November 7 to December 31, 2006

Have you ever wondered about the first person who ate an egg? I envision some individual biting down on a raw egg and taking it into his mouth, shell and all. Certainly, such a person would never try that a second time.

I sometimes wonder about how many things that we take for granted got started. I'm not talking about inventions or situations in which one thing led to another; I refer to basic stuff.

Who hit upon the idea of blowing our noses into a piece of cloth or, later, paper? Until then, did people walk around wiping their noses on their arms? (I will not even get into speculation about what we did before we had toilet paper.)

Who first decided that it was a good idea to clean one's teeth with a brush and, later, to add powder or a pasty substance to the brush? Sure, we now know that cleaning teeth prevents decay, but surely the brushing idea had to come first.

When and how did men decide to start removing whiskers from their faces by using a sharp object? I mean before the safety razor or shaving cream and the electric shaver? How many painful cuts were there before the process became even tolerable?

Who first discovered that adding a sweetening agent (or salt or pepper, for that matter) made certain foods taste better? What possessed that person to even try it? There are hundreds of things one could add to food to make them taste worse? Did we just discover sugar and salt and pepper by chance?

When, for example, did we start cutting fingernails and toenails. I suppose that, at first, nature caused them to break when they got too long, but, given a lifestyle of manual labor and travel by foot, fingernails and toenails must have often become long enough to be awkward and uncomfortable. Before we had the proper tools to cut them, what did we do?

Here's another unfinished essay, the working title for which was . . .

PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE JAILED

Resentments are unhealthy, but who can resist resenting the anonymous individuals who have created some of the devices that have become nuisances in our lives? It is perhaps too extreme to line these people against a wall and shoot them, but at least they might be given lengthy jail sentences. Here is a partial list of the offenders.

> The person or persons who came up with blinding white headlights. It's doubtful that these lights improve visibility for the driver of the car that has them, but there's no doubt at all that these lights annoy the rest of us.

> The individual who first decided that it was a good idea to draw a line of dashes on a box and label it, "Push here to open." Pushing just dents the box and doesn't open anything.

> The guy who invented the hard plastic packages used to contain some products, such as toys, hardware, and printer cartridges. One needs garden shears to open these packages, and one can get a nasty cut from the jagged edges.

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KILLING THE GOOSE WITH THE GOLDEN EGGS: THE DEMISE OF NETWORK TV

Executives of the television networks seem puzzled by the declining number of people who are tuning in. Is it the effect of cable competition? Is it the programming? Is it that people are spending their time with other media, such as the Internet? My answer is: It may be, in part, all of the above, but the truth is, guys, for a long time you've been systematically killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. And now that you're in a hole, you keep digging.

I guess it was about twenty years ago that I started to tune out on network TV, partly because we got cable but mostly because the commercials were increasingly numerous and annoying. When our the cable monopoly in our town (Comcast) proved its incompetence, we spent a few years virtually without TV. The rest of my family sometimes watched fuzzy pictures supplied by an aging antenna; I gave it up entirely.

Then satellite TV arrived. In the early days of satellite, the cable companies and the networks pressured the FCC to invoke restrictions that prohibited satellite suppliers from carrying local network outlets. I returned to watching TV, but though we managed to work around the local network prohibition, I usually opted for channels with no, or at least fewer, commercials. By the time the restriction was lifted and satellite providers were carrying the major networks, I was cured of any addiction I might have had to CBS, ABC, NBC, etc.

My wife was (and still is, to some degree) in a different situation. Certain programs that she enjoys are available only on the major networks. She puts up with them, despite the greater proportion of time devoted to ads – although it's doubtful that any of the commercial clutter really registers in her brain. The ads are a signal to go to the kitchen for a snack or to take a bathroom break. Eventually, of course, she began videotaping the programs and watched them later when she could fast-forward through the ads. The more ad-heavy the programs became, the more likely she was to do this.

Now we record my wife's five or six weekly network programs on DVD. The discs are cheaper than tape ever was, and the quality is better – at high recording speed, it is indistinguishable from the original. She still fast-forwards through the commercials. Sometimes, I will fast-forward through an entire disc to make sure that I have got it all. (Because the equipment is new, I sometimes goof when programming the machine, and I don't want my wife to wind up watching a show, only to find that I missed the last five minutes.) When I do this, I am amazed to see how much of an hour program consists of ads. It must be a third or more, including ads for other programs on the station. There are, I've noticed, even blurbs promoting other programs that pop up on the screen during a show.

Sometimes my wife's description of a show that she watches regularly piques my interest. I still won't watch it. Years ago, I broke the addiction to network TV, and I don't want to go back – especially now that commercials take up so much of the hour. If some timely event such as a football playoff is available only on network, I hit the mute button during commercials, try not to watch them, and swear a lot.

I realize that networks must pay for their programs somehow, but they got greedy, putting into effect a self-defeating cycle. More ads meant fewer viewers. As ratings fell, they were forced to sell more ads to support the programs, driving away more viewers. The goose that laid the golden egg is the audience, and the goose has wandered off to cable or is using technology to skip the commercials. Advertisers know this. They still advertise because Madison Avenue's idea of Paradise is a nation blanketed with advertising from sea to shining sea, but they're discovering other places to promote their wares – places where the ad-saturated public can't ignore them as easily.

Perhaps the TV moguls should read the fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs. Knowing them, they would make it into a TV special. Since the story would take only about ten minutes to tell, they could fill out the hour with fifty minutes of commercials. Everyone but them would see how ironic that is.

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DECEMBER 31, 2006. Well, this "Mudgelog" turned out to be a wash. For two months, I have done nothing but post a few excerpts from unfinished essays. Since I myself tended to forget that the log was even here, I can hardly expect others to notice it, can I?

So, here's the first of my New Year's resolutions (which I never seem to keep): In 2007, I shall keep this log, entering something of general interest at least once a week – short entries, something people will enjoy, that sort of thing. I won't worry about being profound, stylish, or even especially literate (though grammatical correctness flows in my veins). It's time for the "Easy Does It – BUT DO IT!" philosophy.

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