We were watching TV the other night and it seemed there was almost as many ads as programing so I started timing ads versus programing on the History Channel. It came out to about five minutes of program to four minutes of advertising. Being a Saturday, I thought I would switch over and watch college football. There were seven or eight games on different channels and I started going through the channels to find out which games were being televised. As I scrolled through the channels at any given time it over half the football channels had ads running instead of the game.

Then I got the most recent copy of PWW magazine and was disappointed to see so much advertising in the issue. I started opening all the pages of the magazine and accually counted more bi-folds with advertising than content. I was going to cancel my subscription until they offered a free gift subscription for a friend if I kept up my subscription.

We installed an answering machine on our landline a few years ago and finally set it to record after two rings to minimize the sales calls getting through. That worked pretty good, but we finally cancelled that service due to increasing costs. A news report the other night said next year over fifty percent of telephone calls we receive will be spam or scams.

Growing up, there were TV commercials on the hour, the half hour and the quarter hours and TV was free. The shows were better and you didn't have to pay for TV channels that were trying to sell stuff 24/7.

I guess I'm just getting to be an old codger, but this is totally out of control. Maybe I should just give up and spend more time in the shop.