It's What It Is

"You charge with a gun. With a knife you run." - Al Pacino starring as Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman.

I have mixed feelings about Martin Scorsese's The Irishman after investing three and a half hours absorbed in it. That's not to say it's not a great work of art. It is. But that's what I've come to expect from the renown director, especially when the story concerns underworld figures. It's got a star-studded cast with most of the familiar actors playing mobsters straight out of central casting. The two headliners are Robert De Niro as Mafia hitman Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa, a pivotal figure in American labor history. A strong supporting cast with previous Scorsese players such as Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel make this a very enjoyable viewing experience. I envision many Oscar nominations for the cast and crew. Best Picture, too.

Although I prefer the shared experience of watching movies in the theater, I streamed The Irishman on Netflix. My television is large enough that it didn't detract from the special effects which are primarily utilized for de-aging the septuagenarian actors. Really quite phenomenal what the technology does. Makes the players appear to be a lifelike 30 years younger. A main reason why I selected the Netflix option instead of going to the local cinema is the length of the film. Three and a half hours is a long time to sit without an intermission. Both Ben Hur and Gone With The Wind had breaks halfway through the productions. I don't have Attention Deficit Disorder, but needed to pause for ten minutes after two hours just to process everything.

Because of my age of 60, and because I have seen other movies that touch on the same time period and subject matter, I was familiar with the backdrop of the story. Thirteen Days, Hoffa, JFK and The Godfather Part II all come to mind because they deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the labor movement, or President Kennedy and his brother Bobby. Although the film is about Frank Sheeran, Jimmy Hoffa is an integral part of the plot and is instrumental in moving the timeline forward. Remember when it was rumored that Jimmy Hoffa was buried in concrete in the End Zone of the old Giants Stadium? Jack Nicholson as the Teamsters leader in Hoffa met an entirely different fate than in The Irishman. In reality, his death is still a mystery to this day and Scorsese's epic just adds fuel to the fire.

There's a lot of subtle touches to the film from days gone by. Musically, the soundtrack sets the tone for the early 1960's - everything from the Santo and Johnny instrumental "Sleep Walk", to Bill Doggett's "Honkey Tonk". Plus, when they story moves to Miami Beach, the theme from The Jackie Gleason Show begins to play. How sweet it is! The location scout also gets high marks for including not only a Howard Johnson's motel, but a Lum's hot dog stand, too. Relics from yesteryear that sets the tone. Scorsese uses the screen like Vincent van Gogh works with a canvass. Although everyone in the story is on the take, and multiple mobsters get rubbed out, what sets the movie apart is the long awaited conclusion after Jimmy Hoffa gets killed. If it wasn't for the conclusion, this would have been a run of the mill gangster flick, albeit beautifully filmed.

Without giving too much away, the movie begins with Frank Sheeran in a nursing home, then the narrative is told through a series of flashbacks. It's the same story structure as Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman in the early 70's. But the last half hour of the film concentrates on Sheeran as an old man stuck in a wheelchair. De Niro's character is crippled both mentally and physically. He wrestles with the failed relationships with his daughters, particularly one subplot with the rejection of his daughter Peggy played by Anna Paquin. I just wondered how he as an actor dealt with playing a character that's not too far away from his advanced age. I know it made me think about my mortality including the isolation of the "golden" years. Things I don't necessarily want to contemplate.

Only The Paranoid Survive

Every breath you take and every move you make,
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you. - "Every Breath You Take" by The Police

CNBC's afternoon program "Power Lunch" recently featured an interview with Frank O’Brien, CEO and founder of Five Tier, an integrated marketing and media platform. At first blush, I thought the conversation was informative. After thinking about it for awhile, I considered it disturbing in a 1984 sort of way. Think about walking through Times Square with the multi-storied "cult of personality" electronic billboards engulfing the concrete canyons. Broadway stars, best selling beverages, Victoria's Secret models, and a flotsam and jetsam of pop culture loom five stories high. Subliminal seduction at its finest. I used to believe the images were selected based on traditional advertising placement. I was wrong. Industrial innovators persuade us to purchase goods or services based on real-time information extracted from our smartphones. It's called Surveillance Capitalism.

