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Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing!
Okay, so by now you know I'm housesitting over in Bellevue through the holidays. For somebody who lives in a space the size of a small bathroom, having an entire house to oneself feels like the height of extravagance. There is a dark side, however, and that is the fact that I am being exposed to the hideousness that is Cable Television. Even in the past few houses I've lived in, we never had full-blown cable service, so suddenly I'm confronted with 70 or so channels of viewing choices. Some of them are obvious passes of course; the four channels of religious broadcasting, the various ESPN and other all sports channels (with one notable exception), the six shopping channels, but that still leaves an awful lot of channels left to pick from. However, in the past couple of days, I've found I slip into the pattern of simply spending hours channel-surfing, rarely spending more than two or three minutes watching any one thing before moving on.
There have been a couple of notable exceptions; I got to watch the first two semifinals of the Louis Vitton Cup races, which are the qualifying matches for the America's Cup yacht challenge. Oracle is kicking our own hometown One World Challenge 2-0 in a best of seven series. One World's chances look pretty dismal, as they've lost most of their previous races against Oracle, and because of a penalty exacted in an earlier round, they actually have to win 5 races to move on to the finals. So, don't expect to be able to wander down the SYC anytime soon to take a gander at the Big Cup.
It was also a toss-up last night between "Laurence Of Arabia" on AMC and "Mars Attacks!" on Comedy Central; I went with the latter, since "LOA" just isn't as appealing in scan-and-pan format -- you'd think they could have sprung for the wide-screen version at least. And today I watched "The Green Room" for the first time. For those of you not in the know, this is a locally-produced Community Access program focusing on the Seattle Theatre Scene. I didn't expect much in the way of production values, but could somebody please buy these people a nice little throw-rug to lay over the poorly joined platform sections? Please? My friend Bobbi Kotula was the guest, and frankly there are worse ways one could spend 28 minutes. Still, I was sort of hoping the program would be a little more "newsy", but I realize that's tough to do in a once-a-month format.
But, the thing is -- there are 70+ channels on this cable system, and except for some news and the shows I've mentioned above (and an interesting program about side-shows, and the one about medeival weaponry, and MST3K, and "The French Connection", and - oh Hell, I'm hooked!), there really isn't all that much to hold one's interest, hence the constant flip, flip, flip through the system. Is this how normal people spend their precious leisure time? If so, I guess I'm glad I don't have cable, or worse a satellite, which would just compound the problem four or five-fold.
Posted byCOMTE
on 4:07 PM
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