A retroactive gripe

I forgot to bitch about this a few weeks ago, but a few Thursdays back, one of our fine local TV stations ran promos all night about "an animal that has escaped from the Buffalo Zoo! Details at eleven!"

And I'm thinking, Cool!. So I dutifully tuned in at eleven, to hear all about the terror of the beastie on the loose, our mighty wayward...










(wait for it)










...peacock.

Man, talk about a letdown. A peacock was on the loose. If you want to see a peacock on the loose, just go to the Toronto Zoo -- they just let their peacock wander freely around the grounds, and it's about as threatening as a sleeping Ernest Borgnine.

I, of course, was envisioning that the escaped animal was an underfed Bengal tiger. Who'd maybe found his way into a school. A school for the blind.

Yeah, that would have been a show.

Stupid news promos: "If it bleeds, it leads -- unless we got nothin' in the 'bleeding' department, in which case we grab something that we can make people think might bleed."

(And for you Buffalo viewers: how thick do you think that stack of e-mails they keep displaying on Channel 2 will get before they stop having Scott Levin hold it up every night as a display of our public outrage about the tolls on the 190? I'm thinking, four and a half inches.)