We all have a digital footprint, a data trail we leave while using the Internet: email communications, social media interactions, the works. Once you get in proximity to the electronic billboards, machines behind the screens snatch data from your cellphone. This could be an ID number, GPS information, salary, interests, age, race and gender. Anything that's stored on your smartphone, or in the applications on that communications device. There's nothing new about this in marketing. It's the "womb to tomb" information advertising agencies previously accumulated based on public persona such as your zip code. They can infer a lot about you knowing just where you live. It was big in direct marketing, but with the slow erosion of snail mail, the practice has become space-age. Much more precise. It's a form of geofencing, a location-based service that advertisers utilize to send messages to smartphones that enter a pre-defined geographic area.

Five Tier isn't the only company involved with this business trend, Lamar, JCDecaux and Adomni all have similar platforms. There's a terrific article in Consumer Reports by Thomas Germain: "Digital Billboards Are Tracking You. And They Really, Really Want You to See Their Ads.". To paraphrase, the article states that "these companies emphasize they don't learn identifying details such as the names, email addresses, or phone numbers of the people whose data is being targeted...Most of the information is aggregated - they want to know how many people of a certain target audience are present at a particular time, not who each individual is". This is so they can project an advertisement to the dominant demographic in any predetermined area near the billboard.

Sounds harmless enough, but the corporations always sugarcoat things. What they're saying now, and, what may be said next year are two entirely different subjects. If this goes on unregulated, they will bend the rules when the technology advances. These companies are creating information empires. Just look at the pinpoint accuracy facial recognition software has ascended to. Pro-democratic demonstrators in Hong Kong are wearing surgical masks in order not to be identified and imprisoned. They throw the book at you. In Hong Kong it's the communist government, here it's the corporations. It's only a matter of time before these advertising firms compile personal dossiers on us, too. Like Five Tier's CEO Frank O'Brien says about what you can do to protect your individual information: "I don't think there's anything you can do about it."

To be fair to Mr. O'Brien, he states that the "Out-of-Home" advertising industry should be regulated. That's a tough task in a free market presidential administration. In my opinion, until regulation occurs, if it ever occurs, he will remain loyal to his backers, and take the data harvesting and extraction to the limits. If he doesn't, his competitors will crush him. That's the nature of the beast. Unless Uncle Sam intervenes, Five Tier will continue to mine more and more particulars because the CEO has lofty aspirations for his brainchild. Going back to January of this year, Bruce Rogers of Forbes, interviewed O'Brien, and the founder talks about going from the sideshow to the big-top:

"Raymond Kurzweil writes about the point of “Singularity”, when humans and robots become one. Someone's going to be at the center of that. Some company is going to come in and really bring that to fruition. There has to be someone that's sitting in the middle connecting all the dots. That's where I see our platform."

Somebody's got to do it. Technology augmented human life, anybody?

The Crown Jewel

“Every man's memory is his private literature.” - Aldous Huxley.

'Tis the season for Black Friday doorbuster sales with e-commerce companies bombarding you with banner advertisements featuring products you've recently searched for. Deep pocketed behemoths such as Walmart, Amazon and Target utilize predatory pricing with eye-popping deals in hand-to-hand retail combat. This is not the era for upstarts. It's just the opposite. An unanticipated dividend for consumers is that products or services may be had for a song. I recently gifted myself Apple News+, the magazine distribution app, and have been transformed into a news junkie of late. A great stocking stuffer. Much like on-demand streaming for cord cutters, you receive sequential print releases, or you can binge read your favorite periodicals. Some newspapers are included, too.

I'm always looking to make a quick buck in the stock market. It's difficult to do on a consistent basis, but I still scan the headlines on Apple News+ looking for articles that may enhance my bottom line. An article that recently caught my eye is from SyFyWire, "Tangible Holograms Go Beyond Anything Star Wars Ever Dreamed Of", by Elizabeth Rayne. The report begins describing a scene from Star Wars - Phantom Menace , "When R2D2 acts like a futuristic answering machine and beams a hologram of Leia pleading for help.". Although the movie was a disaster, the special effects were not. The hologram communications were a show stopper. Like many science fiction technologies in the movies, it can take years to become adopted for everyday use. A prime example is Uber.

