The relentless pursuit of reception

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Ryan Chirnomas

Instead, they starved my mind. Well, starved my eyes anyway. They committed the horrible crime of depriving me of what can only be called a God-given right: cable TV.

So while all my friends were watching stuff like Double Dare on Nickelodeon, I was stuck watching whatever programming the lame local independent station could throw together. Sure, Wallace and Ladmo were OK, but when I was 8, nothing was cooler than watching people jump into enormous slime tanks. There still isn't.

It was rough, but I managed to survive, perhaps because I didn't really know any better. I knew nothing of ESPN or MTV. I killed time gazing mindlessly at a the major networks, the local independents, and a few fuzzy channels airing programming for the religious, Spanish, and home shop-o-holic types.

I was a couch potato of the free airwaves.

Until I came to college.

After putting up with a year of empty promises from Res Life, my dorm finally got cable TV in my sophomore year. However, I didn't have a TV, let alone cable. Problem? Nope.

Fortunately enough for me, my buddies down the hall were kind enough to share their television with the general dorm populace. The fire marshal would cringe at the overcrowding in that room, all in the name of South Park. And Lenin would weep with pride at the sight of the communal sharing between my campus comrades.

However, for better or for worse, I decided to move out of the dorms this year. More freedom, more space, more responsibility. But no more free cable. Or so I thought.

When my roommates and I moved in, we swiftly set up the most crucial items first. Stereo, TV, computer... the important stuff. Out of curiosity, we decided to plug the ol' Idiot Box into the cable jack to see if we couldn't get a clear picture of the regular, non-cable stations. Hell, if it worked in the dorm, it must work in the real world, right?

It worked all right. A little too well, actually. Instead of a crystal clear picture of network TV, we had the full cable lineup, save HBO, Cinemax and the sex channels. As someone who had been deprived of cable TV his entire life, I was in heaven.

Around-the-clock cartoons. Endless auto racing. Up-to-the-second weather bulletins. What more could a couch potato ask for?

Alas, it was too good to be true. We were foolish to think that we could fool a multimillion dollar media giant like Cox Communications. They were on to us. And on Sept. 1, they cut us off. Zap. Show's over.

No problem, we thought. We don't actually watch that much TV, we can live without cable. How wrong we were.

As it turns out, Tucson's television stations happen to have the weakest signals this side of KAMP student radio. Sure, you can still sort of get the stations, but not very clearly. I was a bit curious as to why it was snowing in St. Louis when Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run.

In order to watch TV, quite an elaborate preparation process was involved, usually beginning about five-to 10 minutes before showtime. Basically, my roommates and I would fiddle with a flimsy set of bunny ears, contorting them in every conceivable position to make a clear picture.

Upside down, right side up, laling down, sitting up, even out the front door, anything to bring a remotely clear picture to our eyes in time for the start of The Simpsons. Of course, the slightest change of any variable sent the entire system out of equilibrium and brought us back to fuzz.

This was no way to live. So, my roomies and I had no choice but to order cable, at least the bare bones basic service. We were forced into the clutches of Cox's trap. Now we finally can enjoy the beauty of a clear picture of the networks and those crappy public access stations that broadcast either the NASA logo or people doing algebra 24 hours a day - for a price.

Ryan Chirnomas is a mollecular and cellular biology senior and can be reached via e-mail at Ryan.Chrinomas@wildcat.arizona.edu. His column, In Hasselhoff We Trust, appears every Friday.