Chapter XX: The Idiot Box

As you might know, television sets are sometimes referred to as 'idiot boxes' in the popular parlance. I am not sure why this is so, but I surmise it is because a TV resembles a rectangular prism (a 'box', as it were), and contains an idiot (Bill O'Reilly).

About a week ago, Cal Poly administrators decided to overhaul the channel line-up accessible in the on-campus dormitories. The decisions regarding which channels to add and which ones to drop were made using a student survey about what they want to watch.

Unfortunately, it appears that my TV preferences differ dramatically from those of my peers and nearly all the channels that I enjoy watching were axed.

ESPN2 , FSN, and the Travel Channel were all removed, which means no more televised poker. This is probably a good thing, since watching televised poker is the second most unproductive activity in the universe. The first being attending Professor Howell's lectures (18th C British Lit).

The also cut out all the shopping networks and Christian programming. I speak of these together since they are essentially the same thing. If you strip away all the organ music and empassioned quoting of Bible verses, televangelism is just infomercials for Christianity. I don't necessarily mean this pejoritively; after all, the elements of argument--logos, ethos, and pathos--are the same whether you're convincing people to find Jesus, or to buy vacuum cleaners. I enjoy studying the speaker's persuasive technique, irrespective of the product.

What I am most upset about, though, is the loss of CSPAN and CSPAN-2. Believe it or not, these were the first two channels I would cycle through whenever I turned on the TV. I can't stand news shows, like FOX News, MSNBC, even CNN to an extent, that give brief summaries and soundbites of the days political developments and then offer biased commentary (called 'analysis'). Only on CSPAN can you hear the whole speech, get the whole picture, and reach your own conclusions. I'm especially mad that the [Cal Poly] Administration decided to pull this crap right before the Senate confirmation hearings for Sam Alito. Sure, a lot of other stations are giving live coverage, but every 5 minutes they cut to one of their 'analysts' to tell me 'what it all means.' I just want to watch the hearings uninterrupted, damn it!

It seems utterly absurd that the Black Entertainment Television channel was added when only about 2% of Cal Poly is black. 99.9% of us are Americans, so CSPAN would hit a much larger demographic.

That said, getting HBO, HBO2, and HBO Signature is pretty cool.

In other news, Brian's Empire Poker account is still cursed. Seriously.

Image of the Day: Inflatable Chairs My Roommate Mounted To The Wall And Ceiling