television

We've been in the middle of a major transition in our living room; we've sold off several components, bought a few others, and drastically changed our media consumption to fit our new equipment and plans.

We sold off our old media box, our old pre-amp, a vintage tuner, and our old 32" tube television. We added in a newer flat-panel television and media box that greatly simplified the number of cords needed to make our entertainment system work.

The only problem? The television didn't fit in our entertainment center. We knew this from the start, and we knew there would be an issue of getting rid of it, because as Jeff put it, it was a victim of changing technologies. Tube TVs are not the wave of the future, to put it mildly.

What if you just — stopped?

A little while back I referenced the idea of a media blackout. I didn’t say that I quietly put the blackout in place as of that post, and have consciously avoided the hamster wheel of news since then. Unsurprisingly, I’m happier. I pick up tidbits from friends on facebook and twitter, but by and large, the world is passing me by for a while.

Jeff and I are considering taking another, more blasphemous step. We bought a media device that lets us play video files on our house server, as well as Netflix Instant streaming, youtube, and another couple of sites. We’re getting ready to do a media overhaul in our living room (our TV is a decade old) and he asked a question that I’d thought about before but never seriously voiced:

“What if we cancel our satellite subscription?”

Anthony Bourdain rails against the current crop of TV chefs and names names:

We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could—if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?”

Via Jody, of course.

I am loving HBO’s show Trueblood if for no other reason than the music. Jeff and I have been having fun with the opening and closing music for each episode. Somewhere around the chorus, the closing song for this week’s episode made me turn to Jeff and say, "It sounds like Fleetwood Mac meets dirty south."

This week’s closing song, for the curious, is Rusty Truck’s "Cold Ground." [buy it here on amazon] The chorus is certainly trying to channel Buckingham/Nicks with a nice sloppy side of slide guitar. (I have it on REALLY loud right now to cover a malfunctioning fan in our office.)

It’s not just the locals … twitter users everywhere are using the service to livesnark debates and other current events.

Current TV (available on Dish Network, DirecTV, and other places) will link up people posting to #current on Twitter during the debate by broadcasting those tweets on-screen.

We were evil enough last time, and it was just the locals. It’s like a live, on-screen, collective drinking game.  Then again, we may need it to get through an evening’s worth of Sarah Palin.

(I’m domesticat on twitter, but my updates are protected. I will give serious thought to un-protecting them during the debate.)

[hat tip to Jeff for discovering this program’s existence.]

Certain conversational gambits should come with warning flags. I’ve decided that any conversation I start that begins with the phrase “So I was on the elliptical, and I was thinking…” should be treated with the same level of skepticism and distrust given to any conversation that starts with “There was this one time at band camp…” Nine times out of ten, it’s going to be a boring, dull recitation — but it’s the pesky tenth time around that’ll get you when you’re not looking, and make you wish you carried a big fat wad of mental floss in your pocket.