For instance: I have DSS for my TV. If you’re familiar with it, there’s a guide menu you scroll up and down until you find the program you want, click on it, and up it comes on your screen. Well, for the last few weeks "ALIVE" has been popping up on various premium channels. You know the movie. It’s the one that generated much controversy because it showed desperate airplane crash survivors canibalizing their dead to survive a brutal winter. (What am I the B-Movies guy?)

Yuk! Awwwww. (Imagine me with squinty eyes shaking my head back and forth.) Bleck! Every time I’d see it come up in the guide menu, I’d think, "I am NOT going to watch this movie. It’s gonna be gross. I can’t stand stuff like that. Ugh! No way!"

So, it’s 2:30am Sunday morning. Insomnia rules. I’m scrolling. Plink! There it is... ALIVE. God only knows why I clicked on it, but I did. Maybe I figured that since it was halfway done, the really gory crash-stuff would be over and the rest would just be suspenseful. HA! It couldn’t have been two and a half seconds after the show popped up on my screen that a guy bends over on one knee, rips a chunk of flesh from a frozen, slapped in the snow face down, body and starts chewing, with that "I’m going to puke because I can’t believe I’m doing this" look on his face.

Awwwww, great. (All squinty eyed again, with my hand in front of my face.) "I have no luck whatsoever in this world," I thought. It was like I was being punished for delaying the inevitable. And since I didn’t want to see the movie because of one hyped-up scene, of course that’s the scene that comes right up. Boom. Guaranteed twisted "tastes like chicken" nightmares, if I ever managed to fall asleep.

Luckily, I watched the sun come up that morning. :-)

The really depressing part, though, is that by the end of the movie they’re all chowing down on each other with the ocassional, "don’t eat my brother, please!" line thrown in to remind me that it’s people, not beef that they’re eating. But by then, I’m so completely desensitized by the whole thing that I’m wondering if there’s any pepperoni pizza left in the fridge.

Now you know why I hate television.

Scot Giambalvo