* I rarely listen to morning DJs but when the Oscars were announced I wanted to hear on my way to work. This show's host does a gossip/news (well really "news") piece every day so this one was about the nominations. She went through the big awards, talking about what was expected and what were not. Then she got to the Best Foreign-Language Film. After going through these she then talked about how many people were surprised that Apocalypto and Letters from Iwo Jima weren't nominated and then compounded the error by describing these surprises in some detail. Now this host used to be a CNN anchor so I expected some minimal journalist integrity (even though anchors aren't real journalists; they're best summed up by the British term "newsreaders"). Instead she just showed that she was making much of this up or at the very least using ill-informed friends as sources. I emailed of course pointing out that it was impossible for either of those two films to be nominated considering that they hadn't been submitted for the award and were anyway US productions and therefore ineligible. Naturally no reply.
* One of my late-blooming guilty pleasures is watching football. Not like most people watch undoubtedly because I have zero interest in who wins and frequently couldn't even tell you who was playing in a game I had on at that moment. It's the whole strategy thing I think. Anyway, during a recent game one of the announcers started talking about how complicated one of the coaches contract situation was and that untangling it would be a "Herculean task." This prompted one of the others--probably either Howie Long or Terry Bradshaw--to say that he knows about Hercules from cartoons and movies and that is really strong. Now apart from the cartoons and movies bit which is really about all we'd expect, it was a bit embarassing that he completely had no idea what the reference was really about.
* A local radio station (not the one above) has taken to running little segues into commercials, things along the lines of "It's time to pay our bills." They're moderately clever and the instinct to foreground the operations is laudable but in practice these instead bring so much attention to the fact that we now have to listen to commercials that the segues are backfiring. (Really "have to listen" isn't quite right; I usually just change the station.)