This is a public-service announcement: please be very careful what you do when the cable guy comes around.
I make this announcement because I have just learned from the redoubtable Livingston Daily (the Livingston in Michigan, not the Scottish one, where Susan Boyle had her singing lessons) that a man is to stand trial for revealing a little too much of himself to Comcast.
No, not in a social-networking sense, though I know that Comcast is extremely active in this area.
Instead, Chris Philip Trikes, 45, of Howell, Mich., allegedly exposed his central nether regions to a Comcast chappy who was merely looking to speed up Mr. Trikes' Internet connection rather than his heartbeat.
According to evidence from the Comcast chappy, Mr. Trikes began his ascent into excessive self-exposure by mentioning pornographic Web sites, as well as a video of some raciness that he claimed to have discovered in a garbage can.
Garbage cans can be receptacles of magic, can they not?
The technician seems to have decided that his best course of action was to mention a date that he was hoping to enjoy that evening (the complaint doesn't mention how that went).
Mr. Trikes' thrust to this parry was, allegedly, to show the Comcast guy his antenna.
This story may well merely be the latest chapter in an interesting trend. Last week, the Web site Rollitup.org featured a post from a Maryland reader who claimed that he had a little problem with the Verizon cable guy.
He alleged that Verizon Fios needed to enter his apartment to do a little cabling. Knowing this, the poster, calling himself PuffPuffGive, moved his pot plants to a room away from the work area.
He described his marijuana plants as "ak-47 clones, 1 week to harvest, stinky, about half a pound."
Imagine his dismay when, one hour after the cable guy had disappeared, he allegedly received a rather official knock on the door. And there were people carrying little guns rather than AKs.
PuffPuffGive wrote: "Cops show up an hour later, say they've got a complaint, can they search? I say no, that I smoked a joint earlier in the day, and maybe they saw that, but why are they harassing me smoking a joint in my own house?"
People of the world, privacy is a delicate and precious thing. Please use it wisely.
Negotiations between sports-governing bodies and TV channels are often rather beguiling.
While News Corp.'s Fox, for example, built the fourth network with the NFL its most sturdy pillar, other channels seem to fall in and out of favor.
Now Comcast, which owns some channels and controls a seemingly infinite amount of cable, is threatening to remove the NFL Network from every last strand of cable because it feels that the NFL is not quite playing ball.
Comcast has never liked the 70-cents-per-subscriber fee that the NFL charges for the its total football network, which occasionally shows a live game or two but otherwise offers quite a lot of talking about football.
The NFL seems to have gone to the Federal Communications Commission to complain that the NFL Network isn't offered as part of Comcast's standard sports package, while Versus (oh, yes, those wonderful NHL playoffs are coming!) and the Golf Channel, both owned by Comcast, are.
Comcast, on the other hand, would dearly, and understandably, like to get hold of NFL Sunday Ticket, a channel that allows those who got out of places like Cincinnati and Tampa to still enjoy their home team's games live. Currently, they can do this only on Direct TV.
Naturally, both sides are offering some necessary roughness, as the current NFL Network-Comcast deal expires May 1.
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen offered this long bomb to The Wall Street Journal: "In the palace of truth and justice, all these channels probably belong on a sports tier, but the leagues are not willing to do that."
Yes, not the Palace of Auburn Hills. The gilded Palace of Truth and Justice.
"Yo, how many of you can make it to my place Thursday for the NFL Network Game? I got Direct TV."
(Credit: CC Monica's Dad/Flickr)However, Steve Bornstein, chief executive of the NFL, offered his own strike down the middle, despite the close attentions of a ruthless safety or two: "Some cable operators talk out of two sides of their mouths...One minute, they say it's about the price, the next, they're saying it's about access to Sunday Ticket."
Is he suggesting someone might not be telling the truth? A personal foul, surely.
Will the FCC turn out to be the referee on this one? Will the two sides reach a hard-fought, swimmingly reasonable compromise along the lines of, oh, I don't know, the Camp David agreement?
When so much money clasps its hands around a beloved national sport, it's sometimes easy to forget that people just want to watch the games they want to watch without hooking up woks on their roof or cables around their wallpaper.
Strangely, the former commissioner of the NFL, the weirdly somnolent Paul Tagliabue, believes that baseball got something right, specifically concerning the way it launched their MLB Network. Cable had first dibs on out-of-market games. Then MLB Network appeared as part of a basic digital package.
I know that many people have never understood why the NFL gave exclusive rights to Direct TV for its Sunday Ticket. I mean, it's not as if you have to wok your chimney to watch other important events--like "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars"--happening elsewhere.
I know you'll tell me that it all has to do with money. But one might have thought that there would have been a far larger market out there if the out-of-town games were offered across multiple platforms.
Look, I'm a San Diego Chargers fan. I don't live in San Diego. I have cable. Ergo, I spend a lot of winter Sundays in sports bars.
Please, wealthy people of commerce, will you sing from the same playbook and help me improve my diet and my lifestyle? Thank you.
How many contracts have you signed without even checking to see whether you've agreed to donate your spleen and other entrails to a Bulgarian vulgarian who lives in Krk, Croatia?
Well, those clever professors at DePaul University thought that "hundreds" might be your answer, because they did something very strange. Yes, they brought about an interesting piece of research.
It was not inspired by the raising of voices and emotions about Facebook's terms of service. But it might now be dedicated to it.
They dragged 91 students in from various interesting corners of the campus and reminded them that they'd agreed to be research guinea pork as part of the course requirement. Then they asked them to sign an innocent consent form. Just three pages of single-spaced type.
Eighty-seven of the students, some of whom may already have been double-spaced from certain student-friendly paraphernalia, signed the form.
The professors were squeezing their legs together in excitement because the contract declared that the students would be "administering electric shocks to fellow participants...even if that participant screamed, cried, and asked for medical assistance."
The contract also succeeded in getting the students' agreement to do push-ups.
I cannot confirm that this is a memorial to all those who agreed to the electric shock contract.
(Credit: CC Eamonn)The professors then told the students what they had signed. "Some of them laughed, some of them just rolled their eyes," assistant professor Jessica Choplin wrote in the NYU Journal of Law and Business.
However, she and her fellow researcher, Debra Pogrund Stark, are not without heart. So without even a spark of high-voltage punishment, they tore up the bogus consent forms and gave the 87 fine undergraduates the real consent forms.
"Of the 87 participants who signed the bogus consent form," wrote Choplin and Stark, "17.2 percent did not even look at the actual consent form, another 18.4 percent looked so briefly that they could not have read it, and 21.8 percent only skimmed enough to get a vague idea of some of the provisions."
The new consent forms actually committed the students to running naked down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, singing Wham's fine hit "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and holding a flag that read, "I Sleep with the Squirrels."
Well, not exactly. But somehow, one wishes it had. I wonder if Comcast got me to agree to never, ever, ever complain about its service. I must go and check.
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