For a long time I really thought it was me. I thought the world had passed me by. Frankly, I even entertained the idea I might not be any where as observant as I thought I was, and I was imagining things. Then yesterday, as I was sort of watching an NFL game on cable tv, for which I pay in excess of a $100 per month, I read that the average game lasts 3 hours and 11 minutes. When broken down, we see only 11 minutes of actual football plays and 100 commercial breaks, and I, no we, are paying for these clowns to try and sell us something while sprinkling in a little football. I'm not nuts, we all are!
Think about it, you are watching a news report and just as it gets interesting the interviewer says "I'm coming up on a hard break", and blip, the interviewee morphs into an e.d. commercial. In fact, if you actually time these shows, you will find you are getting 2 1/2 minutes of what passes for news, sandwiched between 3 minutes of messages on how to "up your game" with a different drug. This might be followed by a message from a "fighting for fairness" law firm telling you how you can be compensated if the drug should happen to kill you. Oh, and the best thing, you are paying for it!
Maybe it's just coincidence that an inning ends at the same exact instant as a forth down or a missed basket but I think the blame rests with the tv remote in your hand. Now if you flip channels during one of those breaks, instead of a different game you to learn how to whiten your teeth in 15 or 30 seconds. Yeah, you're still paying for the privilege of being bombarded with the newest, BUT WAIT, get a second one free deal!
Watching your favorite show is no different. They suck you in with 5 or so minutes of un-interrupted program, and then, when you are hooked, bingo 3 or 4 minutes of program in between 3 minutes of saving thousands on the new car you didn't need! No, I won't remind you again, the hell I won't, you pay for it!
As far as what we can do about it, I doubt many of us will turn off our cable and go back to reading books or simply talking with each other, even though we probably should. The real danger is tv is where most of us expect to get our news. Instead we have a sort of "sleight of hand" trick in which the same "information" is repeated every hour between sales pitches on everything from reverse mortgages to personal lubricants. We can't separate the real news from all of the other crap even though the "talking heads" insist they have our interests at heart. The politicians love it since this "blizzard" of messages helps them hide what they are really doing.
And yes, you are paying fot it in more ways than one!
