I haven’t been writing all that much of late, partially because of RL (real life) responsibilities, but also because I’ve been spending a lot of free time watching old Doctor Who episodes. My mom was the real Doctor Who fan and has most of the episodes that aired on PBS here in the states on a zillion video tapes, but after I watched the last four seasons of the reprised Doctor Who I’ve gotten more interested in seeing the old episodes again. Growing up, most of the kids my age were familiar with only one of the Doctors (Tom Baker), and to them he was and is the one, the only, the quintessential Doctor – but in my house it was all about Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee.

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I’ve been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a “paleoconservative” whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it’s being used to create a distance from the “neocons” (meaning New Conservatives) who were neither new nor really conservative in the first place. The first story I ran into over there was titled Louisiana Cops Plan for “End of the World” Scenario which goes on to describe how the program includes access to a .50 caliber vehicle mounted machine gun to help put down looters and rioting in the event of a crisis. I got a little further into the article and it is suggested that cities across America are beginning their own war training in preparation for the coming apocalypse in 2012. No, not the fabled Mayan end of the world, this refers to a prediction by a “futurist” named Gerald Celente.
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We didn’t ever watch that much TV anyway, so I don’t see canceling cable TV as much of a loss, but there is definitely a feeling of isolation without any TV access and if an emergency were to occur it would be nice to be able to tune in. Well, TV is still being broadcast over the air though it recently went digital. We applied for the DTV converter box at the time (anticipating this move) and I hauled it out to see what we could pull in. I only really wanted one particular channel – Channel 21 out of Garden City (about 25 miles away), PBS. Channel 21 in digital TV land is now three channels (21-1, 21-2, 21-3) and it would be really nice to watch the News Hour once in a while (and not having to stream it over the internet which you can do). It would be especially nice since we’ve actually pledged to the station over the years and now we can’t receive it at all.
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We recently decided to cancel our cable TV service. At $75/mo for what they consider BASIC service, it just wasn’t a good *value*. We still have internet service through the cable company, and that product has been very good. After waiting for an hour on the phone to complete the cancellation, the high pressure sales guy I got transferred to at the ‘disconnect desk’ asked me what he could do to keep me as a customer. I said I’d like to pick which channels I wanted to pay for – I could rattle them off, but suffice to say there are definitely a few (even after the recent cancellation of the Food channel) that I wish I could tune into once in a while. He laughed and said “nobody offers an ala carte option!”
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