Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 1, 1993 TAG: 9309010044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It isn't. It's not necessary to watch volleyball semifinals at 4 a.m., or Oprah at any hour, or the newest rock video at all, or football.
They're just excuses for not doing something more positive, which qualifies most television programming as drugs.
Few are the positive uses of television, save for glowing into our homes the flat images of weather persons.
Television enables us to scream at Robin Reed and Bill Meck when the weather gets annoying, which is often. You crouch low to the screen and you shout in their faces, or Patrick Evans' face, about HOW SICK YOU ARE OF 96 HUMID, STINKING, STICKING, BONE-SOFTENING DEGREES. Sometimes they flinch because they know in their hearts that the weather bites.
Having no interest in or use for television, I subscribe to cable only because I want my young family to grow up as drugged by the electronic mama as the next guy's.
Nothing's too good for my kids.
But we get basic cable television service. Always have. Cox Cable beams to us only the bare bones of the broadcast smorgasbord.
A few networks. A Chicago superstation. A lot of people peddling jewelry. Congress.
That's all we get. That's all we've ever gotten. When we first hooked up, in 1990, basic cable cost us $9.50 monthly.
Since then, Congress has pushed and pulled more with Cox, and Cox with our cable rates, than you have with the handles of your kitchen faucet.
On Thursday, the monthly fee for basic cable service will change for the sixth time - our seventh rate in three years.
We've never picked up the phone; never asked Cox Cable to change a thing. Our service and our rates just keep getting tossed about like dinghies on the stormy seas of regulatory zeal.
Three price increases. Three price reductions. Some channels come, some go.
This time around, it's due to the Cable Act of 1992, which is not to be confused with deregulation, or AT&T, or high-definition TV or Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who fights for somebody's rights on this front but may well be the only man left in America who understands why my cable bill hops around as often as the weather stinks, which is often.
Keep your old basic cable bills around. Sooner or later, you'll pay the same rate. Half-a-dozen acts of Congress or so always return us to the precise place where we began.
\ Ed;s cable rates\ 1990 $9.50\ 1991 $10.56\ $10.50\ 1992 $11.97\ 1993 $13.30\ $12.71\ $8.84\
by CNB