Congress protecting us from loud commercials…seriously
California Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo has introduced legislation to regulate the loudness of TV commercials. The bill, which I promise you is real, is called the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. Read more about it here.
This is the kind of thing where you expect Ashton Kutcher to run onto the house floor in his mesh trucker hat, jumping around and wildly hugging all of the representatives who have been sitting there with their mouths agape since Eshoo introduced this bill and declaring into the CSPAN cameras that we have all been Punk’d. However, that would be too much like reality; this is the United States House of Representatives. I would delve into the ridulousness of this legislation, like the practical impossibility of regulating something like this or the possibility of maybe spending congressional energy on real issues, but it all kind of makes me feel like I’m arguing with my two-year-old.
Next up from Eshoo, watch for bills that will:
- Make pickle jars easier to open
- Keep shoelaces from fraying
- Stop your shower from instantly getting extremely hot or cold when you barely touch the controls
- Make it a misdemeanor to leave the toilet seat up
Go ahead and leave some comments with more ideas to legislate away all of the minor annoyances in American life. I bet yours won’t be as ridiculous as the real thing.
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How about laws that:
* Outlaw disease (anyone infected with anything is jailed)
* Make liver taste better
* Require the producers of Lost to reveal how the series ends.
– Pauley
Honestly, this is the best blogger entry that I’ve read on here. It’s hilarious because of how true it is and how stupid that bill is!
Maybe there should be legislation that prevents people from submitting stupid legislation. A panel of citizens could review it, and if it’s really stupid they each get to slap the person who submitted it.
Actually this is more devious than it sounds.
I am a tech tinkerer and I have a Linux Based homebrew dvr from
http://www.mythtv.org/
One of the plugins is the commercial zapper. How it works is by detecting sudden diiferences in audio loudness. For a toy it works pretty well and gets about 99% of the commercials, so far it has never had a false detection. This law will make my commercial zapper obsolete.
We have long been concerned at The Dufus Institute with the problem of poorly modulated, overly loud commercials on TV and global warming. Hence we have been studying the issue for years using our Darwinian/Global Warming modeling software.
We trained a pair of chimpanzees to watch weather channel television and to activate a switch each time the set volume changed significantly, for which they would receive a peanut as a reward. We compared 3 years of peanut dispensing to second-by-second television programming logs and weather patterns, finding an amazingly high correlation (at the .9 degree level) between the onset of commercial pods the dispensing of peanuts and hurricanes, even when one of the chimps managed to lodge peanuts in each ear.
Even worse, the experience caused a classic log-linear lagged response, the data revealing the dreaded Stochastic Simian Syndrome, augmented by earwax and cold weather in January. Our exclusive Darwinian/Global Warming Projection Model suggests that, had Rep. Eschoo chewed a peanut she would have won the support of FCC chairman and Al Gore, apparently genetically related and sympathetic to the peanut-impaired chimp.
The final result proved peanut brain Al Gore had won the election which was stolen from him in the year 2000, and global warming does exist.
Amazing how the Rep. Eschoo sidesteps trivial concerns like war, health care and the economy to ensure that she doesn’t have to stir from her chair to lower the volume when TV commercials run.