Don't they know what it means to me?!?!

I'm checking the CBC schedules right now because nothing says holiday spirit like that movie where they keep saying "you'll shoot your eye out, kid!" I used to hate it, but now I can not find the words to express how much I love it. It just isn't Christmas without it.

Over the years it's become pretty much the only Christmas special that I can still stomach.

I don't know what it is about the holiday season that allows people to pass off unimaginative, sentimental schlock as entertainment but honestly, it's got to end. Too many people are wasting their time and money producing too much Christmas music and tv that have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Not like A Christmas Story, where we suffer pain and anguish along with Ralphie, because even though it makes you look retarded, you have to wear the pyjamas that your aunt gave you. Because no matter how cool they seem in your own mind, some things are never quite what they're cracked up to be. Because part of growing up is learning that even things that are sacred in this world like Little Orphan Annie are just there to make you buy stuff.

Just like the pain and anguish that I feel at the sudden realization that A Christmas Story (1983) is not going to be aired in my area on the CBC. Bastards. Sometimes I think their management is deliberately trying to force public broadcasting down the drain. Sick fucks.

So it's over to Global, the only other channel I get. Watching any Canwest station tends to give me a dirty feeling. Something about the rebroadcast American crap, or maybe it's something to do with the fact that the Aspers own pretty much all print and broadcast media from Manitoba westward and that creeps me out.

A quick check of their programming schedule shows nothing. Plenty of Christmas specials but not that one. There's a word for that. In IB History 12 we had to come up with a skit about Palestine and Israel, and Ingrid and Heidi ended up being comical little old Jewish ladies who threw random Yiddish words into their conversation with myself, a dumb American tourist who sang a song about a civil war in Lebanon. They had a word for absolutely nothing, which they would shout out comically, but alas, I have forgotten it and wouldn't know how to spell it even if I had remembered.

But that would be a fitting word, because Global is owned by a bunch of Jews who obviously don't know the good Christmas specials from the bad. Not that being Jewish necessarily determines that one would lack good taste as far as Christmas specials go, because there are many others who are unable to distinguish between the two.

Namely, those people who actually bother to sit down and watch all the mindless drivel that is disguised as holiday programming.

Iesu fucking Christus. Don't tell me I'm going to have to rent the damn thing! I was absolutely hellbent on watching it for free.

Which is to say, free in a very simple sense, but not free in the sense that Mr. Dallas Smythe would have interpereted it. You do pay for the crap you watch on tv by wasting your time sitting through all the commercials. The commodity to be sold is not the programming but you, which is then marketted to advertisers who want you to buy stuff.

This whole process of putting commercials on the air for you to see costs a lot of money, so that means that all your nifty consumer products that the television tells you to buy are far more expensive than they need to be because part of the price you pay is part of the price it costs to advertise them to you. Thus, we, and the middle and working classes especially, are effectively financing our own oppression.

Rise up. Rebel.

Public broadcasting is cool though.
So's this.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children tells me I shouldn't be eating meat. Not that I'm bragging or anything.