The Planet's Little Ice Age?

One of the roughest and potentially dangerous aspects of having cable in the dorms at Notre Dame isn't the new and unfettered access that the masses will have to pay-per-view, nor the temptation that Celebrity Poker provides. No, it will be the lure of the History Channel when someone should be writing a paper, or of Animal Planet when really Roman law should be the priority. It is the possibility that one could sit in one's room for hours on end playing Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, or judging the decorating skills of Doug on Discovery Channel reruns of Trading Spaces, or watching Hunky Paul and Chico work their magic on Candace Olsen's Divine Design. The educational possibilites are endless, but they will all result in a surfeit of knowledge that will be in no way useful to anyone outside the realm of Trivial Pursuit and Balderdash.

How, you may ask, do I know this? On what research am I basing this supposition? On the bedrock of personal experience, my friend, that's what! When I did not have a television, I limited myself to watching cartoons online at AOL, or checking out Get Fuzzy and then getting on with life. Stupid stuff that I would be ashamed to share with anyone but you, gentle reader. Well, you or anyone else I may know... or meet... or accidentally spill coffee on at Reckers. Regardless, the point is that, deprived of cable, I occupied my time with pointless activities that would not infringe upon the brain space required for the academic portion of my life.

Given access to cable, however, cartoons go flying out the window. Comics and Snood (see previous post) lose their appeal. The Crocodile Hunter starts calling my name, and suddenly I am spending hours watching educational TV that sometimes inspires--gasp!--additional research.

Case in point? This evening, I was supposed to be memorizing lines for The Parable of the Talents for NDVision. Noticing, however, that Jen C. has my script binder, I resolved to make some jewelry, and headed to the 24hr space and the cable television. And lo and behold, I found the History Channel. I watched 2 hours about the Amazon Basin (did you know that Henry Ford tried factory-style plantation management to produce his own rubber for tires? hyooooge failure) and another 2 hours about the fact that, from the 1300s to the 1800s, the planet experienced an ice age that caused, among other things, the Plague, the Potato Blight, witch hunts, the French Revolution and the winter at Valley Forge. PS, we may be headed for another one, because if the global heating trend continues, the density of sea water will change, causing a change in the way ocean currents flow, creating a ripple effect that will produce erratic weather patterns, including unseasonal and large amounts of precipitation in areas unaccustomed to it, droughts and unusual numbers of tropical storms. That doesn't sound at all like recent years.

Oh, yeah. The Pentagon already had a think tank run scenarios on the global reactions to this kind of climatic change, and among them are worldwide starvation, the United States policing resource use on a global scale, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

I don't quite remember where I was going with this. Just know that now, instead of being able to sleep soundly, as I would if I had been frying my brain with good, wholesome American slopTV, my synapses are firing like woah (clearly this intellectual energy has no effect on my vocabulary) and I will likely be up for several more hours, causing me to sleep in and miss lunch and the opportunity to memorize lines, subsequently losing me my director's favor and my good mood.

Boiling it down: cable, and its accompanying treasure trove of information, will ruin my day, and I'm sure that I am only the first of many victims on this campus.