Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

(WARNING: Irrational anger ahead.)

If the President of NBC were to walk in my front door this morning, I would grab a hammer and beat him with it.

Last night I'm watching the hour-long season finale of Friends, and I'm prepared to switch over to CBS when it's over so I can watch the season finale of CSI. But as the last minutes of the eight o'clock hour ticked away, with Friends still not ending, I started getting a little suspicious. Sure enough, it turns out that NBC ran Friends not for the advertised one hour, but for seventy minutes, thus ensuring that people like me who are fans of both Friends and CSI got screwed by having to choose between missing the first ten minutes of the latter show or the last ten minutes of the former show.

And NBC specifically advertised this episode of Friends as one hour. So: NBC blatantly lied, and they did it for no other reason than to screw people who watch CSI. What's more: it's not like they gave us a special ten-minute extra bonus of Friends. They just inflated the commercial breaks so as to take the show to 9:10 pm.

(And the VCR wasn't a solution, because I was already taping Friends for my wife, who had to work.)

Stupid NBC and their stupid damn #$%&^@!!! ratings-stunts. And while I'm bitching about NBC, gee whiz, how did I ever know that Law and Order would do one of their idiotic "ripped-from-the-headlines" stories about "a celebrity who dangles his kid over a balcony...and drops him"?!

OK, I think I'm better now.