Tag Archives: tv

Nag, nag, nag

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Original writing

(A gift post. A little while ago, I found this article filed away as a “draft” in my now deceased blog, “Limping in the Light” *. I must have written it in Days of Yore but never published it. Either I changed my mind or just plain forgot about it. Now it resurfaces to give me a new post with minimal investment. Being the noodge I am, however, it has taken me longer than expected. You can decide whether it was worth it.)

I don’t like nagging and I don’t like being nagged. I don’t know anyone who does. Even the nagger (one who nags, q.v., as opposed to the naggee) doesn’t get anything out of it. (There are those who derive some perverse pleasure from it, but they embody their own punishment.) And it doesn’t work. At best, the nagger gets what was nagged for—with a side of resentment and bitterness—but never what was truly wanted or needed.

Yet I find myself inundated with nagging. Day in, day out, day through, day over, day around. It never ends. No, it’s not from the stereotypical busybody sitcom housewife. There aren’t any of those in my life. The naggers I’m talking about are complete strangers to me. To those badgering bozos, I am less than a number. I am a disembodied statistic in their potential market share. Here’s the problem:

Cable TV** – Don’t have it, don’t want it, won’t get it. I grew up in a time when movie theaters ran ads heralding the prophetic image of a cash-eating box sitting on top of my TV. It came to pass just as they predicted! Paying to watch TV is like paying a fee for the privilege of shopping. (That happens, too, I hear.) Besides, I’m a TV-holic. No one asks alcoholics why they don’t have beer taps in their houses.

Verizon and Comcast don’t get the message. Nag, nag, nag. A week doesn’t pass without getting at least a couple (usually more) ads to sign up for one of their TV plans. I’ve even told them verbally that they are wasting their time and postage. Your cable rates would drop about 5% if they stopped sending me mailings.

Email spam – Fake Rolex watches, generic Viagra, jobs, lower interest rates, college degrees, tech gadgets, not to mention the unmentionables. There is no limit to the crap I am nagged to buy via email. True, those messages all end up in my spam bin only to be deleted, but I know they’re there. Is anyone really responding to these nags?

Phone spam – Lower your interest rates, sell your time-share, clean your chimney, IRS scams, vote for me, give, give, give, nag, nag, nag. Call me without me inviting you to do so and I will refuse whatever you are offering. Actually, I’ll never know because I don’t answer any calls from numbers I don’t recognize. The world would be a lot better off if everyone followed the same practice. (hint, hint)

Credit cards – I average a credit card offer in the mail every day, with batches of up to five arriving in a single day, some for cards I already have. Stop nagging me! If I want a new credit card, I’ll get it, but blind mailings accomplish nothing except cost you, and by inference your customers, large piles of money.

The nagging goes on and on. TV commercials. Billboards. Traffic signs. PC/Windows warnings. I predict that this post alone will elicit at least a few spam messages, “likes”, or “follows”. All of which will be ignored. Nag, nag, nag.

I am pummeled with messages (nags) with all the subtlety of flying mallets. (Thank you, Dave Edmunds, for the metaphor) This is nothing short of brainwashing. That’s the tactic. And you (and I) are the target.

Eventually, unless you are on your guard, you will actually believe that your life will be improved by a Swiffer or Proposition X.X or enhancement pills or this software or that exercise program or some innovative training class. None of them will improve you or your quality of life.

The only thing that would improve my life is if everyone would stop nagging me.

* Perhaps I should resurrect that old blog. The title is once more sadly appropriate, after a long and welcome lapse. Then again, why tempt fate?

** This is the downside of posting an old article. Some concepts from the era in which this was written (not that long ago) are already obsolete. Such is the case with “cable TV”, if you remember what that was. Substitute “streaming service” (e.g. Disney+, Peacock, Max, Netflix, Apple TV, Prime, blah, blah, blah, nag, nag, nag—each one a monthly subscription conspiring to drive you into bankruptcy while frying your brain) or “cell phone plan” and we’re back to the same old song and dance and nag and nag.

The NFL Blame Game

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

It’s football playoff time. Like a lot of guys, I spend (too) much of my weekends watching overpaid, overhyped, often overweight men pound each other into the artificial turf in pursuit of their big dream: dating Taylor Swift. No, not really. Well, yes, really, but the other dream: a Super Bowl©® championship, which entitles them to wear an immense, cumbersome, ostentatious ring causing their knuckles to drag on the ground for the rest of their lives. But at least they can flash them when making commercials for Subway©®.

One football scene that always amuses me is when there is movement at the line of scrimmage before the ball is hiked. The flags are thrown and action stops while referees confer about whether the offensive line had a false start or the D-line was offsides. Meanwhile, the players on the field blame each other. Seriously, it’s hysterical to watch mountainous men wagging their fingers at each other. “It’s not my fault, Mommy! He made me do it!”

Case in point (pun intended) is this screenshot from the Ravens/Texans game on 1/20/24:

No doubt the refs counted the number of fingers and made their decision based on that. Or maybe they responded as any frustrated parent of juveniles would, yelling, “Kids, stop arguing or we’re going home right this minute!”

By the way, on an only tangentially related note: Football was made for watching on TV.* At the stadium, it’s cold, it’s crazy, and you can’t really see the game. Unless you like to be surrounded by drunks painting their faces and chests and wearing pirate, S&M, animal, or other insane attire like rejects from a junior high costume party, stay home where you can eat anything you want anytime you want and at reasonable prices, see endless replays from every possible vantage point (including that of a slug crawling along the goal line), and you can easily get to the bathroom whenever you want. (Never underestimate the value of an easily accessible bathroom.)

[*On the other hand, baseball was made for viewing live. There’s nothing like sitting in the sun in a non-obstructed view seat, hot dog and favorite beverage in hand, while the greatest sport ever leisurely unfolds before you.]

TV and toilets

Posted on by under Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

Random thoughts on a random day. One for every single day of the year! So far.

Have you seen the ads for the “Golden Bachelor”? They break new ground in hyperbole, hubris, and downright lying. It was proclaimed to “make history”. With such a status, you can understand why they claimed that it was “all anyone can talk about.” Is it all you’re talking about? I’m pretty sure I could watch it (God forbid) and not even think about it, never mind talk about it.

I’m not a fan of the vertical toilet paper holder as shown here. As Cynthia Tobias would say, “What’s the point?” As far as I can tell, it attempts to address only one problem: the controversy over whether the paper should come over the front or the back. Unfortunately, it merely swaps that dilemma for an even more perplexing one: left or right. (Yet another illustration of “Rick’s Law of the Conservation of Woes“.) That answer will likely depend on whether you’re a conservative or liberal. Meanwhile, the solution to the horizontal controversy is irrefutable: the paper should come over the front. End of discussion.

[As I typed the title of this post, it occurred to me that it makes an editorial statement in itself. Both of these household appliances are often filled with crap. Fortunately, the latter is rarely filled to overflowing. The same cannot be said of the former.]

Life by Subscription

Posted on by under Generic Rant

It started with TV. It used to be free. Before we knew what hit us, we were paying a monthly subscription for cable. We got all those channels and, as the old joke went, nothing was on worth watching. Then along came streaming. Now we’re paying for TV… one channel at a time… one month at a time. Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, YouTube, … The list goes on and on. And on and on, etc.

There’s subscription radio (Sirius), subscription software (Quicken, Adobe, and about a million others), even subscription cars. Yup, subscription cars.

And all this is in addition to your monthly (or weekly or annual) fees for luxuries like water, sewer, heat, electricity, internet, phones, AAA, rent, mortgage, insurance (all sorts of insurance), taxes (all sorts of taxes), loans, newspapers and magazines (online or old school hard copy), gyms, clubs… They just keep adding up, don’t they? And we forget we even signed up for half of them in the first place. The folks we’re paying count on it. It’s their business model.

Now add one more subscription to the list:

Your life.

Look at the pharmaceutical ads on TV. Nearly every single one of them is for a maintenance drug, one you’ll have to take every day and pay for every month for the rest of your life for the privilege of healthy living.* Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of those conditions to be cured. There’s no money in that.** Not when they have you on their subscription plan.

Don’t forget to renew those subscriptions.

* That is, if you survive the 750 side effects listed in the ads, most of which are more serious than the condition they’re treating.

** No, sir. As one Wall Street analyst warned, curing patients is not a sustainable business model. Read it for yourself here.

Beating a dead horse

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Movies

As much as I hate to revisit and flog a deceased equine, my time is limited by other projects and general life stress. Thus I’m back to a favorite topic of an unfavorite movie: Boyhood.

My original lambasting of the aforementioned over-hyped project was written several months ago. Recently, however, while stuck in a holding position over personal issues, the topic came back to mind. My primary critique of the film, held in common with others in the blogosphere, is that it was not a great movie, nor even a particularly good one. Its only claim to greatness rests in its gimmick of filming the same performers in the same roles over many years. The only problem is…

…it’s been done! Many times!

…albeit in a different format with more entertaining results. I’m talking about television programs. Many have successfully spanned a decade or more: Ozzie and Harriet, Lassie, My Three Sons, Bonanza, Happy Days, The Cosby Show, Seventh Heaven, Two and a Half Men, and so many more of varying degrees of quality. In each case, the same cast aged before our eyes over the span of the series.

That’s right, “Boyhood” is merely the logical (but dull) extension of any long-running TV series, although the ones with children bear the closest resemblance. If you take the 10-year run of “Happy Days” and edit it into a single three hour marathon, what exactly is the difference? Yeah, the HD movie would be much more entertaining and Boyhood has nobody that comes close to The Fonz in originality. Other than that and a slew of undeserved Oscar nominations, it’s the same deal.

See what happens when I have too much time on my hands to think and too little to write?

Seriously, which of these guys would you rather watch grow up? Mr. emo Boyhood kid or Ricky Nelson? Ricky’s life was way more interesting.

Seriously, which of these guys would you rather watch grow up? Mr. emo Boyhood kid or Ricky Nelson? Ricky’s life was way more interesting.

TV full circle

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Movies

[No time for a long post today. Life takes up all my time. Weird about that, huh?]

magni-tvIt occurred to me recently that a lot about television, in spite of its rapid evolution, is coming full circle. For a long time, in the early days of TV (no, I don’t remember them) interest seemed to focus more on the newfangled technology than on the admittedly skimpy and weak content.

Today, although the content is more sophisticated than ever, talk is still mostly about technological innovations in things like screen size, type, and resolution, sound, source (cable, satellite, Internet), 3-D, and other novelties.

A big topic is resolution: What used to pass for HD is already old hat. 4K is hot. Great if you have a nice big screen at home. Not such a big deal if you’re watching on your phone or tablet, which everyone seems to be doing. As the screens get smaller, seeing anything at all is a challenge for some of us.

I see us going back to TV’s nascent days, when families would put some kind of magnifying device (including fishbowls!) in front of the tiny screens so the whole family could sit brasiltvaround to watch. I’m not alone in this outlook. According to Terry Gilliam’s brilliant film “Brazil” that’s what our future holds, along with a lot of other nasty stuff. His vision wasn’t meant to be realistic, but it turns out he wasn’t far off the mark in more ways than one.

Other “cutting edge” improvements:

Curved screens will soon appear on virtual store shelves. What’s the big deal? My old Zenith had a significant convex curve to it. Didn’t make “Lost in Space” any more credible.

3-D, which for my money adds no real value to any medium except View-Master, refuses to go away.

The worst new feature for televisions has to be “3-D multi-view”. This allows two people, both wearing geeky glasses with built-in ear buds, to watch two different shows on the same TV at the same time. Could we possibly make an isolating activity more isolating? Why would we want to?

Besides visual changes, sound is also important. HD sound is great. Unfortunately, I have low-def (closer to high-deaf) hearing.

Here’s hoping Santa brings you a fishbowl to put in front of your Android.