Getting Digital TV On Track

Want to know what the federal government is spending your tax dollars on next? Seems that with all the other things on the minds of Americans these days - the economy, the presidential election, the war, Brittany Spears is number one on the Billboard charts, will there be a Beverly Hills Chihuahua II? - the switch to digital TV is being drowned out. Shocking as this may seem, the ability to watch your local news anchors to comment on Sarah Palin's performance on Saturday Night Live before going to an exclusive report on clipping coupons (mispronounced as "Q-pons.")to save money is not a priority right now.

As I've previously reported on this blog, the persons most likely to find their TV's inoperable after the February 17, 2009 analog cutoff are the poor, the elderly, and the disenfranchised. In order to reach the poor, the government has offered coupons (COO-pons. It's just a rumor, but I've heard if you ask the government for Q-pons they send you to Iraq instead.) To reach the elderly, they run TV spots every ten minutes, thus putting the federal government in the same league with the insurance gecko and the man who starts the commercial by telling me, "I have genital herpes," as the most annoying things on television.

As for the disenfranchised, a new study conducted by your government has determined that "disenfranchised" means people who like to watch loud cars with tacky paint jobs running in circles on a Sunday afternoon. There are two places you can see this: a Wal-mart parking lot, and NASCAR. The Fed chose the latter.

As a result, and I'm not making this up, for three races, the FCC is sponsoring a car in NASCAR. Here's a part of the press release:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said of the primary sponsorship, “NASCAR fans are known for their avid interest in this sport. Their awareness and responsiveness to NASCAR sponsors is also exceptionally high. I believe this sponsorship is an extremely effective way for the FCC to raise DTV awareness among people of all ages and income levels across the United States who loyally follow one of the most popular sports in America.”

It must've taken a lot of rewriting to get to that from the original idea: in February of 2009, the managers of television stations across the nation are not going to take bitch calls from people who's only mastery of the English language is to put a "3" on the back window.

Of course, the guy I really feel sorry for is David Gilliland, the driver of the number 38 Ford who's car won't bear the insignia of a macho product like Viagra, or Cialis. (But no beer. That sends a bad message to the youth of America.) No. He has to drive around the track in a car that basically says:

Make sure that your visual demodulator is compatible to the ATSC protocal and capable of downcoverting the data stream to an analog NTSC interlaced video composite of 29.97 fps with a frequency modulated aural carrier at 4 MHz above the visual carrier.

Yeah. That'll read good after he kisses the wall in turn three.