Think about your pets. You probably think your wombat, Vietnamese pig, or Burmese python is cute, loveable, and loves to talk baby talk. Others might say they’re ugly monsters destroying the yard looking for fungus, that can eat small children. Oh wait. Your more into cats and dogs. Sorry. In this case other folks will think your cats are too aloof and the dogs jump excessively and keep the neighbors awake at night. Statistically all this can be true at the same time, but that doesn’t matter they’re your pets. You’re the one who has to feed them, pay vet bills, replace damaged furniture, and explain to the police why your alligator is fat when the neighbors Shih Tzu is missing. Others just don’t understand. You might have a dog and old man Shedowski is a cat person. I’m not trying to start a war here, but the data shows that for everything some people like, there are people who don’t like it. Even arsenic, which is a deadly poison, is loved by women to keep their skin smooth. In other words, people are nuts. Statistically speaking.

With all that being said, we humans can be pretty lazy and don’t look at the data much. We hate what we choose to hate and don’t much care, unless of course it was our Shih Tzu. I mean the way we think of our pets, Hollywood producers would immediately start a science fiction script about a super cat from space with laser-beam eyes, or create a dog solving mysteries show, like the Hardy Boys. Can’t you just imagine some of those titles: The Backyard Buried Treasure, The Mystery of The Lost Chew Toy, or Scruffy’s Butt Smells Different Today. Actually, I’d like to see some of those, but saying so doesn’t make my point, so forget I mentioned it.

The thing is there is so much ignorance running around TV studios these days, everyone’s afraid to trust themselves, or the data. They look at the most popular show and copy it. Don’t believe me? A couple of years back just about every show was a comedy about a fat guy, with a smoking-hot wife, trying in vain to be the master of the house, and failing. He would just lumber along, get laughed at until he was in so much trouble his wife had to get him out of it, then learn a lesson he would forget by next week. I can understand how highly intelligent, smoking-hot wives were trending high. But fat stupid guys? I always wondered how those guys nabbed those particular girls anyway. Fantasy’s OK but how do you suspend that much disbelief?

I guess there must have been others like me because the movement after that was to dump the fat guys, and just have the hot wives behaving badly. Now there’s a good fantasy.  I guess cute women need fat husbands to keep them on the straight and narrow. Who knew?

Recently the inclination has been more toward serial dramas. But I have a question with these as well. How many Law & Order’s do we actually need? I mean, it’s one thing to make all the shows similar. But do you have to insult our intelligence by naming them all the same too?

If you wonder about these things like I do, then I am about to give you the straight skinny on how things work. Better get a pencil this is important. I’ll Wait… La la la Hmm hmm Ready? Great! Hear hit is. The straight skinny from Mr. Ohh! himself. It’s all about numbers. Not even complicated numbers. If a lot of people do Thing A why should you take a chance on creating something else. Recreate and repackage Thing A and call it Thing A SVU.

But you say Mr. Ohh! “How do we find out about these numbers?” Easy. You just gotta ask. For instance, take the election in the USA for example. There are two candidates. How does each know how they’re doing? They call people every night and interrupt their dinner. This is an important strategy.

Think about it a second. You have just made a beautiful Fromage Florentine con Aspergras. You sit down and pick up your fork and the phone rings. If you answer they know you are a concerned citizen. If you don’t answer they think you’re a loser who thinks food is more important than the democratic process. You will be taught a lesson by never being able to eat in peace ever again.

Next, they introduce themselves. If you hang up during this time, I feel very sorry for you. You’ve proven you’re concerned enough to answer but they don’t know how you feel. You will be bombarded with mail until you are buried alive in letters and post cards, suffocate, and die. After that your opinion doesn’t matter.

So, you listen to the questions, which are always biased, because the service doing the study wants to make damn sure the conclusion of it is good for the people paying for it. They start with something like this: Do you think the current administration is doing a great job, or just a good job? Sorry but saying anything bad just isn’t a possible answer.

Well you answer questions as you watch icicles form on your beautiful fromage. Then comes the biggie. Would you like to donate money to the campaign? WHAT?? The candidates are all multimillion ga-zillionaires, and they want me to pay for them to get elected? A poor sap who hasn’t worked since March. I would pay the twenty-five-bucks if I could be guaranteed, they would never call at dinnertime again. Unfortunately, this would set a bad precedent. I mean there’s judges, senators, congress people, school boards, some guy selling windows, and thirty-seven final calls on renewing the car warranty, I don’t have. This could get expensive.

I remember in the old days there was an issue with candidates paying for people’s votes. I guess now it’s okay to have people pay to vote for you, but I don’t like it. I wouldn’t mind at all if someone offered me a thousand bucks to vote a certain way. The ballot is secret. I’m not saying I would betray them; I’m just saying I could.

So, what about the statistics? Those are a lot of bunk too. Listen to the radio. The Stupid Poll has the current administration up by four points, while the Idiotic Poll has him down by six. Then again, the margin of error is plus or minus ten so they both mean nothing. If they all mean nothing, why do we have to hear about a new one of them every two and a half minutes? I’ll tell you why. Because Covid had pollsters out of work as well as everyone else. If they make up three-hundred polls that’s thousands of pollsters back to work. They still can’t go to the movies but one step at a time.

Therefore, I’ve decided to take a poll myself. I’m kidnapping old man Shedowski and holding him for ransom.

It’s the only way someone can take a pole that actually means something.