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What a lot of crap!

Have you noticed that there is literally almost nothing but crap on television these days? Oh, I know there is the occasional worthy show, but, on the whole, at any given hour of the day or night, when you pick up the remote and hit the on switch, all you will have to choose from is crap.

Wasn't there a song a few years back about "200 channels and nothing to watch"? Well, if there wasn't, there should have been. Maybe I'll even write one.

This wouldn't really bother me so much normally, because television and I went our separate ways several years ago. I used to be deeply in love with it in my younger days. In fact, you could hardly drag me out of its embrace. But over the years, I admit I grew increasingly unfaithful because I had met other, more interesting and satisfying loves. (I'm sitting in front of one of them now.) In the end, we had just grown too far apart. Irreconcilable differences, I believe is the term. I still tried to remain friendly with the old flame and I would drop by to visit on a regular basis, but I never stayed long - an hour or so at most.

But these last few days I've been in enforced confinement because of illness and my eyes hurt too much to read, so I turned to radio and then television to entertain me. NPR radio offered some relief but what a disappointment television was. Our high-powered satellite dish brings us channel after channel of pay-per-view (mostly movies I never heard of or don't care to see), games, every sport ever invented by man, music of every conceivable genre, sex channels, soap opera channels, channels that claim to be 24-hour-news-channels but are really 24 hour propaganda channels, channels that are all-Hitler all the time (And what's with this fascination with Hitler, anyway?), faux science networks - well, I could go on but I'm depressing myself. I guess somebody out there must want to watch this stuff, but other than things like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and the occasional Nature or Nova or Masterpiece program or HBO series, there just isn't anything there that I can stand to sit still for. How my old love has let itself go.

But there is hope for the old flame. Soon baseball season will be starting and television will have a chance to redeem itself and become desirable to me once again. For the next six months or so, we will have a hot fling, just for old time's sake. In the meantime, thank goodness for radio and audio books and for the fact that my eye is getting better so I can read again.
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