Over Christmas, I'd been taking a much needed break from work and literally chilling out at home for 10 days (the weather was below freezing!).
For all the freedom and independence the media has in the UK, it's surprising that only two major providers of TV entertainment are present in the market - Sky and Virgin. Sky requires a dish antenna and my apartment has banned the use of dish antennas on its premises sighting aesthetic reasons. That left me with the grand choice of 1 when it comes to powering my TV.
While I am tempted to whinge about how much Virgin is ripping me off, I will control myself, for this post is about something else. I am not much of a sports fan, so that eliminates the content of around 120 of the 140 channels that Virgin provides. The only other worthwhile channels are Comedy Central, Dave (only because they have endless re-runs of Top Gear) and Discovery.
Now that we have that out of the way, said break was spent predominantly zoned out in front of the telly and the set-top box stuck firmly stuck on Comedy Central. I was watching an interesting episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and his cuckoo family. For ELR aficionados, this was the one where Frank sends an anecdote to Readers' Digest and gets published. He then walks around with a note pad trying to identify other quips he can send in, now that he is "published"!
Watching it reminded me of myself. In the early days of this blog, I wore the same shoes as Frank B. Frank walked around with a tiny notepad while the notepad in my tiny mobile phone was where I'd jot down amusing things that happened every day in my life. At one point, there were more ideas than the inclination and will to write!
As I 'matured' in the blog trade, I began to make a mental note of things that were blog-worthy. Once again, I noticed that I was flooded with ideas. This made me a very happy man, for ideas are exactly what the doctor ordered for a writer, but I found myself sorely lacking when it came to actually translating those ideas into a post that made more sense than, say, this one.
For all the freedom and independence the media has in the UK, it's surprising that only two major providers of TV entertainment are present in the market - Sky and Virgin. Sky requires a dish antenna and my apartment has banned the use of dish antennas on its premises sighting aesthetic reasons. That left me with the grand choice of 1 when it comes to powering my TV.
While I am tempted to whinge about how much Virgin is ripping me off, I will control myself, for this post is about something else. I am not much of a sports fan, so that eliminates the content of around 120 of the 140 channels that Virgin provides. The only other worthwhile channels are Comedy Central, Dave (only because they have endless re-runs of Top Gear) and Discovery.
Now that we have that out of the way, said break was spent predominantly zoned out in front of the telly and the set-top box stuck firmly stuck on Comedy Central. I was watching an interesting episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and his cuckoo family. For ELR aficionados, this was the one where Frank sends an anecdote to Readers' Digest and gets published. He then walks around with a note pad trying to identify other quips he can send in, now that he is "published"!
Watching it reminded me of myself. In the early days of this blog, I wore the same shoes as Frank B. Frank walked around with a tiny notepad while the notepad in my tiny mobile phone was where I'd jot down amusing things that happened every day in my life. At one point, there were more ideas than the inclination and will to write!
As I 'matured' in the blog trade, I began to make a mental note of things that were blog-worthy. Once again, I noticed that I was flooded with ideas. This made me a very happy man, for ideas are exactly what the doctor ordered for a writer, but I found myself sorely lacking when it came to actually translating those ideas into a post that made more sense than, say, this one.
The end of that episode featured Frank hanging up his boots as a 'published writer'. I wonder if I'm headed to the same fate...am I going to hang up my boots because I can't translate ideas to posts? I don't think so, as long as I can come up posts on how I can't come up with posts :).