The impetus for the formation of Uber was founder Travis Kalanick watching a James Bond movie in the early 2000's or thereabouts. During a getaway scene, 007 had a GPS enabled cellphone that allows him to escape his adversaries. In reality, there was no such thing as a smartphone or GPS at that time. Kalanick had the foresight to let the technology catch up with the movie magic. Just a pipe dream at the onset. It's the same thing with Elon Musk and vertical landings of SpaceX rockets. The Apollo rockets couldn't do vertical touchdowns because the gyroscopes, semiconductors, software and imaging systems weren't advanced enough. Almost every SciFi film in the 50's and 60's had reusable rockets. Remember Fireball xL5? Musk just waited and voilà, the future is now.

My impression is that holograms are just like television in the late 1920's - a technology in its infancy, but will eventually become mainstream. According to the SyFyWire piece, a prototype hologram projector has been developed with speech and tactile effects, making the 3D images seem closer to reality. I'd call that first mover advantage, but we've got a long way to go. In a decade, this technology will be the hottest ticket in town. From bit player to bankable star. It's an area of scientific expertise I am going to monitor going forward.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere with the Silicon Valley conglomerates commanding the lion's share of the market. They claim their monopolies are for "the greater good". That remains to be seen. But the easy money has been made in the Googles and the Facebooks. One technology segment I like is Augmented Reality. The 2002 movie Minority Report features Augmented Reality in the form of a hologram. Although the film is set in 2054, some of the tactics and technologies the PreCrime police utilize in the film will become mainstream in just a decade from now. Wall Street has taken notice and bets have been placed. There are a few pure plays that trade, primarily headset and laser companies, but most of the action is taking place with the venture capitalists. As a retail investor, you're out of luck if you want to get in on the ground floor.

I'd like to hit it big, but investing in individual stocks can be a cautionary tale. I learned the hard way. You see commercials from the discount brokers where a trader has a Eureka moment huddled over a stock chart in the middle of the night. That's not the way the smart money bets these days. They buy S&P 500 index funds. It's too difficult to beat the market. However, that doesn't stop me from looking for patterns in technology. What young company is the odds on favorite to become mainstream? The ninety-nine thousand dollar question. That's when you make all the money, investing in the Microsoft IPO, or, Apple after the introduction of the iPod. You need a disruptive product that's adopted by the masses in order to make a killing.

Luck Be A Lady

The Good Liar is touted as a sophisticated scam caper, but comes off more like a rallying cry for the "Me Too Movement". Originally, I was drawn to the movie for its star power with Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen cast as the principal players. They pull off command performances in a cat and mouse confidence game, squaring off in a battle of wits. Just when you think you've figured out the plot, the tables get turned. Throughout the film, you don't know who's blowing smoke - who's the mastermind and who's the dupe. That said, it's a dark tale and although the ending is unexpected, the story left me cold. I can see why many critics are lukewarm towards it. The Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes was much more favorable, and I can see that, too. It's a story that needs to be told. Nevertheless, it doesn't stack up very well with previous bunko artists on the silver screen.

If you're of a certain age, 1973's The Sting is probably the most noteworthy flimflam film. It starts Paul Newman and Robert Redford at the height of their popularity and won Best Picture that year beating out American Graffiti and The Exorcist. I can still remember the line in the movie, "You don't know shit from Shinola.". It took the nation by storm being nominated for 10 Academy Awards. Adjusted for inflation, box office sales make it one of the highest-grossing films in United States history. $800 million in today's dollars. I watched it more than once and that's the highest compliment I can give to any movie. It left a lasting impression on me and my contemporaries. Just as much as any early Jack Nicholson showcase such as The Last Detail or Five Easy Pieces. However, it's not my favorite con artist movie.

1990's The Grifters is by far my preferred motion picture production highlighting the big bilk. It doesn't have the cultural impact that The Sting did, but it left a big impression on me. Most notably because the screenwriter, Donald E. Westlake, and Jim Thompson, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, were influential in my writing. Jim Thompson "The Dimestore Dostoevsky", experienced a big revival 30 years ago. His most famous work is The Killer Inside Me. I devoured his books, including 1963's The Grifters. Both the movie and the book begin with a bang - Roy Dillon, small time confidence man gets mortally wounded when he takes a blow to the gut by a disgruntled mark wielding a baseball bat. You have an instant time-lock. Only 24 hours to tell the story. There's no Hollywood ending, but that's Jim Thompson's style. He always goes for broke. Thompson died in obscurity, but lives on in cult status.

