Is there a more useless waste of time than channel surfing? Let’s just say that you have 75 or 124 or 700 channels from which to choose. It’s late at night, you are vegging on the couch drinking a coke or whatever and eating potato chips, and you can’t find anything to watch so you surf the channels hoping to find something interesting to watch. You keep getting grease and salt on the remote. So far the best thing you’ve seen is a “surfing” movie, “Beach Blanket Bingo,” on one of the movie channels or Suzanne Summers selling another one of her alternative medicine books on one of the thirty shopping channels. You feel like either your taste is slipping or you are hallucinating because Suzanne looks kinda hot. You move on. The Golf Channel is giving a lesson on how to hit a consistent drive, but you don’t golf. The Spanish channels look interesting, but dubbed Brazilian soap operas about overly dramatic conquistadores does not grab your attention. You think about turning it off, but then you see that Joan Rivers is riffing on the bad clothes worn by the women on the red carpet at some unforgettable forgotten Hollywood award show. You stop briefly to watch cartoons on one of the cartoon channels. You move on to the sports channels, but it’s all basketball highlights, but you hate basketball. C-SPAN. You turn to one of the food channels, but if you see one more diner, drive-in or dive, you might up-chuck and die. The Comedy channel offers nothing that is funny, and MTV never plays music videos. Nor does VH1. Reality shows are everywhere but they offer no reality, just a bunch of drunks with too much plastic surgery trying to not look drunk–good luck with that. Beach Blanket Bingo is looking better and better. Re-runs of MASH are just that, re-runs. The Disney Channel may give you the dry-heaves unless you move on quickly. No, you are not interested in someone else’s renovations or the beach house in the Bahamas that the couple from London is trying to buy. There are about six news channels, but they are all showing commercials at the moment. No, you do not want to buy knives, choppers, fryers or any other useless kitchen utensil that can chop salad, fold your clean clothes and unclog the sewer all at the same time. Annette’s “do” is looking pretty perky, the song the band is playing is totally retro, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are at the beach, so you eat another potato chip, swill some more coke, and you toss the remote aside. A little juvenile beach flick is probably the most intelligent thing on at the moment, so you start to relax and have another chip. You do wonder about the logic of having seventy-five channels when you hate the contents of almost all of them. Do people actually buy Summers’ books? Do they buy the collection of fifty-two lock blade knives (all originals, cannot be found in stores!), and what do they do with fifty-two lock blade knives once they get them home? No, there is no weather tonight and I don’t want to know about winter rescues in Alaska. Maybe I should just turn it off, put the chips away, and dump out the coke? But that’s not the American way, is it?