What the *!@#?

My DirecTV dish/cable/receiver is not behaving as a gray-market TV service should. It's not a constant level of service, either. Channels come in, then they don't, seemingly at random - except for Comedy Central, which never comes in. It's not that the picture is pixelated - it's a binary on/off condition.

Sunday night, I was flicking through channels to see if there was a pattern and I landed on Fuse, and what I saw astonished me.

When people say TV is a wasteland, this is what they mean. I'm not sure what's usually on the show I caught, "Rad Girls", but this episode had three girls riding in the back of a van (A cargo van, not a minivan). Each girl had a bucket and they were having a contest to see who could pee the most while the van drove around corners and up and down hills. The girls drank from large jugs of water to help fill up.

Yes, a bucket of pee did spill. Two girls also got carsick and they decided to count the vomit. The audience was treated to shots of girls throwing up, and the pee going into bottles. Eventually, one girl even crapped in her bucket, but we didn't get to see that.

While that sort of show is not to my taste, I can see that other viewers might appreciate it. That's not really why I was astonished. What flabbergasted me was that while this was going on, the girls were talking, and sprinkled their language with appropriate and inappropriate bad words - and these words were bleeped out!

What is the deal? How, or why can you show this, but not be able to use the most common words for it? It's an astounding window onto - well, onto something. American culture? Maybe.

The next show on Fuse was the cleverly titled "Pants Off Dance Off", in which people and dancers off the street strip to their favourite videos and compete for a prize. Great idea, but not if you cover up all the naughty bits with censoring logos.

I have more to write, but it's time to teach. Au revoir....