2003-11-10 - 9:28 p.m.
Spending a bit of time in my company's office in Texas, I have acquired a new nickname. It's the first nickname in years that does not make me wince. Some of the girls in the office, who do not know my name, have (I'm told) taken to referring to me as "the cute guy who's not from around here." This is so much better than my last nickname, "Big Stupid Dork."*When you're lazing around in a hotel room and there seems to be nothing good on TV, you may surf. Teetering atop the restless television waves, you may click the channel button again and again, a vapid stare tacked to your face and swinging from your forehead like a "this stall out of order" sign on grimy old cardboard. Then you may stumble at last on Celebrities Uncensored, a compilation of paparazzi videos, and you may at last satisfy your urge to mockingly titter and giggle while all that is unholy struts about the streets of California looking the career gift-horse straight in the mouth. Then a question may occur to you: "why, if the Celebrities Uncensored program is 'uncensored,' do they bleep profanities and pixellate nudity and obscene gestures? What sort of censorship do the producers believe their show mercifully free of? Political censorship?" I looked closely for scenes of Richard Gere and Harrison Ford standing on the boulevards of Hollywood chatting about politics, but found nothing. There was a fair bit of bird-flipping, but a noticeable dearth of politics.
Then you may click the channel button once more, and catch a bit of The Anna Nicole Show. Careful, kids -- the snake-hair is fascinating, sure, but you may be inadvertently turned to stone. Who in the inner sanctum of television production looked at this cracking, overweight derelict, with her child-like self-absorption, primadonna whining, and surely drug-induced instability, and thought it good to offer her a television show? Subquestion: why's it so damn hard to stop watching?
This is why I don't watch TV.
* Schoolteachers can be so cruel.
