I’m a Television Snob

There, I said it, I’m a TV snob. I’m subscribed to Bright House’s HD cable package and receive, I kid you not, around 1000 channels. The problem is I only watch about 7 of them, the HD channels that are all bunched together at the bottom of the dial. I find it too much work to search through the entire guide, so I only look at what’s on the HD channels. It goes something like this:

This is what you get when you search 1329 on Google Images.

What’s on ESPN (1329), ESPN2 (1330) or ESPNU (1331)? Oh, nothing. Alright, let’s move down to Discovery (1340) and Discovery HD Theater (1341). Alright, let’s skim through the rest of the Discovery channel partners (Science, History, TLC, etc) and check out Food Network (1359). The interesting thing is that I completely skip TBS (1312), TNT (1311), Disney (1335) and Family (1337) because they completely bore me — unless TBS is showing baseball which is almost never anymore.

Now, if I find nothing in this run, then I start to get a little adventurous. I’ll check HBO HD (1243) and the networks, NBC (1020) and ABC (1090) — who watches CBS? If still I find nothing worth watching, I’ll either turn on CNN (1324) or just return to ESPN.

I’m sure there are other, really great channels out there, but if I don’t get it in HD it’s really not worth watching — also it’s not worth the effort to find it on the guide. There are, of course, very few exceptions. The biggest one being The Soup which is on E! (65).

Is that wrong? Do you only watch a handful of channels? Let me know down under.

Like Free Stuff?

I have talked about Strands before and was even the Pick of the Day awhile back. In case you still don’t know what Strands is, it’s a life stream social networking site that way sweeter than FreindFeed and looks better too. Basically it takes all your web accounts (Twitter, last.fm, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, etc, etc) and puts them all in one convenient place. The people behind Strands are great and the content that is delivered there is always interesting.

If it sounds like I’m attempting to sell the site, it’s because I am. Right now they’re running a nice little membership drive. Since it’s still in closed beta, you have to be invited to join. And this month, everyone that joins is eligible to win a sweet price for them and a friend. Prizes include a MacBook Air, iPod Touch, and a Flip camera. Peek your interest yet? If you want down on this sweet Strands action, I’ve still got a handful of invites left and it’s yours if you want it. Leave a comment below or hit me up on the contact form and I’ll get send one your way. Once you join, make sure you follow me!

(Full details and rules can be found here.)

Digital Political

A week or so ago I decided to prepare for the political debate season by doing a bit of research. I have no idea who I’m going to vote for in this year’s election so I’ve been waiting for the debates to make up my mind. While I was reading through Obama’s tax plan I was intrigued, but had a question. A fairly simple question in the grand scheme of things, but a question that wasn’t answered on the website. So I did what any person would do (well, maybe not any person but people like me) and clicked “Contact Us.” The question I asked was similar to this:

The tax plan you are putting out is very interesting. Cutting taxes for people with income under $200,000 is certainly a good thing. However, how does this effect sub-chapter S corporations which file business taxes with their income taxes? If their business makes more than the $200,000 cut off, their taxes will increase. If their taxes increase it will be more difficult to employ people and continue running the business. I’m curious how this factors in.

-An Undecided Registered Independent from the State of Florida

Yeah, I laid it on pretty thick with the closing in the hopes that someone would actually read it.

Shortly after clicking send on the email form I received a canned response email, much like you would see from any corporation saying something similar to this:

Thank you for your interest into Barack Obama. Due to the very high volume of email we regret that we cannot reply to your message. We encourage you to read Barack Obama’s plan for our nation by visiting… blah blah blah.

Basically thanks but we don’t do email. Which I found very odd considering Obama being considered the more technologically advanced candidate. Either way I felt like my question would go unanswered. A few people suggested I contact the local campaign office but I figured they wouldn’t be able to tell me anything other than what was on their talking points. I basically forgot about it.

What did happen, which I wasn’t exactly happy with, was that I got automatically subscribed to Obama’s various email lists. I got an email from him thanking me for my support — which I thought was tacky considering I asked a question trying to make a decision and instead got added to a list. I also got an email from his wife encouraging me to get involved in some for of campaigning, again, tacky. On Twitter I called this a “courtesy fail.” Needless to say I unsubscribed pretty quickly.

With the idea of fairness I sent John McCain an email asking a question about something in his economic policy just to see what happened. Even stranger than the Obama response, I got nothing. Not a canned “thanks for your interest” email, not a “we don’t respond to email” email, nothing. Basically I figured despite being 2008, neither campaign had figured out how to directly interact with email questions. So I forgot about the whole thing.