Unlike Jim Thompson, you could fill a book about the accolades Donald E. Westlake received during his illustrious career. Three time Edgar Award winner, he primarily wrote comic capers under his real name. However, under the pseudonym of Richard Stark, he penned a series of pulp novels with the infamous protagonist Parker. I read every book in the series published during the 1960's. Many movies were made from the Parker stories with the most renown being 1967's Point Blank starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. The Split with Jim Brown and The Outfit with Robert Duvall are also lesser known celluloid adaptions. Taut, well crafted stories that come right to the point. They wouldn't fly in today's Hollywood, but you can occasionally catch them on Turner Classic Movies. Nothing like a plot.

But back to The Good Liar. One thing that drew me to the movie was the age of the lead characters. Helen Mirren plays Betty McLeish, a 78 year old widow. Most women in their 60's would die to look like Helen Mirren. She's an outlier, or had a lot of work done, but maybe it's just genetics. Whatever she's got, they should bottle it and sell it. Would make a fortune. Ian McKellen stars as Roy Courtnay, a weathered octogenarian scam artist. They appeared to have good chemistry as the story unfolds. I wanted to discover what life may be like for me in 20 years where relationships are concerned. They say you make it past 65 and you're good for another two decades. As the plot progressed, it moved away from potential intimacy, to a caper, which is probably a no brainer. Come 2040, I'll have to find out myself what it's like being in the twilight of my life.

In any event, without giving away the ending, it didn't work out too well for Roy. Didn't work out too well for The Good Liar, either. It's too convoluted and has been a disappointment at the box office. There are many con artist movies, and if you want to see an excellent one in the modern vein, I'd suggest Matchstick Men, Catch Me If You Can, or any of the David Mamet productions such as House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner. However, for a payback film in the "Me Too" era, The Good Liar may be exactly what you're looking for.

The Wrecking Crew

The overarching themes for this blog concern transitions. The first is my passage from mid-life to old age. Secondly is our societal metamorphosis from an analog era to the digital century. Sometimes I talk about "being in the future", but that's from a reference point going back to the 1950's. The Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury future is here. At least from my vantage point. I read all the comic books and saw all the SciFi movies. Read some of the speculative fiction, too. Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek gave us The Communicator and Tricorder. We use them every day. Warp Speed and The Transporter Beam are going to get here sooner than you think. As advanced as today's science is, we're still a technology backwater.

Google, a member of the digital cabal reared its ugly head this week in a variety of ways. The cabal consists of the usual suspects, household names that make our lives easier: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and the aforementioned Google. They have a chokehold on our individual "private" data. But the company that made the big headlines this past week is Google. Full disclosure, I utilize Google's cash cow, the search engine, plus Google's Chrome browser, and I write these posts with Google's Blogger. Life wouldn't be the same without them. It's as if I have Stockholm syndrome, which causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.

The first article that came to my attention is from Forbes which stated: "Google secretly tests medical records search tool on nation's largest nonprofit health system.". This is Project Nightingale, and the name makes it sound altruistic, with an homage to Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. What Project Nightingale really does is collect data on patients and feeds it into an Artificial Intelligence machine. According to The Wall Street Journal, The data includes: name, date of birth, address, family members, allergies, immunizations, and the rest of your history of medical records including medications and medical conditions. This is exactly what you don't want the insurance companies to have on you.

Although it does have some benefits, such as suggesting treatment plans, it could give insurers carte blanche on what they deem as appropriate care. Or even worse, what they don't deem as appropriate care. You couple this with Google's recent acquisition of FitBit, insurance companies will have you tethered to a treadmill. Exercise is a good thing. But not when it's being dictated like in the "Nanny" state. A Google tango with the insurance companies would give them too much information. You'd be forced to knuckle under. They'd tell you to put that in your pipe and smoke it. The Brave New World.

