Occasionally, though, I run across something that makes me wish I could have that 60 to 90 seconds of my life back to spend on something more worthwhile. Last week, I was unlucky enough to see two such items on consecutive days.

One is just plain gross, the other just plain creepy.

One looks impossible, the other insensitve.

Both are crass examples of gimmicky marketing, and make me want to shake my head in resignation for human progress.

Thanks to Thrilllist Dallas, I am now aware of the latest bit of ridiculousness in that modern temple to gluttony better known as “restaurant food challenges.” A place in Fort Worth called the Cowtown Diner offers the “Full O’ Bull Platter” — a 64-ounce chicken-fried steak smothered in gravy with an accompaniment of six pounds of mashed potatoes and 10 slices of Texas toast.

It’s $70, but like any good restaurant serving up cardiovascular health-damning dares, Cowtown Diner will write it off the bill if one person can consume all of it in one seating, no time limit other than the restaurant’s hours.  Never mind that, for those of us who actually practice a little sanity with our meal portions, the mere picture of this monstrosity on its extra large pizza pan/serving plate is enough to trigger an uncomfortable tightening in the chest.

Think I’m being a little too dramatic?  Chicken fried steak dinners are among the most unhealthy options if you are dining out.  This is approximately eight (8) of those in one serving.

And then there is this to consider should you keel over from trying to tackle this or any other gigantic hunk of cooked meat with all the trimmings: You could carry on in this world as a box of pencils.

Yes, your survivors (maybe at the table with you for what became your Last Supper) can have your cremated remains recycled into pencils, which come in a box with a one-at-a-time dispenser and built-in sharpener, thus making the box an urn as the pencils are used. Your name and vital years are embossed on each pencil.

I would like to think anyone remembered this way postmortem would at least be used to write a bestselling novel or plans for a totally revolutionary technology. But, seriously, using what is left of dear old dad to jot down shopping lists and phone numbers?

Between these calls for clogged arteries and cremated novelties, I really don’t want to know the answer to the question, “Wow, what will they think of next?”

As much as I love technology, computers, and cool gadgets, I readily admit that I have never been, in tech terms, an “early adopter” of new products.

I’ve never had the personal budget for it.  I am working on a long-term solution to address that longstanding issue, but I’m not likely to change my buying habits that much in future. About the most cutting edge I can say I’ve been recently with purchases has been with a new quad-core desktop PC with Windows 7 — and that came about two months after Windows 7 systems hit retail shelves.

“New” generally carries quite a price tag.  It can also mean buggy, disappointing, or short-lived, as consumers have learned over the years (Windows Vista or HD-DVD, anyone?)

As I have discovered over the years, patience can be a money-saving virtue when it comes to personal technology and home electronics.  Often, you discover the older item can meet your needs quite adequately, perform tasks very well, and, in some cases such as desktop PCs, can be upgraded or expanded with little pain or expense.

So it was last weekend that I finally acquired something I had truly longed for in the last couple of years, a smartphone.  Thanks to a little legwork and searching in a very non-traditional outlet (a local resale shop), I scored a Palm Treo 680 in perfect working order for just $50, with a car charger.  A trip to Fry’s Electronics the next evening for a wall charger and sync cable was another $30, making the total investment thus far a mere $80.

Not bad at all, even for an experienced last-generation technology shopper.

I’m really pleased with it on several fronts. First, the Palm Treo sports something I’ve never had on any cell phone I’ve had (work or personal), a full QWERTY keyboard.  It isn’t a roomy keyboard, I’ll grant you, but it is a vast improvement for composing text messages or short notes versus a standard alphanumeric keypad, even one with that so-called predictive text mode.  This is a fact that starts to hit home when you have never been much of a text-messaging guy, then find yourself in a relationship with a girlfriend who texts a lot.

Second, the phone is giving me a so-far pleasant revisit with the old Palm OS.  I first became acquainted with this PDA-centric operating system back in 2000 when I purchased a Handspring Visor (again, a rare case of me buying something rather current in tech terms).  I thought it was a greatly efficient, compact OS back then and this version (aka Palm OS Garnet) is much the same.  Dated though it might be, it is still a heavily supported operating system, both with commercial and freeware programs.  I’ve already found and installed a few awesome freeware apps onto the phone.

