I Turned Off the TV

Okay, so I contacted my service provider and cancelled my TV. I didn't select a smaller collection of channels, I cancelled the whole thing. Afterward I went outside and stood on the sidewalk in front of my house and watched the birds and listened to them. We've got a lot of birds in my neighborhood. A lot of big trees. And birds are fascinating, that's why bird-watching is such a huge thing.

I'm being a mama bird, pushing myself out of the warm comfortable nest that TV provided for my brain.

I've intentionally gone for stretches of time with no TV of my own before this. It resulted in a more active social life, which is something I could really use now. Now being the past 20 years or so, which come to think of it is also exactly the amount of time since I last voluntarily stopped watching TV.

It won't be exactly the same this time, because, the Internet. In fact, this might be exactly what I need in order to finally learn how to really take advantage of all that my smartphone has to offer, and become one of the people who walks around hunched over with my face glued to the hand-held screen.

I don't think I need to be TV-less forever. Just for a good long mental flush. Months. Or maybe a few years. Or maybe I'll find something which will mean I could never miss TV all that much. When I have a TV, I tend to watch it too much. This setup I just unhooked was U-TV. How much did I watch it? This is from memory. All hi-def: 1002 was Fox. 1003 was a home-shopping network. 1004 was NBC. I don't remember if there was a 1005. 1006 was a home-shopping network. 1009 was CBC (Canadian). 1020 was a local independent station. So was 1031. 1032 was a home-shopping channel that sold Invicta watches. 1037 was another shopping channel. 1038 was a local independent. So was 1050. 1056 was Detroit public TV. (U-Verse in my area recently dropped public TV from Michigan State University in East Lansing. For a long time I had two different PBS channels.) 1062 was CBS. 1104 was an automotive channel. I don't remember exactly what 1105 was.

I could go on past 3000 but this is getting boring and you can see the point: time for me to chill, seeing as how I'm not actually being paid to know a lot about TV.

According to some random website I'd never heard of, Rachel McAdams, Chloe Sevigny and Cynthia Nixon are among the famous, beautiful people who don't own TV's.

"Undercover Pinko Troublemaker Peon"

I just saw a commercial for the upcoming new season of "Undercover Boss." I don't think I'll be tuning in. I don't have to explain the premise of the show to you either, do I? Good-guy boss spies on peons for the viewer's amusement and to defend American Capitalis -- , um... Freedom.
I'd rather see something more like the exact opposite: have a union rep at a huge corporation pose as a newly-hired top-level exec, have a hidden camera follow him or her to the boardroom, to the executive washroom, to private chin-wags with the CEO, with lobbyists, with legislators -- now THAT would be good TV! That would be new, daring, zesty.
It would also be much much much much harder to do, of course. Somehow it's fine to spy on the peons, but the execs? You better have a warrant, Budro. And 99.99999% of the time the big shots can feel secure in the certainty that you don't. And that you also don't have 547 lawyers like they do, if you somehow do manage, with or without a warrant, to get a hidden camera into the washroom or a lobbyist's office.
I just want people to think about things like that. Especially if they happen to be Republican peons or Democratic board members, but also everyone else.