Comcast should stop interfering with elections

A few months before the 2008 national election, Comcast removed MSNBC from our channel line-up. Of the three 24-hour news networks, MSNBC was the only one at that time that did not appear to be a full-time propaganda arm for the Republican party.

Shortly before the 2009 local elections, Comcast removed our public access channel from local subscribers with TiVo service. At that time, our public access channel was running content about the candidates for local office. Now that the election is over, Comcast has restored our public access channel.

What’s next? Selective elimination of televised political ads? Only showing C-SPAN when Republicans are speaking? An emergency alert saying that Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday?

I have other criticisms of Comcast for their lousy service, price gouging, utterly incompetent employees at every level of sales and support, and fraudulent business practices. I’m unhappy that they bought my mayor, with the result being that we can’t have FIOS here. But it seems like interfering with national and local elections is an entirely new level of evil, and should be punished harshly. It’s a shame that nobody actively regulates either elections or cable providers.

Olympics

Tivo recorded about 180 hours of Olympics for us, sometimes more than 20 hours in a day. We’re almost done watching the recordings, four days after the closing ceremonies, and we were certainly able to see more Olympics this way than we ever have in the past. I used to hate watching non-live sporting events, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. It was sometimes frustrating to know the results ahead of time, since I don’t have a Firefox extension that can redact the sports results from news pages.

NBC didn’t do as many sob story retrospectives this year, showing how every athlete has overcome horrendous personal tragedies. That was really the only improvement this year. NBC still skips blocks of points in the middle of matches, provides nonstop repetitive chatter, rarely explains fine points of the rules or scoring, and complains about the judging whenever possible. Watching online would be a far better choice if only the frame rate weren’t so poor (and the screen so small), because then you can watch entire matches without the commentators, check the rules and scoring guidelines, and not wear the print entirely off the Tivo remote’s skip forward button while trying to bypass 8760 commercials and 17 hours of gymnasts sitting around waiting for their scores to be posted. Oh, and maybe see more than 10 minutes of badminton.

If we had the Tivo connected to broadband, there may have been some better ways to record individual sports rather than 4-hour to 8-hour mixed blocks. But when you do have to record a huge block of time as an individual program, Tivo really needs a way to let you delete part of a program. Even a limited functionality of that would be tremendously helpful.

Despite those frustrations, there were many amazing events to watch. Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are tremendously fast, but there were some swimming finals where almost the entire field was ahead of world record time for much of the race. The Cuban women’s indoor volleyball team dominated their first match against the US, playing at a very high level. The new gymnastics scoring had gymnasts trying more difficult and impressive routines, which bodes well for the progression of the sport in the future. And I’m always blown away by the diving.

200 billion hours

Clay Shirky has posted a marvelous comparison of the time people devote to watching television to the time people devote to Wikipedia. Television is a stunning amount of our collective downtime, 200,000,000,000 hours every year just in the United States. 200 billion hours. Next time someone asks where we’ll find the time to do something, hide their remote control.

We could translate 200 billion hours of television into all sorts of measures. Television is a huge percentage of our electrical consumption, and hence a huge percentage of our CO2 output, our mercury pollution from power plants, our strip mining and nuclear waste generation, and our household budgets. 200 billion hours of television is a displacement of other modes of media and entertainment, a successful approach to social control, and an insanely effective propaganda tool. But the biggest cost may be the opportunity cost, which is the hardest cost to quantify. What could we do with 200 billion hours? On a personal level, what could you do with an extra 500 or 1000 hours per year? What could you do if you reclaimed half of your workday?

TV drama: comments

This is a comment thread for the current poll on how you like to access television dramas (if at all). Do you like the time-shifting of Tivo, or the commercial-free marathon possibilities with DVDs, or the shared culture (same time, same commercials) of traditional broadcast television? Are you sold on HD? Or is the Internet penetrating enough that televisions are going the same way as landlines?

Cookies

A recent episode of Food Network’s Recipe for Success follows a Chicago-based woman named Hilary as she starts to develop a small business baking cookies. The cookies look amazing, and impress everyone who tries them. She sells the cookies by mail, to local theaters, and eventually through four local Whole Foods stores. She makes so little money that she has to give up her apartment and take side jobs cleaning houses. This is not actually encouraging.

The gender roles are really quite stark. Hilary has had two failed businesses before, and the only other woman featured in the episode is a sister who repeatedly bad-mouths her. Her initial loan comes from a male relative, she gets accounting advice from another male relative, she gets business advice from successful male bakers, the buyers she meets with are almost all men, the baker who she ends up contracting with to arrange larger-scale production is a man, and her housing woes are solved when her boyfriend “allows her to move in with him” to end the episode.

On the bright side, the show is realistic and open about the numbers of a small food business, and packs a lot of challenges and possible solutions into a short episode. And unlike reality television, this is television about reality. If you like the look of the chocolate caramel coffee cookies or banana bread cookies, you can place an order.