Free TV is a lot of work

I have always felt that television, like lions, should be free.

But more than half of U.S. homes have cable TV, a fact which amazed the tightwad in me until I tried to install my own digital TV antenna this week. Now I appreciate cable's allure.

Although free digital TV signals may be sharp and beautiful compared to the old VHF ones, without an antenna they are as elusive to capture as Rachael Ray's appeal.

We muddle by in the living room with a set of digital rabbit ears, which are about as aesthetically pleasing as a couple of celery stalks on a wedding cake. Plus, arise from the couch and you block the digital signal, turning the TV picture into instant modern art—Man Swatting Tiny Cubed Bees, perhaps.

In the bedroom, we have been analog for years. That is not a double entendre, we just have an old TV. Had. I finally set it out on the curb last weekend with a sign—"Vintage. Still works. Picks up original episodes of 'Gilligan's Island.'" It was gone in minutes.

The digital TV which replaced it did not come with an antenna, of course, because TV manufacturers own stock in HBO. So I went to an electronics store, where the grudging acknowledgment of non-cable-subscribed humans was on display via a whopping two choices of antennae.

I chose one which purported to be "indoor/outdoor" and "water resistant." In my experience, "water resistant" is to "waterproof" as abstinence is to contraception. They both do the same thing, but one of them only does it right up until it doesn't.

My thinking was, I might put the bedroom's antenna on the roof, free from signal interference, but then I realized that would involve buying an extension ladder, and once you own an extension ladder, you are invited to perform any number of tree-related jobs you don't really want.

I thought about putting the antenna up in the attic, but that would require going into the attic.

So I resolved to mount the antenna, which was of a pleasing white plastic Tupperware Moderne style, high on the bedroom wall, where it would be unlikely to encounter any water requiring resistance.

The mounting plate came with four screws, which for some reason were not long enough for the job. Or I did the job wrong, a possibility whose odds I lay at about 50/50.

Luckily, my garage is awash in screws—slot-head, Phillips-head, hex-cap, spline drive, spanner head—because if there is one thing a man cannot throw away, it is a screw. Screws are to men as yarn is to women.

So I had screws enough, four long ones, but first I had to drill them a home. The joys of owning an old house are many, but they do not include the task of drilling through lath and plaster walls.

Lath, when introduced to a drill, bows away playfully, then pushes back. Old plaster seems to be as much sand as it is anything, and happily coats your new digital TV set, which you have thoughtlessly forgotten to cover.

But never let it be said that there is a wall I could not bend to my will, even if the result does require a half-day repainting job.

I angled the antenna this way and that and managed to snag most major channels and even more obscure ones. Who knew they had Armenian soap operas?

The good news is, our bedroom TV now gets a crisp, spectacular signal. The bad news—mornings I cannot manage to pry myself from bed until I have found out whether Anoush will take Vartan back, the philandering creep.

Sometimes I think we were better off before electricity.

Vote for my three best

Can you spare 15 minutes to save the world? Of course you can. But I'm not concerned about that. I'm asking you to spare 15 minutes to help me win a contest. It's kind of the same, right?

Each year the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (aka "the moderately employed") holds a contest for members, asking them to submit their three best humor columns published the previous year. If you have read my stuff, you know I am no judge of humor. But you are. So, having read all 52 columns from last year (an exercise I would not wish on a dog), I have narrowed the field down to five finalists for your consideration. Here is all you have to do:

1. Clear 15 minutes from your schedule (10 if you don't move your lips when you read).

2. Read each of the five columns below, and write their names on a notepad.

3. Score each from 1-5, 5 being funniest.

4. Go here to vote (vote only for your top three). After voting, you will be able to see the overall results.

I will send the three top vote-getters into the contest. What do I get if I win? Bragging rights and a few bucks, I think. I've never won.

Please only vote once. Voting ends Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Thank you for taking your valuable time. (Note: If you cannot find three of these columns funny, you won't be the first. Just do your best). Here are your choices, in no particular order:

Headline Bites Man

Living in Harmony and Bliss

George seeks the "fun" in fundraiser

Showcase house

Real men don't

Those unsung Olympic names

As the Winter Olympics wind down today, it is time to shift our focus off the medals and world records and onto the unsung athletes, whose names are hilarious.

I am not suggesting we sit here and make fun of people just because they have goofy names. (I am standing up, actually).

