Is It Time to Cut the Cable or Dump the Dish?

Do you ever find yourself clicking through the channels on your cable or satellite TV, hoping to find something you'd actually like to watch?

"Real Housewives of....Somewhere." Click. "Wife Swap." Click. "The Bachelorette." Click. "BBQ Pitmasters." Click. "Dog the Bounty Hunter." Click. "Steven Seagal, Lawman." Click. "I Shouldn't Be Alive." Click. "Shear Genius." Click. "Movie about Teenage Angst." Click. "Movie About 20-Something Angst." Click. "Movie About Middle-age Angst." Click. "WWW Wrestling." Click. "Ultimate Supreme Bash-Each-Other-Silly-Championship." Click.

Press the button. Press the button. Press the button. You go through a complete circuit and start again. And then it hits you....why are you paying $70, $80, $90 or more a month for a mountain of dreck that contains only a  few shows you actually watch?

You can survive without cable or satellite TV. Honest.

I reached the "throw the remote control at the converter box" stage quite some time ago. I'll admit, the thought of going cold turkey was scary, but I did some research and found that I could watch a lot of my favorite shows without that monthly hit from, in my case, DIRECTV.

Can you do the same? Here's how to find out.

First, make a list of the channels and shows you actually watch on a regular basis on your cable or satellite TV. In my case, it was old movies--and I'd pretty much seen everything on Turner Classic Movies twice--home improvement shows on HGTV, Top Gear on BBC America and The Daily Show on Comedy Central. It was surprising to find how much I was paying for and how little I was actually watching.

Second, grab a local Sunday paper and take a look at what's you have in the way of broadcast channels. When I'd gone to satellite, there'd only been about 10 channels available in my area. Now, with a "rabbit ear" antennae, I can pick up nearly twenty channels, including an all sports channel, channels showing old TV series, an all-movie channel and a really excellent new PBS channel called World. I'm planning to buy a better antennae soon and should be able to pick up even more.

Third, check out Netflix. If you have a fairly speedy computer hookup, you can watch hundreds of Netflix movies and a lot of TV series episodes via instant download on your computer, as well as order discs through the mail to watch on your TV. I've got a internet connection with 5 meg download that only costs me $44 a month, and on that, I can watch older episodes of Top Gear, Dr. Who, BBC miniseries such as North and South and Bleak House and everything from classic movies to foreign films whenever I want. The monthly cost? $9.( If you need to have a setup the whole family can watch, you might need to buy yourself a Wii console for your main TV...but there's no law that says you have to buy it new.)

Check out Hulu.com. I found many of my favorite HGTV series available there, as well as back episodes of top broadcast series.

Stop by your local library. If you have kids, see what's available in the way of children's shows on disc. Many libraries also have a good selection of movies.

Check your favorite cable channel's website. Each morning, I can go to Comedy Central and watch the previous night's episode of The Daily Show on my computer, and it doesn't bother me at all that I'm watching it twelve hours "delayed." See if you can do the same for shows on your favorite cable channels.

So....do a little research. Check out what's on broadcast, what's on the internet, what's available fron Netflix or your local library.

You just might be able to cut loose from cable...and that monthly bill....and feel little or no pain at all.

Libraries! One of the Best Deals Around

If you want to save money on books, videos, CDs, magazines, internet access, newspapers, entertainment for your kids,.....

...oh, heck, just get yourself down to your local library!

I live right between two small towns, Azle and Springtown. Both have excellent libraries. Thanks to them, I have been able to, in the last few months

• Read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat for free.


• Read David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas for free.


• Read the entire Dean Koontz Odd Thomas series for free.


• Read the entire Shopaholic series for free. (Yes, I do enjoy Bex's adventures, though in the real world, someone with her attitude would soon be both broke and divorced. Seriously.)


• Watch the entire Masterpiece Theatre series, I, Claudius, for free. Also Bleak House. Also the extended version of The Return of The King.


• Read Newsweek, Time, National Geographic, Consumer Report and half-a-dozen other magazines for free. (Okay, so I don't read all of them every visit.)


• When I was wrestling with both a new computer operating system and a cranky dialup connection (now replaced with broadband, thank God) I was able to use my library's internet-connected computers, broadband fast, to find information I needed...for free.

And those are only a few examples of what a good library can provide.

If I had kids I could also have taken them to the library's Saturday afternoon puppet show, or checked out and let them watch The Land Before Time I, II, III, IV (how many of these sequels are there?) the requisite twenty times straight without buying or renting tape after tape. They could have browsed through a dozen shelves of children's books, or gone to the library's Childrens Reading Hour. Or they could have used the library's "kids only" computers, hooked to highly filtered connections, to explore the internet or play games.

If I was a job seeker, I could have searched through a list of companies, then gone on the internet to browse job listings or even apply for jobs. If I was a student, I could have used those internet-connected computers to do research.

Or I could have checked for everything from recipes to home repair information, in the book stacks, in the magazine room or on the internet.

A library is a terrific grab bag of free information and entertainment, and all you need to gain access is a library card. And a library card is almost always free to anyone who lives in that town.

Stop by your local library. It's a treasure chest just waiting to be opened.