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Via Holy Taco

Thanks to TiVo, I watch South Park fairly regularly. I’ve been pretty impressed with the last few seasons. It’s a show that, as far as i’m concerned, has improved with every year.

Aside from Cartman, my all time favorite character is Butters. The little bastard cracks me up to no end. It’s the voice; it’s the personality; it’s all these things.

Let this video stand as testament to this character’s sheer hilarity:

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Butters is the man!

Jesus freaks have the lamest video games for kids:

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Not to mention the lamest superhero shows:

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The Power Rangers would totally flatten Bibleman and his douchebag posse.

It’s a very rare occasion that I watch televised news. It’s outdated, frustrating and a more often than not a waste of my time. In my line of work, we like to say that print is dead. The thirty to sixty minute TV news show format needs to have a steak pounded through it’s heart.

Chances are, by the time something airs on television, I’ve already read it to death online. I’ve no patience to wait through an news hour for that 1-3 minute bit that I’m interested in, when I can get the same (and usually more and many different versions of) information from my computer. I can even watch televised news online, neatly chopped up by some diligent YouTube user into bite-sized, relevant segments without all the bullshit buildups, the “stay tuned” and “when we come back” crap that sucks you into watching the whole damn thing, even though you could care less about what Paris Hilton is eating in prison.
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I was just thinking about what current television shows that I consider view-worthy. I’ve never been a big TV person, until I got a TiVo. A DVR completely changes the television experience, making it actually worthwhile. Anyway, since I’m a closet list junkie, here’s what I watch now (or impatiently wait the return of) as far as television is concerned:

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At long, way fucking long last, I finally received a replacement remote from TiVo. Mind you, this was a replacement remote that I had to order and pay for myself. Of the three tries TiVo supposedly attempted to ship a replacement remote under warranty to me, not a single one ever left their warehouse and I highly doubt they ever will show up. But whatever, I just wanted the service back. TiVo gets a big, fat “F” on how they run things, but at least I can pause live TV.

I, for one, am completely sick of it.

Yes, it sucked—more than I’m going to bother to try and convey.

I was (and still am) in NYC. I had to live through that day, walk through that day (all the way to Brooklyn) and deal with the next few weeks of absolute discombobulation (which, to me, was the worst – that’s when everything sets in) as to what’s safe anymore.

I had to go to work the next day, convinced I was going to die. I rode the subways every morning and for the first two months, every time the train stopped in the tunnels, a cold sweat would kick in and I was hardly the only person.

It was horrible. I wish it hadn’t happened. It did and it’s certainly affected me, my decisions and how I view things.

But it’s been five years.

Still, every time I watch the news, there it is. 9/11 is invoked left and right. I see the plane crash or at least the smoking buildings in the media every day. It’s no longer a tragedy. It’s been co-opted as a tool for politics and media. It makes me sick.

This morning, I was reading an article about a CBS interview with “Tuesday’s Children“, a group to support and represent the children who lost parents that day. The reporter was asking how they felt now and the biggest complaint, round the room, was the constant barrage of imagery from that day. A quote:

The kids [..] told 60 Minutes some of the worst memories don’t fade because the media won’t let them. [CBS Reporter Scott] Pelley got an earful about showing those pictures of 9/11 over and over again.

“Even when you’re just sitting down like eating dinner and watching TV, you’ll just have a nice conversation and then all the sudden you’ll see like pictures of 9/11. You can’t escape it. It’s just like everywhere you go its always like you’re always reminded of it somehow even in the littlest thing,” explains Amy Gardner.

“They’re showing my dad’s death and everyone else here. It’s just really offensive. Every time I see it, it brings up so much and it actually really hurts,” says Erik Abrahamson.

That pretty much sums it up for me. Here’s the link that has video and a transcript.

9/11 is now a political tool. It’s a ticket-selling, ratings-boosting tool. It’s a tool for bloated, flag-waving idiots to show how patriotic they are to everyone else. It’s disgusting. It’s sad. It’s infuriating.

Happy 9/11, everybody.

Over the weekend, the remote control for my beloved TiVo decided to roll over, shit the bed and expire. If you don’t have TiVo, know that the remote is the only way to control it. No working remote means an uncommunicative TiVo box that does what it wants, recording and deleting at it’s whim. Meanwhile, you can’t watch anything it may have recorded for you.

After calling support, going through the rigmarole to determine the problem, they’re sending me a new remote since I’m still under warranty and I can’t seem to find a store in New York City that sells them separate from the whole system. They all want to sell you those $200 universal remote deals. All I want is my trusty $30 TiVo remote back.

