by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
It's award season, at least according to the TV Guide Channel - you know, the station dedicated to letting you know what's on other stations.
So, as I was lying on my couch for about the eighth hour straight yesterday, doing everything short of sacrificing a baby to get over a nasty bug, I thought, 'Maybe this is what they mean by Oscar fever.'
But I don't care about the Oscars. In fact, all award shows are dumb. So I'm guessing I still have SARS or West Nile virus or something.
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For getting a sense of what this insane country and its insane television industry are up to, no awards show can ever beat sticking your sweaty, blanket-wrapped ass on a couch for 12 hours and zoning out to feverish, channel-surfing delirium.
Did you know that there are more court shows - think "The People's Court" or "Judge Judy" - than there are citizens of Delaware? Networks try to hide this by cramming all 843,525 of them into the 2 to 4 p.m. time slot in the afternoon.
But how do you make it that deep into the afternoon if nothing is worth watching before then? Never to fear, there's always the "Maury Povich Show." That's right, he's still on the air. Virtually any given day, you can wake up at 10 a.m. and turn on the TV to a crying woman hurling a chair at a cheating boyfriend. Or, Povich will be talking for a minute at a time to a series of physically disfigured people - apparently, it's not a debasing freak show if the host pretends to care about people's feelings. This show is like "Jerry Springer," if you replaced the all-in-fun carnival atmosphere with the joy that is scratching a chalkboard with a fork.
Maybe the channel I most regret watching throughout my brain-frying TV binge was C-SPAN. I mean, you know you've hit about the lowest of the lows once you're willingly watch that channel, right?
It seems like it should be exciting - I mean, this is Congress at work. Then you slowly discover about three people in our government know how to give a speech. And no one listens to them, either. Two hours later, I hadn't just lost most of my weak faith in the government, I'd also accidentally fallen asleep twice.
After changing the channel, still half in a dream, I found myself longing for the clock to turn back to 11 a.m., so I could watch "The Price is Right" again. It sounds sad, but it has been the most reliably tolerable daytime show since I was born. Worse, Bob Barker has already announced his plans to retire.
Unfortunately, I couldn't turn back time, and it soon grew dark out. Dusk was greeted by several entertainment tabloid shows. I found out Lindsay Lohan was in rehab, among other facts. Maybe I should have watched the real news, but I figured if Bolivia nuked Canada or Osama bin Laden converted to Scientology - you know, if something really important happened - the story would find its way to "Entertainment Tonight" in some form.
Once night fell on TV land, I was stuck with my choice of CSI shows - original, Miami, New York or barbecue flavored - Law and Order shows - I like trees too much to print all the names here - and new, big-production game shows imported from
Europe.
Come the end of my TV binge, my first thought was that being sick sucks. But my second thought was that TV sucks almost as badly. Don't let the Golden Globes, the Oscars or anybody else lead you astray - aside from a few exceptions, the entertainment industry is infatuated with shoveling uninspired, depressing crap onto the public.