Two days after the Project Nightingale enlightenment, The Wall Street Journal published an additional article stating Google would continue its expansion strategy by offering checking accounts:

"The project, code-named Cache, is expected to launch next year with accounts run by Citigroup Inc. and a credit union at Stanford University, a tiny lender in Google's backyard."

If you opt for this service, Google will have access to all sorts of financial information that was previously privy to only your bank. Direct deposits, bill payments, and whatever else you do with your checking account. You can see where I'm going with this. It's like a scorched earth policy, but Google is not alone. Most of the members of the digital cabal with the exception of Netflix, have aspirations to extend their tentacles into the health care and financial industries. Apple recently launched a credit card, Facebook is experimenting with digital currency, and Amazon is everywhere. It's industrial warfare with high barriers to entry. They fight tooth and nail. These technology behemoths became renown for building a better mousetrap, and flourished with creative destruction. Now they're so big, smaller companies can only hope to be bought out instead of unseat the incumbents.

I discovered this the hard way. Seven years ago I bought shares of stock in many small upstarts that appeared to have forward thinking technology to combat the more established Silicon Valley companies. Storage, data bases, programmatic advertising, you name it, I was looking for that 10 bagger. I did have some winners, but for the most part, was sold a bill of goods. The digital cabal had gone unchecked by the feds for too long, and remains so to this day. They have too much power and lord it over you. Facebook is like one big infomercial. Google likes to make you think they're an ideological crusader, but they're just as bad as AT&T or Standard Oil 100 years ago. We need a trust buster.

Currently, it's not the Federal Government that's going after Google, but the States' Attorney Generals. Forty-eight states along with Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico are investigating Google for antitrust violations in their advertising business. This is purportedly expanding into search and the Android operating system. This is a double-edged sword because of the China impact. Although it would be beneficial for companies in the digital cabal to pay their fair share of taxes, and have less of a stranglehold on their dominance domestically, it may put them behind the eight-ball in Artificial Intelligence. As I've stated in earlier posts, the more data you have, the better the A.I.. We're currently running neck and neck with China for dominance in A.I.. The country with the superior technology will benefit economically as well as militarily. They seem to go hand in hand. In other words, it's good for America. Whoever dismantles the digital cabal will need to do so with the United States in mind.

The Social Network

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Hey, Big Spender: Part 2

Spoiler Alert: Don't Read If You Don't Want To Know.

Terminator: Dark Fate had a lackluster performance at the box office opening weekend. Produced for approximately $200 million, it grossed $123 million worldwide in its first few days of distribution. $29 million came from the United States and Canada. They got my ten bucks. Should have saved my money. Many reviewers reported it was the best Terminator movie since T2: Judgement Day, and that may be true, but it still wasn't a very good movie. Although full of eye candy, and it did pull some of the loose ends together from the previous Terminator narratives, it left me flat. It was like watching The Godfather Part 3 after two outstanding prequels. Wasn't a bad popcorn movie, and it was a decent time filler on a cold November afternoon, but I expected more. Perhaps I've seen too many SciFi movies. They're like The Westerns of 50 years ago. Too much of a good thing.

Although the film started out strong, it lost me early on. In one of the first action scenes, Sarah Connor saves protagonist Dani Ramos and her guard Grace (an augmented human), from a REV-9 search and destroy cyborg. Once the lead actors are safe for a split second, Sarah Connor says "I'll be back", with a wink and a nod to the classic tagline from the original movie. It was too corny and left me cold. The pioneering Terminator and T2:Judgement Day are taut, SciFi noir thrillers. The newest installation in the franchise is a predictable action film.

I would be remiss if I failed to discuss the Governator. The Arnold Schwarzenegger T-800 Terminator role really mellowed out, which was another turnoff. The android developed a conscious after his mission to murder John Conner was complete. It seemed like he was acting for Pumping Iron instead of Conan The Barbarian. Schwarzenegger received second billing to Linda Hamilton, and that in itself is a shame, taking nothing away from Ms. Hamilton's acting chops. Schwarzenegger made the franchise, and was one of the biggest box office attractions in the 1980's and 1990's. He deserves better.

There are some good aspects to the production. Most notably, strong female leads which should be positive role models for teenage girls. Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis and Natalia Reyes, were all armed to the teeth and more than proficient in martial arts. Especially Mackenzie Davis as Grace. I'd like to know what kind of firmware she was using. I need a little help in the Dojo. All three actresses exhibited good character development, but maybe to a fault. It seemed like a cookie cutter script.

