Free Rise

It’s been years since the Smurfs babysat kids while their parents slept in, but this hurts all the same. Fox is cancelling its Saturday morning cartoon lineup and selling off the time for infomercials.

Fox executives said that children’s programming was simply no longer viable on network television — mainly because of competition from cable channels.

Of course, competition from pay-TV is just the tip of the programming iceberg.

My wife was a little sad that our kids won’t grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons. Indeed, those days are long gone, and Saturday morning programming has for the last 15 years or so been a weird mix of animation, peewee reality shows, game shows, sit-coms, and infomercials. Saved by the Bell, anyone?

But the more significant change is that our kids will grow up not knowing “programming” — the placement and scheduling of content — at all. As it happens, she watches Sesame Street whenever we feel like launching it on the Tivo or DVD player or YouTube or SesameStreet.com. She says, “Now let’s watch Elmo,” and we do. Even we don’t know when Sesame Street is really “on.”

When I was a kid, everyone I knew watched the nightly network news in their house, and the only question was whether your parents preferred Brokaw, Jennings, or Rather. (It makes me feel especially old when I remember how big a deal it was when Cronkite retired from his anchor chair.) The nightly news is now an anachronism with a dying customer base, like TV Guide or video rental stores. Everyone saw Katie Couric interview Sarah Palin, but nobody saw it at 6:11pm on their local CBS affiliate.

What we’re watching happen now is an irreversible shift toward self-programming. When our kid is a grown-up — hell, when she’s 10 — “television” is going to be nearly indistinguishable from “the Internet” because none of us will tolerate abiding by some predetermined network schedule.

That is, except for football.

It’s a rough time in the global economy, and the knowledge that we’re still a couple gloomy Xmases from a recovery doesn’t make this season any merrier. But at least we beat inflation, right?

Oil prices have collapsed faster than the value of an unfinished Miami condo. Commodities are down across the board as demand slumps. It just was just a few weeks ago that economists and gold-hoarders were predicting American hyperinflation due to Fed profligacy. But suddenly the dollar is up and the watchword is deflation.

Worry not. Prices aren’t really going down that fast. They’re just being reclassified and hidden. Have you bought an airline ticket lately? Or… a t-shirt?

Check this out. Pretty sweet, eh? Plastering the wisdom of legendary SF eccentric Frank Chu across your chest makes you look and feel smarter.

Wanna buy it? Thirty bucks. That’s right, 30 smackeroos. Now there’s some inflation. I paid 1/3 of that for an original Frank Chu sign a few months ago. But here comes the real kick in the perineum.

A $5 charge for “Economy”? Have things gotten so bad that companies are tacking on surcharges just for business conditions?

Oh wait… that’s for “economy” shipping. Hmm, maybe this could be clearer, CafePress.

But with e-tailers vigorously discounting themselves out of existence, maybe it’s only a matter of time until we see the “DJIA decline surcharge.”