Well at first, I was planning on writing one of my usual columns decrying some excess oozing out from Washington (for example, the funneling of PAC money into the pockets of various members of the DeLay family), but to be honest, one can only write so many of those in a row before everyone begins to tune him out. Eventually I’ll be complaining that the Republicans are responsible for the big snowstorm last weekend, and I doubt that anyone really wants to read through that mess.

As all 15 people who usually read my column know well by now (I figured that by now my readership must have doubled), I’m a bit of a nerdy sort of guy. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m also a bit of a gamer — for example, I finished yet another game of KOTOR in the last week.

Of course, I’m not as much of a gamer I’d like to be or used to be. After all, being a nerd, I’m also immensely worried about my grades and my quixotic attempt to get into a top-tier graduate school.

Not to mention the fact that I’m far too cheap to drop the 50 bucks a pop that is usually required for a game. And while I’d never trade my Mac for a Piece of Crap in the proverbial thousand years, as a gaming machine, it’s almost like having time warp to around the summer of 2003.

Therefore, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that when I discovered there is an actual television network (G4TV) dedicated to all sorts of random gaming paraphernalia, I was enthused. And while there are seemingly only eight programs on this network shown in constant rotation and only one of them is any good, it still quickly became the default television station for my late-night viewing. After all, with CNN being depressing as hell since November, what else was I going to be watching?

One show, X-Play, the network’s review show, has become one of the five shows that have become almost required viewing for me. With a combination of sketches that — while sometimes inane — can at their best rival the humor of “The Daily Show’s” segments and with rather brutal commentary about the varying levels of sucktitude in the majority of games today, this is one of the better programs out there for our age group (well at least the kind of odd/nerdy members of our age group). I guess everyone else is sitting around watching yet another season of the drunkenness of the “Real World” or something.

Anywise the point of this article, well outside of making me a semi-quick ten bucks for senselessly babbling for two pages, is to make an attempt to get this network carried by Time Warner Cable in Kent. I mean seeing as this is, for the most part, a college town, G4 would be a much better fit for the cable package than the Soap Opera Network and the Lifetime Movie Network. So if this sounds like a network worth watching to you, and if your idealism hasn’t been crushed yet, and you think you can still harass a large corporation into doing something, e-mail Time Warner and ask them to add G4 to their basic cable package in Kent. Who knows? It just might work.

Mike McLaughlin is a senior history major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].