John Walson...The Father of Things We Don't Care About

I couldn’t care less.

We’ll get to the why in just a minute.

For now, let’s talk about one of our most commonly misspoken everyday phrases.

I could care less.
I know, I just told you I couldn’t care less.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

And I’m guessing here that you may have already reached the point where you couldn’t care less.

If that’s the case, then good for you.
Because if you could care less, that means that you have not yet reached your limit for caring about it.

Got that “middle of the forehead, eat ice cream too fast” headache yet?

Don’t blame you. But, the point I’m finally getting to is that many of us misspeak that phrase all the time. And I suppose it probably only bothers dedicated English teachers or anal retentives, but I’ve always sort of held true to the idea that if you’re gonna speaks the language, then you oughta speaks it good, you know?

And let’s not even get started on the need to say, “you know?” between every five or six words in our verbal sharings. Even though, you know, it can really, you know, be distracting when, you know, someone starts doing that and you find yourself, you know, missing out on what they’re saying because, you know, now you find yourself not paying, you know, attention and instead you’re just waiting, you know, for the next time they say it,

You know?
You could care less, right?

Wrong!

You couldn’t care less.
I thought we’d already solved that problem.

So, as I said at the beginning (which really does seem like a long time ago right now, you know?), I couldn’t care less and I promised to tell you why.

Hang in there. We’re just minutes away from that revelation.

One thing I have to do first.

Blame John Walson.
What?
Trust me.
Here’s his story.

Cable television, formerly known as Community Antenna Television or CATV, was born in the mountains of Pennsylvania. John Walson and Margaret Walson started it in the spring of 1948. The Walsons formed the Service Electric Company in the mid 1940s to sell, install, and repair General Electric appliances in the Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania area. In 1947, the Walsons also began selling television sets. However, Mahanoy City residents had problems receiving the three nearby Philadelphia network stations with local antennas because of the region's surrounding mountains. John Walson erected an antenna on a utility pole on a local mountaintop that enabled him to demonstrate the televisions with good broadcasts coming from the three Philadelphia stations.
Walson connected the mountain antennae to his appliance store via a cable and modified signal boosters. In June of 1948, John Walson connected the mountain antennae to both his store and several of his customers' homes that were located along the cable path, starting the nation’s first CATV system.
John Walson has been recognized by the U.S. Congress and the National Cable Television Association as the founder of the cable television industry

Now you can dazzle and amaze your friends at the water cooler by telling them that John Walson was the guy who invented cable TV.

And he gets the credit for all of the wonderful programming that we now have available to us twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Like The Discovery Channel and The Food Channel and The History Channel and The Family Channel and The Hallmark Channel and…

Well, you get the idea.

But, fair is fair. If he gets the credit for the good stuff, he has to take the rap for the crap.
After all, in for a penny, in for a pound.
You know?

See, the thing is that while John did, in fact, start us on the road that has taken us a long way from the days when we had only those three network channels, a fuzzy PBS channel and watched all four of them fade to snow to the strains of the National Anthem every night, he also, most innocently I’m sure, created a monster. A monster that has to be fed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No more three channels and PBS from dawn to midnight.
Nope.
Twenty four/seven.

And as we all know, that inevitably means filler.

The price we pay for having A&E all day and night is having The Scotch Tape Channel all day and night.

And at some point, we all find ourselves wondering why we’re watching that same episode of Law and Order that we’ve already seen seventy one times.

Dun-dun!

And we find ourselves wondering why we’re watching an “in depth report” on which designer made the most gowns for the most stars on the red carpet at the Grammys or the Emmys or the Oscars or the People’s Choice Awards or the National Meat Packers Awards.

And, inevitably, even the “legit” shows find themselves faced with having to use “filler”.

Which, finally (and mercifully for you, I imagine) brings me back to why I said I couldn’t care less.

Looking over the news headlines on CNN.com this morning, I noticed that the paragon of timely topics, Larry King, has a real headline making, life altering show planned for tomorrow night.

Prime-time Exclusive!Janet Jackson joins Larry for a rare, live, sit-down interview. The actress and singer gets personal about her love life, weight, and new album! Tomorrow, 9 p.m. ET

Larry deserves credit for all the ground breaking interviews that he has done and will likely continue to do,. And he can hardly be blamed if having to come up with several hours of chat six nights a week, fifty two weeks a year means that not every interview will be with a presidential candidate or a Nobel Prize winning scientist.

But when the monster’s need to be fed has us scraping the bottom of the feed barrel to the point where we’re going to hear all about Janet Jackson’s struggles with love handles, then I think Newton Minnow’s famous early 1960’s description of television as “a vast wasteland” has more than come to pass.

Janet seems like a nice girl. And she sings and dances with style and sparkle.
But when it comes to finding out what a dark turn her life took when she realized she needed to go carb free for a few weeks?

I couldn’t care less.

Thanks, John Walson.
Thanks a lot.