Then just before noon on Friday, the day of the debate, I got a response to my Obama email — sort of. What I got was a five paragraph email response detailing a bit more of Obama’s tax plan with links to a few fact sheets hosted on the Obama website. The email was addressed Dear Friend and was signed Sincerely Barack Obama. Now chances are this was not written by Barack Obama, but the fact that I got a somewhat thought out response at all is somewhat impressive considering the first response basically said they don’t do responses.

Did the email answer my question. Not specifically, no. The fact sheets that were linked to talked more about specific cuts that would actually benefit sub-chapter S corporations, but did not address the issue of the $200,000 income tax cut off. It’s not a perfect answer but I guess it’s an answer.

So what does all this mean? I don’t really know. I still haven’t made up my mind. I’m not exactly keen on either candidate right now. There are things I like about both of them and things that I have issues with for both of them. What I do like, is that despite saying they don’t respond to email, someone actually took a few minutes to — at the very least — compile a few pre-written paragraphs and send it out. If I ever get a response from McCain’s people, I’ll be sure to update this post.

One Spam Comment to Rule Them All

Being a blog on the internet with open commenting I get a fair amount of spam comments. The various WordPress features and plugins I have generally do a good job of keeping out about 99.9% of these spam comments, but there is the occasional one that gets through. One such comment made it through earlier today and cracked me up enough that I had to share it.

Lie down on a car accident and char do everything gigantic boobs else would take five.

That’s it. Obviously some random word generator went haywire and created a sentience to get past spam catchers. I don’t really have anything else to say about it. It just cracked me up.

What’s the funniest spam comment you’ve ever seen?

Did the Writers Strike Make Writers Worse?

The WGA writers strike seems like so long ago but it seems we might still be feeling it’s effects. Since the new television season has started, it seems the quality of the writing has diminished after taking a half season off. I’ve watched three shows so far this season and all of them have had writing “issues” so far.

The first show is Saturday Night Live. To say SNL has writing issues is an understatement. The show has downright problems. In the two episodes that have aired so far there has been one sketch that was actually funny: the Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton season opener.

After watching the rest of the episode, and a majority of the one aired this past Saturday, it seems as if Tina Fey herself might have written this one. The SNL writing has been in trouble for a very long time and this season it just seems worse. It begs the question, will NBC grow a pair and clean out the write staff or *gasp* cancel the show?

The next show that makes me wonder what the writing team is thinking is Fringe. I’ve talked about Fringe before, it’s a great show that is part LOST and part X-Files. One of the main characters is a former mad scientist who has been locked up in a mental institution for the past 17 years. While most of the writing revolving this character is done well, there seems to be one “out” the team is using.

In the first episode Bishop, the character in question, wanted to use his lab from 17 years ago. Good thing it still exists! Harvard just decided to use it as storage. And by storage they meant cover the equipment with a tarp and put a few boxes in there. Convenient. In the second episode Bishop needed a file he left in his car. Well guess what? His car is in the same pad-locked garage it was 17 years ago! Again, how convenient? Finally, last night, Bishop needed a piece of equipment he hid in the wall of his former home. Well guess what. It was still there. But it wasn’t in a wall, it was in a dumbwaiter merely covered by a bookshelf. Do the writers really expect us to believe that the key to all of Bishop’s experiments are littered all over Boston and somehow completely untouched and right where they were left 17 years ago? Come on?

The final show I’ve watched so far this season has been Heroes. Cut to only 11 episodes last year because of the strike, it’s been a long time since Heroes has been on the air. But watching the two hour premiere on Monday, a few things struck me about one of the main characters, Peter.

Peter can absorb every power that he comes in contact with making him pretty much the most powerful “hero” of them all. Yet, somehow, Peter manages to constantly make poor decisions and, as a result, the world ends four to five years later. This season, future “Dark Peter” has come back from the future to prevent bad things from happening. But here’s what I don’t get: Dark Peter has a giant scar across his face. Lest we forget Peter has the ability to heal himself. Curious? Even more curious is that two of the powers Peter has absorbed involve being able to see the future. Given this, you would think Peter would know that his horrible choices have an effect down the road. Either that or the writers just assume we don’t remember these things.

None of these writing slips will cause me to stop watching the shows, well except maybe for SNL. But after waiting so long for good TV to come back on, I’d like to think the writers would be willing to not treat the audience like children and actually write the show without the sloppy “outs” they have been given themselves. Maybe it’s just been so long that I forgot this is the small screen norm and am being overly critical. If Toby shows up on The Office on Thursday I’ll know sloppy writing abounds.

What do you think? Have you noticed other instances of sloppy writing on TV so far this year? Leave it in the comments.