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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Commercials gone wrong Or Close your eyes Kids

I know lots of families are for going television these days citing the obscene language and questionable content. We have 3 tvs ourselves. We only bought 1, which we promptly broke. Thankfully (as thankful as one can be when something is broken) it was a plasma so you can still watch it. We are like the drop off of unwanted things. They figure, hey you have a lot of people you probably need more stuff. So along the way we acquired 2 more.

So now we have these 3 tvs. We enjoy watching, when we get the chance. Dh and I don't watch a whole lot. I have a couple of shows I enjoy. Kids watch probably an average kid amount. The older kids call the smaller kids shows babyish so sometimes it nice to have a couple tvs for them to fight over. I mean watch. Apparently Wow Wow Wubzy isn't that entertaining to an 11 year old.

However I am starting to rethink this whole tv thing. I can block any shows I don't want them to watch; thats not the problem. The problem is with these stupid commercials. I can't watch a show with my kids in the room anymore. Last night I was holding my breath during this commercial:

What the?! Thank goodness none of my kids came in the room while that was on! I don't think I should ever, under any circumstances have to explain what that was to any of my children. And here I thought the horror movie commercials were bad. Call me old fashioned but I think thats something they can figure out for themselves WHEN THEY ARE ADULTS. Geez. Make parenting difficult why dontcha.

What approach do I take when thats on? "Quick change the Channel or Kids cover your eyes" both would elicit questions of "Whats wrong with this commercial?" We do that with the horror flick ones. All I need is 8 kids up in the middle of the night with nightmares. For the record they thought Coraline was the scariest movie EVER. So do I take the "La la la, nothing here to see."approach? Ignoring the commercial hoping they don't think there is something weird about a lady walking around and topiaries changing shape. Or do I get rid of the tvs all together and not have to worry about such things. Either I end up the bag guy or really embarrassed. Either way, fun for me.

2 comments:

  1. If your husband is the geeky techie type this solution might work for you. Right now I don't think the technology is ready for non-techies to tackle it.

    I am guessing you have heard of TIVO? Well, we have ghetto hacked-together TIVO. It took some start-up costs for hardware but the software is free and it is totally worth it.

    We had to get a TV tuner card and some additional memory, and hook our computer up to the TV, but basically our computer records shows off tv. Then, it automatically runs a program on them that marks the commercials so that when we watch the show, they are automatically skipped. The program isn't perfect, but we can go back if it took out part of the show, or fast-forward if it left in a commercial. We don't see commercials anymore.

    If you're not techie, maybe you could stop getting cable and get netflix instead. Netflix is, in my opinion, the future of TV--you decide what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and pay for exactly that. They advertise the movies more, but you can also rent TV shows one disc at a time, and that's most of what we do. No commercials that way either. With either option, we can tuurn on subtitles if the one-year-old is saying mmm, mmm, mmm all through dinner, or pause if we need a bathroom break.

    TV is so last centuy.

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  2. I think dh can hack that. TIVO is linux and dh is a linux admin. Ohhh another project for him :).

    And I totally agree, tv is so last century. I can watch just about everything on here. Almost. I am still waiting for the 18 kids and counting episode that my kids stopped the DVR 1/2 through.

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