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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Fox News at the gym
Posted by Jill | 5:58 AM
So the Grand Opening of the company gym at the Major Corporation™ that employs me is this Tuesday, and there are these bigass outlets high up on the wall that I'm told are going to hold flatscreen TVs. This is usually an ominous sign, because these days, most public places where you see flatscreen TVs means that said TVs are going to be constantly tuned to Faux Noise.

It's going to be hard enough to get me to take the plunge to go to the gym and become the hamster-on-a-treadmill (or elliptical, or whatever) that I never wanted to be, without listening to idiotic wingnut-bots piping propaganda into my ear all day. I'm only hoping that the "TV sound through your earbuds wirelessly" they're talking about becomes a reality, because there's only so loudly you can play WTF podcasts to drown it out.

As annoying as it is, I don't make a fuss about Faux Noise in doctors' offices. My experience has been that you usually find it in the offices of urologists and in imaging centers, where a sizable portion of the clientele is exactly the kind of Angry Aging Man that is the Faux Noise audience. My local bagel shop has it because it caters to the Town Geezers, who gather every morning to rant about our local government but then the one chance they had to actually change things, they voted in the same cronies who have been in power for thirty years yet again. The day I find it in, say, a gynecological office is the day I find another doctor. It's bad enough that Dr. Crazy Unhealthy Diet (of whom I was very fond until she went off the Diet Deep End) publicly crowed with joy in December 2000 about the selection of George W Bush and when someone has a long-stemmed Q-tip in your nether parts, you just smile benignly and say "Uh-huh". That should have told me something right there.

So how do YOU deal with Fox News in public places? Drown it out? Ask for a change? Find someplace else that delivers the same service?

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