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Wednesday, August 15, 2001
Seedspillers of Earth, drop your shorts. Your crotch is open to the sky... 
| | Our target audiences are wife swappers, exhibitionists, whores, people who need to hide their favourite prOn from their boss. It's Cluetrainish, but possibly not what Doc Searls and Chris Locke had in mind... |
| | If anything ever deserved the expression What the fuck ... this is it. |
| | Hey, as long as it doesn't open 10,000 windows and fill my browser with nasty cookies, it's okay with me. |
You too may be suffering from cornucopia.
| | On the Dish Network Web site I count 236 channels in our package, the Dish 150. Subtract out the 30 Pay Per View channels and we're still over 200. There is a "guide" screen to all this and much more on the TV, featuring umpty channels from HBO, Showtime, Encore, Starz and other premium services we don't pay for and can't watch but are listed anyway, just to tempt us. The whole list is so long that looking up and down the length of it is a half-hour project. To save that effort Dish provides a "favorites" feature that lets you restrict your choice to about 45 channels, but it's a pain in the ass to set up, and it's too easy to slip into when you'd rather look through the whole list. |
| | Anyway, I've noticed several other things since we upgraded to this package — thanks to a new dish on our roof that looks at two satellites at once, about doubling the number of channel choices: |
| | The most appealing channels are the least familiar. These include |
| | Dicovery Wings (Channel 195) which is nothing but features about aviation, thrilling Jeffrey, who is obsessed with airplaines and rockets. |
| | The other Discovery channels — Home & Liesure (194), Science (193), Civilization (192), Health (189), Kids (179) and Lint (just kidding, but ya never know). |
| | The Research Channel, from the University of Washington, which is way up there at Channel 9400. |
| | PBS You (9402), which is about "personalized learning." Even though it has no idea what I want to learn, the channel has interesting programs anyway. |
| | An endless choice of CD-quality audio channels, which is what we leave on most of the time |
| | Far more other items than I have time to list |
| | The whole thing is really more like the Web than like regular old TV. Next to these truly informative and useful channels, the old terrestrial TV networks — and even familiar cable networks like CNN and MSNBC — look tacky as supermarket tabloids. What we're seeing in these new channels is something more like a big magazine rack full of interesting specialty publications. |
| | The choice to learn or to vegetate is more stark than ever, raising the possibility that TV might actually fulfill its original promise as an educational service, especially since the learning choices seem to be proliferating faster than the vegetative ones. For the curious, it's a cornucopia. |
| | Since it's looking more Weblike all the time (check out the new CNN Headline News layout, which consists of frames), TV is easier to compare to the Web. But it still comes up way short, because so much of it is still just a trough, and you're still just a consumer. |
| | And here I am, back working on the Web. Can't do that on TV (even though I'm slotted to appear on TechTV's Screen Saver's show in a couple of weeks). |
| | Besides, it's rather inconvenient to carry your TV into the john, which I'm doing with the laptop right now, expanding the frontiers of 802.11b right here in our own home. |
| | For TV to survive in the long run, it will need a better verb. I'm using the Web right now, not just watching it. |
Clearing up
| | Two nights ago, while we sat on the roof and watched meteors streak across the Milky Way, we could hear the foghorn blowing down at the harbor. Last night was just as clear, even though the Santa Ynez Mountains, which rise like a wall behind the house, were shrouded in clouds. Now it's 6am and the clouds are in our yard, so dense I can't see the tops of the oak trees. Moisture collecting on the leaves drips so lavishly on the brush below that it sounds like rain. But when I stand on the deck, there's not a drop to be felt. |
| | I see by the yacht club's harborcam that it's just as gloomy down there. Yet I know, along with every local in town, that the Sun will burn it all off in a few hours. Then the high temperature will be 74 degrees while Los Angeles swelters. I heard it was over 100 degrees there yesterday. |
| | Which is all part of my daily rationalization for living here. |
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