The story is set in contemporary times, but moves around with flash-forwards and flashbacks going twenty-five years either way. When the movie jumps into the future, we're told a military neural network gone rogue is on a mission to wipe out humanity. In reality, if this would come to fruition, that would happen in my lifetime if I live into my 80's. I just don't envision that. I'm not wary of the United States armed forces, it's the conglomerates in Silicon Valley that concern me. I keep driving home this idea. It haunts me. In Fahrenheit 451 the authorities burned books and made reading illegal. In contemporary times, disenfranchised youth and a lot of adults opt out of reading anything larger than a Tweet. 280 characters. Alternative facts and fake news. In an information rich world, this seems counter-intuitive, but it is what it is. Graffiti abounds. The handwriting is literally on the wall.

Hey, Big Spender

In 1981 director John Waters released Polyester to much more favorable critical reviews than his previous productions. This is the movie that catapulted Waters to mainstream acceptance after a string of campy films know as the "Trash Trilogy" which included: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. To me what sets Polyester apart from many movies of that era is the gimmick coined 'Odorama' where theater goers were given a 'Scratch and Sniff' card with a series of numbers printed on the card. When a digit was flashed on the movie screen, you were instructed to scratch the corresponding number and voilà, you'd be able to smell what was going on in the production. Or this was what was supposed to happen. In any event, it wasn't a very sophisticated plunge into olfaction.

What is a futuristic push into olfaction is brought to us by Google. According to Wired magazine, "Google researchers are training neural networks with new techniques to predict how a molecule smells based on its chemical structure.". Although in its infancy, machine learning algos in what are referred to as 'graph neural networks' will enable the robots to have a sense of smell. With the rapid advancement of A.I., this could come quicker than you'd think. It's November 2019, the same year and month the neo-noir, sci-fi thriller Blade Runner takes place. I'm not going to go deep into the movie, but back in 1982 when Ridley Scott directed it, the thought of bioengineered beings known as 'Replicants' seemed like a far fetched idea. Now I wonder.

Another film from the same genre and era is 1984's Terminator which needs no introduction. This weekend Terminator: Dark Fate opens at the box office, and from everything I've read, it's much better than most of the other Terminator productions. Terminator 2:Judgement Day was a good movie, but you can keep the rest of them: Rise of the Machines, Salvation and Genesis. I am trying to keep an open mind about the new release because I am planning on seeing it on Tuesday when Regal Entertainment has their half priced popcorn promo. Don't want to get too down on it before I see it, or, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some movies are designed to be seen in the theater, and this is one of them. I am looking forward to it.

A movie I am anxiously anticipating is Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. I have been a big fan of Scorsese since Mean Streets which I saw on HBO in the mid 1970's. I just really liked it. He wasn't a household name then, and I didn't know a lot about directors in those days. Unless you were John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, you went unnoticed to teenagers 45 years ago. Things are different today. Teenagers are more informed and media savvy. They know all about creative content and the metadata that accompanies it. I enjoy Scorsese stories so much, I just signed up for Netflix so I can watch The Irishman when it begins streaming on November 27th. Would have preferred to see it in a theater, but the closest screening is 40 miles away. In an era of conspicuous consumption, I have to budget myself, and that includes a subscription to Netflix. I was a customer of the service two years ago, but cancelled because I wasn't utilizing it enough. Especially during baseball season. I am going to give it a second chance.

According to Ad Week, about 25% of U.S. households will completely cut the cable cord by 2022. If you include the cord-nevers (people that have never paid for cable or satellite service), the number of households that forego traditional PayTV is even higher. I joined the streaming revolution and haven't looked back. I save close to $1,000 a year by cutting the cord, and that includes subscriptions to Netflix, HBO, MLB.TV and a basic television package through Spectrum TV Choice. That's a big savings for me and I'm still overwhelmed by all the viewing options. There's only 24 hours in a day and you can only watch so much television. Plus, if the impeachment hearings come to fruition, all eyes will be on the news channels such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The nation will be locked in on their news channel of choice. It's like Watergate. What a freak show. What's old is new again.