TV
HDTV not HGTV
About a month ago I wrote about my cable company trying to cheat me out of $2.99 a month for a stupid digital adapter box that I didn’t need. I managed to get them to stop charging me the money because one or two adapters were supposed to be free.
I also hoped that in the end I wouldn’t need it. You know what they say about hope? “Hope in one hand & bleep in the other.” By the end of the month all the HD versions of the regular channels disappeared and if you wanted to watch the lo-def versions you needed the adapter. This is no good. Once your eyes have feasted on tasty 16:9 crystal clear images, you just can’t go back to a 4:3 fuzzy-wuzzy picture.
Not wanting to give AtlanticBB the satisfaction I hoped maybe a newer amplified Mohu Leaf would pull in all the local channels unlike the regular Leaf we tried 5 years ago. This way we would keep the high-speed internet and drop the TV portion of the bill. Well you know what they say about hope? Unlike 5 years ago with the non-amplified Leaf, this time we got the local Fox affiliate great, but NBC was nowhere to be found. To top it off ABC worked well only most of the time.
Giving up, I called Atlantic Broadband and asked what do I have to do to get local channels in high definition. Right now we are paying $132 for the Limited TV package and the 125Mb internet, but if I wanted to drop the internet down to 100Mb we could get the “Essentials Package” which would be the Limited TV in HD and they’ll toss in HBO and EPIX for $95…for the first 2 years, then it goes up $5 bucks a month until it gets back to $130ish…at which time we will no doubt have to call and beg for a lower rate for a different package.
Our appointment was scheduled for 2:30 to 5:30pm yesterday and I certainly hoped whoever showed up to do the work would be better than the last time these chuckle-heads had to come into our house. This time, like a Vegas slot machine paying out a few coins, hope won.
Al was pleasant, competent, and went above and beyond. The only possible bad thing I could say about our hour and forty-five minutes together is he reeked of cigarette smoke when you got near him. Because our signal strength was only marginally acceptable he went outside and climbed the pole across the street. From up there he removed a couple of old filters (that are no longer used anyway.) He also ran a ground wire from the new splitter he put on the house to the ground on the electric meter instead of the ground stake (which is not to code) that Mutt and Jeff didn’t fix 4-1/2 years ago. He then made up a couple of new RG-6 coax lines to replace my interior runs, just because.
We have the same channels as we did before, only now in glorious HD. We now also have 5 channels of HBO and 4 of Epix which we will probably hardly ever watch, but I left them in lineup of channels that we will scan through while surfing using the remote, so who knows.
Somewhere along the line when I was telling Donna what we were getting HDTV, either I mis-spoke or she mis-heard, so she was disappointed when I told her we don’t get HGTV even though everytime we are in a hotel room in which that channel is available, she will invariably remark, “I’ve already seen this one.”
Shouting At The TV
Growing up I remember my mom watching the network evening news and getting so upset at whatever was happening in the country and world that she would literally shout out her disgust at Chet Huntley or David Brinkley or both. I remember thinking what good does that do?
Donna likes to watch the network evening news, so if I’m in the room, by proxy I do too. We watch ABC because she liked to watch Diane Sawyer when she was the anchor, but we are still watching ABC long after she is gone. Diane used to always start the program by saying, “BREAKING NEWS!” even though it was only breaking if you didn’t have access to a 24hr news channel or the internet. I think the breaking news qualifier for them could be added if it happened since their broadcast ended the night before.
When David Muir took over I was hoping that he would drop the charade, but no, he’s even amped it up a notch. Plus he has continued the ridiculous “the Index” feature, 4 or 5 stories hyped at every chance during the first 20 minutes of the broadcast. They are the television version of clickbait, eight to ten word headlines that make you want to find out what they are about. They are saved until near the end and you get one 10 second Index item followed by a minute and half of commercials for prescription drugs your insurance won’t cover the cost of. Then another tidbit and another 2 minutes of commercials, rinse and repeat until it is time to see what the daily lottery numbers are.
It used to be just watch the show and listen with 1/4 of our concentration letting the news wash over us, but since what’s his name took over the news cycle over a year ago, that has been impossible. We don’t shout at the TV, but Donna has taken to sighing a lot and I cussing non-verbally in my mind. Now that the hirsute yellow-fin tuna has taken office Donna’s sighing is becoming words of disbelief and I’ve started muttering incoherently. It is only a matter of time until one of us turns into my mother and starts shouting at the TV.
I’m here to tell you, it won’t be me. From now on if I join her on the couch anytime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM I will have my headphones on listening to Radio Paradise and staring at my Kindle.
Re-Opened
If you are a fan of the original show and are not spoiler adverse for the new mini-series event take a look at this vid. For Donna and I it was 20 minutes well spent. I am now officially more excited to see these six episodes of TV than I am about the new Starwars flick.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 131
More Mixed Emotions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R1WiuzIQbM
defunct link to a X-Files promo for Season 10
A different look promo, perhaps trying to capture a younger hipper graphic novel reading audience as opposed to us old-timers who were X-Fans from the beginning.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 97
Forget Fortitude
Forget Fortitude. Episode 9 was so graphic that Donna left the room and there were even a couple places where it was so creepy/gross that even I fast forwarded through them. We started watching episode 10 after work today and it wasn’t gross, but it did kind of veer into slightly ludicrous territory.
Episode 11 solves the opening episode’s original mystery, leaving us now with the secondary mystery of why there were some folks on the island going bat-shit crazy. This too gets revealed in #11 near the end in an X-Filey way. We are left with a cliff hanger of a cast member doing something so stupid that it could only happen in a TV show.
Episode 12 opens with our cast member being saved by something that could only happen in a TV show, filling the room he is trapped in, that is also full of what is causing the madness, with oxygen and hydrogen and having him ignite it by flicking his lighter. The ensuing explosion knocks out the glass wall in a ball of flames. When the dust clears, the 2 folks who pumped in the gas, then stood outside the glass and watched, stagger to their feet and drag our cast member out alive.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the lighter, we had never seen said cast member with it until episode eleven where he is sitting in a bar nervously flicking the Zippo open and closed as the camera slowly zooms to a close-up of it. Three minutes into the season finale, we stopped watching the show.
As a pallet cleanser, watch this short video of scenic arctic beauty, this time from the antarctic:
httpvh://vimeo.com/124858722
Welcome to Fortitude
In my never ending quest to watch every obscure, but critically acclaimed, television shows, I’ve found another, Fortitude. It starts out sort of as a north of the arctic circle Broadchurch as a murder mystery with an outsider cop arriving to help, but we are about 3/4 of the way through watching it and it seems to have morphed into an X-Files like show about a maybe thawed out wooly mammoths with polar bears.
It is jam full of people with questionable origins and motivations. The cinematography is stunning like Utopia, yet totally different in its beauty. While it is “set” in the town of Fortitude, it is really sort of based on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Where can you watch this you ask, where else but on the cable channel called Pivot. What never heard of it, neither have I, but I have heard of Amazon Instant Video.