Advertisement Please, spare me the winter wonderland hooey. Years ago I concluded that weather that, given time and left to its own devices, will reduce my corporeal being to a granite-hard crystalline mass constitutes a seriously hostile environment and ought to be regarded as such. Just as I don’t go scampering about the caldera of active volcanoes or play dodge ’em with rampaging tornadoes, I don’t go a-recreating in weather conditions conducive to chilblains, hypothermia and frostbite.
But the furnace is tuned, the oven is cleaned and the freezer is full. I have whiskey in the cupboard, and they sell more just down the street. Until the trees start to bud and it’s time to break out the barbecue, my plan is to put on some stew, pull on some wooly socks and enjoy the kind of weather that will soon provide at least 20 subzero excuses for a life of indoor indolence. Life would be swell, if it weren’t for that #*&%$#%! cable bill.
Yeah, I’ve just about had it with TV. A week past Election Day and I’m slowly realizing its not the politicians’ ads I was sick of — it was the crud they were embedded in that’s truly annoying. And to add injury to the insult, every month, I’m paying for it … paying a lot.
OK, in terms of the Bush budget it’s not all that much, but every month I’m laying out cash to bring “The Biggest Loser” into my living room — even when it’s not campaign season. For years I’ve paid for the Golf Channel, and I’ve yet to watch long enough to see Tiger slice one into the woods. Every moment of every day more than 80 streams of programming are piped into my house — most of which I wouldn’t give a nickel for but for the fact that without cable, my TV wouldn’t be much more than a big box that glows in the dark.
But that might be changing. Y’see, the cable that’s hooked to my TV is the same cable hooked to my computer — just don’t ask me why I don’t end up with reruns of "Gilligan’s Island" when I go to file my income taxes online — or at least that’s the way it’s worked up ’til now. But, like I said, that might be changing.
Actually it already has changed. If I had a notion and the boss wasn’t likely to be looking, in the space of a few mouse clicks I could pick up on last night’s Leno just about where I dozed off on him. Television has come unstuck in time and a guy doesn’t even have to figure out how to program a VCR (do they even make them anymore?) to take advantage of it.
Of course, most of what’s tucked away in the more convenient recesses of cyberspace is the same dreck that wasn’t worth
watching when it was spewed out over the airwaves, but just like the 49ers had to sluice through a lot of muck to wash out the gold, there is a bunch of good stuff just waiting to be Googled and the part the cable guys would just as soon not have you know — it’s free. Time was, if you didn’t pay the cable bill, no History Channel for you. Now it’s just a matter of click, wait and there you are — free for the watching … which is very good … as far as it goes.
Where it goes is a squinty little window on your computer screen and, if eyestrain and tinny speakers aren’t bad enough, not many of us rate a desk chair to compete with a Lazy Boy. So when it comes time to grab the Doritos and settle in, most of us still grumble and write the check. But a bunch of clever folks are coming up with smart little boxes that hook up to set in the living room that put the stuff you want to watch right there where you want to watch it — and once the box is bought, all there is to pay for is the broadband bill you were paying anyway.
No more paying for the Home Shopping Network.
It could give a guy something to do while he’s waiting for May.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
