When in doubt...

...listen to music.

Or at least that's fast becoming my mantra. I am absolutely at the saturation-point on the political races right now. Yes, I will vote in November, but that's all the more I care about the election right now. I don't want to hear who's attacking whom or who supposedly lied about something. All politicians lie; the only thing that's left to us is to decide who's not lying in the "wrong" direction about things important to us.

(And we have HOW MANY MORE MONTHS of this? Whimper.)

So anyway. I can feel my blood pressure (which is normally a pretty mellow 110/55) creeping up every time I see "Special Election Coverage" or BaraHillMcAbee.

So I'm using the "DMX channels" that hide out in the upper end of my cable lineup. (I would never have thought, as a child, that I might someday own a television that had the potential to receive 600 channels. As it is, I think I have about 125 broadcast channels and maybe 30 of the music channels, but still: amazing. I wonder if the next innovation will be so many channels that there's, for example, an entire network devoted solely to showing reruns of Gilligan's Island, in order, all the time - cycling through the show maybe every three days, but who cares, because there are people who want their Gilligan fix, and it's the world of narrowcasting. And maybe, just maybe, someday there really will be a Cute Baby Animals channel for people like me, or a Fishtank channel - where there's no commentary, no news, no plot, no drama, just puppies and kittens playing, or fish swimming hypnotically around. But I digress).

Anyway. DMX music channels. Next best thing to satellite radio (which I AM going to get someday, as soon as I can stomach the thought of spending the money and as soon as I'm reasonably convinced that the particular format I buy won't be the moribund one). I get lots of channels - about six heavy metal channels (WTF?), and a bunch of rap channels, ranging from "OK for your eight year old" to "Will make the ears of both feminists and Christians bleed." (And feminist Christians, I suppose their heads explode). And I get one lone "Big Band" channel, and a "standards" channel which, IMHO, SHOULD play more Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. and less Barbra Streisand, but who am I to program? And there are a couple of classical channels, and an "80s oldies" channel (eep. I remember hating most of those songs when they were first popular. My descent to fogeydom continues apace). There's a disco channel which can be amusing if you're in the right mood (and if Fortune smiles on you and they happen to play "I Will Survive" while you have it on. I am not really a disco fan but I think "I Will Survive" is one of the best pop songs, ever, mainly for the sentiment behind it but also because it's wicked fun to lip-synch to, at least when you're alone and feeling bummed about something. And yes, it does make me feel better to lip-synch to it [with the hand movements, too] when I'm alone and feeling bummed about something.).

And then there's "Holidays and Happenings." A holiday music channel. Which can be tiresome - they played all kinds of bad pop covers of traditional Christmas carols starting in November. (And I studiously avoided it in February, lest there be an unknown-to-me genre of Valentine's Day carols, which would cause me to leave my house, purchase a gun and ammunition, learn how to safely fire the same, get a concealed-carry license, return home, and shoot my less-than-a-year-old television and the rented cable box for good measure. And I bet there's not a jury in the land that would convict me.)

Anyway. It's March now, and they happen to have Celtic music on. In celebration of - the announcer told us, so there'd be no doubt - St. Patrick's Day. (Ya don't say!)

But actually, it's pretty good Celtic music, ranging from really old traditional (including what sound like older recordings) to fairly recent.

And it's kind of a joy to be able to come home at the end of the day and put something like that on, and just let it play, without having to think about it or change the channel for some inane ad or have it change from some happy fun program to a talk show about politics or some other distasteful thing.

So I think my channel rotations these coming months will consist largely of The Weather Channel (which I am kind of mad at right now because they are reducing the time spent on their main mission - telling us if it's OMG WTF THERE'S A TORNADO OUT THERE!!!!11!! - and shifting to these darn programs about things like snowboarding in the California mountains. Seriously, if I wanted that? I'd watch X-games or whatever the hell they call it. Tell me what kind of clothing I need to wear tomorrow. Not what some hurricane did 20 years ago) and Food Network and maybe HGTV and the Medical channel (which is starting to tick me off with all their Let's Watch This Family Melt Down Because OMG They Have So Many Children and OMG Americans are Teh Fat! shows. And yeah, there's only so much of "Trauma: Life in the ER" that you can watch before the corny re-enactments get to you). And Discovery (but again: they're larding on the Bigfoot and killer-ant shows right now, ugh.)

But the music channels - I suspect they won't disappoint me these coming months. So thank you, DMX, for your two classical channels and your swing channel and your goofy trance music channel and the Celtic music (though might you consider making that a full-fledged real channel?) and even the crazy hair-band channels. Please don't ever change.