CBEB’s

“I’m too stupid and lazy to configure the V-Chip on my television”

Now the longer version… Thomasson’s idiotic column was printed in today’s local fishwrap. Here’s the Letter to the Editor I’ve sent in response:

Was it a slow day for news, or what? The 761 words in Dan K. Thomasson’s March 11 column, “TV overkill: A serial murderer in prime time”, could have easily been summed up with one simple sentence: “I’m too lazy to configure the V-Chip on my television.”

Every single television set sold in the United States since January 2000 has been required by Federal Law to include the V-Chip. In the time it took Thomasson to write his ill-informed column, he could have consulted his TV’s instruction manual and solved his problem with a few simple steps.

Thomasson strikes me as the curmudgeonly type who likes to rail against all this highfalutin technology. If that’s the case, he might be pleased to know that virtually every child in this country comes equipped with some old-fashioned technology known as a “parent” (sometimes referred to as “guardian”). Mr. Thomasson seems unaware of the concept, as he wants to place all the responsibility for what children watch on the shoulders of the networks.

What will Thomasson write about next? How those new-fangled “Horseless Carriages” are scaring his mules? Those silly Beatles with their long hair and loud music?

I was going to close with the suggestion that Thomasson read a book instead, then recommend a novel by Jeff Lindsay. That would have brought my word count past 200, and I doubt if readers would have gotten the joke. (FYI, Jeff Lindsay wrote Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the novel on which the TV series is based.)

I realize that The Grumpy Old Man Who Complains About Everything is a staple of newspaper opinion pages, but with so many legitimate things to complain about, Thomasson’s column just comes off as the whining of a really stupid person who wants to assault an easy target.