Nice Guy Eddie
Before I get started, I would like to state for the public record that I'm not some kind of hippy. I get regular haircuts, I find mescaline to be pedestrian and narcissistic and me and soap are on a first name basis. I wouldn't eat bean curd on a bet. A beaded poncho is not a good look for me, although I understand that the beaded poncho is not a good look for anybody, ever. I do own a pair of Birkenstocks, but how can a $100 pair of sandals represent the anti-material anti-establishment ethos? The answer is: it can't. All it can do is wrap my materialist pig feet in cork-lined leather-strapped consumer goodness. So what follows is not a loony ashram Left-Coast anti-corporate knee-jerk thing.

Also before I get started, I would like to further point out that I'm not some kind of whack-job conspiracy theorist. I don't line my windows with tin-foil to keep the invisible mind-reading waves at bay, I don't drive out to places like "Area 51" to catch a glimpse of the government-hidden UFOs and me and soap are on a first-name basis. I don't believe the CIA has any secret transmitters hidden in my dental fillings or that any of the materials used therein are left over from the melted-down guns used by the small army that assassinated John F. Kennedy. Sure, I do believe that the world is controlled by seven Jewish bankers living in a bank vault in Switzerland, but some things just stand to reason. So what follows is not a crazy paranoid dementia caused by too much alone time and access an X-Files box-set DVD.

Finally, I would like to point out that I am also not 100 years old. Both my hips are the ones I was born with, my hearing is completely un-aided and me and soap are on a first name, non-home-aid-worker-applied basis. When I do take Viagra it is for entertainment purposes only. I wish I had the luxury to complain about how my kids all abandoned me. So what follows is not a "I remember when I was a boy, them were the good ole days" meandering soliloquy about the degradation of society in general from its high point which happened to coincide with the period of time when I was a) old enough to remember and b) not old enough to have to pay taxes.

I want you to keep all that in mind while I talk about how shocking it is that CBS and Warner Bros. are merging UPN and the WB to form a new network.

At first I thought "Wow, great, merge UPN and WB. Now I can have all the shows I don't watch conveniently in one place."

And then I thought "Hey, CBS is starting a new network, that's interesting. That name sounds familiar, CBS... CBS... what do they do again?"

Oh yeah! They already are a network!

It seems sort of stupid. I mean, essentially CBS is going to be competing with itself 6 nights per week. Now, maybe they don't mind so much since Reba isn't much of a threat to CSI, but now she's their Reba.

I think. Unless she's not on any more. I would ask you people, but I'm 100% certain nobody on earth ever watched that show, ever. I think just to be safe I should include an IMDb link just so people will believe that there is (was?) a show with that name.

This merger is just another step in the corporate consolidation of the mass media, man, all folded together as part of the military-industrial complex.

Worse, it will help them keep track of all of us. See, the satellites can't track us with just one channel, so the second channel is being introduced so that our exact locations can be triangulated from space via our remote controls and then transmitted to the Specimen Tracking Station and Staging Area on the dark side of the moon being operated jointly by the human-Zephaloid One Earth Provisional Government.

When I was a kid, we didn't go in for this sort of thing. Not just the tracking and the aliens, I mean the whole thing all the way down to the TV stations. We had laws, you know, that said companies couldn't own more than one TV station in any market. Now in LA alone, CBS runs channel 2 (KCBS), channel 9 (KCAL), channel 5 (KTLA) and maybe channel 13 (KCOP), not to mention all the Viacom channels (MTV, Comedy Central, etc.) and Lord knows what else. If it weren't for all this rheumatism, I'd fly outta this chair and give them boys up there what-for. Not in my America, mister!

I've told you what I'm not, so now let me lay out exactly what I am: I am a person exactly my age of exactly my time and exactly of my socio-economic standing. That means I'm going to sit here and bitch to you people and then not do anything else about it because if I plan to do too much, I might overschedule myself and miss Two and a Half Men. And nobody wants that.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.1


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:25 AM