Rah-Gee-Lay - It must be Italian!

At 8:00 tonight, TBS and TNT began what is fondly known as the "A Christmas Story Marathon!" and I will watch it as many times as I can.

I can't get enough of The Skut Farkas Incident...

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We noticed you are running an ad blocker....

I get that message on a lot of web pages I visit and they keep asking me to disable it.

Attention web administrators everywhere: I'll make you a deal. If you use only unobtrusive ads that don't prevent me from seeing the content I came to see, I'll disable my ad blocker. Deal?

No, you won't do that?

I didn't think so.

The reason people run ad blockers is not because of ads on web sites. None of us want to pay for content just like we don't want to pay for television so we are willing to accept ads on web sites as long as those ads don't become the primary content. When you decided to make the ad the primary content, we decided to block the ad.

At some point in the past, a computer language was created for web browsers that allowed web admins a lot of flexibility in how their content was displayed. They could write small programs (now called applets) that would do things when the page was displayed. No longer were they limited to different color text or flashing letters to get your attention. No longer were they limited to static images or data-heavy videos to visually stimulate your wallet.

No sir, they could now do all kinds of "stuff" with video, sound and various other active content. And "stuff" they did.

Initially they popped open  a new browser window and displayed some gaudy, awful ad for cheap car insurance or low mortgage rates. When that happened, people found a way to prevent those pop-ups from covering their screen with really bad porn-like GoDaddy advertisements or just really bad porn.

So the ad boys needed to do something new.

That something new is a small java applet that displays a semi-opaque video or image over the web page you are trying to see that advertises some bizarre product that you have no desire to buy. And they usually have some timer that prevent you from moving on until a certain amount of time has passed.

Imagine if you put on the morning news, watched a few minutes of it and while the talking head was still telling you about the tornado that was coming your way, an ad for Dave's Soda and Pet Food City suddenly covered the screen and stayed there for 30 seconds.

You would be pissed and you would do anything you could to stop that from happening in the future.

Enter the ad blocker.

I love my ad blocker. It blocks almost every ad imaginable, including the ones that prevent you from seeing what you want to see.

So to web admins everywhere, if you want us to turn off our ad blockers, you need to turn off the ads that prevent us from reading the content we came to see. In other words, stop making the ad the content.

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We here at The Daily News are ready for Christmas.

Are you?

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Here are your links for today:

• Another reason why I gave up golf.



• Only in Florida.



• Merry Christmas!