I admit it, I’m very lucky. For one thing, I was born in the United States, where everyone can have bananas even though none are grown here. Those Guatemalans are pretty nice folks, and so are all of the many others who do things just for us. And there is so much leisure time! Even if I can’t afford to travel very much or to go to see a Broadway musical about cats or slavery, there is always television, where I can sit and watch uplifting shows about criminal investigations or hysterical situation comedies with people of almost every ethnicity who never seem to have money problems and stuff. Plus television brings us live sports, like major league baseball, and it’s all free as long as I pay the cable bill and the electric company and am willing to watch commercials about cars and beer and insurance and the right poisons to buy for my lawn so that I never have to put up with weeds and things.

Except for today, when the Giants were playing in Philadelphia and the game was “free” on Facebook. Am I not smart and with it enough to have joined Facebook? Yes, I’m there. What do you think, I’m not hip? Data collection companies do us all a great service, providing the means to see what people we don’t even know had for lunch. It was a bit unnerving to realize that having a day off and paid for cable service wasn’t going to be enough for me to enjoy watching Ty Blach, Brandon Belt, Pablo Sandoval and company go down to their fourth consecutive defeat at the hands of Odubel Herrera, Carlos Santana, and the rest of the new improved Phillies. The Giants have caught on to the trendiness of not worrying about strikeouts very well, but they still have some catching up to do with the hitting home runs that is supposed to go with it, and I wanted to witness another day of double figure fanning because that’s even more exciting than reruns of The Big Bang Theory.

So I brought up Facebook on my computer. Now, admittedly, my setup is not what they call state of the art, which never refers to sculpture. My machine is more than two years old, the operating system is older than that, and my provider is hundreds if not thousands of miles away. So it’s probably the equivalent, all things considered, of a 1948 Hudson. That was a pretty good automobile in its day but modern electronic equipment has a life expectancy more in line with a cold mosquito. Nevertheless, my team of legal experts and I agree that, if you are going to squeeze all competition off the map and be the only possible option a person has to obtain a product, you have an obligation to actually provide that product for all of those who have been denied any other option, especially if they didn’t previously require your venue. Boy, are we suckers!

First off, I had to search on Faceschnook before a button was found to click on to get this “free TV”. By the time I received a picture the Giants had a 1-0 lead. There was no sound, even though Duane Kuiper promised me yesterday that he would be there. No sound, and the “picture” reminded me of the early days of consumer television, when brave adults were risking falling off their rooftops while “adjusting” the antenna. It was choppy at best. Oh,but there was something working quite well. To the right of the “action” was a column containing lame comments from viewers all over the world. Great! Then it quit streaming altogether. After 18 minutes of being as patient as I could be, I gave up. Maybe Suckenburger will make another cynical apology. Maybe he can kiss my ass.