The Marshall in the dell.

Another captions post? Madness! It cannot be comprehended! What's to be done???

Joke #1 - The gathered crowd fell silent when Marshall Montgomery poked his head out of his burrow. He sniffed the breeze and looked tentatively in all directions. Then he quickly vanished into his hole. It looked like we would have six more weeks of war after all.

Joke #2 - Commander Needel was almost legendary in his skill applying camouflage. His tank was completely undetectable among the other haystacks. As a result, he was baffled when the rest of his battalion arrived at the rendezvous point and could barely hide their amusement.

Joke #3 - The mobile tactical haypile. Scourge of the barnyard.

My mystery doppleganger phil has left us a joke #4 that's so perfect that I'm mad at myself for not coming up with it! Thanks, a lot jerk! - Marshall Montgomery's fortifications were complete. Let that big bad wolf huff and puff all he wanted.

Fil had another good one. Unsure if it's the same as the phil who spells his name with a dipthong, though. - Joke #5 - General Jacques Toupee, leader of the Donald Trump Hair Battalion, shown here surveying the lay of the scalp.

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.    -Mgmt.]

The Seesaw Affair

Joke #1 - The kids hated Seesaw Saturdays. Mother hated Seesaw Saturdays. Everyone hated Seesaw Saturdays except Father, and they hated that most of all.

Joke #2 - Father had the whole family come outside and test his new invention: a strange seesaw kind of thing he simply called "the dilator".

Joke #3 - Gordon's invention had to work. He wasn't going to let an enlarged prostate get the best of him.

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

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Supplementary Sidebar - The Cord Cutting Chronicles, Pt 3. The long kiss get lost.

When we last left our hero, I (Hey, it's possible.) had just been disappointed with stuttering issues trying to use Hulu Plus or Amazon Instant through my Samsung "smart" TV, and a call to Comcast didn't reveal any clues. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 both have apps for Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant, so I powered up the PS3 for the first time in months to give it a whirl.

Success! Video playback was buttery smooth and the toast of my eyes welcomed the melty playback goodness into their every nook and cranny. The reviews I had read about my TV had said how useless the internet connectivity was, but I had thought "How bad could it be?" Really bad. My 2012 model Samsung's smart TV functionality is so bad as to be unusable. Buy it for the picture. Not the internet feature. It's weird that Samsung, a company that makes smartphones, could get it so wrong in scaling up the exact same functionality to their TVs. My guess is that TVs and smartphones are handled by two different arms of the company, and they don't share their secrets.

Anyhoo, with this victory fresh in my experience, I ordered a top-of-the-line Roku for 90-whatever dollars. It's smaller than a sandwich and can be connected via WiFi or cat 5 cable. Both types of connection flow smoothly, which surprised me a little. I tried going three days of no cable TV, using only the streaming services. It was fine. There's lots of stuff available in the streamers, and Hulu is even creating their own original programming. Better still, the production values are good. It's not ghetto-hillbilly reality TV stuff. Roku seems to have a handful of free "channels" that don't require a Hulu or Amazon membership. After all, the thing has to be able to do something on it's own, right? Good news, troops! The Thunderbirds series is available on Crackle, Roku's free movie channel. They are GO!

It was time to call Comcast for the cable TV break-up. Their phone maze questions led me to the "remove services" option, which in turn led to a recording reciting their regular business hours. Guess what? You can get ahold of a Comcast worker bee 24 hours a day for anything EXCEPT cancelling a service. You have to call them during their business hours to do that. The people who handle your cancellations don't want to hear from you that badly. Shocking!

Following day, I called in the afternoon to catch the "customer retention" or "too little, too late" department while they were still on the clock. I talked to a very nice lady, oddly enough, who asked why I was cancelling. I explained that I was tired of their channel packages and paying for things I don't want. She said she could understand that. When she asked me what Comcast could do to keep me, I said "a la carte pricing", and we both had a good long laugh. I told her that I would happily pay $5 per channel for each of the six or so channels I used. She then explained that my current deal was a better value, because I was getting over six hundred channels, and in my fantasy world, that would cost over $3000 per month. I then explained to her that I am a fire engine named Sylvia and my house is made of cabbage, because she clearly hadn't listened to the last five sentences I had said to her.

So now my Comcast bill should be about $54 per month, down from over $150. With their five megabit per second speed, I can watch a show while using a web browser on my phone without any problems. Amazon Instant Video comes as part of my Amazon Prime membership, and Hulu Plus costs $10 per month. This is better.

Next thing I plan to do is buy a digital TV antenna to see what's HD programming is flying through the air in my town. It's free. I might as well get some local traffic reports and weather (which Hulu and Amazon don't do, sadly.)

It's a little weird and scary, but it can be done. You can survive without cable. I suggest trying a streaming service for a few days before making the final cut. I guess I could have saved us both some time by just saying that to start with. Ah well.

