayhem, there’s nothing but smiles.

I like to imagine right after the five-day forecast recap, the whole happy gang skips back to some big bed behind the set to snuggle and snooze until it’s time to slap the make-up back on.

See what I did there? I put a titillating visual in your head.

And that, my friends, is the future of the news.

It will be vivid, it will be imaginative and it will hail from Taiwan.

It will be the aptly-named Next Media Animation.

I’ve been hooked ever since I saw Roger Ebert tweet about it last year.

It is the greatest news innovation since live television. They not only report the news, they recreate it and add cartoonish embellishments.

The bin Laden take down may have been the best ever. It showed brave SEAL Team 6 breaching the walls, mowing down the doomed defenders and finally the bloody coup de grace.

As all this is being shown in deliberately clunky animation, a narrator prattles on in Taiwanese. Beneath the action, subtitles scroll.

So as you read “The Americans treated the body with respect according to Muslim tradition,” you watch the SEALs from behind urinating all over the body.

I can see where some news directors might have trouble with this sort of artistic license, but I found it very compelling, especially when the 90-second clip took it even farther and depicted what happened next in Hell.

It was all so wildly profane, so sacrilegious, the station pulled it down after just 12 hours.

As this bold step may take time, I advise local broadcasters to pave the way by hiring thespians to act out the news.

This would be a huge ratings boost and viewers would immediately begin to bond with the cast.

Think of how much theatrical drama you could wring from a news segment that opened with, “A North Side woman shot a trespasser she saw peeking through her bedroom window.”

It could work with actors either playing it straight or, better still, really hamming it up. And it would be a great training ground for our next generation of actors. We’d see what it was like the exact moment the single mom realized she’d won the lottery, and the sin extravaganza of how the comely 8th grade teacher plied the boys with weed and liquor to satisfy her indecent lusts.

It’s possible the same actor could in one 30-minute broadcast die from multiple gunshot wounds, be stabbed to death in a neighbor dispute and get electrocuted stealing electricity.

It’d be an instant sensation.

Oh, how I hope I only live to see it.

It may be unethical. It may be tawdry. It may be a tad unrealistic.

But it sure would put at least a little new back in the news.

Speaking ill of the dead for fun & profit

Roger Ebert’s flip comment about the DUI death of stunt actor Ryan Dunn has ignited a debate about the propriety of speaking ill of the dead.

I believe it’s high time to bury the quaint prohibition.

Can’t speak ill of the dead? Why the hell not?

I guess it makes sense if you’re afraid of ghosts.

But for someone like me, uncomfortable with confrontation, I can’t think of a better time to honestly address consensus flaws and shortcomings of a person than when they’re no longer around to punch me.

An extreme (true) example: Just last night we were engaged in a lively bar conversation about great war movies when talk turned to a notable World War II veteran.

“Now, that guy was really mean,” said one buddy.

Mean? Kids who steal lunch money are mean, I said. The guy he was talking about was satanic, pure evil.

I don’t think I was exaggerating because the vet was . . . Hitler!

This friend of mine was so well-raised by careful, fastidious parents he was hesitant to lay it all on the table about one of history’s worst monsters. Talk about polite.

(To be perfectly honest, his folks, may they rest in peace, must have been at least partial idiots. After all, their kid spends way too much time getting drunk with me).

I refuse to place any conversational shackles on any topic that might restrain my ceaseless urge to yap.

I speak ill of the dead, the living and often speculate what kind of unformed pre-natal moron a pregnant woman might be about to spring on the rest of us.

I’ve always been that way. But I learned the hard way years ago that candor often makes aggrieved people want to strike honest men like me in the face.

So now I find it prudent to just -- pssst! -- whisper my unflattering observations.

I try and always be truthful.

Unless I’m bored. Then I make stuff up.

Just the other day I told a jealous friend with a hair-trigger temper, “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I caught Bert hitting on your wife last week at the bowling alley. He swore he’d deny it if you ever confronted him.”

It’s a despicable lie. His wife’s far too ugly for Bert or any other non-blind drunk to hit on, but the ensuing mayhem certainly had a way of demolishing the daily tedium and that’s my ultimate goal.

Really, talking ill of the dead should be a lively enterprise.

I’m thinking here of newspaper obits.

There’s no sensible reason death notices have to be so deadly dull.

They read like phone directories: “Frank died. Frank worked. Frank had kids. Frank had grandkids. Frank golfed. Say goodbye to Frank at McLaughlin & Sons Funeral Home today from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 p.m.”

It practically kills me to read obituaries.

I could change all that overnight if one insightful publisher would give me free reign over what we in the newspaper business used to call the “dead beat.”

My honest obituaries would be more lively than the sports pages.

“Frank, a Latrobe boozehound, died of the massive heart attack his friends had been predicting since 2007. Married and divorced three times, he was an emotionally distant husband, was mocked for his Moe Howard haircut, and was known to area waitresses as the town’s worst tipper. He failed to pay child support to four children who are now dysfunctional adults nursing substance abuse problems of their own. He cheated at golf, sent annoying ALL CAPS e-mails and frequently drove in the passing lane with his left turn signal on. He worked at Kennametal.”

And that would just be the standard disquisition. God have pity on the sad soul who dies owing me more than $10.

Newspaper circulations would skyrocket, what once bored would magically entertain and, best of all, everyone would be on notice they’d better start behaving -- at least those who’ve been informed they only have six months to live.

We need to talk ill of the dead to help the living understand there are consequences to going through life mean, petty and stupid.

We need warts ‘n’ all death notices that really tell it like it is.

Yes, America needs “oBITCHuaries.”