As I previously described, my cable and internet provider, or as I call them, the Ministry of Static, has upgraded my service to some unheard of number of petaflops per second of binary goodness. I know this because they tell me it is so. Of course, the picture looks the same and the data transfer from YouTube and X are equally erratic as before. But they tell me it is so and they are honorable men. They are all of them honorable men.
Honorable men or women or giant talking celery stalks or whatever else they hire there at the Ministry.
But what is undeniable is that I had to install the new router and the cable box. And even though these operations went surprisingly well, eventually I got back to programming all the devices into the master remote. Ah yes.
“One thing to rule them all,
One thing to find them,
One remote to click them all,
And in the darkness bind them,
On the living room couch where the snack crumbs fall.”
So there I am trying out all these codes to get the master remote to turn on the tv, audio receiver, the dvd player and the roku thingamabob. And I’m thinking what the hell am I wasting my time for? There’s nothing on the damn cable anyway.
But the truth is we’re creatures of habit. Sixty some-odd years of television viewing has conditioned me to plunk myself down in front of this device, or cluster of devices, in expectation of something that could be defined as entertainment.
And so I dutifully performed my task and I even managed to improve the set up so that Camera Girl doesn’t have to use the audio receiver to switch between separate output buttons when switching between the cable and the DVD and the roku audio. And she verbally patted me on the head, much as she does with her dogs and other critters. Well at least she didn’t give me half a dog biscuit.
And when everything was hooked up and working it was nice that it worked better than the old one. And I will admit that watching a YouTube video that theorizes about how consciousness might be accounted for in quantum theory is kind of a fun thing.
But then I remember how in the old day YouTube was called books and that there are even certain advantages to paper podcasts. Like writing notes on the pages. But I shouldn’t get too crusty. Human beings can waste time with or without the latest tech hardware. The trick is to actually earn your daily bread while wasting the time. Which I guess I did. I even vacuumed up some of the dust I found under the old cable box. It was a kind of frightening accumulation. If you’ve ever seen a dust explosion you know the destructive potential of finely divided solids.
But the really frightening thing is that that stuff is either dead skin cells, or even worse, dead mites that lived off dead skin cells. I feel like some brontosaurus with my own ecosystem living on my back. It’s not a flattering thought. Note to self: vacuum the entertainment center once a season from now on.
Well I wrote this frivolous post because they say tomorrow, Friday the 13th is some kind of jihad day for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Isis, Al Qaeda and whatever other Islamic psychopaths are still around. If that’s so I wanted to have a little fun just in case these lunatics created further havoc and spoiled my mood.
And I think that, part of their plan is to make us so miserable that we lose the will to enjoy life. I think back to 9/11/2001 and how we spent years watching the newscasts and worrying about the soldiers over in Iraq and it sucked all the joy out of life. And they said that if we didn’t go on with our lives the terrorists win. Well, they won. They had lots of help from George W Bush and the rest of the Uniparty but in a real sense they took years away from our lives. And we got back nothing. So now I want some fun even when they’re blowing up everything. And I blame them all and I hate them all. Hamas, Joe Biden, Hezbollah, the FBI, Al Qaeda, the LGBTQ Mafia, ISIS, Anthony Fauci, Islamic Jihad, the Media Liars and all the rest of them. They steal away our joy and our lives. Well, not today.
Now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets… drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor.
Play, Don.
Now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets… drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor.
Play, Don.
Groucho always had the best lines!
I think this might have been Groucho’s homage to Lord Byron:
…
“On with the dance! let joy be unconfin’d;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.”
― Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
“Well I wrote this frivolous post because they say tomorrow, Friday the 13th is some kind of jihad day for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Isis, Al Qaeda and whatever other Islamic psychopaths are still around.”
Good thing I am NostraDumbass, and not the real thing. I did not see this coming, but true to my talents, I can clearly see the past.
Even hindsight can be valuable as long as it’s clear.