END

Monday, we will return to our usual snarky-jokes-about-old-pictures program.

Eastern Drapery Hardware - From the ones who know.

A pointless endorsement now, from our friends back in 1961! Shopping for new blinds or drapes? Trust Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, like all the smart decorators!

When you listen to the Bing Crosby - Rosemary Clooney Show, there's one key takeaway, and it's that these two know about window treatments! You know how all their songs are about windows? That's no accident. Bing and Rosemary were working their way up to their dream job of being cut and pasted into an Eastern Drapery Hardware ad. It just makes sense, people. Whenever you see a famous person doing a paid endorsement, you should always assume they're personally concerned about your buying choices.

Actually, Eastern was just a sponsor of the show, and part of the deal must have been that Eastern can use the stars' likenesses in their ads. Stupid reality. I was happier imagining Bing and Rosemary working in a curtain factory.

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Supplementary Sidebar - The Cord Cutting Chronicles, Pt 2. The Dawn Breaks, or, The Night Dawns on Comcast.

So, back in December, I took advantage of the ridiculously good and cheap crop of television options we now enjoy and got a new one. It's a Samsung, which got great ratings for picture quality and horrible ratings for it's "smart TV" functionality. Since I was cable-cutter-curious, I figured the "smart" part of the thing would be enough to satisfy the part of me that wanted to give cable the finger, which, truth to tell, was most of me.

I had done some research, and knew that almost all of my must-have shows were available through either Amazon Instant, Hulu, or both, just with (with some shows) a bit of a delay between first-run air date and the episodes' appearance on the streaming services. Bummer, but getting Top gear six months earlier than Hulu was not worth $1200 a year.

Desired shows: (Mix of free and not free, depending on newness of episodes.)
-Top Gear
-Walking Dead - Getting a little slow and tedious in its budget-cut 3rd season. Can live without it.
-Breaking Bad
-Game of Thrones
-How It's Made - Equivalent shows are all over the place on the streaming services.
-Mythbusters - Not available streaming, but the show is getting more and more scripted and lame.
-Wheeler Dealers - British car restoration show. Not available streaming. This one really hurts.

Adding up the cost of the infrequent seasons of the shows I would happily pay for, it's still less than the $150 per month I've been paying. Most of the time, when I flick on the TV, it's a rerun of something I've seen anyway. Any yes, I'm one of those tree-killers that turns the TV on while cooking, or working on the computer and stuff. When the house is silent, the voices come. We don't like the voices.

Found shows I wasn't looking for on Hulu Plus: ($10/month)
-International news from all over
-Numerous nature shows
-Loads of obscure anime
-Lots of guy brain-candy similar to How It's Made and Really Huge Bridges, or whatever.
-Lots of documentaries
-Weirdo B-movies I've never heard of
-Actual movies normal people would want to see
-5th Gear - Another British car show only slightly less good than Top Gear

It's pretty cool pressing a button on your remote and seeing a whole new screen filled with Netflix, Amazon Instant and Hulu logos, along with Samsung's idea of a home page. As it turns out, Samsung's idea of a home page is this: Start adding logos to click on, and when the screen gets full, make the screen slide left and right. This is a lesson that everyone else in the world learned was a bad idea back in 1998, in the prehistoric years of Web 1.0. Anyway, Samsung has been concentrating on making TVs all this time, so maybe they get a pass.

Since I was already an Amazon Prime member (something like $60 a year gets you free two day shipping on lots of things, and also includes free streaming content like movies and TV shows), I tried watching a few episodes of Top Gear. The thrill of watching something through an artery other than Comcast's main vein quickly wore off when stuttering and disconnects happened with disappointing regularity - about every 5 minutes. "TV has no internet connection. Please check your settings." Since I wasn't using wi-fi to connect to the web this was surprising. I had a cat 5 cable stuck in the back of the TV and my modem and router were doing nothing else at the time. How could there be traffic problems? I wondered if Comcast was throttling my connection, or I had reached my monthly data ceiling or something like that. I had never had to worry about streaming video before, so these were both possible.

Fast forward to me on the horn with a Comcast worker bee who verified that I had 15 megabit per second of download speed. I had done enough homework to know that services like Hulu recommend no less than 1 megabit  download speed, and I had 15. That shouldn't be a problem.

I could taste the streaming content cake, but it often disappeared mid-chew and had to be re-bitten over and over again with only the occasional swallow. What was to be done?

Coming soon - What was to be Done.

Admiral Color -The neighborhood watch.

Televisions are currently ridiculously great and cheap right now. Standing in line a Target recently, I saw a pallet of name-brand 42" high def LCDs for about $400. What you get for your money now is just kooky, considering I can recall buying a 32" CRT in 1996 for something like $700. The crane required to get it up to my second floor apartment was not included in the price, or the cost of reinforcing the Earth's crust in the region, to keep the TV from falling to the center of the planet. Good picture, though.

