(This entry is both another test and a legit entry. You can sometimes have it both ways, after all.)
I watch very little television these days. I have a sizable cable-TV bill, mind you, because a lot of what I do watch is at least on basic cable programming, if not on a premium station. I'll confess to watching Farscape (SciFi), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Enterprise (both UPN), Sopranos and Six Feet Under (both HBO), and a handful of others. I calculated once that at a worst-case point in overlapping seasons (since many of the shows have shorter seasons than you usual network fare), I might have 12 hours a week that I set aside for watching. Realistically, I only average 6-8 hours, because many of the HBO shows rarely overlap their seasons, and even the network shows fall back to re-runs for more than half of the year.
So when I do watch something, I suppose I'm more vulnerable to being repulsed by the sad state of advertising. I say vulnerable, because I feel that if I watched TV more than I currently do, I'd have developed a tolerance, a resistance to it. As it is, my brain has to rapidly deploy anti-moronic antibodies before I give in to the impulse to buy a new car, consume cheap beer, and utilize hair-restoration products that are potentially toxic to the touch. (Think I'm kidding on that last one? Listen to the quickly-spewed disclaimers at the end of a commercial for Propecia.) How can a hair-regeneration drug be so critical to society, that it would be made available even if it's a potential hazard to women who might even be thinking about getting pregnant? Besides, my hair is this close to non-existent on purpose, anyway.
It's not merely limited to television, it's just more prevalent there. On a recent drive home from work, I was alternately amused and annoyed by an ad for a product being sold via web-presense at "penisgrowth.com" And yes, I consciously choose not to make that an actual link. Type it into your browser's location box if you want to, but I won't be responsible for them getting any referrer logs on their site from this one. I was amazed at how many times the (female, of course) narrator managed to fit the phrase, "penis-growth-dot-com" into a single 30-second ad spot. I can only guess as to how long she was laughing, once the recording was completed and the mics turned off.
I long for a TiVo, but even if I were ready to make the investment (and go through the trouble of switching signal providers), it would only simplify the process of skipping over the crud. It wouldn't eliminate it. I would still know it was there. It just gets so discouraging, sometimes.
Must run to the grocery-- I have a sudden craving for a rather specific brand of snack food...
--rjray
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. -- Sir Winston Churchill
It was posted not only by means of my upj_post.pl script (written as an exercise while learning SOAP::Lite), it was posted from within a buffer in XEmacs. I still have a few quirks on the XEmacs side to fix (it initially had comments disabled, I'd like the function to use the whole buffer if a region isn't already selected, etc.), but this beats the heck out of creating a temp file for every journal entry, just to avoid using the browser interface.
--rjray
