Burke’s Blog

With the economy being what it is right now, I would like to share one way in which I am not only going to save $600/year but also will have more productive time. A few months ago my wife, Melanie, and I got rid of cable TV in our house. It has been great.

You know how sometimes you flip through the channels and there is nothing on? TV is a big waste of time, so much so that I am not going to capitalize it anymore (even though my spellchecker tells me I must). Some people wake up and turn the tv on. They keep it on all day as background noise. They plop their kids in front of it instead of doing any sort of real parenting.

We still have the actual boob tube equipped with rabbit ears. Just no cable bill. We want to be able to watch the New Orleans Saints and some of the presidential debates every now and then. But television is part of the problem of politics – no one who cannot pay for tv advertising, no matter how smart or able, will ever get news reporting. This is why we are stuck with puppets of big business lobbyists. The best long-term solution for helping America is making advertising on tv irrelevant.

The other great thing is that there is not a constant laugh track in my living room. The humor on tv is sometimes so bad, but the laugh track still runs. I guess the tv producers think it is contagious so we will all laugh along or that they are fooling us. Wrong. The world would be much better if every laugh were genuine and not forced upon things that are not funny.

If you can’t turn the thing off, then what else can’t you do? Get a library card, read a book, go visit an old person every now and then - DO SOMETHING ELSE! It is your life - are your memories of childhood actually things that happened to you or to Peter Brady?  I wonder.

I’m just trying to help.  Hope it worked.