HISTORY

Due to the fact that I’m moving soon, I haven’t had time to write in this thing. Everything is culminating in MONDAY the day when Andrew and I pull a trailer across the USA. In any case, I wanted to put something in here so here is a text document I found on my mother’s computer. It is an angry diatribe against the degeneration of the history channel. I will write more in this when I find myself in Texas.

*BEGIN QUOTE*
When I was a young boy the History Channel was the last bastion of empirical knowledge on television. It was a television station for those of us who were unutterably boring, pale indoor kids. It was a place for the dry and pasty to learn about HITLER’S LAST STAND, or about HOW SHARKS WORK.

BUT OH MY HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED!

Now, the History Channel has become a place where crackpot quasi-scientists showcase their crackpot theories and present them as though they were just cold hard facts. These will be shows like DID THE WEREWOLVES BUILD THE PYRAMIDS? or WAS JFK A DRACULA? or SEA-MONSTER PSYCHOLOGY or IS HUMAN SADNESS CAUSED BY TINY INVISIBLE ROBOTS THAT LIVE IN OUR SKIN? or HOW EVERY AMERICAN PRESIDENT SINCE TAFT HAS BEEN AN ACTUAL ENORMOUS PUPPET I AM NOT BEING FIGURATIVE I MEAN AN ACTUAL PUPPET LIKE THE KIND OF SESAME STREET.

Furthermore, the History Channel used to show programs with easy to digest, boring cinematography. The kind of lulling repetition with which one ought to address “The Physiology of Kelp”. If you couldn’t sleep, you would simply turn on the history Channel for repeated shots of desert sands erroding the sphinx, or bugs eating other bugs, or a shot panning over a black and white photograph of a civil war veteran. Now there isn’t a shot longer than one second. WE CUT TO A SHOT OF PHD CANDIDATE, THE FORTUNE-TELLING CRACK POT, THEN CUT TO A SIDE-SHOT OF THE SAME MAN WITH A BLACK AND WHITE SHAKEY CAMERA THEN CUT TO A WEREWOLF INVENTING THE WHEEL THEN CUT TO CGI FLYING SAUCERS OVER ROSWELL THEN CUT TO A TECHNICAL DRAWING OF WHAT A REAL WORKING TIME MACHINE PROBABLY WOULD LOOK LIKE THEN CUT TO THE TOWN DRUNK TALKING INTO THE CAMERA SAYING, “It was 50 years ago today that it rained carnivorous frogs…”

*END QUOTE*