I can remember the day when cable was truly a novelty.  Further, in those days cable was commercial free after all you were paying to watch TV.  Nowadays we not only pay for cable we get bombarded with stupid inane intellectually insulting commercials.  In any given hour we are exposed to at least 15 minutes of commercial advertising.  And if you watch cable TV late at night the networks will turn up the volume of commercial advertising presumably to “wake you up”.  And to add insult to injury, we now have 4000 stations with maybe 2 stations having any intellectually redeeming value.  I find this whole cable TV experience to be a total rip-off. 

Have you also noticed that cable and satellite are competing on quality and the number channels.  Each continue to add worthless demeaning stations that serve nothing more than a placeholder for purposes of claiming more channels than the competitor. 

And now that these oligopolies have us under their collective thumbs, they continue to raise the rates while reducing the features.  All said, I long for the good old days where TV was free and we had only a handful of options.  At least back then we had quality programming that didn’t require us to squirm in our seats as we hear about “erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostate, constipation, incontinance, hemorrhoids, bladder control issues, bankruptcy protection, IRS protection, asbestos, disability insurance, car insurance and my favorite commercials about how Merril Lynch is “bullish on America”.  Thanks Merril Lynch for spending all that money to tell me you are bullish… sounds like you should have paid more attention to managing your money than annoying me!