Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Is John Stossel -- that guy on ABC's 20-20 -- an obnoxious doofus or what? In his always provocative segment entitled "Give Me A Break!" the other night, he indignantly complained about -- gasp! -- the fact that movie studios, when doing publicity for movies everybody hates, will selectively quote from bad reviews to make them sound like raves, and they will use actual raves by little-known pseudo-critics who write gushing praise about every movie they see. And lest anyone think maybe they were simply re-running an old Stossel piece, all of the films featured are current or very recent releases, like Gigli and Alex and Emma.

I wonder if next week Mr. Stossel might do a "Give Me A Break!" piece on, say, the old practice in Radio Shack where the clerks would ask for your address if you were just buying a three-foot piece of video cord. Or maybe he'll get angry about those unlawfully-removed mattress tags.

POST-SCRIPT: I actually wrote this post, as I am occasionally likely to do, on Friday night. (Sometimes I like to write posts in MSWord and then cut-and-paste them into the blog at a later time.) In between then and my actual posting it here, Jesse of Pandagon commented on the same Stossel feature. Weird. But Stossel's still a doofus.