TV News LIES

After failing to secure a single delegate in the New Hampshire Republican primary, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is expected to suspend his presidential campaign Wednesday.

Christie could announce his departure from the presidential race as soon as Wednesday afternoon after he meets with advisors, an anonymous source familiar with the plans told ABC News.

"We bet the ranch on New Hampshire, and no one ever anticipated the Trump phenomenon," the source said. "He's a realist."

Astronomers in Australia have confirmed the discovery of hundreds of galaxies hidden by the Milky Way and a gravitational anomaly known as the Great Attractor.

Until now, the galaxy-rich region of space some 250 million light-years away has been obscured by the stars and dust of the Milky Way.

"The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," Lister Staveley-Smith, a professor at the University of Western Australia, said in a press release.

Some stories seem to fade as soon as they appear, while others keep popping back into awareness, wanted or not.

In the language of The Hunt for Red October, which we screened again Sunday, some stories are "one-ping-only," while others pull "Crazy Ivans" for months and months at a whack.

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Yes, we have no TV access in our Little Boonieville, so our screen is used in a quaint, old-fashioned way, as a monitor for selected discs -- movies, documentaries, TV shows.  Yes, we miss the still somewhat-sane channels, like PBS or BBC, but we do not yearn for the wallet-hosing expenses associated with cable, satellite dishes, pay-per-peek, uplinks, downloads, nor wireless brain-stem implants, where you change channels by winking and wincing.

The wife of a now-deceased Islamic State leader was charged Monday for her alleged role in last year's death of American aid worker Kayla Jean Mueller.

Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar, 25, the widow of former ISIL leader Abu Sayyaf, allegedly conspired to provide support to the terrorist group, often forcibly holding Mueller in the couple's homes where she was subjected to repeated sexual abuse by ISIL chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Mueller died in February 2015.

And now, a word about Landmark Decisions:  Boxy.

(No, not like the hyper vlogger, nor like those who boil down everything to thinking in-or-outside of that very same box -- but, well, squarish.  You know, like a box -- not, um, square-ish, like not being hip or very uncool.  Uh, to quote a Monty Python sketch:  Wait, I'll come in again...)

As I has begun:  Landmark Decisions -- no, wait, hang on, hang on.  No running away in panic is required here.  There'll be no airing of legal briefs, or any other kind, here today -- much to the relief of all concerned.

No, I was starting to warm up on the weirdly interwoven subjects of Time, Change, Culture, Cars, and Architecture.

It would be so much easier if election laws specified a new tag line at the end of every candidate's campaign ad:  a one-line summation of what, exactly, the candidate's overall goal, plan, and aim was all about.

I think you'll admit the current format doesn't help much, where the candidate is heard saying, "I'm M. T. Poseur, [or Ecoli Ebola-Zika, or whoever] and I approved this message."

This gets into trickier ground, though, of course.  Who is to say what, exactly, any candidate really, truly stands for -- what he or she really hopes to accomplish?  It triggers the whole who-watches-the-watchers Orwellian nightmare.

This way to the time machine:  Back when one had to fight pterodactyls in the schoolyard at recess, in order to keep hold of one's snacks, there was a terrible candy called Good & Plenty.  It was white and day-glow, neon pink, before there was day-glow anything, and only just as neon was itself being tamed to do electrical tricks.

It was terrible junk -- a chalky outer shell with a hard, black licorice center -- but, it was dirt cheap.  It was also pay dirt for the non-discriminating 5-year-old on a budget.

Yes, the downside was that it was horrible, but the upside was that there was a lot of it.  Somehow, the combination worked.  Such is youth.

Utahns castigated the adult entertainment industry in a legislative hearing Friday on a proposed resolution declaring pornography a public health crisis.

Jenny Brown, a member of the Utah Coalition Against Pornography board, said many are scared of the industry because of the "fierce" way it goes after people in court. Brown said it's time for children's rights to be acknowledged and that no one has a right to harm another person.