Don't You Know That Television Rots Your Soul?

"I've been flipping channels for four hours and forty minutes now," muses Scott, "And I've yet to repeat a channel. And so far, if there's a number, there seems to be a network or station that corresponds with it. And while sometimes it's a familiar network, I don't think they're all coming from the same world. I don't even know what kind of TV this is. It shouldn't even be able to go that high."

"TV from parallel universes rocks," says Josh.

"Really? Let me see that," says Sara, grabbing for the remote. She starts punching in numbers at random.

"What have you managed to find so far?" asks Jasper, grabbing for the popcorn.

"Lessee...so far, I've found about--oh, let's say thirty or so different versions of Fox, and at least three times that number of CBS, NBC, and ABC feeds. Not too many PBS-type feeds. I have no idea how many different versions of HBO I've seen, or Cinemax, or Bravo or any of the other normal channels. I don't even recognize some of the languages they're in either."

Click."--photographs of the Iranian missile test released today. According to experts, at least two of the missiles in the photographs were actually computer-generated fakes, and so--"

Click. "--and proceedings at the Hague continued today following former American vice-president Richard Cheney's heart attack yesterday. The defense counsel team has urged the tribunal to take Mister Cheney's health and advanced age into consideration--"

Click. "...what I'm SAYING HERE is that the president's decision to deploy nuclear weapons was perfectly correct, and I think he showed remarkable restraint. This is a WAR, not just of men, but of cultures and ideas that are fundamentally opposed to one another, that can't--and SHOULDN'T--live in the same world together. Sure there were Iraqis who weren't bad people at heart. We all understand that. But, with all due respect, what card-carrying, bleeding-heart liberal *traitors* like Ann here DON'T understand is that in war, there are always casualties, collateral damage, and that the President's actions, while perhaps too extreme for her tastes, undoubtedly saved far more lives, American AND Iraqi, than a ground--"

"Jesus wept...Moore's *collateral damage* is nearly two million Iraqis dead! DEAD! Whole cities reduced to ash, the *BLEEP*ing countryside poisoned for decades! BIRTH DEFECTS that are going to last for generations! Men, women, children, OLD PEOPLE blasted into soot or dying of radiation poisoning, because of psychotic war-tards who get a boner over death like this bloated monster Michael-*BLEEPing*--"

"Miss Coulter, you'll have a chance to give your rebuttal in a few moments. Moore, you've got two minutes left, and I suggest you BOTH refrain from any further personal attacks or profanity, or..."

"I, uh..think I found CNN," says Sara. "Or something that passes for CNN."

Click. "...speech at the memorial ceremony in memory of the Decepticon attack on Seattle four years ago that left more than ten thousand dead. Though the wreckage has long since been cleared and our losses mourned, the healing process yet continues. Optimus Prime, the high commander of the Autobots, laid a ceremonial wreath at the foot of the memorial at the conclusion of the services--"

"Whoah..." says Josh. "Make a note of that channel, would you?"

Sara munches a handful of popcorn and finally flips past the cluster of news networks--more CNN's than you could shake a stick at, plus GNN, Terrestrial News, the Solar System Newsfeed, ISSR People's Democratic News, Fatherland News Network, Cascadia National News, and their myriad equivalents from a hundred alternate worlds, some in languages that didn't no longer existed or had never existed in the first place.

The room is filled with the sound of Ozzy Osbourn's gravelly, sepulchral singing. "Wow--I know this! Stop here! I love this show!" says Jasper. "But..." stops dead. "What the hell?"

The man onscreen buckling his belt and his badge amid stirring shots of his family against computer generated backgrounds isn't Duane Chapman--it's Phil McGraw, chomping a cigar. "I'll hunt you down, 'cuz I'm the Doc...I'm Doctor Phil, the Terrible Phil...The Bounty Hunter," sang Ozzy.

"Weird," said Scott.

"Now the reason I was able to catch you that time son, is that eighty, ninety pounds of extra weight you're carrying around there, tubby. You're not getting any younger...OR thinner. That's what smoking Crack all day and eating Hershey bars under an air conditioner gets you, and I'm just trying to HELP you."

"Yes sir." The orca-fat bail-jumping junkie handcuffed in the back of the huge SUV stares out the window and sounds bored.

"Now packing that fat around like you are, that's going to kill you. I'm looking at a walking, talking dead man right now. You think you're going to live to see fifty. I got news for you--you ain't. You. Are. Going. To. Die. When they get you to prison, you need to see if you can get on the prison weightlifting team and drop some of that excess fat as fast as you can, maybe see if you can swap the Crack habit out for Meth, because that, at least, helps you lose weight, and I hear the prison-sex is better too..."

As they watch, it becomes apparent that "Doc" Phil and his family are bounty hunters in whatever world that this channel comes from. On every collar, Phil goes out of his way to give gruff, homespun pseudopsychological advice--useful or no--to the people he and his family collects, much of it to do with their relationship to their parents and their weight. Mostly their weight. As near as the four of them can tell, nearly everyone is either too thin, or too fat, is a drug addict, and EVERYONE has some sort of emotional hangup about their mother.

1. The show gets weirder--one of the bounties the McGraw clan collects is...Josh Burbank?
2. The show ends. Next up is "Oprah: Warrior Princess!"
3. Profit!
4. Same as #2, but the next show is a reality show that follows Paris Hilton in prison. Yay!
5. "Spoonhunter," a show about hunting dangerous wild game armed only with spoons, is next!
6. The president of some alternate version of the United States or another gives a drunken, rambling and terrifying State of the Union address.
7. Josh rams his head through the screen of the TV in hopes of feeding the channels directly into his brain.
8. Doctor Phil is the antichrist and must be stopped. Josh and the gang begin the arduous journey to stop him!

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