First, there is Fanny Chmelar, whose name is gold even without the medal. It sounds like more of a hobby than a name. Who needs a nickname when you are the renowned Fanny Chmelar?

When missing his target, Croatian biathlete Jakov Fak has been known to scream his own name in frustration.

I think Australian skier Esther Bottomley and Canadian snowboarder Alexa Loo should start a law firm.

Then there is Swedish ice hockey player Jenni Asserholt. Can you imagine the ribbing on the playground? I can, and I, for one, am sorry I missed it.

Would you believe Dandan Man is a Chinese woman?

You might assume Jinelle Zaugg-Siergiej plays hockey for Ukraine. No. For the U.S.

Harri Olli sounds more like an exotic fruit or, at the very least, a death-defying snowboard trick, rather than the Finnish ski jumper he is.

Miraslav Satan, when he is not playing hockey for Slovakia, likes golf. (Weekend golfers everywhere already knew Satan was in the mix there somewhere).

I know you have many choices when deciding on your favorite Slovenian ski jumper, and I thank you for choosing Primoz Pikl.

If the world ran the way it should, Primoz would marry Italian skier Johanna Schnarf, resulting in lots of little Pikl-Schnarfs.

Then there is Roman Polak. (No, he is neither. He is Czech).

One has to admire the uplifting comeback of Serbian skier Marija Trmcic after having nearly all the vowels removed from her name at birth. Friends say she took inspiration from Czech bobsleigher Jan Vrba.

Some athletes names are just fun to say. Ekaterina Ananina for one. It sounds like a wagon going fast over an old slat board bridge.

Juha Lallukka is a great name. It seems like what you might yell when something really amazing happens but you are not allowed to curse.

I really like Margarita Marbler. When not freestyle-skiing the Austrian Alps, she says she enjoys "playing Gameboys." Oh, Miss Marbler. Don't you mean "gaming playboys"?

Most fun of all is Raluca Stramaturaru. I swear this is what my dog yelps whenever the UPS truck drives by.

The longest name in these Games belongs to Svetlana Malahova-Shishkina, 10 melodic syllables of Kazakh bliss.

The shortest name is a five-way tie between Jan Bos, Tim Hug, Hui Ren, Yao Shi and Ben Sim. I wonder if those guys have syllable envy, and whether I have too much time on my hands.

I wonder if Mama Berlot, back in 1990, had known she was birthing a future Olympic skier, she would have still named her son Gasper.

I wonder if cross-country skier Ivan Batory gets a lot of "Energizer Bunny" jokes.

I wonder if Olivia Nobs is really quite curvaceous.

I wonder if Jeff Pain unconsciously took up the sport of skeleton because of his name.

I wonder if Tessa Virtue thinks hers is an awful lot to live up to.

Well, Juha Lallukka! I'm out of space. See you again next week when ice and snow will be gone from our TV sports shows and back doing God's work—bringing Washington to a grinding halt.

Mashup tale

It has been said that there are really only something like seven story lines, with a few variations, like boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl to better-looking boy, boy dresses up as a girl and kind of likes it, and so on.

Virtually every possible plotline has been catalogued and numbered in a book called "The Types of International Folk Tales," so on a whim I slammed together tales #1+2+675+705+762+851+1414+1457+1620+1804 and wrote my own kind of folk tale mash-up. Tonight at bedtime, tell your kids a story they have definitely never heard:

Once upon a time, a clever fox played dead in the road, so that a man with a wagonload of fish would stop to pick him up, thinking to sell his beautiful pelt. But the fox stole the fish and fled.

Ever the trickster, the fox came across a bear in the forest and persuaded him that he could catch fish using his tail, so the bear stuck his tail through a hole in the ice where it froze fast.

That is why bears do not have tails to speak of, or to fish with.

Not far from the very same river sat a lazy boy. He had been born from a fish, as it turns out. The boy sat with his best friend, a dwarf, who didn't mind if people called him a dwarf, frankly, because he owned a golden billy goat.

The goat had once put a beat-down on an ogre and butted him off a high bridge, so he was golden, not in the sense that he was shiny and valuable, but just in that he had it made.

At the shriek of an owl, which was odd because it was only noon, a spider crept out from under a rock nearby, and the boy took this as a good luck sign, and who wouldn't? So the boy and the dwarf and the goat went to town.

Here the lazy boy (who was not really lazy, just introspective, but once you get a rep in Juvy, it sticks) encountered a princess who was trying to solve a riddle. The answer, unbeknownst to her, was "why the cat has a short nose," but the riddle, strangely enough, involved a woodcock, which was really a red herring.

