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If you've made it this far, I hope you saw the warning. 'Cause I'm pissed.

I saw a quote a few days ago that said, "Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done." I thought that was an excellent quote, and promptly memorized it and repeated it to people.

There are a few shows that I watch regularly. SportsCenter, mostly to see how the players I've got in my fantasy baseball league did the night before, the HBO drama series Oz and The Sopranos, and The Muppet Show. I love the Muppet Show, and think it's one of the best shows television's ever seen. The Odyssey Channel recently started reshowing the Muppet Shows at 6PM, Mondays through Fridays. Sheer bliss. Edgar Bergen was on Monday night and he (and Charlie McCarthy, of course) were great. Tonight was George Burns. So I turned on the TV around 6PM, switched it to channel 32, and do you know what I saw?

Some fat, sweaty, child-molesting pedophile of a televangelist, prancing about a red-carpeted stage like a cheap whore, shouting and cajoling people to feel God's love and send him their money. I stared. Liz stared. "What the hell?" We flipped through the TV Guide. No help there. I quickly zipped through the channels. No sign of Muppets or George Burns. Just the same fat cocksucker, sweating and yelling and praying.

Liz got on the phone to our cable company. She talks, gets put on hold, talks some more. The phone droid tells her that the Odyssey Channel got bought out by the religious channel. No more Muppets.

Dammit! There's enough crappy TV as there is! We get the fucking Golf Channel for Christ's sake. About three different versions of the Home Shopping Circle-Jerk. Enough shitty local stations shot on bad video with the coloring all skewed to shit to choke a goddamn horse. And who the fuck really gives a shit about CNBC, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, TNN (Hicks R Us), or any of about 20 other waste-of-bandwidth channels festering on cable. The last fucking thing that cable needed was a greedy, heavily-jowled, sanctimonious hypocrite jiggling around, preying on stupid people.

Dammit, I want my Muppets back.