Vanderleun notes the not-so-earth-shaking nature of the news alerts he’s been getting of late.

I make that two tawdry crimes and one skeevy bimbo ranking up at the top of the “Breaking News” moments of today. That’s it. That’s the way it is. That’s 30. Th-th-th-that’s all folks!

I hope you won’t take it amiss that, as one of my close friends notes, I think that sort of “Breaking News!” is very good news indeed. It gives me a great deal of reassurance to see such stories dominating the half-baked brains of those in NewzBiz. Stories like that mean, in short, that nothing terribly bad is happening in the world at this moment. No airplanes crashing into skyscrapers. Nothing other than a low-grade grind coming out of Iraq. No tsunami sweeping across the globe. No nation poised (right now) on the brink of eradicating another nation.

Nothing breaking except the ordinary evil of ordinary individuals losing it in ordinary ways. When you’ve got 300 million people bouncing around this country, you’re always going to have this kind of mundane stuff popping up. Tragic to those touched, but utterly without import to everyone else. If you are a NewzBiz bozo you put it on the air because… well, hey, you gotta have something, right? Right. You just can’t send out an email saying, “We wanted to bring you some “breaking news” but right now there just isn’t any. Have a nice day.”

Here in SoCal, we have some 16 million souls to generate crime stories with the same number of news outlets to carry them, as say, Denver with approximately 2 million souls. That can make SoCal seem awfully dangerous.

My mother, who watches TV news religiously and knows the TV weathermen by name (although she rarely steps outside to experience any weather), thinks danger lurks everywhere. Especially the freeways. Whenever I go somewhere on the freeways, she frets as if it’s a tour in Iraq.