The boy soon lost interest in the task anyway, because suddenly down the road came a woman with 365 children, one of whom was carrying a worm in a stone. The boy used this opportune distraction to steal the golden goat, but lost him in a wager a week later, competing with the devil at mowing grass.

Seriously.

Meanwhile, across town, Lucky Hans, who had gotten his name due to some now-forgotten escapade with a lisping maiden, pulled his shoes from the furnace (don't ask), lit out for the street, and immediately fell into conversation with a one-eyed man and a hunchback.

The hunchback had an eel filled with sand over his shoulder, a conversation-starter if ever there was one. Soon the men were fast friends, and headed together for the church, because they had heard a rumor that the parson was going to sell his daughter. The parson refused, on principle, to sell to an eel-toting hunchback, and anyway somebody else bid higher.

Then there came a thick fog, and a giant turnip. Or maybe it was a huge loaf of bread. Well, you can just imagine what happened...347+629+153.

And they lived happily, if peg-legged, ever after.

Those winter games

The Winter Olympic Games are in full swing, which you can tell because guys you can't usually get a word out of on the topic of women's 500 meter short track are snapping at you for interrupting their pontifications on the merits of drafting.

Guys who, a week earlier, you could not have paid to watch their own kids sled down a hill are suddenly chastising the Spandexed alpiner on the TV for going into his "tuck" too early.

These same guys are telling anybody who will listen that "piste" is the French term for a groomed ski run. ("Piste" is also an excellent word to describe British athletes who drink excessively after a race).

Fun Winter Olympics facts:

• In alpine skiing, racers can reach speeds of more than 130 kilometers per hour (70 liters) down a vertical slope 1100 meters (12 furlongs) long. Longs. Long.
• The Giant Slalom was originally called the Giant Salmon, and smelled much worse that it does today.
• The Super Giant Slalom, fittingly enough, requires the skier to race the course holding a 64 oz. soda in each hand.
• The Super Combined comes with fries.
• In skiing "moguls," athletes must ski over the prone, buried torsos of Donald Trump, Richard Branson and Martha Stewart.
• The sport of "curling" dates from 1541, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, coincides with the invention of whiskey.
• In the summer months, the sport of "curling" is known as "shuffleboard," and the "Olympians" are referred to as "Octogenarians."
• "Bobsleigh" is the same sport formerly known as "bobsled," but don't be fooled—it has the same rules.
• In terms of learning sledding technique, the novel "Ethan Frome" would be about as bad an instruction manual as a person could likely find.
• While attempting to qualify for the Olympics, Briton Gillian Cooke's Lycra bodysuit split open from behind, revealing that she is partial to a thong. In the interests of propriety, readers are urged not to visit YouTube.com, not to type in the words "Gillian Cooke pants," and not to join the 776,258 other in viewing the frosty mishap.
• "Ice dancing" is to figure skating as orange roughy is to sea bass.
• Figure skating is the only Olympic sport, winter or summer, in which a male athlete is allowed, nay, encouraged, to wear spangles.
• Luge racers can travel 140 kilometers (20 cubits) an hour and, in corners, can pull five G's (the gravitational force at which five wheels of Gruyere cheese appear to be only one).
• Ski-jumping was invented by ex-wives for husbands who got behind on alimony payments.
• Short track speed skating became a full medal sport at the 1992 Winter Olympics, in which Apolo Anton Ohno competed as a toddler.
• "Ohno" has entered common vernacular as a shorthand term for an unappreciated skill someone has completely mastered yet refuses to give up, as in "Marge has totally 'Ohno'd' that fruitcake recipe."
• Callan Chythlook-Sifsof is not, as one might assume, a character from "Star Wars," she is an Eskimo on the U.S "snowboard cross" team.
• Snowboarders perform acrobatic tricks in a snow tube called a "half-pipe." In the off-season, a typical snowboarder may often be found utilizing what is commonly called a "water pipe."
• Kenyan Nordic skier Philip Boit sold five of his cows last year to finance his training in Finland. "Kenyan Nordic skier" is now my favorite Olympic phrase ever.

Whatever happens in the next two weeks, the Vancouver Olympics have already made history as the first Winter Games held without snow or ice. If weather permits, maybe they can even hold summer Olympics instead.

Those get better ratings anyway.