FTT Off-Topic: America, I'm Sorry

So for the last four days, I've been working the day job in the middle of America. Adding to the trip's, um, merits is the fact that the hotel's wifi has combined the strength of a butterfly with, well, the concentration of a butterfly. I'm clearly down on butterflies this week. Add my post-40 nature, need to be sharp in a new office and overall loneliness without the wife and kids, and it's been a pretty work-intensive week. But, well, so be it. I don't travel for business very often, and there are worse things than living on an expense account.

But then, there's this: four days without sports, because the All Star Game barely qualifies as sports. A Dish TV fight on networks that has made multiple channels on the hotel cable system go away. And so, for the first time in something like decades...

I'm channel surfing through mass market American television.

Folks, tell me something.

When did it mainstream TV just give up?

Either it's a talent show that should cause your spine to constrict in sheer embarrassment with being a mammal like them other mammals on the television... or it's a fake documentary that's devoid of anything relating to actual honest humn life... or it's a not funny fake documentary comedy show... or a train wreck obstacle course. That last one was actually the closest thing to entertainment, in that I got to watch terrible people get hurt. And I suppose I should just be happy that it made me get up and go work out of sheer indifference and boredom, and that it's all a good thing, since it means that I won' t ever be tempted to waste my time in this way again...

But good grief. This is really what passes for entertainment these days?