I live in Minneapolis, in case one couldn’t figure it out from the various rants about the weather and the giant header on this page. This past weekend we had a huge storm that passed through the area, churning up a few tornadoes that ripped apart an entire neighborhood, in Hugo, MN, about 15 miles North of where I live. It was a particularly harsh storm, and it did claim the life of a 2 year old, seriously injured many, and caused millions of dollars in hail and wind damage. Many people’s entire lives were upended in a matter of seconds. To be perfectly clear, I feel for those people in my community, and thank the FSM for my good fortunes, allowing me and my loved ones to be spared. The most damage that I saw was that my flag pole was ripped off my house. That will cost me a whole $10 to fix.
This is not why I am blogging, nor do I want to slight those that were less fortunate than I. I have a simple observation/rant that I need to get off my chest, and it comes down to me being the selfish jerk that I am.
Channel 9 is our local Fox affiliate, and apparently, Fox9 doesn’t make enough money to have the equipment to broadcast anything in HD. From the news to the local-only programming that they churn out, everything is in plain-old “regular definition”. That means that on my nice HD-LCD, everything looks pretty much terrible, with large black bars on both sides of the picture, only using about 70% of the screen, and it is quite fuzzy. Normally, I can handle this, because these non-HD programs are restricted to only what the local affiliate broadcasts, while the national shows, sports, etc, are all in glorious HD.
Back to Sunday night’s storm. Whenever there is even a hint of a “weather event” in these parts, the local weather team likes to take up about the bottom third of my TV with warnings, radars, beeps and bloops, basically anything to get the viewer’s attention and scare them into thinking that they may die at any second. If the wind goes above 50 MPH, forget it. Whatever you are watching gets pre-empted, and the weathermen and women come on, repeating the same phrase every 14 seconds, whatever that phrase may be (usually something about going to your safe place, and what to do if you are out in the middle of nowhere - “get in a ditch!” - I still haven’t figured out how you have TV reception if you are out in a cornfield…). In the summertime in Minnesota, that roughly equates to once a week. We get to know our weather people here very well from May to October. Sunday night was one of these times. Mind you, it was right at the start of the NASCAR event in Charlotte. Did I happen to mention I am a huge NASCAR fan?
I was happily watching the pre-race festivities, in the magic of HD, when suddenly, my TV’s picture shrunk down to 30% of it’s size, then the bottom third was obscured by the aforementioned graphics, beeps, bleeps, and “you will die” info crawlers. I went from 100% of viewing area to about 40% in a matter of seconds. Yes, Fox9 had decided that it was time that they ruin my night.
Here’s my real beef: why can’t we stay in HD while all these alerts are flying around the screen? At least then those of us that tuned in can still enjoy what we sat down to watch, and those that tuned in to see whether or not they were going to end up in the next county could get the information that they deserved as well? I don’t think that this is that much to ask. Because of the size and destruction of the storm, Fox kept the offending graphics up during the whole race. Ask Lori how mad that made me. I’m pretty sure she just went to bed early just so she didn’t have to listen to me any more.
To summarize: Fox9, I know you’re not listening, but I’d still like to know the reason you can’t catch up with the rest of the world and get with the HD program (no pun intended). You’d make all of us that spent a hefty sum on an HD set much happier. Cite all the technical reasons you want, but if Fox25 in Boston can do it, so can you.
I will give credit where credit is due, though. Fox had the decency to PIP the race while they broke in with their weather updates. Even if it was even less space on my screen, I still got to see (but not hear) the live event in the background. More than I can say for the local ABC affiliate, who just decided that the exit interviews after possibly the biggest race in the world, the Indy 500, was just not important enough, and just cut off all coverage altogether. Bravo…I guess.
