Dept. of Nonbespectacled Edification

Despite having subscribed to cable for, oh, three months now (I really am considering turning this off) I still do most of my TV watching at the gym. This bothers me, not in that I feel like I should be watching more TV at home, but in that I don't like watching TV at the gym, since all the screens are usually tuned into CNN. The sound is always off, but it still bothers me. It's worse now that I'm wearing contacts; Lou Dobbs was slightly less of an unwelcome sight when he was a blurry orange-ish presence. (The show was always a predictable sequence of shots: blurry Dobbs, blurry border scene, blurry detained illegal immigrants, blurry Dobbs, maybe blurry trucks rolling down the highway. As far as I could tell, before I had contacts, they just popped in the same video every night.) Now I just have to avert my eyes.

I recall a Saturday morning back in '03 where I spent a 25-minute treadmill session in a gym in Astoria watching the Columbia space shuttle disintegrate, blurrily, over and over and over again. I really am not a fan of CNN playing at the gym. Eventually I joined the New York City Sports Clubs, which would show network TV and crappy music videos. At least these had the potential to be occasionally hilarious.

I went to the gym late on Saturday morning and they had half the TVs tuned to CNN, and half the TVs turned to cartoons on CBS. I decided the least irritating programming was a cartoon called "Dino Squad," which is apparently teaching our nation's preteens some terribly inaccurate things about DNA, in particular its potential to take mutated forms that allow teens to morph into dinosaurs. Also, the theme song (which, mercifully, I only experienced via closed captioning) starts with the line "From 25 million years in the past," which the careful viewer might note refers to the end of the Oligocene epoch. Did an early write of the show had the teens morphing into early baleen whales and ancestral elephant-like mammals? I guess it's a moot point, since mutant DNA can't make you do that either.

The last couple times I've been at the gym, they've been piping in classical music. I'm generally OK with anything they play that isn't "My Humps," but there's something less than inspiring about listening to a tinny version of Respighi's "Pines of Rome" with everything except the trumpets and violins inaudible.

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Part of the reason I'm not watching cable at home is that I've been plowing through DVDs of the British version of The Office, which Nate got for me for Christmas. Not much of the show is quotable, since it's based on slow comic timing and bleakly hilarious awkward moments; this appraisal meeting set piece is a little gem, though. I think this may also be the only scene in the series where Ricky Gervais isn't playing the most obnoxious character in the room.