Rabbit eared joy

When people want to get rid of household goods in my building, they often just leave it in the lobby for others to take. In this way I've acquired an end table (currently sitting in a corner collecting junk), a toaster oven, a vacuum cleaner, 3 plates, a bowl, a mug, 2 boxes of Kraft dinner (in festive Blue's Clues and Spongebob Squarepants shapes), a bag of instant fettucini alfredo, and, most recently, an antenna.

I get an impressive number of channels now. One of the benefits, maybe, of living in a large city in a part of the world where there are hardly any hills. I count 25 channels with watchable reception. One of my first viewing experiences with my new antenna was a bhangra show. Woo! At the moment there are shows in Mandarin and Korean on a couple of channels (I don't know if these are dedicated Chinese and Korean stations, or if they run programs in different languages).

For some reason I was briefly awake this morning around 6am, and caught a rerun of Saved by the Bell. That was fabulous! It's the one (I know you know this one) where everyone's at this resort, because Jesse's dad is getting remarried, to a much younger woman, and Jesse tries to break up the wedding. Meanwhile Slater is dating a princess and Zack and Kelly briefly consider getting back together, but decide against it. The episode ends with Jesse storming off, and Zack running off to convince her to come back, which he manages in about 30 seconds, because he is just that smooth.

By far, though, the most exciting viewing experience enabled by my new rabbit ears is, without a doubt, the Trinity Broadcasting Network. All Jesus programming, 24 hours a day!

I heard a guy report a vision in which he visited hell, which is inhabited by (among other things) giant spiders, 13 foot tall demons covered in scales and bumps, and an honest-to-God (ha!) lake of fire filled with the skeletal bodies of the damned (all of them?). He was pretty sure it was located in the centre of the earth, and not in "a different dimension".

I also caught Pat Robertson's show--if you make a pledge, he'll send you a DVD of investment strategies, because the baby Jesus loves sound financial management, I guess. If you pledge $10,000, you get to have dinner and pray with Pat, in person. Wouldn't that be lovely!

I watched some other guy called Hagee, who's in the middle of a series on "Promise, Problem, Provision". The way he says "problem" makes me smile. I also smiled when he uttered such wonderful sentences as "Jesus is omnipotent--he knows everything" and "for me, the story of Moses is one of the most striking in the New Testament". Nobody in the audience laughed. They just kept taking notes.

And during the "news broadcast", I heard about some women having C-sections specially scheduled on June 5, in order to avoid having their babies born on 06/06/06. It's hard to be an effective satirist when people actually go out and do things like this.