This week’s episode is a chill trip under the sea. Calm waters, whale song, churning motors, occasional sonar, and some drift. An underwhelming odyssey beneath the waves for relaxation, or a break from the bickering “brolitics” of the creatures living above sea level.

And let me save you the time James Cameron, I am positive if we fastened a microphone outside of our jolly ****** submarine it wouldn’t sound like this. I am not an oceanographer (well spaced clapping hand emojis). Like, I went to school hoping I would be a radio disc jockey… When my biology professor sister casually dropped like, yeah, when whales die they just sink to the bottom of the ocean. I was honestly flabbergasted, I didn’t assume whale hearses were a thing, I just—I don’t know what I thought…

Speaking of odysseys, I was at the movies with my wife this week, and there’s just a slew of trailers featuring the awesome power of man. Ancient long-haired dudes with pythons for arms and giant mythological weaponry clasped in catcher-glove-sized hands. Magic pew-pew-pewing all around. One was He-Man, one was some assassin… I step away from adult movies (to watch Disney/Pixar) for a bunch of years, and now the trailers are all The Northman.

And I’m in my wife’s ear like, “We dudes love fantasies where we’re awkward twerps as children, go away for years, and come back home as gods. And everyone is so glad you’re back. Totally starstruck—”

And she’s like, “What’d you say?”

And then in the trailer I hear a character say, “Odysseus…” and I turn to my wife and I’m like, “Never mind, I do want to see this movie.”

And she’s like, “Shut up, I’m trying to watch this.”

So I watched a movie this week—quietly.

Oh, also on our underwater theme… why is it that when you order anchovies on pizza, the pizzeria assumes you are a fish aficionado? When I order pepperoni, it’s not meat coverage from crust to crust. Ordering anchovies equals triple coverage by default. I ordered anchovies with olives once, and when I opened the pizza box, it looked like the bottom of a pond. It tasted like the ocean—with olives…

Men and women of pizza-dom, chill the **** out.

Star Trek TOS Enterprise bridge ambience at warp speed for sleep, study, and deep focus. 8 hours of continuous space ambience featuring engine hum, starfield visuals, and a steady bridge atmosphere.

Visual episode with no talking or interruptions.

Let’s get off-world again this week with a visual ambience bonus episode. In the spirit of the recent space news (the only non-horrifying news from last week)—the Artemis crew flying around the moon and giving us astounding images of Luna’s far side—let’s head to the bridge of Captain Kirk’s 1960s Enterprise and wander through space at warp speed.

TV static and ambient drift is this week’s episode—the sound of no television signal, i.e., no channel transmitting.

I’m old (we’ve discussed this). I realize that TVs today just have a logo bouncing around the screen (yes, I'm thinking of the Office). In the old days, we would see static or “TV snow”—random electromagnetic noise displayed on screen (in the absence of A Current Affair). And that electromagnetic noise gets passed to the TV speaker—“you deal with it” and that sounded like “KSSSSSSSSSSSSSH.”

In the old days, when humans got mad at the TV, they had to stand, walk across a room, and turn a knob to change the channel. And many channels were unassigned, so we had to traverse multiple screens of “KSSSSSSSSSSSSSH” before seeing another human talking at us.

Speaking of changing the channel—modern cable news.

Cable news is essentially sports radio (they even have betting now). Drive through any major media market (NY, LA, Philly—I love you, Philly! **** the haters) and listen to any sports radio station: bickering, crazy talk that all purports to lay the groundwork for fixing the home team’s problems. One subject that covers the entire day, ad infinitum.

There was a point in the ’90s–2000s when television leadership realized their anchor—a stiff doofus reading current events—wasn’t great for keeping eyeballs. And TV heads wanted audiences sticking around for twangy erectile dysfunction ads. Execs realized that arguing and debate among ***holes with insincere smiles and unearned gravitas equaled prolonged viewership.

The problem is that on-air talent often doesn’t know what the **** they’re talking about, especially when they drift from the teleprompter. I’ve worked in television (we’ve discussed this too) and have witnessed anchors interject into on-air time with riffing—saying profoundly incorrect ****.

One anchor claimed a local basketball phenom with size 18 feet wore bigger shoes “than even Shaq” (Shaq wears, like, size 22). Another anchor, during a breaking live takeover of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson River landing), claimed that whatever caused the plane’s engine to fail must have occurred in Connecticut airspace, because “once you take off from Laguardia you are almost immediately over Connecticut. All you have to do is look at a map to refute that dumb ****. A third anchor notoriously killed whole segments of the 11 o’clock news to make room for ad-libs. How long the show floated unscripted depended on how many beers the anchor had with dinner.

Yes, inconsequential examples. Like these idiot anchors and TV producers, I’m a communications major, so my criticism is limited to the banal. Yet one needn’t give these TV screws the benefit of the doubt on more complex subjects if they can’t get Shaq’s shoe size right.

If you must watch the news, I would suggest you find an independent source you can trust. If I were to suggest guardrails, it would be: follow sources that tell you what’s happening rather than pitting opposing sides against each other to argue about it. If the channel you’re watching brings up a two-box with a couple of ***holes about to square off anything but Tom Brady—change the channel.

PS: Shaq had one of the last awesome Reebok basketball sneakers—the Shaqnosis… For me, it’d be third place to Dee Brown, second to Shaq, first to Allen Iverson’s The Question (honorable mention for John Wall’s weird-looking pair).