What I do miss, however, is TV cabinets like this old Admiral.

See, now that we can make televisions with hardly any bezel (the "black frame" part of the TV around the screen) and thinner than anyone really needs them to be, we absolutely are. This is cool and makes product managers all moist in the trouser region, but I think I have space in my house for some kind of hilarious hybrid, like this Admiral with a big LED-backlit LCD in there, instead of the old glass tube screen. Sure, you'd have to cut out some of the vertical slats on the sides, due to the wider screen aspect ratio, but that's not horrible, and it would still leave room in there for some great speakers.

Of course, there's not enough of a market for this to be worthwhile for any real company to do. It will have to be pulled off by one of the insane hobbyist proletariat to pull off. If I came into possession of an old console donor TV like this one, I think I have the carpentry skills to totally make this happen. The LCD implant wouldn't have to be modified in any huge way. I'd just need to build into the console a kind of wooden bracket to hold the LCD in there without its stand on. The trick would be including an amplifier to drive the speakers without it needing to be separately controlled via remote, which would require line-of-sight for the infrared to work, and, hence, visible to look at. Hmm. Fun to think about.

Anyway, what's on tonight in the Admiral ad? Looks like Weird Head Scarf and Hat Lady again. Damn, it's a rerun. I saw this one before. It makes you wonder why we bothered to drag our Admiral out onto the driveway to share with the whole neighborhood. Oh no. Those headlights coming in from the left. Dad's back from the bar and can't see straight! Noooo! Not the Admiraaaallllllll!

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Supplementary Sidebar - The Cord Cutting Chronicles, Pt 1

Herein, find the chronicle of a man yearning to invite Comcast to remove their straw from his checking account. I've been a Comcast subscriber for basically 18 years, and the price of having a 600-channel spigot of raw entertainment leaving puddles of excitement, hilarity, and adventure on my carpet has risen just slightly faster than the subjective value of those puddles. My channel lineup includes over 600 channels, but I doubt that anyone really watches more than six or ten, unless they're unemployed, or a shut-in. By my reckoning, to actually use all 600-something channels, I'd have to house a random selection of 900 people, each watching television for sixteen hours a day (assuming they slept for eight hours per day and they all ate and excreted in front of the TV). I'll go out on a limb and say that those 900 people would have access to all the entertainment they can stand, but that they wouldn't necessarily be entertained. Also, my aforementioned carpet couldn't handle such high-frequency excretion.

What was fifteen years ago a sixty dollar monthly bill has ballooned up to a $150 monthly bill. Mitigating factors include the addition of broadband internet, HD fees and additional channels which, admittedly, I called and invited into my home. However, Comcast's decisions to spread similar content throughout different tiers of channels isn't a mistake or something I can control. If, for example, you like sciencey programming, you'll find yourself paying for tens of channels worth of sports, cooking shows, and at least one channel solely dedicated to reality slapfight mind poison types of content that you aren't interested in, just to get several channels you do like. Sometimes, Comcast migrates a favorite channel into a new group of gotta-pay-extra channels, for your satisfaction. It's also worth noting that the sports channels are the single most expensive type of content for pay TV providers to license from the NFL, NBA, etc. If you have pay TV, you're paying for at least a few sports channels. I hope somebody in your house likes to watch sports, because you're paying extra for them, like it or not.

Please enjoy the following metaphor to help you understand what a massive prick cable providers are:

If a grocery store worked the way cable TV does, you would walk into a store after navigating a labyrinth, with a one in three chance of finding yourself re-deposited in the parking lot. After your second attempt at the door labyrinth, you hopefully would have memorized it and managed to gain access to the actual store. Hoping to buy oranges and paper towels, you would be confronted with a helpful sales associate. "Oranges?" the sales drone would drone. "Sure, those are in produce, but you'll have to buy some folding chairs, a greeting card, three different kinds of lettuce, some ground beef, two tablecloths, and an ice pick." That's our 'Produce Lover's' Tier of products. For paper towels, you'll also get a three pack of cigarette lighters, some bread (not the kind you like), carrots, squash, shoelaces, a set of picnic spoons, two bendy straws, one more birthday card, instant coffee, and a Chinese made yo-yo that's way too light and flimsy to develop any kind of rotational momentum and is essentially worthless. That's our 'Basic Starter Pack'. It's a great value." The total price for your oranges and paper towels purchase would come to $126.32. You would then take your recently purchased ice pick and ram it up your nose because you no longer want to live in a world this stupid. However, if after this shopping ordeal, you were still thinking really clearly, you'd use the ice pick on the sales drone. "Ow, the cavity where the remainder of my brain is!" the drone would drone. "That's one satisfied customer" you'd rasp to yourself, and then stride confidently away from the store, unflinching, as it explodes in a slow-motion ball of flame for some reason. See? I know my basic cable Saturday afternoon classics.

Coming soon: The Dawn Breaks, or, The Night Dawns on Comcast.