When this blog started, newspapers were still writing, “so-called Web logs, or ‘blogs’ …”
From February 22, 2012, “Actions speak louder than ‘Satanic baby-killer’ fantasies“:
Syndicated reruns got me hooked on the old CBS show Early Edition years after it was cancelled.
It’s a lot of fun. If you haven’t seen it, it starred a pre-Friday Night Lights Kyle Chandler as Chicagoan Gary Hobson. Every morning, mysteriously, he receives the next day’s newspaper — a newspaper with tomorrow’s news.
Given this advance warning of the traumas and tragedies about to unfold, Chandler races around the city, trying to avert disasters, rescue the innocent and save as many lives as he can.
This plays havoc with his life. It disrupts his career and upends his relationships. He ultimately has to surrender any thought of a normal life or even of ever getting to take a day off.
He resents this — resents the ceaseless, relentless responsibility that comes with the “early edition.” But what choice does he have? Lives are at stake. If he took a day off or ignored the paper when it arrived, then people would die.
And you can’t have a show in which the hero is willing to sit around on his butt, just letting innocent people die without even trying to save them. That wouldn’t make him the hero of the show. It would make him a callous, apathetic monster.
All of which is to say, yet again, that I cannot believe that my “pro-life” friends really believe the extraordinary things they claim to believe. Because if they really believed the things they claim to believe, that would make them callous, apathetic monsters. And I don’t think that’s what they are. …
Early Edition isn’t on any of the streaming networks, but you can find some episodes — including the pilot — on YouTube. That’s where the screen-shot below is from. TV producers in 1996 didn’t anticipate how easy it would one day be to pause the screen, so they didn’t bother writing the actual articles in Chandler’s magic newspaper. The text they used here appears to be copy-and-pasted from the manual for a Macintosh printer.
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