Nothing on the tele

It's really interesting not having extended cable. I get about 25 channels. Of those 25 channels, 1 is a tv guide, 3 are shopping, 2 are public access, 2 are C-Span, 1 is TeleMundo, 1 is some weird christian religious channel. That leaves me with 15 channels of progamming to choose from. Of those fifteen channels, there are 2 of each of the major broadcast channels - one from Madison, one from Rockford; so those 8 are really only 4 channels. That leaves me with ABC, CBS, NBC, WB, UPN, WGN, and PBS. And I can tell you, after about 3 months of this great experiment, that broadcast television is some of the worst progamming in the universe. In fact, we watch only a few things: football, CSI (only CSI: Miami because there is really nothing better on - David Caruso is an idiot and the show is poorly written and directed - but more on that later), Charmed (Erin's "guilty pleasure"), Gilmore Girls (yeah, I said it, you gotta problem with it?), Law and Order (only the original), and PBS. That's what 5 shows?

To be honest, there are few other shows that we'll watch if there is absolutely nothing else on and we just don't feel like reading: Commander-in-Chief (Geena Davis is pretty decent, the husband character is a whiny bitch, the kids aren't really that believable, but Donald Sutherland is one of those evil characters you just love to root for), the new Criminal Minds (that show has gotten considerably better since its first episode; thankfully the cast is excellent which more than makes up for the crappy writing and dialogue and the over-use of special effects), Without A Trace (it's getting a little tiresome though), and Ghost Whisperer (sometimes on a Friday night you just get desperate; it is a ridiculous show, but desperate times call for desperate measures). Oh and Everyone Hates Chris - a good goddamn show. Anyway.

So, of those shows, most are on CBS, football is on Fox, a few from the WB, one is ABC, and one is NBC. And I can tell you that without a doubt we (I) have watched more PBS than any of those shows. Newshour is the best news on tv; bar none. Our local PBS station, during their pledge drive, ran a show about this dude out in the middle of freaking Alaska; utterly captivating to watch this guy make a log cabin with his bare hands and tools that he made himself. Nova's had some good stuff lately. They ran some show about some dude who has way too much money and free time who goes on these weird adventures to the middle of nowhere to hunt for orchids; his goal was to find a brand new orchid species he could name after his grandmother - he succeeded but the species he found was pretty weak. They've also show Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and last weekend was a new Sherlock Holmes.

That's not to mention Austin City Limits, which is probably the best show featuring music found on TV. Check out their upcoming broadcast schedule for 2006: Ryan Adams in January, then in March starts an ubelievable run of Polyphonic Spree/Ozomatli, Wilco/Bright Eyes, Modest Mouse/Guided By Voices, Flaming Lips/The Shins, Trey Anastasio, Jack Johnson, Allison Krause, Etta Freaking James, Ben Folds, The Killers/Spoon, and Franz Ferdinand. I mean come on. Makes me wish I had TiVo with DVD-R functionality.

Anyway. I can say without a doubt in my mind that PBS has the best programming on TV.

In any event, the whole point of the post (I'll bet you wondering when I'd get to it!) - Last night we watched this show hosted by Alan Alda called Scientific American Frontiers. They ran a program on hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Now, it was my pre-conceived notion about this subject that we, as a society, were far from this being a viable option. The conventional wisdom is that hydrogen is dangerous (not true, or at least no more dangerous than conventional gas), that it is expensive (while probably true in true volume measures, not as an efficiency measure; in other words 2 gal of hydrogen is more expensive than 2 gal of petrol, but it is considerably more efficient, so less is needed to do the same amount of work), and that it was hard to get it moved around to stations (turns out you can manufacture it on site, so there is no need to move it!).

There is this ridiculously talented dude in Michigan who appears to have shit figured out. He's an inventor. He makes materials that do really cool things like soak up hydrogen so it can be used in solid, rather than gas form. He also made solar cells that are light and extra-ordinarily efficient; they can be physically damaged and still work, in fact they work even while it is raining. Anyway, watching this show made me mad. I can hear the chorus now: "Why did it make you mad?" Well, it made me mad, because it seems that this dude has it figured out. And if he can figure it out, why can't anyone else figure it out and, more importantly, why aren't we using his shit!?!?! They didn't go into how much his stuff costs to manufacture. But that seems like quibbling to me. If we know how to make it, and this dude can make it with a relatively meager staff of a few people and some elbow-grease, it would seem that the manufacturing minds over at, hmmm, Ford or Chevy, or Dodge, or Toyota, or Honda, or BP, or Exxon, or Phillips, or Sony, or any of the other companies that have figured out how to reduce manufacturing costs of a cd player to under $20/unit, could all put some thought into how to manufacture these things and distribute them so that we don't have to rely on the oil cartel to feed our cars.

In the over 100 years that automobiles have been in existence, they still rely on essentially the same technology that they used when they were first invented: the internal combustion engine. They still use gasoline. They still are horribly inefficient. They are still spewing hundreds, and thousands, and millions of pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. They make cities like Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul unlivable in the summer months.

It seems to me that it would be a relatively simple process to just start putting hydrogen engines into cars. The biggest problem, and I really don't think it would be that big of a problem, is getting hydrogen to gas stations. Will it take some work? Sure. Will it take some money? Sure. Is it sustainable? yep. Is it better for the environment? Yeah. And we introduce products all the time that can't afforded by the lower class (hell, even the upper-middle class). But eventually those products come down in price. Take the DVD player for example: when they first came out they were thousands of dollars; a little over a year ago I bought one for under $90. My point is, there is a demand and a need for the technology. OK, it's too expensive to manufacture in mass quantities sufficient for someone like me to buy it. I can understand that, but make them and sell them to people who can afford them. I guarantee you that if you put a hydrogen engine in a Hummer, someone will buy the damn thing. You want to know why? Because someone will always buy one.

The bigger problems is hydrogen stations. I'll admit, that's a problem way beyond the scope of this blog; I am not smart enough to figure it out. But there are people who are.

I think is the biggest reason to do it is to reduce reliance on Middle East oil. As a country we don't produce anywhere near the amount the amount of oil we use. The simple fact is that if we wish to keep cheap supplies of oil for our country, we can't rely on the whims and bargaining table with OPEC. We have to have the wells for ourselves. So, we have to do things like invade countries that pose a threat to our oil supply and install governments that are more sympathetic so that we can continue to get the oil. Is it a tragedy? Sure, but wars have been started for less. Even more disturbingly it's an endless cycle. Because once Iraq is stabilized and oil prices start to normalize again, OPEC will get greedy and start restricting output to increase prices. Then we'll have to have invade someone else in order to get more oil. Uzbekistan, US calling Uzbekistan. They're a corrupt country that no one knows anything about - and they produce oil. We can invade them for cheap oil. Bonus points because they are next to Afghanistan and have a history of violence against Muslims, so we can invade them and show that we care about religious tolerance in the region. Anyway, my point is that we always need more oil and we'll always have to get it from someone else. And as long as we need to rely on someone else, the someone else can always bend us over; and we can either bend over and take it, or we can do what we always do - kick their ass.

Perhaps I'm overstating the case for hydrogen. Maybe there's something better. The fact is, someone needs to come up with a solution. The pity is that politics will keep it from ever being implemented. But that's another story for another day.