The Bane of Digital Cable

Since this post reads uncharacteristically like a real blog, I've decided to add (in the High Fidelity spirit of "It's not what you're like, but what you like that matters") this:

Current listening:
Deitaphobia, Lo Fi versus Sci Fi
Morella's Forrest, From Dayton With Love
David Gilmore, Live in Concert (DVD)

Current reading:
Sunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Thank you, Brian Cubbage. Merry Christmas to me!)
Ken McLeod, Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Current watching:
Ghostbusters (Sami, can we please watch this tonight? It's been so long since we've had a movie night. I know the Olympics are on, but...)

This past Friday my mom called me to ask if I was interested in going to see Driving Miss Daisy at the Lexington Opera House. My parents have season tickets to the Broadway Live series, and evidently feel like they need to bribe me from time to time to get me to visit them (and more importantly, bring their youngest grandchild to visit them). I wasn't too interested in Driving Miss Daisy, but since it is one of my wife's all time favorites, and since we were offered tickets for the low, low price of visiting with my family, I couldn't turn it down. [note: I was wrong about Driving Miss Daisy. It was a fantastic show. Now I can see why it one the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. My bad.]

Because I'm a doofus, the tickets ended up being not exactly free. That's because, like a moron, I parked in a pay parking lot, but didn't put any money in the slot. Insert predictable parking ticket. I guess the seats were free, but the parking was pretty expensive. You know the show was good when I got us a parking ticket and Sami didn't even complain about it.

Never one to leech off my parents and then run (I really do enjoy visiting them, I promise) we spent the weekend with them in Lexington. The problem was, between the snow and the extreme cold, there wasn't much to do. Of course, my parents have digital cable, so who needs something to do? According to Dad, there were like 17 different college basketball games on, so why not just plop in front of the TV with our standard Wheat Thins and Slone's Signature Guinness Dark Beer Cheese and watch basketball until our eyes bleed?

As an added bonus, we could watch our beloved (and insufferable, this year) Kentucky Wildcats lose yet another winable game. Alas, UK disappointed us (not really) by putting together their best performance in recent memory, wiping the floor with South Carolina in the second half. But there were many more games to watch.

We flipped over to the channel promising The Florida v. Arkansas game, at which point I realized that, if you've got something like 900 television channels, some of them are bound to behave strangely.

Instead of Florida v. Arkansas (the only game in which I can ever remember rooting for Arkansas) we got an infomercial for Yoga Booty Ballet. I couldn't make that up. Click on the link to see what its all about. We watched it dumbfounded, unable to tell whether or not we had accidentally stumbled on some Saturday Night Live parody, or the genuine article. It was simply the funniest thing I've seen in my life, made all the more funny by the fact that it didn't seem to know how funny it was.

You simply have to buy Yoga Booty Ballet, no matter what it costs. The laughter alone will shape and tone your abs.

Other than that, I still have nothing of substance to say. A cold and severe sleep deprivation (comes with the parenting territory) have robbed me of my brain cells. Please forgive the banal blogging. And, don't forget to contribute to the discussion at Habakkuk's Watchpost. There have been a couple of really good comments lately. Food for thought, and all that.