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I know someone whose apartment had a view of a river choked with garbage—foil packs, empty plastic sachets, cardboard boxes floating on the water. Some years ago, he noticed that the river was clean. Alright, maybe not clean, but there were no foil packs, plastic sachets and cardboard boxes, so he could actually see the water. He found out that there were people who collected these empty packages, washed them, dried them in the sun, and sold them to aspiring game show contestants. See, some game shows charge an “admission fee” of their studio audience. This “admission fee” is a designated combination of empty packets and sachets of their corporate sponsors’ products. For instance, two empty shampoo sachets plus an empty detergent packet. Instead of buying the corporate sponsors’ products, a lot of the people who want to be game show contestants simply buy the trash salvaged from creeks, rivers, canals, and garbage dumps. So some TV game shows indirectly help clean rivers and promote garbage recycling (besides peddling false hope and making stupidity look cute, but that’s a different issue). As long as the studios are not taking the heaps of empty consumer products packages they collect from the audience and dumping them in rivers. These empty packages should be returned to the corporate sponsors/manufacturers for proper disposal. They have huge budgets; let them get rid of their garbage.

The fifth and final season of HBO’s The Wire begins. From the NYT: No Happy Ending in Dickensian Baltimore. 

“This series’s greatest distinction is perhaps the very thing that chases away broad popularity and peer recognition: ‘‘The Wire’’ traces the interlaced lives of drug dealers and police officers, and both sides of the street receive equal time and consideration. No other series has as many African-American characters, and some of most richly conceived ones fall into categories — drug dealers, convicts and addicts — that violate television’s taboo against racial profiling. By defying the very stereotypes it perpetuates, the show confounds easy viewing. And in the inverted logic of ‘‘The Wire,’’ failure is its own success, a badge of honor in a decaying and dishonorable world. The series’s creators never received the acclaim their work deserves, and there are no lasting victories on ‘‘The Wire,’’ just glimmers of success that tease out hope only to be quickly and brutally squelched.”

Next week I’m going to sit down with coffee and doughnuts and watch four seasons of The Wire. Then I’m going to read Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I’ll call it my Humanity: Dontcha Love It? Week.