In the meantime, to stop TiVo from changing channels on me and deleting shows on it’s drive that I may still want to watch, I’ve unplugged it. I actually felt a pang of loss watching it’s little power light fade as I stood there, cord in hand. Almost like I’d just pulled a Schiavo on it. It was suffering, unable to communicate and just going through the motions, still trying to be a good little worker ant even with it’s legs pulled off. Poor little bugger. I had to put it out of it’s misery.

I’d never realized how dependent I was on TiVo. I used to hold the fact that I didn’t own a television as a point of pride, but yet there I was, reflexively thumbing the old cable box remote I’d pulled out of limbo only to find that no, Dave—you can’t pause live TV anymore. You can’t rewind. You can’t skip commercials and you can’t do whatever you want and trust that your favorite television shows will be dutifully recorded for you. No, you have to sit there like a tool and watch every mind-numbing commercial at the proper time-slot and God help you if someone talks to you or a car alarm goes off on the street, you deaf fuck. There’s no pausing in the land of no TiVo.

It’s snotty, but it’s almost an offense to have to watch TV the old fashioned way. It’s like if the Amish watched television, they’d be going through what I have to deal with—only by choice. Without TiVo, watching TV sucks monkey balls. Instead of a hard drive filled with all your favorite programming, you’re back to Sunday nights with 200-plus channels and jack-shit worth watching. Lame! Hopefully my replacement remote will arrive soon because while I hate missing the Daily Show and Colbert Report, etc.—dealing with this for much longer is going to have me back to being an anti-television believer.

Now that I have TiVo, aside from a nearly endless supply of Law & Order reruns, I’ve been really getting into some new (to me) television shows. I have just about wrapped up season one of Lost and although I was skeptical at first, due to the somewhat ridiculous dialog at times, as the season has progressed, I’ve found myself completely hooked. I’m a big fan of Hurley.

Another show I really dig is the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Network. I vaguely recall the original show from the seventies—I was bit young to retain much of it. However, no experience with the original series is really necessary. I’m about five episodes into the second season and while at times the show gets a bit absurd with characters contradicting their motives, attitudes and personalities with no real reasoning other than what seems to be a scriptwriter being sloppy and schlocky, the show’s good. It’s got violence, good CGI, robots with machine guns and Edward James Olmos. It’s hard to err with that combination.

One thing that gets me about Battlestar Galactica is the stupidity of the villain. The Cylons are the cyborg baddies that are out to destroy their human creators. These big, bad-ass Cylon robots run around with their machine guns kicking ass and all humanity is on the run because these dudes are super fucking smart, evil and devious as hell. However, often the show has humans hiding from the Cylons. Two soldiers seeking shelter in a burned out building as a Cylon patrol goes by. The Cylons are actively searching for the humans, who are only a few feet away and yet never find them. What I don’t understand is is these cyborgs are supposed to be so smart, where’s the fucking infrared? These hi-tech cyborgs with their Kitt-like scanners can’t see for shit. That just makes no sense to me. Every science fiction show requires a certain amount of suspension of belief, but this show really takes it out there in ways not too well thought. Still, I really like it.

When I was around preschool age, I was obsessed with the television show, CHiPs, much like all the other kids I knew. As far as I was concerned, the coolest motherfucker in the world was California Highway Patrol officer Frank Poncharello aka “Ponch“. With a cool uniform, a motorcycle and proficient in a wide variety of skills such as skate boarding, street and roller hockey, handball, racquetball, basketball, flying, singing, jet-skiing, hang-gliding, sky-diving, wind-surfing, demolition derby driving, square dancing, drag racing, volleyball, chess, and Karate—Ponch was cool. Ponch got bitches a-plenty. I wanted to be exactly like him. His partner, Jon Baker was a fucking hick tool.

One day, I watched an episode where Ponch, having returned to his apartment from exercising, pours a glass of milk, cracks two raw eggs into it and drinks the mix. Supposedly, this is Ponch’s secret recipe for starting the day off right. I became fixated on this raw concoction. It was the magic potion of coolness. If I were to drink this elixir of milk and egg, I would instantly become cool like Ponch. If I managed to drink it every day, I’d surely get a motorcycle and roller-skating bitches would just flock to me like a pint-sized porn magnet. I was a big kid now. I didn’t need diapers anymore and I sort of knew what a vagina was. I needed this.

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