I have to say I’ve also been impressed with the sound quality on phone calls and with the built-in voice recorder, a great plus when you are a journalist often needing to record a quick interview on the spot.  The camera on the back of the phone is nothing to shout about, but not a concern for me, anyway.  About the only negatives I’ve found has been short battery life — previous reviews were spot on about that and made purchase of an AC charger a must — and the proprietary jack that makes an adapter necessary if I want to use standard mini-headphones with it.

Overall, though, I think I’ve found a smartphone that will yield quite a long time of solid service for me, and for less money than a lot of new basic messaging phones.  Sadly, it is starting to sound like Palm may not be with us much longer despite what is, by most accounts since it was first announced, a fantastic smartphone operating system known as webOS.

Age doesn’t necessarily diminish usefulness or relevance.  I remind myself of that every time I look into a mirror, too.

On the morning of Feb. 25, students at Texas A&M University at Commerce who wanted to get their free copy of The East Texan, the campus-published daily newspaper, could not find one on campus. The newspapers were all gone, allegedly taken out of their racks by members of the TAMU-C football team.

It just so happened that the lead story on the front page of that issue concerned the arrest of two of the football players on drug charges.

Bad and embarrassing for the football program as that might have been, even more negative attention came the university’s way by the theft of the newspapers and the subsequent comments from head football coach Guy Morriss when campus police interviewed him after finding videotape showing football players removing the newspapers that morning.

According to the police report, Morriss stated, “I’m proud of my players for doing that. This was the best team-building exercise we have ever done.”

Regardless of how you feel about the media or newspapers in general, this act and Morriss’ apparent sanctioning of it should disturb you to your very core. After all, we’re talking about Commerce, Texas, here, not Chongqing, China. Newspapers, even collegiate ones, have the right to publish arrests made by the taxpayer-funded police departments.

Worse yet, Morriss’ words come dangerously close to implicating that he was the genius behind an act of intentional censorship. According to the same police report, referenced by The East Texan in a report published March 1, his use of derisive remarks such as “that crap” in referring to the The East Texan and its report on the arrests is not exactly scoring him many innocence points.

But to me, a newspaper journalist for 27 years and a former college newspaper reporter and editor, Morriss’ little attitude display in the police investigation just proves something I’ve known for a long time: There are people within every university who regard the collegiate newspaper as nothing more than a student-produced fansheet.

The moment these young men and women have to run a story that doesn’t play the cheerleader for the university or any of its programs (drug arrests, parking issues, yet another tuition hike, etc.) they are branded as some band of traitors to their school. I speak from experience. A lot of other former campus newspapers reporters and editors probably could, too.

Apparently, Morriss is one with no understanding or appreciation for what goes into producing a campus daily newspaper. The East Texan’s March 1 article stated that Morriss asked how taking a publication that is free to Texas A&M-Commerce students could be considered theft. It was explained to him that the newspaper publishes a statement in each edition that the first copy is free to students, and every one after that costs 25 cents.

How or if The East Texan ever receives payment for extra copies is irrelevant here. Those responsible for taking all of the Feb. 25 editions distributed on campus did not do so because they needed floor covering to paint the inside of a house. They did it to prevent other students at the university from seeing an article about an arrest of two football players, and that is an act which is in violation of the First Amendment.

I’ve got a bit more news for Coach Morriss and those involved in the act: It may be a free publication, but I guarantee you it isn’t published for free. The printing press company that cranks out that newspaper isn’t doing so out of the goodness of its employees’ hearts. Oh, and let’s not forget the advertisers in that Feb. 25 edition — some of whom may be financial supporters of the football program — who are probably really ticked off about their paid ads not being seen that day by about 10,000 students, staff and faculty members.

Again going back to the March 1 report in The East Texan, in a meeting with Texas A&M-Commerce President Dan Jones regarding possible disciplinary action for the football players involved in the incident, Jones stated that Morriss said they would suffer the consequences as a team.

Well, I’ve got a unique and educational suggestion to offer.

All of the football players involved in the taking of the newspapers, and Morriss himself, should be given the task of producing one edition of The East Texan.

Perhaps only then, they will all have a better understanding of and appreciation for what the publication’s staff and student-reporters endure several times a week throughout each fall and spring semester, all while carrying a class load to get a college degree and, hopefully, a decent job after college.

