At The Risk of Sounding Stupid…

Cidu Bill on May 6th 2010

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Filed in Arlo and Janis, Bill Bickel, CIDU, Jimmy Johnson, comic strips, comics, humor, television | 12 responses so far

12 Responses to “At The Risk of Sounding Stupid…”

  1. Marshal May 6th 2010 at 12:21 am 1

    At a guess someone activated the parental controls.

    .

  2. Usual John May 6th 2010 at 12:24 am 2

    Someone set the stupidity control to prevent access to the stupid shows (like the parental control, but not literally the same, I guess). Unfortunately, that left Arlo with nothing to watch.

  3. Frosted Donut May 6th 2010 at 01:23 am 3

    Remember the “V” chip? That was a chip built into every TV set that was going to let us set a level of carnage and mayhem we (or our sensitive family) could tolerate. Then whenever a TV show came on that exceeded our V-level, the TV would show us pictures of rainbows and kittens. (Okay, I made up the part about the rainbows and kittens.) It turned out that nobody ever really set a violence level, because it was too hard to figure out how to do it. Plus, you’d get really tired of watching “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” all the time.

    Arlo has got an S-chip in his TV set. Whenever TV exceeds a certain level of stupidity, it shows him articles from “The New Yorker.” Unfortunately, any setting of the S-chip cuts off pretty much all TV.

    It’s a reasonably clever way of saying “everything on TV is stupid.” Is everything on TV stupid? Discuss.

  4. George P May 6th 2010 at 01:44 am 4

    I think “somebody turned on the stupidity filter” would have been clearer.

  5. Marshal May 6th 2010 at 02:19 am 5

    Was Gene ever shown to be a big TV watcher like some of the
    other comic kids. Although I’ve read this comic for many years
    Gene was getting close to going to college and pretty much
    vanishing from the comic except for the occasional story arc.
    I started reading when Jimmy Johnson did the story arc about
    the fisherman and the mermaid… I like that, sometimes wish he
    would do more.

    Frosted Donut,
    I could be mistaken but I think modern TVs still have the V-chip.
    I’m sure some parents use the capability. I’m also sure that even more
    parents don’t. Oh, and the fact that the manual tells how to reset
    the v-chip to 0000 is not a good reason not to use it. Since the child
    would need to know the original password in order for the parent
    not to find out they were watching forbidden channels.

  6. Daniel J. Drazen May 6th 2010 at 09:47 am 6

    The lack of “stupidity control” in real life is the only thing keeping C-SPAN on the air.

  7. Lihtox May 6th 2010 at 10:17 am 7

    It could be the other way around: perhaps all TVs come with a filter which *only* allows stupid shows in, and the filter is turned on by default. Turn the filter off, as Arlo does, and wow, look at all these great shows! It’s a nice fantasy, anyway. :)

  8. hm May 6th 2010 at 10:21 am 8

    There is still a “V-chip”, a little more refined now. It uses those show ratings to control what shows you can see. If you try to watch something that violates the settings you have to enter the parent password. Otherwise it just shows a black screen and a message saying that the show is blocked.

    I think you can set it not just by the rating (TV-14 for example) but also by what the rating is based on (violence, nudity, adult situations etc). You can also block complete channels…at least that’s how mine works.

    I like the idea of the stupidity controls, although sometimes the stupid stuff is the most fun.

  9. Marshal May 6th 2010 at 10:36 am 9

    Daniel J. Drazen,
    The lack of a lie detector chip in TVs is why most politicians can
    stay in office.

  10. Keera May 6th 2010 at 12:25 pm 10

    Or: Many TVs work in such a way that if you set them in stand-by with the remote, you need the remote to get them out of stand-by. Mine’s that way. Turning the power off and on has no effect on the stand-by mode.

  11. tee_eff_em May 6th 2010 at 03:57 pm 11

    I turned the brightness control on my teevee all the way up, but the shows didn’t get any smarter.

    (apologies to whichever stand-up I stole that from)

  12. Christian May 6th 2010 at 04:10 pm 12

    This is a much better joke along those lines:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/comics/king.html?name=Bizarro&date=20070628

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