Through the Pixelation I see Tina Turner...

Damn You, Hurricane IKE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don’t ever let it be said I am not a highly compassionate person.

I feel the pain of all of those in The Gulf who just suffered tragic losses from Hurricane Ike.

You see, Ike has stirred up a weather system that is now causing very heavy rain here in the Midwest, and as a result I am dealing with my own minor tragedy.

I don’t have any High Definition Satellite signals for my local stations, and the Indianapolis Colts game is less than 2 hours away.

Sure, I have High Def on all of the “premium” and normal channels one would associate with cable/satellite. However, Directv broadcasts their market-specific local channels through a Spot Beam Signal (for me its satellite 99s) and at the moment the rain is strong enough to be choking that signal out. Yes, I still have the standard definition signal that I will be able to watch the game on, but do you know how grainy standard definition football looks on a 47 inch 1080P LCD television???? It’s almost unbearable. Woe is me.

To a techno-junkie like me there are few things worse than being separated from technology. It's been that way for a long time. Nine or ten years ago, while others were showing off the early Palm Pilots, I was showing off a first generation Pocket PC that allowed me to accomplish REAL work in Excel and Word without having to drag a laptop around.

Nowadays, I am secretly bugged that I cannot access a free wireless signal in church. (Pastor, that’s the King James version of the Bible I am looking at on my PocketPC during your sermon. What do you think I am doing? Checking my blog hits?)

My cell phone obsession is worse than the WiFi one. I not only cannot live without my mobile phone…I now have to have a quad band phone so that I am ensured of coverage on the most remote outward parts of Papua New Guinea.

If you want me to have a full blown breakdown…just keep me away from my email account for more than 16 hours.

If you want me to do my impersonation of David Foster Wallace, just take away my cell phone and all internet access for only one hour.

Let me clarify one thing…I do go hours at a time without being either on the phone or on the internet. However, the mere thought of not having available access to those forms of communication causes me severe emotional distress.

I don’t constantly use high tech communications…I just need to know it’s available.

At the moment, I am starting to feel a little bit of that same TSA (techno-separation-anxiety) each time I switch from the grainy standard version of CBS to the high def version of that channel where I find a black screen with an update from Directv that says, “Looking for Signal In on Satellite 2… (771).”

Thanks to you, Ike, I have to watch Peyton, Joseph, Marvin, Reggie, Dwight, and Bob on a grainy big screen.

Ike, it wasn’t enough for you to just batter the coast, but you had to reach up here into the Midwest and put the smack down on me, too.

Apparently Tina Turner wasn’t exaggerating about your evil ways.