TV DT's

I saw this thing the other day on CNN that informed me that we are the only household left in America who does not have cable TV. (See what I did there? No cable = no CNN = I'm a big, fat liar.) I mean, you could go into any fourth grade classroom and the ten year olds there would have a better understanding than I do of TiVO and HBO and the art of working three remote controls simultaneously.

Part of the reasoning behind not having cable was that we'd be saving huge chunks of money every month. The other part is that without 500 broadcast channels to distract us, we might actually read, or having meaningful conversations, or remember to sleep. Of course, the reality of not having cable is that we go out and buy box sets of every TV show known to man. Which means that (a) we still spend our lives watching TV and we still forget to sleep; and (b) we now spend on DVDs probably twice what we would on cable. Awesome plan.

The silver lining of our plan, or course, is that I never have to sit through ads, EVER. And that's a pretty nice bonus. The big, angry raincloud, on the other hand, is that I no longer get to watch documentaries. And the thing I have discovered over the past year or two is that life without documentaries? Not really worth living. There's something pretty spectacular about being able to watch a show about a kid born with no ears at 3 in the morning. Especially if you follow it by watching a show about the Pharoah's curse, or maybe about the knights Templar. I hope that if there's an afterlife, it involves a soft bed, a large screen, and endless documentaries.