Jonas Jonesing

Last night, my daughter and I tried to watch her grandmother's new digital television. It was not a fun experience.

First off, the hardware and software were both, in my mind, profoundly buggy. The hardware was a Samsung plasma screen which would go bleep-bloop-BLIIP when it turned on, and the reverse when it turned off. Sounded like fun the first time, and the second time, but afterwards.... We figured that since the TV took about three seconds to actually turn on, this was its way of saying okay, okay, I'm coming already! We also found the audio control to be less than awesome -- you'd press the button to change the level, the little audio-level indicator would pop up on the screen, and literally 1 to 2 seconds later, it'd drop off again. You want to change it multiple levels? Push the damn button multiple times -- nothing happens if you just hold it down. So that was not fun, and it was made worse by the Comcast remote control, which has (I counted) 53 separate buttons, including the what the hell is THIS for buttons marked EXIT, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN ... Look, I just want to watch TV, okay? Not hunt for the MUTE button (hint: its a tiny button in the middle of the remote), or accidentally hit INFO or any of the other cuteness selectors.

But the deal that made me glad I'd brought a book along was that my daughter really wanted to watch Camp Rock, the plot of which is, essentially, poor girl gets to go to a 'rock music camp' (the phrase 'so hip they can't see over their pelvis' comes to mind) where she meets rich rock star (one of the fabled Jonas Brothers playing, gasp, a member of a boy band... the other members being his actual brothers in the actual Jonas Brothers group). Mistaken identities, intense hipness exhibited by all, ditto intense stage presence and performance skills (think High School Musical In The Canadian Woods), teen bitches in training getting slapped up side the head by their former mind slaves, all of this ending with a hunt by the aforementioned Jonas through the camp for the one girl who can sing his new song to perfection.... only to give up in despair, when, guess who it turns out to be? Aw....true love. I could not believe how thin the plot was, or how dumb the show. Or that not only did my daughter like it, but when I called home to say hi to my wife, and I mentioned that the daughter was watching 'this dumb TV show', my wife said 'Oh, Camp Rock? Yeah, I was watching that.' Sigh. I guess guys weren't meant to understand.

Though, hey, I did get her to watch some of a CSPAN talk show with Obama voters, post election, talking about why they voted as they did, and other matters. She was interested, and we talked about some of the topics they brought up, which is why I let her watch the other stuff. Camp Barack earns you Camp Rock, kiddo.