More Television
Ok, this might sound like the worst thing to do when you have lot of work and a thesis to write, but recently my cable TV operator sent me a letter that they are upgrading their digital system and I'd need to pick up my decoder card from the nearest service center (which is, by the way, in the worst place available considering parking.)
Well, between me picking up the card and them upgrading their system to block all channels I had virtually no channels available, except those Latvian ones but their novelty value has worn off a year ago. Thus, having no channels I had a lot of time, too much it seemed sometimes. I read two books in this time, though this was due to traveling for two weeks in a row.
Last saturday I finally managed to pick up the decoding card after a sobering walk through old town with my friends and when I got home, trembling with excitement I noticed that they had approximately doubled their channel offering - up to about 105 channels.
Of course, most of these channels are the turkish, russian, romanian, italian, spanish and what have you useless channels - but there were a few pearls available.
There's one channel called Arirang, which is a Korean channel filled with news and cool advertisements from local producers. I honestly don't know who the channel is aimed for, maybe Korean ex-pats, but one thing I've noticed - Korean soap operas are cool.
On the pique of elitism is the Wine TV - A channel about wines. Even though I am a well-known wine connoisseur and gastronome extravagant, this channel is filled with something that has a round, bitter, ashy aftertaste and a vibrant and relaxed color. It's filled with sentimental violin music and massive helicopter camera drives over huge chateaus and a deep, masculine voice flagellating on his own ingenuity over whatever topic he's babbling this time.
Also I noticed that now I'm a proud owner of five (5) MTV channels, and yes, they're all Music Television. I've got MTV, MTV Hits (are they showing so many crazy frog commercials series and reality shows these days, that they actually need another channel to actually show hip music videos?), MTV Base (which is a Hip Hop version of MTV, although they play the same music and show the same shows than normal MTV, except there's more "bling".) Then there's MTV 2 (the channel where they save most of the good music and their volume level is about 50% higher than other channels) and MTV Europe, which is MTV with European Crazy Frog commercials (different phone numbers).
To make sure I get my daily dose of music, they also packed German music channel VIVA for two channels and VH-1 also with two channels - so that gives me 9 music channels - and that's just in European languages. There are also Russian music channels, if I ever find myself longing for slavic, sorrowful hip hop.
Oh yeah, next to the always-cool-nerd-channels (Discovery etc.)there is one cool channel, which I respect as a musician. It's called "Performance" and so far what I've seen has been opera, a Paul Simon concert and some really American-looking oldies singer, which was pretty cool. They also have live jazz and all kinds of cool stuff.
Well, enough of that. Leaving the country again on thursday, I should be back on monday morning if everything goes as planned. Enjoy la vie (as we say in the wine channel) until the next one.
Ta ta.
Well, between me picking up the card and them upgrading their system to block all channels I had virtually no channels available, except those Latvian ones but their novelty value has worn off a year ago. Thus, having no channels I had a lot of time, too much it seemed sometimes. I read two books in this time, though this was due to traveling for two weeks in a row.
Last saturday I finally managed to pick up the decoding card after a sobering walk through old town with my friends and when I got home, trembling with excitement I noticed that they had approximately doubled their channel offering - up to about 105 channels.
Of course, most of these channels are the turkish, russian, romanian, italian, spanish and what have you useless channels - but there were a few pearls available.
There's one channel called Arirang, which is a Korean channel filled with news and cool advertisements from local producers. I honestly don't know who the channel is aimed for, maybe Korean ex-pats, but one thing I've noticed - Korean soap operas are cool.
On the pique of elitism is the Wine TV - A channel about wines. Even though I am a well-known wine connoisseur and gastronome extravagant, this channel is filled with something that has a round, bitter, ashy aftertaste and a vibrant and relaxed color. It's filled with sentimental violin music and massive helicopter camera drives over huge chateaus and a deep, masculine voice flagellating on his own ingenuity over whatever topic he's babbling this time.
Also I noticed that now I'm a proud owner of five (5) MTV channels, and yes, they're all Music Television. I've got MTV, MTV Hits (are they showing so many crazy frog commercials series and reality shows these days, that they actually need another channel to actually show hip music videos?), MTV Base (which is a Hip Hop version of MTV, although they play the same music and show the same shows than normal MTV, except there's more "bling".) Then there's MTV 2 (the channel where they save most of the good music and their volume level is about 50% higher than other channels) and MTV Europe, which is MTV with European Crazy Frog commercials (different phone numbers).
To make sure I get my daily dose of music, they also packed German music channel VIVA for two channels and VH-1 also with two channels - so that gives me 9 music channels - and that's just in European languages. There are also Russian music channels, if I ever find myself longing for slavic, sorrowful hip hop.
Oh yeah, next to the always-cool-nerd-channels (Discovery etc.)there is one cool channel, which I respect as a musician. It's called "Performance" and so far what I've seen has been opera, a Paul Simon concert and some really American-looking oldies singer, which was pretty cool. They also have live jazz and all kinds of cool stuff.
Well, enough of that. Leaving the country again on thursday, I should be back on monday morning if everything goes as planned. Enjoy la vie (as we say in the wine channel) until the next one.
Ta ta.
posted by Unknown at 11:09 pm
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