While I'm ragging on Las Vegas TV news outlets...

This past week saw fugitive Pahrump, NV native Jody Thompson captured by police while he cowered in an elderly couple's closet (or laid on the kitchen floor with his hands on his head begging 911 to tell the cops not to kill him, depending on what you listen to or read).

This guy got sent to prison for pulling stickups and telling people he didn't want to rob them but had to because his (non-existent) kid had cancer. Earlier this year he escaped. This genius heads right back to Vegas and starts holding people up again. (Personally, within 48 hours of escaping I'd have been tromping through some farmer's back forty trying to avoid the cow pies while tiptoeing into Canada. That and trying to get Tiny Tim strumming his damned ukulele and warbling "Tiptoe through the cow pies with me..." out of my head.)

America's Most Wanted boosted the search this past weekend when they featured the case. This wasn't one of those "This guy is so awful we gotta get him now!" AMW features, but one of those, "Okay, we're coming to you from Frozen Fart, Wisconsin this week, so to throw a bone to the locals, here's who Frozen Fart's finest would like to sniff out" features.

Whatever. It worked. Someone tipped the cops, they captured him, and ever since then Vegas TV spends a good portion of every newscast on Jody Thompson. One station devoted a 15+ minute block in the middle of the newscast to a "special report" on the capture. Maybe I'll give them that on the day it happened, but several days later we don't need to be seeing interviews with Thompson's doctor's dog about how he had a queer sort of feeling every time Jody would pet him.

No, seriously, it's that bad. One station was out in Pahrump interviewing people who never knew the guy, never saw the guy, barely knew he existed, just because they happen to live in a house Thompson lived in as a child.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Non-news story! "He escaped, we captured him" -- end of story!

You'd think Las Vegas Metro had caught Osama bin Laden at a craps table in Caesar's Palace. (That's how he really funds, al Qaeda, by the way. He's a freaking genius at craps. He played 24/7 at al Qaeda's Afghanistan mountain retreat. Gambler's would come from around the world looking for "the crap in the hole" and locals would say, "Oh, you want Osama," and point toward Tora Bora. If the U.S. really wanted to capture bin Laden, all they'd have to do is have soldiers shake dice while patrolling, sooner or later he'd squeeze out of a hole.)

Given the obsessive nature of TV news to get their teeth in the neck of a story and shake it not just to death but till the rotting corpse is falling to pieces, I know for the next couple of years we'll have to wade through this guy's new trials, interviews, civil lawsuits, manufactured controversies, and what not. Mark your calendar's now for the "It's been one year since the capture of..." stories.

Gah!

Please, if anyone reading this is in Vegas media, I beg you: No more Jody Thompson. No More Siegfried and Roy. It's an addiction you've got to break. Nancy Reagan's on the phone, "Just say no!"