Maybe they will learn another important lesson: Headlines are not always going to be happy ones, but the best thing you can do is keep yourself out of them.

It is with a note of nostalgic sadness that I have read of the BBC”s plans to make some service cuts, including the decision to silence BBC 6 music channel.

The station had the notoriety of being one of the first BBC digital stations when it went on-air in 2002. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when I learned about it (one of my 2 a.m. wonder-what’s-going-on-across-the-Atlantic sessions on the Internet), but once I started listening, I knew I had hit upon something really pleasing to the ears.

Fact is, my music collection (MP3 and CD) and enjoyment of what we broadly term “indie rock” today would be but a pale shadow of what it is, if not for BBC 6 Music, its excellent playlists and engaging roster of on-air hosts. I can run the names of a lot of bands…Doves, Hard-Fi, Razorlight, I Am Kloot, to name a few…that I probably would have never known about otherwise, certainly not from any terrestrial station in central Arkansas, where I was living and working at the time.

But here’s another fact: Radio is, and has been for a very long time, all about numbers, as in how many people are listening. According to the BBC, the station is reaching 700,000 listeners per week, only 1 percent of the adult population in the UK, and only 20 percent of the UK population knows about the station’s existence (I’m guessing that is from a recent survey). When the economy has gone as south as it has in the last two years, those figures are not going to bring a strong argument for another eight years or beyond on the digital airwaves.

Still, the reason the title of this article ends in a question mark is that the plug has not been pulled yet. The most recent information I have is that BBC 6 Music (and BBC Asian Network, the other digital station set for closure) will not be closed before the end of 2011 at the earliest. That means there is still time for you to discover what I did years ago, and possibly do a small part in keeping the station alive and kicking by joining a petition effort to keep it on the air.

Take some time to listen to one of the rare examples of a truly excellent radio station in a world overpopulated by stale and formulaic ones. Hopefully, the BBC will listen to us when we ask it to keep 6 Music.

BBC 6 Music Web site

Online petition site

Monday was the most anxious day of this school year for high school athletic directors, coaches, student-athletes and fans — UIL Realignment Day.  Every even-numbered year in early February, the University Interscholastic League in Austin announces which schools will be in what classification and the district lineups within each of those classifications.  Speculation always runs rampant as to which schools might be moving up or down among Class A to Class 5A, and what schools will become their new district opponents for the next two years.  No one knows but the people at the UIL office and that information is guarded more tightly than a nuclear testing site, it seems.

So Monday came the big reveal for school years 2010-11 and 2011-12.  The biggest surprise to me?  For the first time in 20 years, the minimum enrollment number for the largest classification (Class 5A) went down, by 20 students to be exact.  While that may not sound like a lot, it was large enough to pull Denton Guyer from Class 4A to Class 5A for the first time in that school’s brief existence (it opened in 2005).

Of no surprise at all is the continued drop in enrollment, and thus classification, of several urban schools.  Someone pointed out that Dallas ISD will be down to just four schools competing in Class 5A and Fort Worth ISD continues to have Paschal as its lone ranger in 5A.  Both urban school districts also had a school drop from 4A to 3A this time around.  High-growth suburban and extended suburban areas opened new high schools to differing effects.  In Wylie, TX (northeast of Dallas), the opening of Wylie East (4A) was enough to pull Wylie High back to 4A from 5A; North Forney (3A) did not have the same effect on Forney High (still 4A).

On a personal note, I have to say I was very happy with how the UIL’s tumblers clicked in the area I have to deal with in my reporting work, the hinterland between Dallas and Tyler.  Not only did the three Class 3A schools in Van Zandt County — Canton, Van and Wills Point — remain together in a district for another two years, but they also will be joined by the other Class 3A high school I cover, Quinlan Ford.  Nearby Rains County and Lindale (dropping from 4A) join in, making for a very good and very compact new district.

Some schools only wish they had it so good.  DeSoto, a Class 5A school southwest of Dallas which must (for yet another two years) travel all the way to Tyler and Longview for district games, comes immediately to mind.

