cum grano salis — nobody likes a clever bastard

Cable bills rising in 2010, how to lock your rate in today
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/01/13/cable-bills-rising-in-2010-how-to-lock-your-rate-in-today/
Josh Smith – Jan 13th 2010 at 12:30PM

The next cable bill that comes in your mail could contain a belated bad start to 2010 in the form of higher prices. Not only are new offerings, like 3-D programming…

I stopped reading right there. Of course, following my instincts, I composed an inflammatory response. “Lock it in at $0. TV is bad for you. It destroys lives, families, and is destroying our country.” This was enough to get at least one TV apologist to come out of the woodwork and try to justify a mass of cancer by the little fetus in fetu inside because it’s still a life!

The news media is destroying our country, I can agree with that. Not all of TV, but most of it. What about the cooking shows? I see you guys watching those from time to time! ha. If anything push the FCC for a la carte TV subscriptions where you get to pay for the channels you want. If that were the case I would probably have about 10 channels and be set.

Good points, but not good enough.

I would rather rent or buy quality shows. The rest, even the crap I’ve watched, is easy to give up. The cooking shows are even shit almost all of the time. It’s just Real World all over again or some fat chick trying to show off. The occasional gem like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations are just cynical, nihilistic, and/or hedonistic fluff making fun of how stupid everyone is and the intended audience already understands. It’s just passing the time until Rachel Ray comes on and ruins your life. It’s purely optional, and I would rather sit in silence while I eat, since reading while eating is too difficult. Other shows that involve science and nature are on the borderline of expendable entertainment, like Good Eats where you may learn some technique or science behind cooking. Shows like Planet Earth just make you want to kill, so they can be very inspiring and help get you through the day. They’re all available in other forms, though.

All of the aforementioned shows are available off of TV:

• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 1
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 2
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 3
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 4
• Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]
• Good Eats: Vol. 5-7 Super Sweets, Breakfast Eats 2 & 3

… and so on.

It’s also not the news media. It’s the people who watch it. People have been taught that news is actually news and not entertainment. The lines blurred over time and now there’s almost nothing left of “news”. The only way to change it is to stop watching altogether, since they aren’t responsible enough or smart enough to be able to determine which is which. They sit, eat more garbage, get fatter, and are entertained, thinking that this is the only time they get to themselves in their day after getting raped on both ends by their employers, the government, and any purveyor they deal with cutting new holes to rape them, too, so they’re going to be entertained. All other forms of entertainment are practically dead and you can’t even go to the park without the threat of being mugged, perceived or real, or having the park not be covered with graffiti and McDonald’s trash. You can’t even talk to people in public without them suing you. People have lost their imaginations and are too jaded to come up with and enjoy any form of constructive entertainment because TV does it all for them. Watching a cooking show does not make you a chef, watching Friends does not make you funny or cool, and watching MTV does not make you black.

It really boils down to stupid people being irresponsible with their time and lives and TV the catalyst, drug, or whatever that enables it instead of people, I don’t know, educating themselves.

Oh, American Gladiators is on…

Don’t Panic! Cable TV Rates Increasing in 2010! by cum grano salis — nobody likes a clever bastard, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.