Wisdom from the TV weatherman

I just watched the local TV news. And because it's summer, I paid attention to the weather report. Alas, the weather person warned that New York is in for another heat wave next week. He said it will be even hotter than the last one. Yikes.

And then he said, "it will be in the 90s, and might reach three digits or more."

Jeez, a thousand degrees! He's right. That's a lot hotter than the last heatwave.

Sun image: Wikipedia Commons

Whatever happened to three thumbs down?

I used to love one facet of my old directv system: you could rate what you watched. With the old remote, you had the ability to press the thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons to let shows know exactly how you felt about them. I was very happy with this set-up.

I used to give every show three thumbs down, with extremely rare exceptions. It was so satisfying to stab that thumbs-down button for shows about Jeebus or fat people or "reality stars". It felt wonderful -- and productive.

But on the new directv remotes, the rating buttons have disappeared. I wonder if it's because of people like me. I actually used this feedback mechanism to tell the TV powers-that-be that I hated just about everything they offered. TV is a wasteland -- and it doesn't have to be. That's the sad thing.

Maybe we thumbs-downers collapsed the system. After all, companies were interested in seeing how their shows were faring with viewers. Maybe they didn't like the information this rating system sent their way. I suspect I wasn't alone in my mission to alert them to the horrid quality of their shows. So what did they do in response to all those thumbs-down? They didn't fix the shows. That would have been too sensible. No, they just canceled the ability to rate the shows. Problem gone, sorta.

Way to go, TV producers. And the cascade of TV poop marches on. This is quite a country we've got here.

Gimme some visuals

Speaking of the vast wasteland that is TV, I've been thinking about something. Since there's nothing on, I wish they would add a hundred stations that showed atmospheric scenes -- no talk, no music, just real-life scenes.

One channel could show a snowy country street in late afternoon. On another channel you'd find a drizzly rain falling on a city street at night, neon colors smearing the wet street surfaces. There should be streams of these channels to choose from. They'd be like attractive screensavers but much more detailed because they would be actual recordings of reality. HD, of course.

Flip the channel and you see a waterfall and hear the sound as it crashes to the water below. Flip again and there's an underwater cam of tropical fish at a reef. Or a night view of a froggy pond, complete with those wonderful, nighttime pond sounds. The possibilities are endless.

Wouldn't this make sense? I mean, they're not showing us anything we want to see. We have zip interest in 99% of what's on TV, and there are no signs that the situation will ever improve. So why not show us some interesting scenery? They could offer the stations for a fee so they wouldn't have to burden us with commercials. For instance, fifty or so visual channels could be offered within a certain tier of satellite or cable pricing.  Me, I'd watch the snowy and rainy scenes. It would be like getting a new window with a great view.

I want this. Do you hear me, TV people? Gimme some visuals. And god forbid you don't already understand this: do not add cheesy music!

Horror movies and violence against women

For the past two weeks the Chiller Channel has been showing non-stop bloodfest movies where all the victims are half-naked women. The movies run on the same formula: turn camera on, point at half-naked woman in vulnerable situation, stab, stab, strangle, stab.

In addition to movies about fictional psychos, they're showing serial killer movies: Ted Bundy, the BTK killer, all sorts of women-hating psychos. It's woman-killing season at the Chiller Channel. And not only has this been going on night after night for weeks but I just looked in the guide and it seems the stab-athon will continue into next week. This is not okay.

Five female students lost in the woods, ten female researchers stranded on an island, two women locked in a basement, a bunch of girls in a broken down car on a lonely highway, young women sleeping in a dormitory -- and a blade-happy maniac on the loose. Sure, a guy gets killed now and then but that's just affirmative action. It's all about the babes.

These aren't horror movies though they are horrible. The only genre that applies here is sadistic, anti-woman garbage. Now, I don't think there should be a law against this kind of movie. Censorship sucks. But violent misogynistic movies should get a triple-X rating -- to move them off a general-audience channel like Chiller and push them to the shadier areas of the listings, where normal people won't have to bump into them.

It's not responsible to show stuff like this night after night to a country of nincompoops. Who do you think is watching this? Male, beer-stoked, women-hating losers, that's who. It's sickening.