That Rant I promised you

I'm working from home today. It's a pain in the rear to try to write with as much noise as I have to deal with in my lab, and I am using the time between "wet" experiments to work on the actual document of my thesis. In our department, you can use submitted manuscripts as individual chapters of the thesis since you already did the writing. I have one published journal article, and we are submitting the second paper next week, and I will have a third written and submitted by the time I turn in my thesis, so for me, thesis writing is a lot of cut and paste. But it's not that simple. I have to do it in chunks because it all has to be formatted properly for publication. UNC even has a 32 page document that tells you how to do it. Argghhh! (as John says)

Anyway, here's the main rant:
Daytime TV sucks big hairy donkey testicles.

Some of you might understand this, I know Ben does, anyway, but I need some kind of noise on while I work. Like white noise, but it has to be intelligible. At work, the noise level is too unpredictable, so I prefer to write at home where I can control the volume on the TV etc. In fact, I think of the TV as sort of audio wallpaper, but I need to find SOMETHING I can leave on that won't distract me or make me retch. That's been kind of hard today. Let's peruse the channels at 2:45 pm, shall we?
2 (NBC) Montel
3 (CBS) As the World Turns (yecch...soap operas)
4 (SCOLA) German News
5 (ShopAtHome) Ugly Ass Men's watch with FAKE diamonds
6 (ABC) dumb Antonio Banderas cologne commercial (during One Life to Live, evidently).
BTW, who in hell wants to smell like Antonio. Yuk, sweat.
7 Home buyers channel (Cape Cod for $133K)
8 WTF??? (indy channel)
9 (PBS) some dumb economics/math class show
10 (WB) Pooeymon (pokemon)
11(UNI) Telenovelas
12 (UPN) Judge Joe Brown
13 (FOX) Jerry Falwell (!!)
14 (Local) Local News all the time
15 (HSN) Royal Jelly Mandarin shampoo set (WTF????)
16 (QVC) Reed and Barton silverware
18 (C-SPAN2) David Hilzenrath (whoever that is)
19 (BET) some white dude trying to be black for some judges???
21 (WGN) Rockford Files (ahh, finally something watchable)
22 (???) infomercial
25 (USA) Dumb Steve Martin movie
26(TNT) NYPD Blue rerun

And about 50 more channels of pure and utter crap. ESPN is playing an NFL movie I've seen before, ESPN 2 is playing an episode of World Series of Poker I've seen three times. And I refuse to watch some woman I've never met have a baby on either the discovery channel, discovery health, or TLC, thank you very much. Even CourtTV sucks now that there's nothing new in the Scott Peterson case.

I know, I know there's always FoxNews, but I can only take so much of the same thing. Otherwise I'd leave it on there or headline news (moves too fast for too much politicking)

I even caught myself watching CNBC because everything else sucks!

While I'm on the subject, night time TV sucks too. These are the shows I watch:
House
The Amazing Race (when it's on at a different time from house. Damn you CBS and Fox)
Law and Order SVU (on reruns!)
Law and Order CI (when I remember)
Survivor (it amuses me)
CSI (mostly 'cause it's on after Survivor)
and Extreme Makeover Home Edition (love Ty, love the concept)

I hate Desperate Housewives, couldn't get into Lost, and frankly Joey is the dumbest Friend. Why would I watch that? Not to mention that his nephew is a good-looking street smart grad student at Caltech. I assure there is no such creature on this earth. Period. Good looking, a few, street-smart, maybe a couple, but both? No way!

And Ray Romano is the worst comic on earth. Everybody loves Raymond? Not in this house.

Maybe it's just that I've had a grudge against TV since they cancelled my all time favorite show and refuse to put it out on DVD (The Pretender, of course. Duh.) even though you can pretty much get any other show that was on at the same time including Profiler (Pretender's "sister" show)....

Screw TV. DVDs are frickin' cheap (often cheaper than going to the movies!)