Okay, so I got Digital Cable. Big whoop. New clearer picture, six-hundred channels, shiny-new cable box. Still haven't made my mind-up. Now I've made it up.

Here in SF, the wonderful entity that is our Cable Company has decided that Comedy Central will share the same channel as CNBC. We get CNBC all day and Comedy Central at night. Fine. Comedy Central isnt' all that exciting most of the time anyways.

But it does at 7. At 7, they reshow the "Daily Show" from the previous night so if I miss it, I can watch it then. I heart "The Daily Show." If you took a hundred pundits and lined them up one-by-one, they still wouldn't make as much sense out of the world as that show does in ten minutes. So, since I missed last night's episode I flipped to good ole channel 53 to watch me some Jon Stewart and what did I find? Hockey. Olympic Hockey. And not USA Hockey, but Finland vs. Russia or something equally as exciting. Why? Because NBC is showing everything that isn't figure skating on all of it's sister stations, of which CNBC is one. And some lameo at AT&T decided that people would rather watch Russia vs. Finland then "The Daily Show."

Look, there are about six-hundred stations available. I can get the Game Show Network and watch six straight hours of old Match Game episodes. I can get the Western Channel and watch nothing but really bad, B-Movie Westerns all day. I can get the Mystery Channel and watch…well, I don't know what it shows because it all looks so boring I always flip by. I get four HBO's and two Cinemax's and for the life of me I couldn't tell you what the difference is between all of them. But I can't get Comedy Central at 7 at night. What the fuck? I mean Comedy Central is a fairly well-known Cable Station. It's got the Daily Show and South Park. It's got the Man Show. Why touch that when you can just put Russia vs. Finland on the Game Show Network channel. Does anybody watch that channel? And if they do, can we keep them from voting? Whose bright idea was that anyways- a channel devoted to nothing bad cheesy game show's from the '70's? Or they could of put it on the Mystery Channel. I'm sure the three people who watch that wouldn't of even noticed.

And another thing. Before I got my new fancy, shmancy cable box, I was able to set the timer so it could record different shows from different stations on the same night. I could on Tuesday night's, for example, tape Buffy on UPN at 8 and then have the cable switch to tape The Real World on MTV at 10. For some reason, the genius's at AT&T took that away. Can't do it anymore. I can, however, set-up the guide that comes up telling you what station you're watching so that it appears on the bottom of the screen if I so wanted it to. Or I could switch it to the top. Or, I could receive very important messages from AT&T telling me what exciting new channel they've just added ("oh, cool, they've added the Love Boat Channel!"). But I can't record more than one channel at a time like I used to, back when I had my cheap, only 55 channel, non weather showing, non-digital box.

And the only reason why I switched to digital cable, besides the fact I got a deal on it, was so I could watch porn on Cinemax. Something I could do, by the way, until AT&T decided to take it off the basic package as a way of forcing people to swtching to digital cable.