Saturday, January 21, 2012

Nothing On

There is NOTHING on TV. I don't mean that literally, of course, because there's a ton of stuff on TV. Just nothing I want to watch. And since I'm kind of bored and at loose ends to begin with, that's pretty sad. I should go work on a model instead, but I'm in the midst of a minor scale modeling lull - all my current projects seem to be stuck at the stage where they need interior green paint, and I'm fresh out.

So I decided to see what was on TV instead of going to the hobby shop and getting new paint (besides, it's 9 pm and the hobby shop proprietor probably has better things to do right now than sell me a couple of bottles of Testors interior green). I started at Channel 1 and finally gave up somewhere around Channel 750, and nowhere did I see anything that interested me, not even in my current mildly bored state.

Sports! Holy cow, look at all the sports! There are apparently more sports channels than there are actual sports, because some of the channels were actually replaying past sporting events - football games from 1982, especially tense putts from some golf tournament, highlights (I kid you not) of some poker championship. I had no idea there was a tennis channel, or a golf channel. There's a Major League Baseball channel, even though I'm reasonably sure they aren't playing baseball right now.

Reality shows! American Pickers! Pawn Stars! Storage Wars! Pass. How can the so-called "History Channel" executives sleep at night knowing that they're running this kind of crap? The only reality shows I watch are the ones involving hoarders, and even then, I watch with a certain reluctance. I confess that a part of me watches those shows just to see how awful the latest hoarder home really is - "Oh my god, they just found a dead cat in the clutter!" And while a certain part of me feels a certain sympathy for the bizarre psychological pathology of the victims, there's also a part of me that bellows "You've got dead cats in your glacier of litter because you're a lazy slob, not because of psychological trauma! Quit crying, get a garbage bag, and start throwing some of that junk away!"

I watched the Food Network for a while, but apparently today it's all Guy Fieri, all the time. He's okay. But after an hour of watching Guy Fieri eat enormous hamburgers and do fist-bumps with the greasy spoon chef, I'm ready to move on (and I see that the Food Network still airs "Chopped". In today's episode, some unwashed-looking guy with way too much oily-looking hair and ridiculous hipster eyeglasses was going on and on about the artistry of his work. I wouldn't have trusted that guy to cook me a Pop-Tart; I don't want greasy hipster hair and droplets of hipster perspiration in my breakfast, thanks very much, and you can pay for your tattoos yourself).

There are a lot of paranormal shows these days too. Ghost hunters, vampire hunters, UFO investigators, psychics, people who will (for a modest fee) channel the soul of President Hoover, and more shows combining Nostradamus and the Mayan apocalypse than I could shake a stick at. These shows can sometimes be unintentionally funny, like when they do their ESV analysis and mistake someone's squeaky shoe for a woman's voice saying "Which one of you bastards ate all the potato salad?" Please.

And then there's the sudden sobering realization that I really am deeply naive. I had no idea there was so much pay-per-view porn on satellite TV, such as "Hot MILFs Like It Black 3". I think what disturbs me about that show is the "3" business. Is it kind of like Star Wars, where if you watch them out of sequence they don't make much sense? Do we fail to appreciate the emotional nuances of Hot MILFS 3 if we haven't seen the backstory presented in Hot MILFS 1 and 2?

There are a couple of channels that I won't watch because of unfortunate names. Syfy, for example, which I haven't watched since they adopted the name "Syfy", and H2, which used to be History Channel International but is now just "H2". It sounds like a little-known mountain, not a TV channel - but maybe one of those hundreds of interminable sports channels will air something about a team of bearded guys with vaguely European accents trying to climb K2 and climbing H2 by accident. I see them on the summit of the mountain, exchanging weary breathless congratulations, and then someone says "Wait, wait, you wanted to climb K2? I thought you said H2! CRAP!"

The more I think about it, the more I think that I'd be better off mixing paints and coming up with my own shade of interior green paint than wasting any more time on this ultimately fruitless attempt to find something that wasn't either deadly dull or blatantly insulting on TV.

1 comment:

-Warren Zoell said...

Star Trek quotes one rarely hears.
"I'm game, love. Lead and I'll follow. Where's library?"
"Brain and brain what is brain?"
"Schmitter. Like the rest of them. Burned to a crisp."
"The occipital area of my head seems to have impacted with the chair."
"I fail to understand why I should care to induce my mother to purchase falsified patents."
"Study, study, study, or bonk bonk, bad kid."
"Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate."