Life With One Channel, Part Two

In an earlier post, I mentioned how through a combination of factors (we're both poor college kids who can't afford cable and digital TV's line of sight transmission) my room mate and I only get one channel: NBC. Although NBC has it's redeeming qualities, it regularly ranks dead last in the ranking systems among major channels. That by itself isn't completely terrible, but we get in on channel 7, WITN out of Greenville. This is a problem.

"WITN? Ed Harris sent me. You know why."

When you only have one channel, and that one channel is terrible, what do you do? Frankly, my room mate and I play a lot of video games and movies when the television is on. But sometimes it's the middle of the day, and you don't feel like doing any of the reading that comes with being grad students, you just want to watch some TV. Normally not that big a problem, unless you only get one channel. And that one channel is the worst fucking channel ever.

After starting your day with the interminable blather of the Today Show and whatever other drivel WITN decides to show bright and early, you reach the crux of NBC daytime television. The marathon of mediocrity and morons is led off by what is arguably the strongest segment: Rachel Ray, for like two straight hours. Luckily, my room mate is big into learning cooking stuff, and I like food, so it works out alright.

Also, she's a lot more attractive than Martha Stewart.

We'll skip past the unavoidably bad soap operas that come on around noon, because now we get to the really soul crushing part of the day's broadcast: court T.V.

The average 'contestant' on court T.V.

If you are not familiar with the concept of court television, take equal parts Jerry Springer and COPS, add a dash of pseudo justice and mix liberally with a dash of embarrassing facts unrelated to the case before the judge. Although the judges in each of the three solid hours of court television are probably actually real judges, I have more respect for random people or objects with the word 'Judge' in their name. Examples: Pontiac GTO's, Mike Judge, etc.

This guy has my complete respect.

Each of these shows has a greater collection of degenerates and losers suing and counter suing for ridiculous reasons and prices than should be humanly possible. Like seriously, what producer was like, "Let's get this guy who's suing his crack addict ex-fiance for not paying back a verbal agreement loan; while she sues for emotional damages because he called her a crack head, and once got a DUI."

Somebody who knows the quote to this scene.

There are three straight hours of people in black dresses pretending to care about the cases before them for judicial reasons instead of merely profiting from society's need to feel better than some other poor schmuck. We have yet to see a case where this new-fangled thing called "evidence" took precedence to the personal issues.

I'm just glad in a way that these frivilous and overtly pointless quarrels are not clogging up the already bogged down judiciary system that my tax money goes to. Wait, what? You mean these judges are merely legal arbitrators whose rulings are able to be (and often are) appealed in real small claims courts? Fuck.

My personal favorite form of conflict resolution.