As a youth, when I turned on the TV I went straight to MTV. Now that I'm older three different letters have become my go-to channel: CNN. More precisely, the offshoot of CNN, HLN. HLN was previously known as Headline News before Time-Warner decided to get cute and shorten the name to an abbreviation, which Al Ries and Jack Trout would tell them is a marketing mistake unless you're as well-known as International Business Machines (IBM) or American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), which I don't think HLN is.

The idea is that HLN gives you a short summary of the national and world events of the day. Isn't that what CNN was supposed to do? But now CNN is for longer-form reports and Larry King, Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper, so they devised HLN. Except now I turn on HLN and suddenly I'm getting a long report on what John and Kate Plus 8 are doing. Did somebody switch channels on me? No, it's still HLN, but now they have a Entertainment Tonight-style show called Showbiz Tonight, which is a crappy title because I'm usually seeing it mid-day. What's the "tonight" about?

The Joy Behar Show

HLN also has Nancy Grace and her Hispanic clone, Jean Velez-Mitchell, both of whom I can't stand. However they also just gave a show to Joy Behar, who I enjoy on The View and anticipated liking her show. I do watch it (what else is on at 10?), but it needs some tweaking. I wondered how Joy would handle news interviews because, although I often agree with her viewpoints, she doesn't seem any more informed than someone like me who glances over the front page of USA Today. So they have her doing celebrity interviews. She does alright with these, but in some instances I think she doesn't have a sense of how she's coming across and she makes her guests uncomfortable. I'm particularly thinking of when she interviewed Dolly Parton: I think she was trying to compliment Dolly but something about it sounded like backhanded insults and I think Dolly may have taken it that way, or maybe its just me. She did great with Valerie Bertinelli, though, and they must know it because they've re-ran it 12 times already. Now they have Joy leading a roundtable of comedians in making fun of the day's news, but they don't seem like they've even read the front page of USA Today, and does a world of airplane hijackers, landslides and nuclear escalations lend itself to comedy? I sound brutal and it's really not nearly that bad, I enjoy the show more than most of what's on TV, but I hope they settle on a direction soon.

MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow

Now if you want to talk about something I thought I would love that made me squirm, let's talk about MSNBC. FOX is for far-right Nebraskans who handle snakes at church and think Sarah Palin is actually qualified to be president, CNN/HLN is down the middle (and last in ratings), and MSNBC is for the Michael Moore fan club. So I happened to tune in in the middle of Keith Olbermann expecting to dance around the living room...this show sucks*. The problem is that, and this has been noted by behavioral psychologists, liberals like detail and shade and nuance, and TV isn't good for any of those things. So you have Keith Olbermann trying to read five minutes worth of script in two minutes, and as a result he talks too fast and a lot of info whooshes by and you don't catch a damn thing. It's an hour of Chipmunk-speed chatter. And "The Worst Person in the World" segment: does any 50-year-old male like Olbermann really use that phrase?

Olbermann is followed by Rachel Maddow. Now, as I've noted here many times, I LOVE girl-girl porn, so it's not Rachel's sexuality that bothers me. It's that she seems like she probably knows more about how to use power tools than I do and has my same haircut. Why is it every time the left has a national microphone they find the nearest K.D. Lang to put on the podium? Independents will be turned off as fast as they tune in. Also, Maddow has risen to national fame on a radio resume as thin as mine. Look it up.

Fortunately digital cable has Palladia so maybe I can stop being an old man and start tuning in a music channel again. Except they're showing a repeat of the Kenny Chesney Soundstage. Okay, back to Joy Behar.

* Or maybe I just need to watch it more. Gave it a second viewing, it's alright.