TV Dinner

Now, I like television as much as the next guy. I think TCM and Encore-Mystery are the greatest things since sliced bread and wouldn't miss the latest installment of Battlestar Galactica for the world. For the last 10 years or so, I've been using a DVR with my satellite system, which makes TV even better. I am no longer bound to a schedule about when I should watch something, but can select what I want to watch ahead of time and watch it whenever the mood strikes me. I currently have movies recorded on the DVR that aired over a year ago. I'll get around to watching them one of these days. I watch several hours of news/politics programs every day, but I don't watch them in real time. I watch them at my convenience, and skip through the commercials so that a one-hour program only takes me about 45 minutes to watch. Even less if they interview Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor.

All this is just to say, I'm a fan. I like TV. I watch TV a lot. I'm not a TV hater.

Here's the problem. It seems recently that it is becoming impossible to go out to eat without having a TV in sight. It used to be that a restaurant might have a TV in the bar section. Sports Bars, which were a kind of fad a few years ago, would have lots of TVs doing ESPN of one flavor or another. Almost every restaurant we have gone into in the last couple of years has multiple TVs hanging from the ceiling, strategically placed so that they are in view from every seat at every table in the place.

This wouldn't be such a problem if I weren't so conditioned to what Harlan Ellison called "The Glass Teat" that I find it very hard to ignore a TV if one is turned on in my vicinity. Not that the program that is playing is EVER something that I would choose to watch at home, mind you. It's usually sports, of one sort or another.

And it's not just restaurants, either. I went out to have my wife's car inspected at the local lube&tuneup joint the other day, and there was a TV in the waiting room playing something called "Auto Net TV" that had little snippets of entertainment programming interspersed with well-endowed young women in fetching, if not not terribly convincing, mechanic uniforms attempting to sell me on the idea of synthetic motor oil. This, accompanied by animated illustrations of how natural motor oil was made up of long chains of molecules and synthetic motor oil is made up of little round molecules and "what's more slippery, a floor covered in pencils or a floor covered in marbles?" Personally, I refuse to take a position. Both options seem equally undesirable and indicate extreme carelessness on the part of the janitorial service.

In the waiting room at my doctor's office they have "Health Net TV." In the local Wal-Mart they have the "Rapacious Soul Devouring Hillbilly Corporation TV Network."

The Wal-Mart TV Network mostly, from what I understand, runs commercials for the different areas of the stores. Now, basically, anyone who walks into Wal-Mart deserves whatever they get, so I don't much care about Wal-Mart TV, but you can see where this is going. How long will it be before all those strategically placed screens at the steak house and the spaghetti joint are no longer playing ESPN but something far more objectionable?

Don't say I didn't warn ya!