Another disappointed bunch would be the football coaches in the smaller Class 2A and Class 1A.  The UIL opted for a split division format (again, based on enrollment) within those two classifications for the entire season, not just in the playoffs as is the case with Class 4A and Class 5A.  That was not the complaint heard around the area, though.  It was rather the reduction of playoff spots from three per district to two, cutting the Class 2A and Class 1A postseason field statewide from 96 to 64 teams (32 districts x 3 teams vs. 16 districts x 2 teams in 2 divisions).

If you want to check out the new districts for yourself, you can do so at http://www.uil.utexas.edu/

Posting here kind of fell by the wayside since early August — I imagine it happens to a lot of bloggers whose activity is not directly connected with their job — and weeks turned into months, six of them.  After a high school football season in which providing local newspaper coverage became much more grueling than necessary, November elections followed and then came the whole holiday song-and-dance.  January came and went with sub-freezing weather except for one week, which featured a tornado running through the county.

Now, here we are in February, the weather here in East Texas still bobbing up and down the thermostat and local primary elections around the corner in four weeks.  It’s not the election year I thought it was going to be around here.  In Van Zandt County, Texas, there will be only two local office elections in November because that matches the total number of people running as a Democrat.  I can’t remember a local election year in 27 years of newspaper journalism in which nearly all the suspense would be gone by April (the time for any run-off elections).

On the other hand, I’m very happy because I am looking forward to Valentine’s Day less than two weeks away.  That is something of a drastic change for me, but that is the result of a very lovely young woman walking up to me at a local winery and inviting to me sit and chat with her.  Destiny or dumb luck?  It matters not to me.  I’m too busy basking in what has been three months (and counting) of truly being enriched by the love, affection and caring of another, and returning it in kind.

There is more to life than press deadlines and politics.

Thank God for that.

I think I have been in a period of denial for a few months, but can no longer ignore the stark truth — given that it stares back at me every time I log on and see my “home” page.  For a time, Facebook seemed to be serving a useful purpose, putting me back in touch with former work colleagues, current friends and high school classmates.  But then the latest redesign for the site took hold, shoveling all sorts of lists and application-based doings and pointless information about anybody and everybody on my friends list.

To wit, my complaint and reason for falling out with a site I once appreciated such a short time ago:  I really do not care what everybody’s five favorite (fill in the blank here) are, nor do I need to know what movie character you most closely match.  The same goes for whatever you are searching for or what you got points for in whatever silly game somebody has coerced you into adding to your probably overpopulated applications list.

Then there are the people who apparently see Facebook as yet another avenue to display their personal drama skills and/or utter lack of anything resembling good taste, public decorum or basic mental aptitude.  If you need to see proof on your own, look no further than one of the best examples of Internet-based cynicism I’ve ever clicked a link to:  Lamebook, the brainchild of a couple of Austin residents who are probably as bemused as I am at some of the information that finds its way onto Facebook every day.

What I do care about is occasionally chatting online with other people far away in the physical realm.  I don’t mind replying to a really interesting or witty status update.  I would like to think Facebook still has potential as a work/career/business networking tool (but why will people continue to try using it for that purpose if they have to hack their way through the jungle of application drivel?).

I really wonder about Facebook’s future and its relevance therein to its users.  In my opinion, it has become social networking’s answer to bloatware and may be on the fast track to becoming vanquished in the same sense as MySpace before it.  I still have a MySpace account but only because the site developed something of a niche identity as an online music source and I do love streaming music I enjoy.  Twitter now seems to be everybody’s favorite flavor, but somehow I doubt I’ll be Tweeting anything anytime soon.  I just don’t see the value in it for myself or anyone else.

It’s the same as what I’ve started to feel lately about Facebook.

John Fontana asks several key questions in his PC Advisor article on the subject.  I heartily agree with him on a couple of points.

One, trotting out a new OS option in and of itself is not compelling enough.  A new OS is a world apart from a successful OS — as ghosts of OSes past and Microsoft’s painful lesson with Vista will show.  Two, once Google does have Chrome OS available for purchase or pre-installed on netbooks (its initial target market), it really needs to already have a few heavy hitters in the application development scene ready to roll out some game-changing apps with the OS launch.  Chrome OS as a “preferred” OS for Web apps is, again, probably not going to be enough of a deal-making aspect for most PC buyers.

With the growing high-stakes rivalry between Microsoft and Google, it’s an interesting move on the chess board by the latter, to be sure.  Whether it turns out to be a very potent move remains to be seen.

The bad news? Free listening might remain free only to a certain point.

The Pandora site blog has this explanation from founder Tim Westergren.  Essentially, the big webcasters will pay an amount based on either a portion of their revenue (up to 25 percent) or a per performance fee, with smaller players paying based on a percentage of revenue or expenses.

What you will find in Westergren’s blog entry about the agreement is something I expect to become the norm.  You will still be able to listen for free, but the free ride will be capped.  In Pandora’s case, it will be 40 hours per month.

I expect this to become a standard model across the board, Internet stations capping the amount of free listening time per month, beyond which you will be asked to pitch in a small access fee (in Pandora’s case, it is going to be just 99 cents) or upgrade to a paid premium service in the cases of those sites that offer such a service.

There will still be some casualties on the battlefield, especially among the smaller webcasters, some of which were totally dependent on not having to fork over a significant recurring royalties payment.  Hopefully, your favorite station will not be among those going silent.

Thanks to the Sci Fi Channel and the creative wonder of a man who once walked this earth by the name of Rod Serling, I didn’t need wheels and a gasoline-powered engine to go to the place I have loved since my childhood.  You know it from the hypnotic first notes of the introductory theme music.

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind…”

More than 35 years after I saw an episode for the first time, the name still brings an immeasurable sense of joy to my eyes and ears.

The Twilight Zone.

The stories, the characters, Serling’s insightful narration — these were all the elements that bound together to form one of the most unique television series to ever air.  Fifty years after it was first introduced to an unsuspecting American television audience, episodes of The Twilight Zone still seem as relevant as ever to the world around us in 2009.

It is that timeless quality to so many of the stories and the grains of knowledge that can be found within that I find so endearing, over and over again, every time I watch an episode and regardles of how many times I’ve seen it.  The stories still speak to me today as strongly as ever because, as Serling himself put it, The Twilight Zone “lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

I could have done without the car breaking down earlier in the week, but as a friend and newspaper colleague of mine noted on my Facebook page, being cooped up with Sci Fi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon during the holiday weekend was “a pretty good consolation prize.”

I didn’t stay up all night, as it were, but saw most of the episodes even the most casual Twilight Zone fan knows, the ones that might be called the “classics.”  Most every fan of the show has an absolute favorite and I am no exception.

If you’re thinking that is “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” that would be an incorrect guess.  Great, great episode illustrating the destructive power of fear, but not my fave.

“Time Enough At Last”?  Again, great story, but that’s not it, either.  “Eye Of The Beholder”?  As shocking a story twist as you’ll ever find, but still not the top of my list.

No, the episode that stirs me without fail is one, surprisingly, that Serling did not write.  It is “I Sing The Body Electric,” an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story about a robotic-but-lifelike grandmother that must win the hearts of three children of a widower to whom she has been assigned.

To understand why the story touches so deeply is to go the Twilight Zone itself, or rather to consider the time it first appeared.  That was the time of infinite possibilities, for better or worse, and the latter end of what many consider the golden age of science fiction.  It was before a man had set foot on the surface of the moon and long before the term “personal computer” was on anyone’s lips, much less one sitting on anyone’s desk.

But in The Twilight Zone, infinite possibilities become reality and that includes robotic grandmothers who will love you for eternity.

For me, though, it goes beyond that to a perhaps unintended metaphysical analogy.  When the children are grown and about to start college, the robotic grandmother says she must leave them to allow them to make their own lives.  She tells them she might go to another family to look after the children, but she might be dismantled.

The children-now-young-adults are worried it will mean the end for her, but she assures them by explaining that if she is dismantled, her “heart and soul” will go to a big room of voices — those of other robotic grandmothers — where everyone shares what they learned from the families they looked after.

Could there have been something more human about the robot grandmother’s existence than just her appearance, her ability to teach and learn, and her ability to love?

Again, I’ll quote from Serling:  “Fable, sure — but who’s to say?”

Author’s Note: Fortunately, you don’t have to wait until the next Fourth of July holiday to take a vacation in The Twilight Zone.  Thanks to online video, many episodes of the show can be seen for free at CBS.com and on various video compilation sites like Veoh and Fancast.