Careful care and feeding of the peevs

Gripe #1
I bought a new monitor. It's "wide screen." So, it takes all the images that used to be on my square monitor and stretches them. It's no problem for text, but faces look fat and distorted. And as far as I can tell, there is no way to correct for this. I don't like that.

Gripe #2
Television networks like CNN and ESPN have for years now been keeping banners at the bottom of their screens. I have nothing against this in principle, but those who frame the shots don't seem to take this into account. Sometimes 1/4 or even as much as 1/3 of the picture is cut off on the bottom, and sometimes this doesn't matter, but often it does. A few examples:

9/11 -- the shot is framed to show the World Trade Center tower and the plane flying into it. Only the banner on the bottom blocks the plane, and so all you see is the top of the explosion bursting out from behind the banner.

tennis -- a computer simulation of the path of the ball is shown, supposedly illustrating where the ball hits the court with respect to the line. 1 problem -- the picture is framed so that where the ball hits the court is at the bottom of the screen, which is blocked by a banner.

red carpet coverage -- "Hey look at Jessica Alba, doesn't she look gorgeous in her strapless gown?" I'll admit she looks great, but I can't see her dress at all because it is covered by a banner taking up 1/2 the screen. This also happens on a show called "The Fasion Team," where it's especially suprising that no one pays attention to whether the audience could actually see the clothes they are talking about.

Hey, remember Porky Pig saying "That's All Folks!" inside that circle? They played a clip of that on CNN the other day for some reason. But since Porky was centered on the screen, and there was a banner covering up the bottom 1/3, you could only see the top of his head.

I guess they could take the square image and just stretch it out in the rectangle at the top of the screen. (See Gripe #1.)