December 2, 2005
Sung to the Tune of 57 Channels (and Nothing On)'Posted by Bryan
I'm in favor of the blustery proposal by FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin to make cable television programming a cafeteria plan.
I've accepted the fact that I have to pay the high cost to receive bundled programming and television access. However, I would be thrilled to not have to pay for stations I never watch, in exchange for ones that I might if they weren't only available in other packages.
And one other question...what is it that compels a person to include their middle initial in their formal name? My own father includes his in his signature, but not in his name, which is actually a familiarization of his middle name. Is it because Kevin Martin is a common name that the FCC bigwig did it? Although I'm not sure that Kevin J Martin causes him to stand out so much. Perhaps if he were Kevin X Martin, I could understand the justification. There has to be dozens of Kevin J. Martins. Maybe there were like 2 Kevin Martins in his Phys Ed class when he was in first grade, and Coach Pete got frustrated every time he did roll call and both kids kept saying "here" whenever he called out "Kevin Martin." So finally, he blew his whistle and said, "You....picking your nose...you are now going to be 'Kevin A.' and you, the one who can't do a pull-up, you are 'Kevin J.'"
And by the way, I was one of those kids who couldn't do more than like 3 pull-ups during the presidential physical fitness tests, and it always drove me nuts because I could do the shuttle relay quickly enough, and could do like 60 sit-ups in 45 seconds, but because I was tall, I had more body weight to pull-up. Meanwhile, the Kevin A's of my day weighed like 48 pounds in the 8th grade and could do 27 pull ups in 30 seconds...with one hand, because the other one was busy picking his nose. Big Deal. I could have too if I didn't weigh any more than a rhesus monkey, comparitively speaking.
Okay, so maybe that's a bad comparison because both a rhesus monkey and an orangutan (as a standard for completing the analogy) could probably both do a lot of pull-ups, but it still really frustrated me.
You know what else frustrates me? When people say 'fustrated' instead of 'frustrated.' I don't understand the justification for leaving out that initial 'r.' And make no mistake, I hear it when you leave it out. Every time. And when you do it, if you listen closely, you can probably hear the grinding of my molars between clenched jaws.
There was a guy when I was growing up, his name was Ray Lichtenhahn. He was in my brother's class, I think. He definitely didn't go with a middle initial. But his brother's name was Roy. Ray and Roy. And I'm not sure if they included the "r" in frustrated, but probably they did since both their first names started with it. Anyway, "Ray" had the nickname "Orangutan" in school because the guy had the longest arms you have ever seen on a human. He endured a fair amount of jokes about his knuckles scraping the ground when he walked.
The guy sure could wrestle, though.
I find it pretty interesting that the name "orangutan" doesn't have anything to do with the primates color. I would have thought that it did, with them kind of being orangeish. Their name actually means "man of the jungle" in Malaysian. I bet if there really was a man of the Jungle with that name, he'd probably go by "Orang U. Tan."