USU, the Mountain West, and heartache

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Posted in: Mountain West Conference,Sad Stuff,Sports,Utah State University

Piers Morgan is awesome

Piers Morgan is great and I can't wait for his show to debut on CNN.

In a time when our choice in cable news is crap coming with a huge slant from the right or crap coming with a huge slant from the left, there's just not much out there worth watching. That is, until later this month.

If you aren't familiar with Piers Morgan, you've probably been living under some type of a rock. He's been prominent in American pop culture the past few years as a judge on "America's Got Talent" and also as the winner of season two of "Celebrity Apprentice." Prior to those exploits, however, Morgan was a very respected British newspaper editor and journalist.

Later this month, he'll be taking over Larry King's timeslot on CNN. It's a show I'll watch until I have a reason not to.

Larry King had way, way, way outlived his usefulness on the network, so it's good to see him gone. He hadn't asked a germane question in six years and had the same old and tired guests on all the time and more often than not had worthless guests on.

I've got high hopes for Piers Morgan's unique interview style and believe he'll really be able to get people to open up on the show. Fortunately for those of you who don't know Piers, CNN put out a little taster of him interviewing Anderson Cooper on 1/3.

This is good stuff. If Piers can make every guest looks as human as he made that closet case stiff Anderson Cooper look, then we're in for a real treat.

Incidentally, I also recommend following Piers Morgan on Twitter.

/Piers Morgan lovefest over

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Posted in: cable news,CNN,Piers Morgan,social media,traditional media

Shopping carts as a matter of personal responsibility

I've decided there is no greater sign of laziness amongst our society than failing to return a shopping cart at a store to the "cart corral." 

I was at the 1300 South Target tonight (a beautiful new store that opened in October) and on my way out of the store, I noticed there were stray shopping carts all over the parking lot.

This cart someone took the effort to mount up on the curb, you'd think they'd be able to move it 20 feet to a corral?

I snagged one cart as I was going to my car (because I figured if I'm going to walk by a stray cart, AND a cart corral on my way to my car, shouldn't I put it in the corral?) Then after unloading my groceries, I grabbed two other nearby carts and took them both to corrals. 

Here you can actually see a cart corral in the background.

 I took these pictures as I was driving away. I considered for a moment getting all the carts in the parking lot and moving them to corrals, mostly because I've had a car hit by a stray cart before and I figure it is my duty to my fellow man to do a little tidying up of the lot. But I put three stray carts in corrals and it was cold, plus, I can't do Target's job for them...

Even more carts. This was just the north side of the parking lot, too.

The whole experience got me thinking: Is there anything that more defines the laziness of some people than failing to put a shopping cart in a safe place? How careless and thoughtless do you have to be to just leave a cart stray in a parking lot once you're done using it? Yes, there is an employee whose job it is to retrieve carts from the parking lot (I retrieved plenty of carts when I was 16 years old working at K-Mart in North Logan.) But it's a lot easier job for the cart jockeys when the carts are properly placed in their corrals. Stores put several cart corrals in their parking lots for the convenience of customers. Usually they are no more than a 20 second walk, literally, from anywhere in the parking lot.

I'm going to argue that the failure of people to do something as simple as returning a cart to its corral is a microcosm of a larger issue, being the decreasing value some in society put on personal responsibility. Some people just don't care about anyone but themselves, even at a base level of returning a shopping cart.
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UPDATE:
When I linked to this on my Facebook page, an excellent comment was posted. I am calling on all retail stores with shopping carts to adopt this process in their operations:

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Posted in: Life,Personal responsibility