12:13 A.M.

UPDATE — Brandon was right, no cable technician was outside unplugging accounts at midnight on a Sunday, and in fact the panic that begat the following post was based on a temporary outage. When I woke up this morning, everything was back to normal. Phew. I've removed the name of my cable provider, even though it would be fairly easy for them to find out, and though I doubt they're running the company name through Technorati, but what the hell, let's stay on the safe side. I need a weekly dose of Larry David and Ricky Gervais.

It finally happened.

After ten months of free basic and premium cable, [cable provider] unceremoniously withdrew my connection just a few minutes ago. To quote Robert Redford's famous last line in "The Candidate," what do we do now?

I haven't made up my mind yet. First, a bit of history:

At the beginning of the year, I decided I had better knuckle down and focus on blogging, freelancing, and developing the project that eventually became The Hotline's Blogometer. The biggest distraction was, of course, television. If I simply cut it off, I could eliminate the distracting audio-visual wallpaper of cable news, and maybe actually get some work done.

But this wasn't the only consideration:

At the time I had been watching the same 14" TV/VCR combo that I'd purchased en route to college in mid-1997. That television set was perfect for the concrete shoeboxes of UO Housing (among the worst in the nation) but its time had gone long before I finally replaced it. I held on to it for far too long: Living in Crystal City lat year, my constant dragging of it back and forth between my room and the apartment's balcony had jostled loose the coaxial connection in the back, to the point where it finally just fell out. In response, I snipped off one end of the coax cable, stripped back the plastic to reveal the wire, and jammed that into the opening in the back. Positioned just right, most of the channels came through just fine. Most of them. Because the connection was iffy, I had to set up Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions to keep the wire touching precisely the right part of the TV's innards — this often included a coffee mug or tape dispenser to hold the cable in place, sometimes buttressed by the wall or reinforced by a strip of Scotch tape. I grew to know that TV's "sweet spots" intimately. For the last ten months of that TV's life, this is how I watched television.

But it was a major pain, and neither ESPN nor Fox News came in very well, and finally this hassle — plus my interest in saving money, plus the aforementioned concern for my productivity &mdash led to my decision to cut it off the umbilical cord of mindless entertainment that has played in the background of my entire life. So upon return from Christmas break this January, I called Comcast to disconnect my cable service.

But after they promised me the job had been done, and before I completely disconnected the disfunctional contraption, it turned out that my cable was still coming through. And not only that, but it seemed that I was now getting both HBO and Showtime.

So... I reconsidered. And of course, I didn't feel a bit bad about watching this "stolen" cable. I hadn't asked for it, I hadn't gone out of my way to acquire it, and I wasn't going to care if it was suddenly disconnected — I'd then go back to Plan A.

Unfortunately, sort of, I soon became a fan of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" and "Family Busines" on Showtime, and I could now watch some HBO programs that I already liked, such as "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "The Sopranos." And then I decided to do something that would have been unthinkable a few months prior: I bought a massive, 100+ lbs, 37" Sharp TV set from Best Buy. It was also better for viewing Netflix rentals than this already-outdated Apple iBook upon which I am composing this very post.

So here we are, ten months later.

What do I do? Well, I can afford cable again, and could even swing HBO if I deemed it necessary. But now there is yet another consideration: BitTorrent. Nowadays, I can look up virtually any popular broadcast or cable series and find the latest issue, and download it in a matter of hours. (Of course, I can also get movies and music this way, too.) Do I feel bad about this? Definitely not. I am an avowed fan of capitalism, but the companies that put out television programs have as yet failed to make downloads available. They will eventually, just as iTunes has proved that people will buy music online. (Do I patronize iTunes? Occasionally. I get most of my music via IM transfers from friends, not from the still-ubiquitous P2P networks.)

But there's a catch: I cannot watch breaking news, and I cannot watch the TV shows I enjoy on the evening of their first airing. I also don't have the tempting, even comforting background of MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. And that televisual behemoth I put good money down for is a huge cost, albeit a sunk one (as economists would put it).

So... I may make the call tomorrow. I need some time to think about it.

Questions, comments, reservations?

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posted by WWB at 12:18 AM |