Post by Moses on Jan 10, 2006 19:10:11 GMT -5
How to make your TV go black
Saturday, Jan 7, 2006
By John Brummett
In this line of work, it's the throwaway lines that get you. Like the other day. I was making all those hilarious spoofing predictions for the new year, such as that Gov. Mike Huckabee would join Fox News as the liberal counterpart for that blowhard Sean Hannity.
Huckabee didn't seem to mind. But Allen Colmes, the guy I was nominating Huckabee to replace, did.
It was my offhand reference to him as "pitiable," actually, that riled him.
This Colmes fellow, it turns out, has some kind of Yahoo alert that tells him when he gets mentioned in the press somewhere. He e-mailed to relate that he didn't appreciate being called "pitiable" and to dare me to talk with him on his radio show about this "cheap shot."
Perhaps I didn't improve relations by responding, "You have a radio show?" I also seem to recall suggesting that overreacting to a backwater columnist's spoofing one-word reference was, well, pitiable.
Long story short: His people in New York called me early in the second half of the Texas-USC game to put me on the air for maybe 45 minutes. This is a national show on the Fox network, but the only place around here that airs it is Fort Smith. They played Warren Zevon's "Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me" coming out of a commercial break, even after I had explained the difference between pitiable and pitiful.
By pitiable, I told my friend Allen, I had meant that I felt sorry for him for having to work as a sane and decent man on that evil right-wing cable network, surrounded by all those blustery conservative oppressors.
He said he neither wanted nor deserved my pity, that he had a good life, that he served a noble purpose providing an attempt at balance on Fox and that liberals' main problem with him seemed to be that he was entirely too civil, unwilling to engage in a "Crossfire" kind of shoutfest.
I backtracked, saying that if he didn't want my pity, there was no need in my extending it. He certainly was not pitiable in his behavior toward me.
We had a few callers. One guy from Fort Worth took me to task. He said Colmes wasn't pitiable. He said Colmes was a wimp.
What I didn't tell Colmes was that I'd never watched his and Hannity's show all the way through and haven't seen even snippets of it in months.
I got one of those BS-Chips, a relatively new technology derived from the V-Chip. You use it to block your television set's presentation of, well, BS.
I haven't been able to pick up Fox since. I don't get much of MSNBC. I wasn't getting CNN until they fired Aaron Brown. I've not seen hide nor hair of my president. I do get John Stewart and the Daily Show, apparently because BS that knows it's BS doesn't get filtered.
For sports events, I get the picture, but no audio. During the Arkansas-LSU game on CBS, the screen went blank every time they showed Houston Nutt on the sideline. I get KTHV's news in Little Rock, but not Craig O'Neill's sports. I get nothing on KARK-TV's news. I get all of KATV's news except when Paul Eells is doing the sports.
On that Sunday night show on KATV during football season called "Sports Rap," I could see and hear only when Bruce James was talking.
I sent off for a radio BS-Chip, but the manufacturer replied that the product was still in research. In the meantime, the company related that its early investigation of the Arkansas market suggested I steer clear of anyone named Schaffer, Barrett, Mattingly or Rainwater.
It added that it appeared there had been a recent installment of Allen Colmes' show that should have been filtered, but that its broadcast was too limited in the area to trigger any devices.
No such filter exists as yet for newspapers, which would explain why this space isn't blank.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
Find this article at:
www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2006/01/07/JohnBrummett/332598.html