I finally did it: I cancelled cable.

This has been a multi-year process. A few years ago we dropped all but the local channels, Discovery, WGN and Versus. We still needed cable for the reception, in particular, and we loved Versus (Tour de France, hockey games) and Discovery. But then Comcast removed Versus from their basic service and Discovery stopped showing good shows.

In addition, we moved. In Hillsboro, where we used to live, Comcast’s Basic coverage cost $10 per month. In our new house, 16 miles away, it costs $21. And in last month’s bill we found out they are raising the rates, less than one year since we signed up here. To say the least I was annoyed. Since I reduced my plan to Basic six years ago, we lost channels and got more lousy programming in exchange for more than double the price.

In that same time period all the local channels went to digital high definition. I started investigating antenna, thinking if we can get the local stuff free we can live without the other programming. [1] My first thought was what happens if I unplug the cable, switch the tv to antenna and searched for local channels?

Lo and behold, we get every one of them, perfect quality, plus a couple of others we either didn’t get or didn’t know about on the cable box!

Now… I have $24 per month to spend on entertainment. Hulu+ maybe? Amazon Prime? Or maybe we wait for the next, great thing that actually gives us compelling content to watch. [2]

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[1] This, of course, excludes Mythbusters, which we can’t find when new episodes run anyway. Turns out some old episodes are on Netflix anyway (and more on Amazon Prime!) so we still get our fix when we need one.

[2] Spent some time last night looking at these options. Hulu probably isn’t for us but Amazon Prime is compelling. There is a lot of stuff there that is not available on Netflix Watch Instantly. Plus, free two-day shipping and one free Kindle rental per month.

I’d like to say that I am shocked and surprised, but I lived in Florida for 6 years and while I never heard anything like this, I heard plenty of other oddities:

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said.

(Here’s the Miami Herald’s original story and the follow-up.)

There were lots of oddities about that place when I lived there. No one drove the maximum speed limits. The number of murders was unbelievable. There were neighborhoods you didn’t drive into, and they would be just couple of blocks from multi-million dollar homes. I remember one story about an escaped mental patient carrying an AK-47 rifle down the middle of a major road. No one was hurt. Of course, the dead German tourist thing happened right before I moved there. Nothing like this, but these other stories are so routine they don’t even make the paper.

We went to see The Avengers this weekend. I turned to my wife at the end and said if there is any one lesson from these super hero movies, it is that living in New York City is a very dangerous place. It seems NYC gets destroyed every year!

I was kidding about New York. Not so much about Miami.

Absolutely hilarious post (at least to my weird sense of humor) from Nick Bradbury on a pair of shoes that fart when wet:

One recent rainy morning, I stopped at the grocery store after walking my dogs in the park.

As I strode into the store I realized that my wet shoes were making farting noises with every step. I tried walking more slowly, but that just resulted in slower, deeper farts.

So I paused for a moment, too mortified to move. Then like any geek of good conscience, I asked myself, WWJCD?

“What would John Cleese do?”

I don’t usually post stuff that I don’t have a comment about, but hey! it’s Friday before a long weekend. And this one cracked me up.

My wife was a swimmer in school and on Saturday all the ladies in the area that swam on those teams gathered at their old swimming pool for a reunion. Most are married and have kids. Most were still in excellent shape. She talks about that team with affection, how they whipped most teams in the district and if it wasn’t for some weird coaching decisions the relay team was headed to states. While I haven’t met most of them before I knew almost all the names.

So we all swam at the pool and the girls talked to each other and all the kids played. At one point I saw the diving board and, realizing that I hadn’t done a swan dive in 25 years, decided to try one. It was sloppy — a 4.5 on the judges scale not including difficulty which probably would have dragged my score lower — but I did it.

Afterward it dawned on me how, as we get older, there are just certain things we don’t do any more. I haven’t dove in 25 years. Now I’m content to walk in the water or slide in off the side. There was a time I wouldn’t get in the water without diving. I don’t jump anymore, either. I watch my daughters, aged 6 and 4, skip. Don’t do that, although I’m not certain I ever did.

I don’t know when that happened but at some point those things just went out off fashion for me. And, for the most part, I don’t miss most of them. (Although having a little more hair on my head would suit me fine.)

A moment of silence for one of the great authors of all time: Maurice Sendak. He died today at age 83.

My wife and I have a wonderful children’s book collection. Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, editions from the early 1970s given to me by my stepdad, are two of our prized possessions.

Thanks, Maurice, for inspiring multiple generations of children to explore their imaginations to its fullest!