Rip Van Ed

As I mentioned last week, Verizon updated my old telephone service and Internet service and "threw in" Cable TV for free.

Well, I figured that Cable had finally come down to "my price," so I said, what the heck...go ahead and put it in.

The joke was on Verizon. They just assumed that at some point over the past 30 or 40 years that the basic cable lines had been installed in my house and all their installer would have to do was "turn" their box on. Nope, they had to bore holes in the walls and actually start from scratch.

So far, we've watched it twice. I watched 6 minutes of the Super Bowl but had to turn it off after a
couple of fast paced commercials  and local station promos, all at 500% Visual Overload...at BAM, BAM, BAM speed...made me so dizzy I had to lie down.

Linda watched one of those British shows on PBS for about an hour, well, actually, the TV was ON that channel for an hour, but I noticed that she had fallen asleep at some point, so I really don't know how long she actually watched.

But, I'm not giving up. I'm confident that as I scroll through those one thousand (Heck, maybe it's 2,000 channels) I'm eventually going to find some shows that I like.

But in my heart, I know that TV can be addictive and that is NOT what low information Americans who are in charge of electing our "leaders" need.

And I haven't even mentioned the 68% of Americans who are addicted to Video Games.

• The average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.

• The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 39 years old.

• Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (34 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).

• In 2009, 25 percent of Americans over the age of 50 play video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999

God Bless America.

Soon.

-Ed