Let’s talk satellite dishes.

I know we all saw the happy little family in “March of the Satellite Dishes,” and most of the country thinks they know everything about them now, but most of the country is wrong. No, this isn’t a belated post-2004 election rant; this is about the public’s satellite dish misconceptions. You need to keep up here if your immortal soul is going to be rescued from satellite ignorance.

First of all, satellite dishes do not waddle hundreds of miles to an isolated, barren playground for some kind of annual mating ritual and dodge ball game. The truth is that satellite dishes are surprisingly dormant, and will live out most of their lives simply sitting on your roof and staring wistfully into the sky.

Their playground pilgrimage only happens on their fifth birthday, when they meet all the other satellite dishes born at the same time as themselves. They do play many games of dodge ball; that part is true. The intensity that they devote to the game and the violence that they play with would probably surprise you, though. Almost 10% of the players are too damaged to return home on their own. I guess it’s their Darwinian mechanism that keeps weaker dishes from surviving and procreating. See also, “Dodgeball as Natural Selection” (Douglas 2002).

The damaged dishes that are still slightly functional are quickly and humanely put out of their misery, followed by a solemn and moving burial service for their fallen brothers and sisters. After that? On with the mating!

We won’t get into that. It’s a little disgusting, and you’d probably never watch TV again if you knew all the nasty details. Let’s just say that in 4-6 weeks tiny little baby satellite dishes pop out, and they’re all very cute and make funny little baby dish noises.

The ones that aren’t eaten by their parents eventually grow up to be full-sized adult satellite dishes, who eat a steady stream of television signals from the sky and excrete a steady stream of television signal to your TV. And then, on their fifth birthday, they return to the dodge ball game themselves.

And the circle of life continues.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 8:06 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.