Our cable company has FINALLY come through on the promise of five months ago and brought us OnDemand. Which, when you work from home, is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever depending on how productive you’re trying to be.
We had this service when we lived in New Hampshire, too, so I’m a pro at it now. It’s like having your cable service be your Tivo for you, but you just don’t get to pick the shows. Since I am broke butt po and can’t afford a real Tivo, this version is fantastic. They carry random movies, new releases that you can buy if you gots the cash, and a bunch of cable shows like BBC’s Coupling and Adult Swim’s Home Movies. AND since we have HBO, we also get all the HBO series and a bunch of their currently running movies. Which is really the only way to have HBO, because otherwise the movies you want to see always seem to start a half hour before you sat down.
This new version of OnDemand that just showed up also includes the single best use of the television medium I’ve ever seen: Personal Ads. You can scroll through this list of internet handles like abeil and xxcit, and then when you pick one, up pops this picture of a person of varying degrees of freakiness talking about why they’re so great for four solid minutes. There are not words to discuss the genius. IT’S. AWESOME.
So, as if I wasn’t distracted before, I now have all these nameless people calling to me from my T.V. “Don’t clean the house, Tresa, let me tell you all about myself!” I found one the other day with the thumbnail, “ziplining with monkey’s in Africa, flying to Asia, adventure seeking, can you keep up?” I expected to either see a frat boy or his female counterpart pretending to be wild and zany to distract from the lack of substance, and instead found a quite pretty woman, despite being overweight and having a wicked underbite but rocking on the hair and makeup front, describing how she’s from South Africa and studies International Relations so that she can be a legitimate traveling bum for her whole life. Wow! People are fascinating!
And some are freaky and fun to laugh at.
