Here from TV Guide is a calendar of fall TV premiere dates, as well as a printable version; here’s a sortable list.
Looks like stuff doesn’t really kick in for me until September 20.
Author Archives: Tin Man
August 24
I’m a geek about dates sometimes. I remember the exact dates of many events in my life. I don’t know why.
For example, I’ve always remembered that I moved into my first-year dorm at UVa on August 24, 1991. (Oddly, I started law school on the exact same date, five years later — though maybe it’s not so odd; each date moves ahead one day further in the week each year, so five years plus two leap days (in 1992 and 1996) equals seven days, and therefore August 24, 1996 fell on the same day of the week as August 24, 1991, and UVa always does its move-in on a Saturday in late August. Geekitude!)
So this afternoon I realized that it was 19 years ago today that I moved into my college dorm. And then I realized, wow — 19 years ago, most of today’s entering college students weren’t even born.
God, I feel old.
The First Amendment, Again
Yesterday I wrote about the First Amendment. It’s come up again in the last couple of days — this time, the free speech clause.
Laura Schlessinger quit her radio show yesterday (which she was apparently going to do soon anyway), and in an interview with Larry King, she said, “I want my First Amendment rights back, which I can’t have on radio without the threat of attack on my advertisers and stations.”
Linda Holmes at NPR has pointed out how ridiculous this statement is. Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights were never infringed.
But the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee that speaking your mind will have no economic consequences. Proclaiming that those without thick skins probably shouldn’t marry outside their race is always going to be, let us say, commercially risky if you’re aiming for a broad audience — or if your sponsors are. General Motors and Motel 6 both reportedly pulled their sponsorship over the flap, prior to Schlessinger’s decision to leave her show. But whether that’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, it doesn’t implicate the government; it implicates the profit motive.
In fact, the organization of a boycott is itself the exercise of First Amendment rights — GLAAD, or the American Family Association, or Sarah Palin, or Laura Schlessinger, anyone can publicly advocate for an end to the economic support of someone else’s speech. If you want, you can boycott them back — “Okay, if GLAAD is boycotting Laura Schlessinger, then I’m boycotting anybody who donates to GLAAD.” It becomes reductive and unhelpful at some point, and it may or may not be justified, and one side or the other may be substantively right or wrong — but all of it, from every angle and every political position, is consistent with the idea of free expression.
Because the “free” in that concept means “free from government interference,” not “free from consequences.”
Awesomely put.