What Do Howard Dean and Republican Farting-Heads have to do with the Modern Gym?

I went to the gym tonight which means, I got to just watch some television courtesy of some company called BroadcastVision. I love those people!

They very recently installed this setup with +- 12 TV sets/4 channels and obviously some kind of FM transmitter somewhere in the room. I can bring in my MP3player/radio plus earphones and tune into any of the 4 channels using my walkman's FM and actually catch some TV, with audio. Not CLOSED CAPTIONING, though it’s still on, I don’t have to read it. I love these people! and the people at Cary Str. gym of course!

I hate CLOSED CAPTIONING! It’s such weak technology. If it were a hard product, it would have never have left the assembly line, defect, scrap. It has this +- 10 second delay, it's probably a shorter torture period; it seems like an eternity. What you are reading is never what you are seeing said. You could be watching an anti-depressant ad with those facetiously happy people, while reading, “….find out how he killed his three children and turned the gun on himself” - having somehow missed the nauseating, “when we return,…yada yada yada" and dead happy people. Do they really have to CC ads?

Watching TV in the gym: The visuals, the CLOSED CAPTIONING and that bloody TICKER at the bottom, overlaid with mindlessly talkative DJs, the callers, and still many, many more radio ads courtesy of Clear Channel and their local pimps blasting through every speaker in the room. It’s a mind-fuck. It is stimulation on THG, and you get plenty of it in the gym. It's part of the reason I switched to the smaller gym, which until recently had no TV sets, just the radio idiots, the horrifying local ads, and the ten songs they play over and over again.

Tonight I got to watch Anderson Cooper 360. I can run, watch Anderson at the same time, and actually hear what he's saying. Not quite a mind-fuck, but titillating nevertheless. A problem arises when guests (or AC) say something really funny. Man they need to stop that! Twice now, I have wound up sprawled on the floor somewhere, praying I hadn't broken anything, having suddenly stopped dead on my tracks, chocking with laughter, when the machine wants me steady at 6mi/h. Forget the so-called Precor, that woosie-making elliptical machine. That is a nightmare. I banged my head on the computerized panel's magazine holder thing from being dealt a deadpan blow from the hilarious Andy Borowitz, with Lewis Black (the nut) from the DNC last week.

And then there are the other people in the gym, what must they think? I don’t know. They just look at you funny, sometimes seemingly curious at why you are guffawing in confined public spaces. For once CC with the delay has been somewhat useful. People will look at whatever you are watching for while, but I have never seen anybody laugh at the same joke/comment. I’ve seen laughing at me for falling off, yes.

Tonight AC360 had Howard Dean on the show, and the obligatory, rebutting Republican farting-head- which is what this entry was supposed to be about, not the modern gym. Oyi.

Anyway as the farting-head was talking, spewing the usual fact-less garbage and character assassinations, I said, "Ohh, shut the hell up," loudly. Oyi Oyi Oyi. In my defense I was wearing earphones, with the fart-head in my ear as it were.

Gyms are odd semi-social places. The one I go to is decidedly odd. There are no free-weights and therefore no jocks, and so nobody seeking jock-attention. There is almost no verbal interaction, just people trying very hard no to stare at anybody else, an impossible feat in a place so small. When you are in the gym you are mindless and thought-less (i.e. without thoughts). I mean you can focus on an exercise, but you don’t think about the exercise. So you look at different things without actually seeing them, especially if they move occasionally. Your eyes wonder and settle on an arbitrary object and viola, before you know it, you have committed cardinal social sin No.5: You are staring at a sweaty stranger, and you are freakin’ them out! Not because they are hot or anything, perhaps because, they move occasionally. I don’t know. Alerted by something, perhaps too much movement, or no movement at all, you snap back to planet earth, make yet another mental note NOT TO STARE. Later, eyes wonder you find yourself looking at somebody who in their mindless state is also looking at you. To add insult to injury, this is an equal opportunity problem. Quickly, back to planet earth!

Hence, television in the gym is the perfect antidote for this staring pathology. The downside is TV (with its audio for me) takes us off the mindlessness and thought-less mode of the gym (what?), back into the planet of farting-heads who get away with it. So we find ourselves cursing out loud at political fart-heads, in confined spaces with sweaty strangers. Damn you farting-heads!
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When I get around to it, tomorrow or whenever, I want to write about the exchange between Anderson and the farting head, and what makes anchors bad journalists/arbiters. I have plenty of love for Anderson (why?) and to be fair , he tried, but.....the chair of the debating society at your local high school can do a better job.