The Holy Quatrony

I was flipping through the channels tonight and accidentally saw the last five minutes of PAY IT FORWARD. Being a movie person, one might think that if I were going to have seen the movie I would have by now, but still; I felt cheated having it ruined for me.

I think it would be a cool feature if TV Stations had an optional "blank" page when you first turned to them, telling you what they were showing, and then you hit Enter if you're cool with that, thus taking the blank page off that station. That way you'd avoid seeing the end of movies you're looking forward too, and also avoid uneccessary Full House marathons and such.

Speaking of Flipping around, one of the things I miss the very most about Canada is randomly flipping around and finding UGN: Unexpected Gratuitious Nudity. Perhaps the greatest advantage to living in Canada was how little standards when it came to such matters. The way they justified it (and you're going to love this), is that any program with objectionable material had to have a verbal and written warning after EVERY commercial break.

[Just a bit of a tangent here, but sometimes this could be frustrating too. Let's say you were watching a 12 episode run of "The L Word." Somewhere in that season is nudity, but not in every single episode. So the warning would say "The following program may contain scenes of nudity..." I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. If I'm slogging through some indie movie or British program or whatever, I need assurances that my time and effort will be paid off then!]

The warnings were such a joke because it seems like they were being more protective than America, which usually just does the letters up in the corner, but in reality it meant far more. Showcase was a particularly great channel, showing HBO and Showtime shows, as well as European movies, and many was the Friday night when I waited for a commercial break of some lame looking movie, hoping to hear the words, "The following program may contain scenes of violence, strong language, nudity and sexuality," or what I liked to call the Holy Quatrony.

It wasn't just Showcase though that had nudity. Almost any channel could, and at any time of day. I saw naked bodies at 3:00 in the afternoon on Bravo Canada once, and CTV, which if available even to those who don't have cable was infamous for educational "sex" shows on Fridays and Saturday nights. They may have been borderline educational, but the visual aids were definitely not necessary.

But they were appreciated.

I miss you, my frozen nipply maple leafy peeps.