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Cable Channelss
by Rob Schaeffer
Okay. We all have cable or know someone who does. Or maybe
you don’t. You know, this writing thing is hard. I am under the weather today
and maybe I read too much Brunching today so what I am going to type will
be more or less the textual equivalent of REM sleep—pieces of what happened
this day but not in any sort of coherent order.
Well, I was going to write about cable channels and how lame or cool
they are. You know, how Lifetime’s movies have only has one basic plot
and once you figure out who is the evil male and who are merely the clueless
ones you’ve pretty much got the plot done.
Maybe I will write about the good channels. TLC is pretty cool. They
talk a lot about huge buildings that practically have a sign on them asking
any passing hurricane to knock them over. They also have Trading Spaces
which has Frank, who everyone thinks is obsessed with chickens. Apparently
he is not which is sad.
You will soon discover that I, on the other hand, am obsessed with
chickens.
What other channels are there? The Spanish language channels have their
moments. Where else can you have such a level of surrealism and miniskirts
at the same time? I don’t speak Spanish, which is moot since I never turn
the sound on anyway, but I have been told that the dialog tends to be pretty
bad. I never would have guessed from watching fifty year old men and women
who look like centerfolds, dressed as eight year-olds running around in
fast motion in a brightly colored classroom that makes the Simpson house
look like it was filmed in black and white.
Okay. Ah. Cable News. There are many flavors of that which are unique
and distinctive from each other as are the many flavors of plain M&Ms.
For those who are metaphorically challenged, what I mean is that they are
all the same, just look different until you actually eat one, except that
this metaphor is falling apart because I like M&Ms and don’t like cable
news.
So, you turn on MSCNNFox and during they day you get pictures of cheering
Iraqis pulling down statues of people, over and over, until they cut to
SARS and you get people in public places wearing face masks. Yeah, I know
that totally dates this, but deal with it. Then in the evening you get
the conservative commentator making personal insults to various liberals
(“Those Dixie Chicks, don’t they know that they dress totally stupid just
like all the other loony liberals.”) and trying to defend what ever latest
thing a Republican has done or even bashing President Clinton two or three
years after he has left office. Do these guys need interns, if you know what
I mean?
Sometimes they bring a on liberal to their shows and then play conversational
keep away.
Oh, yeah, and up-to-the-second stock quotes for those three people
who still trade on an hourly basis.
Here is an odd one: TNN. What is up with them? Wrestling, Blind Date,
and Star Trek? Huh? Do you think they do market research or that someone
stole a truckload of random videos from somewhere and that’s what they use?
And then there is the Weather Channel. Well, that it is.
The SciFi channel seems to be turning into the Post-Apocalyptic channel.
Secret government lab or secret corporate lab finds an alien or something
and breeds a monster that kills everyone. Amazing how hot all those scientists
are. I guess in the future only hot looking scientists can breed monstrous
abominations that eat everyone’s heads of in a gruesome way.
If you are a hot looking scientist stop what you are doing. Right now.
Put down the beaker or the laser. Just walk away. Or hire someone really
ugly to balance things out, but they have to be smart so they aren’t just
comic relief.
Trust me, it looks like fun on TV, but it is a lot of work and messy,
messy, messy.
The various history channels can be summed up with: “And if the Nazis
had gotten this technology to work in time it would have changed the course
of the war.” Done.
Sport channels. Uh. I don’t watch sports and I am saving all my ramblings
about sports for another time.
Then there are the scrambled adult channels where you can almost make
out something but not quite. This can’t be good. Eventually, millions of
teenage males are going to accidentally program themselves to become attracted
to flickering, weirdly colored images. This may explain music videos.
Well, that is enough for today. I am going to go watch Cartoon Network.
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