[mi-noo-shee-uh, -shuh, -nyoo-] Usually, minutiae. precise details; small or trifling matters: the minutiae of his craft.This is the word that comes to mind most often when I am watching television.
If you are even close to my age, you will have the childhood memory of waking early on Saturday morning to test patterns of circles and Indian head profiles. At 6:00 a.m. or so, dependent upon your local time zone, the early morning cartoons would come on. You would have a choice of several channels, and the cartoons would be sane in nature.
In our Los Angeles suburb, we were spoiled by VHF channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. We had a few UHF channels as well, channel 28 (PBS) and I think we had a channel 52. So, we pretty much had a whopping nine channels and limited hours of broadcast.
Fast forward to 1977 when ON-TV, a scrambled UHF TV channel and precursor to cable television, came to the Los Angeles area. A harbinger of things to come, no doubt.
Now, we have so many channels of 24 hour programming that we are inundated with minutiae every minute of every day. We have time for grotesque cartoons like Ren and Stimpy and rude and ungrateful teenagers and play by play cops chases of every magnitude. Plus cooking shows for southern belles, chefs with only a half hour to spare, and people who like to cook semi-homemade crap. And don't forget catching people in the midst of cheating on a loved one, parents who want to secure a date for their offspring, and so on.
Oh, and what about the celebrities willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the spotlight. How about those quasi-celebrities like George Foreman, Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, etc., "Run's House" and Gene Simmons who whore out their family moments for a paycheck, only to have their daily moves choreographed to clown-like undignified music?
Take me away to the days of nine meaningful channels and fewer visions of corny celebrities and cartoon vomit. Please.
