I don’t normally watch TV. If I have time to waste, I find it much more satisfying to waste it on the computer. But yesterday my brother was watching TV. I ended up watching a bit of TV with him, and then he left. So I started flipping through the channels, and came across National Geographic in HD.

Whatever you might have thought National Geographic TV would be about, you’re probably wrong. I tuned in halfway through a show about mobsters controlling Las Vegas in the 80s (or maybe 70s), and the FBI work to bring them down. It was kind of a fascinating show, actually, but when it ended, I looked forward to quitting this “TV” thing and getting back to the computer.

But then the next show was about the Mafia working with biker gangs to sell cocaine in Canada, which got me hooked. After that, I finally escaped.

But then last night was another one of those “I finished the Internet” moments, and I really didn’t have the motivation to go do anything actually productive. So I tried another hit of TV.

National Geographic (which they call “Nat Geo,” a name which for some reason comes across as pretentious and irksome to me) had a program on “police technology,” the latest high-tech they’re using. They talked about the “Shot Spotter,” a neat system of microphones throughout a “bad neighborhood” in LA as a pilot program. They fired a test shot to demonstrate the system (they apparently test it often). About a minute later a cruiser showed up. Apparently it works by calculating the (miniscule) difference in arrival of the gunshot sound to various listening posts, and then triangulates the location with awfully good accuracy. He also modeled some newer non-lethal weapons. They modeled tasers, which, despite the whole “Don’t tase me bro” bad reputation they’re getting, actually strike me as a good thing. (They’re basically there for times when an officer’s only other choice is to pull out his gun, and I’d certainly rather get tasered than shot in the face.) The new ones come with embedeed video and audio cameras for accountability purposes. They also had what’s basically a paintball gun, firing something like 10 rounds a second. They have a few different “balls” they can fire, including hard rubber balls intended to inflict a bit of injury for crowd control, and traditional paintballs for marking suspects. But the neat one was the one they apparently use the most: “paintballs” filled with something like mace in powered form. They can fire a couple at a suspect and stop him pretty much instantly, or, for crowd control, fire a stream of them at the ground in a distance to keep people back.

That finished up at 11. Finally, I could escape the TV. Except, darn them, the next program was about past CIA programs, including some insane attempts at brainwashing people / feeding them LSD, and the pretty blatant murder of one of their operatives who’d expressed to his superiors that he was very uncomfortable with them testing serin on people, particularly after one died. So he “committed suicide” by jumping out a 13th-story window. The CIA insisted on a closed-casket funeral (for the family’s protection, of course!), and apparently discreetly had a few CIA agents at the funeral. The family later caught on that someone wasn’t right and exhumed the body, finding that he suffered blunt trauma to the head (which entirely contradicted the medical reports), and that the CIA the next year released a “manual” for their agents, including a recommendation that, to kill people, you should whack them in the head to knock them out, and then hurl them out a window to make it look like suicide.

Right now I’m just tuning into “Seconds from Disaster,” a show about a volcano in the Caribbean.

At 3pm there’s a show on the Green Berets, but I’m gone then. 4pm is a show about “hired guns” in Iraq, 7pm is about the shooting of Ronald Reagan, 8pm on Kent State, and 9pm is a program they’ve been hyping on the Oklahoma City bombing, with suggestions that the people convicted for it didn’t act alone. 10pm is about Columbine. I can skip 11pm, because it’s a repeat of Kent State. In fact, it’s repeats until 3am, when it’s about an old al Queda attempt at blowing up a plane. 4am is another plane crash, and 5am is another al Queda attack. Then 10am is “Military technology inspired by nature.”

I don’t think I can sleep anymore.

Seriously, this is an amazing TV network.