TV Time

OK, I’ll admit it. I love television. I’m not proud or ashamed of this. It is simply a fact.

When I first moved here we had a local family cable provider called Nicoli that was eventually bought out by Charter Communications, a Paul Allen Company. The bill for cable went up every year as did Paul Allen’s philanthropic grants. It's one thing to make a reasonable profit and be generous with the extra funds, but I was getting the feeling that Allen was charging prices that were way over the top so he could make himself look better by giving away tons of money.

Most of the time they just raised the bill without notice, but one year I was warned with letter from Charter that said, “In order to remain competitive we need to increase your cable fee.”

Excuse me! I always thought that in order to remain competitive you should lower your prices. This fee adjustment was a 16% increase. WTF? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 16% pay raise in one year, and this company has some set of balls doing this. I decided to switch to Dish Network, which offers more for fewer dollars. Sure I still get the Independent Film Channel, and all the local stations and HBO and all that, but I also get satellite radio and a bunch of channels I never heard of before, like RFD-TV a channel dedicated to rural living and agricultural shows. They even have live cattle auctions and shows about antique tractors.

OK I know this isn’t for everyone, but hey. Anyone out there ever see Pants Off Dance Off, oh man… What about the Documentary Channel? What about Brinny Maxwell, a transvestite who dose a spin on the Martha Stewart thing. Brinny has been off for a while now, and I can’t even find a reference to him/her on the net anymore.

Anyway, I do enjoy irony. At the time I switched to a dish there was a dish marketing campaign that used the phrase, “Stop feeding the Cable Pig.” I was working out back the day that the cable guy came out to disconnect my cable. I saw his truck and he climbed into the hydraulic basket to ascend the utility pole to switch me off. During the five minutes it took him to do the job this guy let out several really loud deep gut burps and a couple farts that were audible to me over 100 feet away. I realized then that there was indeed the cable pig.