Everything I Learned, I Learned From Cable

I will come right out and admit it: we are too cheap (no, make that 'frugal' - sounds better in this economy) to pay for cable. We instead subscribe to 'antenna service', which consists of the broadcast channels (CBS, ABC, Fox, etc.), for a fraction of the cost of the lowest, 60+ channel Digital Cable package.

This, however, carries the unfortunate social stigma of not being up on the latest water cooler or talk radio chatter. "Sopranos"? "The Shield"? "The Dog Whisperer"? Never have seen an episode of any of those shows. All I can contribute is who got kicked off "Big Brother" or a fun story about someone scoring an unexpected windfall on "Antique Roadshow".

So, whenever we go on vacation, an eagerly-anticipated aspect is the chance to check out the latest shows on cable. For example, I finally caught one episode of "Jon and Kate Plus Eight" - but those two people were so uninteresting and sullen that I can't figure out what the all the hullabaloo is about. Dude's just having a mid-life crisis and she defines 'control-freak', albeit with a bad hairdo.

I also saw a show on the History Channel (go figure) about how they create lunch meat. That's right - except for pastrami for the famous New York deli's, virtually every other lunch meat is pureed, mixed, and molded to within an inch of not being considered food anymore. I have not been to Subway since, and don't even mention the words 'head cheese' to me...urp...

But the one that got me really thinking was another History Channel show debating whether we really landed on the moon in 1969. Now, I do not consider myself to be either a crackpot or a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe the world will end in 2012 (sorry, Joe P.), I doubt actual alien saucers are in the middle of the Nevada desert, and that most definitely was not Elvis buying peanut butter and bananas at the Lake Zurich Dominick's yesterday. Yet, we have never gone back to the moon, have no plans to go there for a long while, and those astronauts have kept a really low profile ever since. Add in the fact that NASA just recently announced it 'lost' or 'accidentally erased' their own footage of the moon landing...I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

(Oops...have to go - the Wife wants to catch the last epsiode of "Ice Road Truckers" on Hulu...)