• by Jack Feuer , June 6, 2007

I was waiting for the kid to show up and get his gas money, so I had some time to kill. And I was bored with kicking the cat. I clicked on blogpulse.com and tried to access its top video, "Sex Crimes and Vatican." But I didn't have the right QuickTime or something, and it wouldn't play. So I gave up and went to WikiHow, where I found "How to Keep Chickens in a City" instead.

Apparently, there is something called the urban chicken movement where people and New Yorkers, who are like people only noisier, raise fowl for fun and profit in the city. I live in Los Angeles, and we're too busy with Phil Spector right now to worry about chickens. But when I read about all the "magic and fun" you can have raising a Buff Orpington -- comes in large and bantam sizes -- I knew I'd discovered the perfect second career for media-industry professionals.

Honestly, I think it's time you people found something else to do.

For decades, everybody whined about how program ratings aren't good enough, and Nielsen was the devil. Then, everybody whined about how the program ratings didn't find young men, or count enough Hispanics, and Nielsen was not just the devil, but also ugly.

Then, everybody complained that what they really needed were commercial ratings. Rino Scanzoni was fond of wondering, frequently, why "Lithuania has commercial ratings, but we don't."

OK, fine. Then Nielsen agreed to provide commercial ratings. For a year, everybody argued about how to do it, what it should look like, when it should happen and what kind of devil Nielsen was. Finally, commercial ratings arrive. And what happens? Everybody argues.

The broadcast networks say, hey, anyway you want it, we'll slice it -- as long as we get paid for live-plus. Agencies and clients bicker about whether to pay for time-shifted ratings, and if so, what kind. Cable is so confused that its trade association has to form --wait for it -- a council!

And Viacom this week just said to hell with it, we're sticking with program ratings.

I mean, come on. Entities that collectively command a marketplace of hundreds of billions of dollars, organizations that span a planet (and in Nielsen's case, Hades), breathtaking resources and thousands of smart people can't figure this out? After arguing about it for years?

You know what? Get Laura Desmond to fix it. She'll straighten your argumentative asses out in a week. Guaranteed.

Or else, buy a couple of big, fat Buff Orpingtons and go into the omelet business.