1032 Clicking the Remote

Saturday, December 24, 2006

Flipping around the wasteland of the six channels available to one without cable, on Christmas Eve afternoon. Everything is either Christmas-themed or sports.

Seen in passing:

On PBS there were bell-ringers, fourteen or so of them playing some complicated classical music. In front of the U-shaped table of bells and ringers, there was a conductor, in tux, energetically waving his baton and generally acting like he was personally making the music.

What amused me was that the ringers were frantically glancing from the sheet music to their arrays of bells, and not one of them so much as glanced in the conductor's direction. I stopped there and watched for a while, to see if any looked up, and none did through two full selections.

I can listen to bells, I dearly love carillons, but I can't watch these groups. They look like one-armed paper-hangers, and they get me all tensed up.

I clicked into the middle of "Nicholas Nickelby", and found Nathan Lane. With apologies to any NL fans, I really can't stand the man as a (non-stage) actor. I have never seen him in any movie or TV sitcom (starring or guest appearance) where I was not painfully aware he was acting. Contrast him with, say, Dustin Hoffman, who completely becomes his character. Nathan Lane will ruin anything for me faster than Liz Taylor - who also acted like she was playing the part of an actor acting.

Another flip found a piece on "green products". There's apparently a public school in or near Albany that has committed to use only environmentally safe products throughout the building, from building materials to cleaning products. However, they have to make an exception for floor finishes. There are "green" floor finishing products out there, but they "don't stand the test of time". They go down safely, but they need to be reapplied more often, resulting in buildup that needs to be removed much more often, and removal results in harmful dust. I thought that was an interesting point, given how serious they seemed to be about the "green" project.

Flip. "It's a Wonderful Life". Ack! Flip flip flip!
.